* 23 articles including: capitalism & socialism (series); last tourist trip (series); networked warfare (series); Meta AI supercomputer | designing VLSI chips with AI; EU warns Musk about disinfo | Biden & China | IRS online tax form; top-attack anti-armor mine | JFSM cruise missile | Ukr Toloka UUVs; building up the virus database; Zelenskyy at G7 in JP | Trump ends the war? | Rick Wilson on DeSantis; US Army & Air Force lasers; Japan V China for Taiwan | Biden & inflation | Bakhmut battle; Microsoft Security Copilot | perovskite retina | dye solar cell; Zoonomia mammal genome project; Ukraine offensive on the pad | US restraint at beginning of war; Dragonfly copter to Titan | ein stein tile | rice carbon footprint; rainy California; Kaja Kallas on cybersecurity | Biden at Correspondent's Dinner.
* THE LAST TOURIST TRIP (1): As described here previously, I went on a long road trip from my home in Loveland, Colorado, to Ohio in 2022 -- which proved satisfactory, but suggested that I didn't want to take long road trips any more. That conclusion led to the thought that I ought to take a couple of quick air trips to cross a couple of things off the list -- leading to a visit to Disneyland in California later in 2022.
That left a second air trip to take: a visit to Washington DC, primarily to get pictures at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum (NASM) with my Samsung S21 Ultra camera-phone, and also tour the National Mall downtown. That would be a follow-up to a road trip I took in 2016. I started thinking about the DC trip after the new year, and got airliner tickets for a flight from Denver to Dulles Airport near DC on 4 April, then back again on 6 April.
I got a reservation for two nights at the Hampton Inn Dulles just south of the airport. I was going to arrive at mid-day on the 4th and then canvass the NASM annex at Dulles, which stood likely to crunch me for time. I figured I could leave my kit at the Hampton Inn and just walk over to the annex, Google Maps showing that it was about a half-hour walk. Later I got to wondering if the road to the annex was actually open and checked the street views on Google Maps, to find that the road was restricted access with a guardhouse.
So what to do? I thought it over for a while and decided to use Lyft, installing the Lyft app on my smartphone. I was concerned about how effective it would be -- given the limited time I had to cover the annex, I couldn't afford much delay. After scratching my head a bit, I decided to see if I could line up a Lyft here in Loveland, and found I could easily get a ride in 15 minutes if I wanted one. Finding a Lyft in the Dulles Airport area would be even easier. I was still a bit nervous about having time to cover the NASM Annex on the afternoon of 4 April, but I'd have to see how it went in practice.
The next problem was going to the National Mall on the 5th. I figured I could take the Metrobus 5A from Dulles Airport, as I had on my 2016 trip. First thing I wanted to do once I got to the mall was tour the monuments and get pictures before the museums opened, which was a lot of ground to cover. However, in 2016 I'd considered using the Capitol Bikeshare system -- a rent-a-bike network around the mall and inner DC -- and I figured that a bike would get me all the way around the mall in a timely fashion.
My major objectives on the mall were the NASM center and the Afro-American History Museum (AAHM). I'd missed the AAHM in 2016 because it was too crowded, and I was curious about it. I did some checking online, which was fortunate, since I found out that I had to make reservations for them; they were the only two museums on the mall that required them. No problem, I got the reservations, printed them out, and put them in a little cardboard folder I put in my travel backpack. That left getting my kit all packed up, with persistent worries that I was missing something. Finally, I was as ready to go as I was going to be. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* META AI SUPERCOMPUTER: According to an article from THEVERGE.com ("Meta Has Built An AI Supercomputer" by James Vincent, 24 January 2022), social media giant Meta -- previously Facebook -- has introduced an "AI supercomputer", built to train machine learning systems. The company says its new "AI Research SuperCluster (RSC)" is the world's fastest in its class.
RSC will be used to train a range of systems across Meta's businesses: from content moderation algorithms used to detect hate speech on Facebook and Instagram, to augmented reality features for upcoming Meta AI hardware. It will also be used to tailor experiences for the "metaverse" -- the company's brand name for an interconnected series of virtual spaces, from offices to online arenas.
Rivals such like Microsoft and Nvidia have already announced their own "AI supercomputers," which are different from traditional supercomputers that are generally used for physical simulations, such as weather studies. Both are facility-scale systems, and rely on thousands of interconnected processors that swap data with their neighbors at high speed. One big difference is that AI supercomputers don't require high numeric accuracy; they're more into calculating averages and "weights" than obtaining precise answers, and so they can get by with 32-bit or even 16-bit floating-point calculations, as opposed to the 64-bit math normal to traditional supercomputers.
The first-phase RSC consists of 760 Nvidia GGX A100 systems containing 6,080 connected graphics processing unit (GPU) number-crunchers, interconnected through a Quantum InfiniBand network that can transmit data at 200 Gigabits per second. The system features 175 petabytes (PB, or 1,000 terabytes) of bulk storage, 46 PB of cache storage, plus 10 PB of network file system (NFS) storage.
Now it has about 16,000 total GPUs, and is able to train AI systems with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte -- 1,000 terabytes. It has a faster network that can deliver 16 terabytes of data per second, and features a grand total of an exabyte (1,000 PB) of storage. For comparison, Microsoft's AI supercomputer built with research lab OpenAI has 10,000 GPUs.
In benchmarking tests, the previous RSC was able to train natural language processing models three times faster than Meta's previous AI supercomputer, and was 20 times faster at computer vision tasks. The RSC will use its massive computing power to train AI algorithms to better recognize objects in images and spoken words in audio, efficiently and effectively translate between languages, and identify harmful content and misinformation that shouldn't be on social media. To protect the data being crunched by the RSC, the computer system is not directly hooked up to the internet, with only company data centers able to access it, and the data is encrypted.
* As discussed in a loosely related article from WIRED.com ("Samsung Has Its Own AI-Designed Chip" by Will Knight, 15 August 2021), tech giant Samsung of South Korea is now developing very-large-scale integrated circuits (VLSIC) using software from Synopsis, a service provider, that incorporates machine-learning capabilities. Others, including Google and Nvidia, have talked about designing chips using AI -- but Synopsys, though not such a big name, has reach because it works with dozens of companies.
A spokesperson for Samsung says that the company is using Synopsys "DSO.ai" software to design its Exynos chips, which are used in smartphones, including its own branded handsets, as well as other gadgets. Design of a VLSIC chip is based on blocks of standard system modules. Coming up with the block diagram for a chip doesn't really need AI, but AI becomes important when the diagram is translated into a chip layout. The problem is that optimizing the layout of the chip to minimize chip area and reduce the length of connection runs is a fiendishly complicated problem -- which gets much worse as the number of blocks increases, leading to a "combinatorial explosion" of possible layouts that strains computer power.
The AI solution cuts through the computational burden of exploring those possibilities through machine learning, the DSO.ai system leveraging off examples from Synopsys' library of chip designs. In short, DSO.ai lays out a chip on the basis of layouts of other chips that are seen as optimized. In principle, the system could use a "generative adversarial network" -- split in two, with a subsystem generating possibilities, and a subsystem evaluating them.
Stelios Diamantidis, senior director of AI solutions at Synopsys, says the DSO.ai software can be configured to prioritize different goals, such as performance or energy efficiency. Mike Demler, a senior analyst at the Linley Group who tracks chip-design software, says that AI is the coming tool for chip design: "It lends itself to these problems that have gotten massively complex. It will just become a standard part of the computational tool kit."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Twitter Pulls Out Of Voluntary EU Disinformation Code" by Francesca Gillett, 27 May 2023), billionaire Elon Musk, having acquired the Twitter microblogging service, has made it a playground for trolls and bots. It wasn't great before he took over in October 2022, but now it's much worse.
Even before he took control, European Union officials warned him that the EU would take a dim view of his allowing Twitter to become a disinformation delivery platform. For now, the EU has a voluntary code for social media firms to follow; Musk has now publicly rejected the code.
Thierry Breton, the EU's internal market commissioner, warned Musk that new laws were coming and he would have to comply with them. Breton said: "Obligations remain. You can run but you can't hide." Twitter will be legally required to fight disinformation in the EU from 25 August, he said, adding: "Our teams will be ready for enforcement."
A number of other social media firms are signed up to the EU's disinformation code, including Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok, Google, Microsoft and Twitch. The code was launched in June 2022, with the goal of preventing profiteering from disinformation and fake news, as well as increasing transparency and limiting infections of bots and fake accounts. Firms that sign the code can decide which pledges to make, such as cooperating with fact-checkers or tracking political advertising.
Under Musk's ownership, Twitter moderation has been effectively dismantled. Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are now thriving there -- but Musk says there is now "less misinformation rather than more" since he acquired Twitter, meaning he approves of the disinformation.
The EU has passed a Digital Services Act, which will go into effect by late summer. The law specifies that Twitter will have to have a mechanism for users to flag illegal content, act upon notifications "expeditiously", and put in measures to address the spread of disinformation. Musk is not noted for thinking things out, but he is faced with consequences, one European Commission official saying: "If he doesn't take the code seriously, then it's better that he quits."
* Concerning the G7 summit in Hiroshima a week ago, US President Joe Biden commented after it was closed that the meeting had led to an agreement on a united approach to China that called for diversifying supply chains to reduce dependence on one country, while hinting that he would soon speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Biden told a press conference: "We're not looking to decouple from China. We're looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China." He said G7 nations were more unified than ever in terms of "resisting economic coercion together and countering harmful practices that hurt our workers."
The G7 leaders agreed that the goal was to "de-risk, not decouple" economic engagement with China, but the Chinese didn't think much of the nuance -- with China's embassy in Japan urging the G7 to stop "creating confrontation and division". Biden downplayed the negative reaction, saying that frigid relations with Beijing were likely to thaw, having been strained earlier in 2023 when the USA shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon.
Biden said: "We should have an open hotline." He added that he had agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia in 2022 to keep communications open, but everything changed after "this silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars worth of spying equipment." Biden says that's water under the bridge: "In terms of talking with them, I think you're going to see that thaw very shortly."
China's aggressive moves against Taiwan remain problematic, but Biden said there was a clear understanding among most of the allies that if China were to act unilaterally against Taiwan, there would be a response. He said: "We're not going to tell China what they can do, but in the meantime we're going to put Taiwan in a position where they can defend themselves."
This is the story of the Biden Administration's strategy for dealing with China: cooperation with the right hand, confrontation with the left. Some critics have slammed that approach as contradictory, but it's just a way of seeing which hand Beijing will choose. The fact that it seems to confuse the Chinese is all to the good.
* The US Internal Revenue Service has now announced that it launch a free, government-provided direct tax filing option next year, which could lead to the full-scale launch of an IRS filing system that would compete with private tax preparers.
The IRS said in a report to Congress that 72% of American taxpayers surveyed said they were "very interested in" or "somewhat interested in" using a government tool to electronically file their tax returns. The agency estimated that a new direct filing system would cost between about $65 million USD and $250 million USD a year to operate, depending on the complexity of returns accepted and the number of taxpayers using the system.
Plans for a free filing system have been criticized by Republicans in Congress as unneeded because private firms such as H&R Block and Intuit, maker of TurboTax, perform free filing with their software. House of Representatives Ways & Means Committee Chair Jason Smith, a Republican, attacked the e-filing study as another step in the Biden Administration's efforts to "supercharge" the IRS to harass taxpayers. Smith said in a statement: "Americans will be powerless when the IRS completely controls the tax filing process from start to finish."
However, Treasury official Laurel Blatchford said a free direct filing option could "potentially save taxpayers billions of dollars annually," because it may cost the IRS less than $10 USD per tax return filed, compared with about $40 now paid by taxpayers for simple returns handled by private firms. Treasury officials noted that all filing options would continue, including free e-file options from private firms and non-profit tax advocacy services, paid filing by tax preparers, and free paper filing to the IRS.
[ED: I was happy to hear this news. Every year, I buy a basic H&R Block package to make out my taxes, and have persistently wondered why I needed to so. Why not allow me to make out my taxes online? I have very simple tax returns and H&R Block gives me no benefit. It'll be a heavy hit to H&R Block and Intuit, but those are the breaks.]
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (48): The Reagan Era represented something of a triumph of free-market economics; in 1988, Reagan awarded Milton Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It should be noted that Friedman was not happy with Reagan's inclination to pile up budget deficits.
The economy of the Reagan Era -- in particular, the hotbed of innovation that was Silicon Valley -- also reflected the thinking of Joseph Schumpeter (1883:1950), an Austrian who ended up at Harvard. Schumpeter wrote a great deal, but he was best known for THE THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (German edition 1911, English edition 1934), BUSINESS CYCLES (1939), CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, & DEMOCRACY (1942), and HISTORY OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS (posthumously published 1954). CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, & DEMOCRACY was his most influential work.
Schumpeter focused on business cycles, and how innovation drove them. He owed a debt to the work of Nikolai Kondratiev (1892:1938), who postulated that business went through periodic ups and downs -- on a short-term basis and, on top of that, a "long wave" of about 50 years from boom to boom, from bust to bust. Schumpeter called the long waves "Kondratiev waves" -- which became a memorial to Kondratiev, who was executed for being insufficiently dedicated to Marxist-Leninist ideas.
The idea that economies operate in a cyclical fashion is obvious; that they do so on a predictable basis is dubious, the detail functioning of economies being about as easy to predict as the weather. The Kondratiev wave is now seen as an example of the human inclination to read predictable patterns into noise. Schumpeter's impact was on why the waves occurred, and he zeroed in on technological innovation that drove the waves -- for examples, the introduction of steam power, the telegraph, the radio, television, computers. With each introduction of new technology, entrepreneurs arose to commercial them and make money off them. Those industries that couldn't keep up would then die out, with new industries arising to start the cycle over again.
Schumpeter called this engine of economic progress "creative destruction" -- he didn't invent the term, but he popularized it. He was opposed to contrived barriers to entry into business, and did not see business failures as inherently a bad thing. To be sure, a lot of them all at once wasn't a good thing, but businesses have life cycles of their own, being born, growing old, and then finally fading away. Schumpeter understood that this process of creative destruction could create hardships for the have-nots, but saw the system as, in the bigger view, the engine of prosperity.
Schumpeter's insights were dulled by his inclination to grand ideas, a certain amount of hand-waving, and a tendency to go down dead-end streets. He predicted that socialism would eventually predominate, but not out of any ideological belief that it should be so; he just speculated that it was likely to happen. Unlike Marx, who thought the proletariat of the workers would overturn capitalism, Schumpeter thought capitalism would be done in by the intelligentsia. The success of capitalism would create an intellectual class that was suspicious of capitalism, and ultimately suppress it.
Schumpeter judged that the dominance of socialism would stifle "creative destruction" and result in a stagnant economy. In that example he missed the mark by believing in the "false dichotomy" of capitalism versus socialism, and underplaying the influence of progressivism -- which, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, had never rejected capitalism. In any case, during the 1980s, the process of creative destruction was entirely in evidence, with new companies such as Microsoft and Apple rising, and old firms like IBM going into decline. It was also a time when, thanks to Ronald Reagan, power began a noticeable tilt from the government towards the capitalist bosses. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As reported in an article from JANES.com ("US Army Approves New Top-Attack, Anti-Tank Landmine Production" by Ashley Roque, 11 August 2022), the US Army has now awarded Textron Systems a low-rate initial production contract to produce its new "XM204" top-attack munition, a landmine designed to destroy combat vehicles.
A top-attack mine fires a munition over the top of a target, with the munition firing downward into the relatively thin top armor on top of a tank or other vehicle. The XM204 is part of the Army's plan to replace its "Family of Scatterable Mines (FASCAM)", which the service judges to be "nearing their end of useful life". This replacement plan includes the XM204 top-attack munition and a future bottom-attack munition, with both to eventually be network-enabled.
* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("MBDA Unveils Ground-Launched, Deep-Fires Cruise-Missile Concept" by Tony Osborne, 23 June 2022), the US Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS) is proving to be one of the stars of the war in Ukraine. Ammunition for the launchers is provided in "pods" that are easily handled, with six MLRS missiles per pod -- there being a number of different kinds of such missiles -- or one bigger ATACMS missile per pod.
Now European defense giant MBDA has announced development of a ground-launched cruise missile, the "Joint Fire Support Missile (JFSM)". It will be turbojet-powered, with an advanced guidance system to allow it to take different routes to a target. Maximum range will be 500 kilometers (310 miles). Two JFSMs can be carried in a single MRLS missile pod -- though illustrations show three missiles per pod, that possibly being an earlier concept. MBDA believes the JFSM can in service in no more than five years.
* Ukrainian naval forces made something of a splash, so to speak, with their drone attack boats, performing strikes on Russia naval assets in Sevastopol harbor. It appears the drone boats were quickly neutralized, so now the Ukrainians have turned to a drone submersible, named the "Toloka (TLK) 150".
The Toloka is the size of a light torpedo, with a blunt nose, a pointed rear, wings on each side with an electric prop thruster, and a mast with a video camera and radio antenna. It has a range of about 100 kilometers (60 miles) and a warhead in the range of 20 to 50 kilograms (44 to 110 pounds). The Ukrainians are also working on what look like uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) -- robot submarines -- including the:
No other details are forthcoming for the moment.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (7): Satellites provide the most coverage of sensor systems, though not at the greatest detail. They are, however, expensive, and vulnerable. The US, Russia, and China have all worked on anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, though nobody's ever used them in anger. The problem with ASATs is that if, say, China takes out US satellites, the US will promptly take out Chinese satellites in retaliation. So far, nobody's seen an advantage in destroying the satellites of an adversary.
It is, however, possible to jam surveillance satellites, with lasers or microwave beams. The US says that Russia tries to dazzle its orbiting surveillance systems with lasers on a regular basis. Such actions fall into the domain of electronic warfare (EW), and nobody has much restraint in that domain. The deployment of American and Russian forces close to each other in northern Syria led to an EW war, with General Raymond Thomas -- at the time, boss of US special forces -- saying in 2018: "They are testing us every day, complained in 2018, "knocking our communications down" and neutralizing US EC-130 electronic-warfare planes.
In Green Dagger, an exercise held in California in October 2021, a US Marine Corps regiment was tasked with seizing a town and two villages defended by an opposing force thrown together from other American marines, British and Dutch commandos and Emirati special forces. It struggled to do so. When small teams of British commandos attacked the regiment's rear areas, paralyzing its advance, the marines were hard put to target them before they moved, EW having disrupted the operations of marine command posts.
Armies that once required air cover will now need to obtain "cyber-deception cover" -- according to Ed Stringer, a retired air marshal who led recent reforms in British military thinking. Stringer says: "There's a point at which the screens of the opposition need to go a bit funny -- not so much that they immediately spot what you're doing, but enough to distract and confuse."
The ability to degrade the other side's sensors, interrupt its communications and mess with its head does not replace old-fashioned camouflage and modern stealth; they remain essential in modern warfare. Russia has platoons dedicated to spraying the air with aerosols designed to block ultraviolet, infrared and radar waves. During their recent border stand-off, India and China both employed camouflage designed to confuse sensors with a broader spectral range than the human eye. In addition, although much is made of battlefield sensing capabilities, it's hard to get full coverage, hard to get information to warfighters when they need it.
To the substantial extent that battlefield sensing does work, it is possible to complicate the battlefield that it has to sense -- by using many small, mobile forces, and also using feints and decoys. During the First Iraq War, the US invested substantial resources in trying to hunt down Iraqi mobile missile launchers, to be only too easily misled by convincing decoys.
Data fusion helps pick out fakes by integrating target signatures. However, the technology of fakes has improved "immensely" over the past few decades, according to Steen Bisgaard -- the founder of GaardTech, an Australian company which builds replica vehicles to serve as both practice targets and decoys. Bisgaard says his company sells a very convincing mobile dummy of a British Challenger II tank, one with a turret and guns that move, the heat signature of a massive diesel engine, and a radio transmitter that works at military wavelengths, all for less than a 20th of the cost of the real thing. Shipped in a flat pack, it can be assembled in an hour or so.
In addition, countermeasures employed by real weapon systems, such as stealth, can make them harder to tell from decoys. The technology has room for further improvement. Remy Hemez, a French army officer, imagines a future where armies deploy large "robotic decoy formations using AI to move along and create a diversion".
Decoys are not merely about diversion; they can also help expose adversary attack assets. Silent Impact, a 155-millimeter artillery shell produced by SRC, a US firm, can transmit electronic signals as if it were a radar or other emitter, being deposited on the ground by parachute. Attempts to attack it will give away the position of the shooters.
Underlying the new weapons tech is, again, AI technology -- which is somewhat of a double-edged blade at present. An AI system searching for adversary assets can spot things humans can't, but at the same time can miss things entirely obvious to humans. AI technology is certain to improve, but the same principle applies to the hardware as well: the more sophisticated it is, the harder it is to know how it can go wrong. It will often reveal its failings on the battlefield, possibly with disastrous results, since an adversary will quickly identify and exploit technical blind spots.
However, there's no turning back the technical clock. The battlefield cloud is here to stay; getting it to work right will demand experience, sometimes painful experience. Even once it's working right, an adversary may figure out ways to trick it. War has become more complicated, and is going to continue to become so. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SEARCHING FOR VIRUSES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Dangers? Computers Uncover 100,000 Novel Viruses In Old Genetic Data" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 27 January 2022), we have a weak grasp of the world of viruses; they can readily hand us unpleasant surprises, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The depths of our ignorance were revealed by a recent study, in which extensive databases of genomic data were "mined" to find novel viral genetic sequences. The researchers found over 100,000 novel viruses, including nine coronaviruses and more than 300 related to the hepatitis Delta virus, which can cause liver failure.
The work began in early 2020, when computational biologist Artem Babaian, now at the University of Cambridge, was between tasks, and got to wondering how many unknown coronaviruses could be found in sequences in existing genomic databases. He hooked up with an independent supercomputing expert named Jeff Taylor to scan through cloud-based genomic data that had been deposited to a global sequence database and uploaded by the US National Institutes of Health. At the time, the database contained 16 petabytes of archived sequences, produced by genetic surveys of everything from fugu fish to farm soils to the insides of human guts. The genomes of viruses infecting the organisms in these samples were also captured by sequencing, but were generally ignored.
To scan through the database, Babaian and Taylor devised a set of computer tools. Working with a number of bioinformaticians -- some of them becoming dedicated collaborators -- they tweaked their software to make their analysis "way faster than anyone thought possible," says Babaian, who is now at the University of Cambridge.
They quickly expanded their viral hunt beyond coronaviruses, searching through all the data in the cloud. Babaian and colleagues performed their search by hunting for matches to the core of the gene for RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is key to the replication of all RNA viruses. Such viruses include not only coronaviruses, but also those that cause flu, polio, measles, and hepatitis.
Babaian's approach was fast enough to crunch through a million data sets a day, at a computing cost of less than a penny per data set. When they were finished, they had discovered the partial genomes of almost 132,000 RNA viruses. The new viral database does have complete sequences, but not for all its entries; in many cases, there's just the gene for the core enzyme. However, even partial sequences can be used to build family trees that show how different viruses are related and how they evolve. They can also use the database to find out where a particular virus came from, and what its host is. Finally, when a new virus is isolated from a sick patient, researchers can more easily tell whether it has already been found elsewhere. Babaian says: "We have turned this [database] into a giant virus surveillance network."
Some findings were unexpected, including previously unknown coronaviruses in the well-studied fugu fish and axolotls. In some aquatic animals, the sequences suggested the coronavirus genome has two separate loops, not the usual single RNA strand. In addition, Babaian's team came across evidence of more than 250 giant viruses that infect bacteria and are similar to those found in algae. Members of the bacteriophage viral group, close relatives of these "huge phages," were detected in sequences from vastly different organisms; One group of huge phages was found in a person in Bangladesh and also in cats and dogs in the United Kingdom, for example.
To make sure others can take advantage of the work, Babaian's team has created a public repository of the tools it developed, along with the results. The amount of cloud-based, publicly available DNA sequences is expanding exponentially; if he did the same analysis next year, Babaian says he would expect to find hundreds of thousands more RNA viruses. "By the end of the decade, I want to identify over 100 million."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Zelensky Dominates Summit As G7 Leaders Call Out China" by Tessa Wong, 20 May 2023), the G7 group of developed nations met in Hiroshima, Japan, this last week, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy making a surprise visit on a French government aircraft.
Zelenskyy's arrival prompted G7 leaders to issue a statement early -- in which they condemned Russia, and also issued veiled warnings to Beijing. Less confrontationally, the G7 leaders extended invitations to several emerging economies in the "Global South", as well as India and Australia.
Zelenskyy's visit was apparently a last-minute improvisation that disrupted the typically plodding nature of a G7 summit, with the Ukrainian president dominating the scene. Nobody there seemed bothered by that; while sanctions against Russia have had mixed effect, world leaders literally standing shoulder to shoulder with Zelenskyy sent a firm message to Moscow that they mean business.
Besides addressing key topics such as nuclear non-proliferation and climate change, the joint final statement of the G7 talked about their commitment to the Indo-Pacific region, which they tried to demonstrate by inviting countries such as Indonesia, India, and the Cook Islands. They stressed their support of South East Asian and Pacific countries, which have been heavily courted by Beijing, and called for a "free and open Indo-Pacific" -- verbiage used in the past in response to China's territorial claims in the South China Sea. More importantly, the leaders took a strong stance against what they called "economic coercion" -- that is, China using trade to bully other countries -- and called for China to "play by international rules".
Stressing their commitment to "economic resilience", the G7 leadership promised to take steps to "reduce excessive dependencies in our critical supply chains", meaning weaning themselves off of trade with China. However, they also said they wanted "constructive and stable relations" with China, adding that their polices were "not designed to harm China, nor do we seek to thwart China's economic progress and development" -- possibly added at the suggestion of the Japanese, who do not want to unnecessarily provoke Beijing.
Nonetheless, the Chinese foreign ministry immediately expressed "strong dissatisfaction" with the G7's joint statement and complained to the summit organizer Japan, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying: "The G7 insisted on manipulating China-related issues, smearing, and attacking China." The Japanese hadn't replied at last notice, but will likely politely tell the Chinese to hike off. They don't want to provoke the Chinese, but don't take kindly to being bullied, either. Besides, it places Beijing in an awkward position to act like a bully and then complain about being called a bully.
* In other news concerning the Ukraine War, Donald Trump announced that he could end the conflict in 24 hours, saying: "I want everybody to stop dying. They're dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying." When queried by a reporter during a recent visit to Rome, Zelenskyy was unimpressed, saying that when Trump was president ...
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... there was no full-scale invasion, but there was a war. There was already a Russian aggression. Crimea was occupied, part of Donbas was occupied. I'm not sure if he was deeply involved into this matter, but, nevertheless, he did not solve this issue. I'm not sure it was a priority for him. I am not accusing him of anything. But we have the facts. And we have to look at them.
END_QUOTE
Zelenskyy is personally familiar with Trump, and knows better than to think he's a serious person. In the meantime, the war drags on. This last week, Russia launched more missile strikes, notably performing an attack on Ukraine's new Patriot surface-to-air missile sites with a wave of six Kinzhal (Dagger) air-launched ballistic missiles. The Patriots shot all six of them down. Although a diesel generator was apparently damaged, Vladimir Putin was nonetheless handed a stinging defeat. Incidentally, videos of the Patriot launches circulated online -- with Ukrainian security reacting angrily, saying that the videos helped the Russians and would not be tolerated. Ukrainian security is much tighter than it was a year ago, and much less is leaking out.
* In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been continuing his culture wars, though as of late he's been stumbling. Political pundit Rick Wilson, talking with MSNBC's Ali Velshi, suggested that DeSantis is not going anywhere in any hurry:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
AV: You tweeted the other day, Ron DeSantis is "the most overpriced stock in American politics." ... you know, I'm an economics guy, so when you say things like that, I pay attention. Talk to me about that. ... there's always a theory, that if Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump made it to a debate, Donald Trump would eat him alive, because Donald Trump eats a lot of people alive at these things. Ron DeSantis may be doing all the things necessary to be a presidential candidate -- but when we see him as an actual presidential candidate, a lot of people are going to be a little bit surprised.
RW: Ron DeSantis has a strange personal affect: he does not like to make eye contact, he does not like human beings. I guarantee you, that after this [recent] Iowa [campaign] trip, he's exhausted by having to pretend to be human for three days -- or two days, however long he was out there.
This is a guy who notoriously is short with people, he's unpleasant one-on-one, and the donors who have flocked to him now are squirrelly about him now, because they're starting to see he's kind of got a mean streak. And in American politics, a mean streak is not really a good thing. And voters are seeing that, I think, a little bit.
He's got all this mechanical "stuff" around him. That's the right thing to do, but even a great campaign can't save a bad candidate. A great campaign can sometimes, you know, pull one along -- but you've got to have a certain amount of felicity and grace and engagement with people, if you're gonna go run for the highest office in the land. And Ron DeSantis is gonna have to go places like New Hampshire, and sit in a diner with the Merrimac County state Republican committee-man for an hour, as this 79-year-old dude talks about the gold standard or whatever he's obsessed with.
And he can't just walk out! He can't just leave the room! So he's gonna have an interesting time of this. There are a lot of people in the donor class who've given him a lot of money; they look at him as an alternative to Trump. The legislative session in Florida was a wishlist for everything he wanted, and a lot of it turned out to be radioactive waste, like six-week abortion ban, this stupid war with Disney ...
Y'know, look, I have a short list of things I don't do, and one is I don't go to war with Bob Iger and Disney, it's like "a land war in Asia" ...
AV: ... Tom Nichols [a bright, hawkish curmudgeon mentioned here in the past] was on yesterday morning, saying: "It doesn't animate anybody." There's no Republican who gets up in the morning, saying: "YEAH ..."
RW: Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes: "Man, I HATE Disney! ... We gotta crush Disney! The rogue Disney!" So look ... I think DeSantis is, he's a smart guy, but he's narrowly smart. He's not a person with those gifts. I dislike Donald Trump in every conceivable aspect of his behavior, of his character, everything else -- but he has charisma. He engages people.
He has a sense of ... energy about him, which probably will end up in the primary debates coming out again, the base will rally back around him -- and look, I said this the other night -- you watch the way Donald Trump behaved in that [recent CNN] town hall, and I said to myself: "Good god, he's gonna tear Ron DeSantis's head off and kick it around like a soccer ball." This guy will go nowhere against him.
Now look, I remember in '16, a lot of Republicans -- Jeb, Marco, Ted, all of them -- they would go out like: "My speechwriters wrote me a funny zinger against Trump!" And they would go out like they thought they were gonna beat him, and he would just like, blow the whole room up.
END_QUOTE
Donald Trump won in 2016 because he was controlling a perfect storm against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. The Republicans lost the next three elections. They have no alternative to Trump for 2024, with the sensible among them realizing they are facing a perfect storm much more brutal than the one that took down Hillary Clinton. By the time the election comes around, Donald Trump will be facing court dates, if he hasn't been convicted by that time, and only bizarro people will vote for him. There aren't remotely that many bizarros to elect him.
Exactly how this will play out remains to be seen. There remains the interesting possibility of Liz Cheney running on a separate ticket, which will split the GOP into two parts. However, nobody has any real clue about what will happen.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (47): The 1980s saw the boom of computing technology that had begun in the 1970s, with personal computers (PC) becoming widespread, particularly after giant IBM entered the market, offering PCs using a disk operating system (DOS) provided by a Seattle start-up company named Microsoft. There was a shakeout among PC makers during the decade, with IBM and rival Apple Corporation becoming predominant. Ironically, IBM gradually found PCs undermining its domination of the mainframe computer industry. Microsoft, in contrast, became an industry giant, not just because its MS-DOS operating system became a standard, but because Microsoft also offered applications.
Startup software companies also arose to provide applications for users. As far as business applications were concerned, PCs were used for traditional business accounting, but they were also widely used for the electronic spreadsheet, which made handling nitpicking finances easier. Games were also popular, though the primary action in computer gaming remained in arcade games, where players shoved quarters into machines to play Pac-Man, Missile Command, or Asteroids. Home game consoles were still primitive compared to the arcade consoles.
Computer communications were also primitive, there being no global internet, with "information service providers (ISP)" such as CompuServe providing services such as email, forums, news, and some online services such as airline ticketing for a monthly fee, with access through "modems" on phone lines. The internet did exist at the time, but it was restricted to academic, government, and corporate organizations. However, mobile communications were beginning to boom, with cellphone networks being established all over the developed world, and cellphones becoming commonplace.
The introduction of the microprocessor in the 1970s led to a technological revolution all up and down the line, with machinery from sprinkler control systems to washing machines to aircraft acquiring digital "smarts". Robotics and industrial automation advanced rapidly, as did "computer-aided design (CAD)" and "computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)". Instead of laboriously drawing out blueprints for a product, CAD allowed them to be created and manipulated digitally -- and to create 3D visualizations. CAM became linked to CAD, with the digital models created by CAD translated to manufactured products.
The new digital tech era was embodied in "Silicon Valley", in the southern San Francisco Bay Area, named for its semiconductor device manufacturers. Silicon Valley wasn't a new thing, having been emerging in the 1960s and building up steam in the 1970s -- but in the 1980s the place went into full gear, with businesses there competing to come up with new hardware and software. Startup companies rose and fell, fueled by "venture capitalists" who seeded them, knowing some would fail, while others would turn into gold mines.
The 1980s, as an aspect of the Reagan Revolution, were an era of corporate power, most notably manifested in Jack Welch (1935:2020), CEO of General Electric. Welch ruthlessly cut costs and laid off employees, doing everything he could to drive up GE's market value. The doctrine of the time was that the goal of a corporate business was to "enhance shareholder value"; it did not go unnoticed that executive compensation was also growing rapidly at the time.
Incidentally, the 1980s were the great age of business management books, likely the most popular being THE ONE-MINUTE MANAGER from 1982, a set of short and easily-digested epistles on various management tasks. It was not universally admired, critics suggesting that it was a dumbed-down read on the popular doctrine of "management by objective (MBO)", which in itself was the unremarkable suggestion that management needed to be guided by well-defined goals. That book was followed in 1983 by the 59-SECOND EMPLOYEE, which offered suggestions for how employees could stay one step ahead of the latest management fad.
Foreign competition with the USA from Europe and particularly Japan continued, with resentment against the Japanese persisting as well. Japan was at the peak of its commercial power at the time, with Japanese techniques such as "statistical quality control (SQC)" and "just in time (JIT)" becoming popular business mantras. SQC was just what it said, the application of statistical methods to ensure product quality. JIT was a little more devious, suggesting that manufacturers obtain their source materials as they needed them, cutting costs by reducing stockpiles and handling. JIT demanded prompt performance from suppliers, enforced by contractual penalties; it would also later prove to have a painful downside.
Although developing nations like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore were following the Japanese lead towards export-driven industrialization, their impact was limited for the time being. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for April included:
[02 APR 23] CN JQ / TIANLONG 2 / JINTA -- A Tianlong 2 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0848 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Aitaikong Kexue (Jinta)" 8-unit (8U) demonstrator CubeSat into orbit. This was the first launch of the Tianlong 2 light booster, and was a success.
[02 APR 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / TSLT0 x 8, TKLT0 x 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1429 UTC (local time + 8) to put the first of two installments of the Space Development Agency's "Tranche 0 Transport / Tracking Layer" satellites into orbit. There were 8 Transport satellites & 2 tracking satellites.
Once completed, Tranche 0 will include 20 optically-connected data transport satellites and eight optically-connected missile warning / missile tracking satellites equipped with wide-field-of-view sensors. SDA plans to field the first operational generation of the "Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA)" constellation, Tranche 1, beginning in late 2024. Tranche 1 will include 126 Transport Layer satellites, 35 Tracking satellites, and 12 tactical demonstration satellites (T1DES).
[07 APR 23] CN JQ / HYPERBOLA 1 -- A commercial Hyperbola 1 light booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0400 UTC (local time - 8) on a test flight. The booster was built by Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology LTD, better known as "iSpace". The previous three Hyperbola 1 launches ended in failure.
[07 APR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / INTELSAT 40E -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0430 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Intelsat 40E" geostationary comsat into orbit.
Intelsat 40e was built by Maxar Technologies and was based on the company's 1300-class satellite platform. The satellite had a launch mass of about around 5,440 kilograms (12,000 pounds). It was the 54th satellite built by Maxar for Intelsat, in a partnership that has lasted more than 40 years.
The satellite also hosted a payload for NASA, named "Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO)". TEMPO was a UV to visible spectrometer built by Ball Aerospace, designed to measure atmospheric pollution over North America. TEMPO was the second of a three-instrument constellation designed to monitor air pollution on an hourly basis. The first, the "Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS)" was a sister instrument to TEMPO and was mounted onto the Korean Aerospace Research Institute "GEO-KOMPSAT 2B" satellite, launched in 2020 to monitor Asia. The third and last instrument of the constellation will be mounted onto the "Sentinel 4" satellite, to be launched in 2024. The Falcon 9 booster soft-landed on the SpaceX drone barge in the Atlantic.
[14 APR 23] / ARIANE 5 ECA / JUICE -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1214 UTC (local time + 3) to loft the "Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE)" onto an interplanetary trajectory. It will observe the three biggest icy moons of Jupiter -- Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, entering the Jovian system in 2031.
JUICE carried a payload of ten instruments, including hardware from by ESA, NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). JUICE will perform four planetary flybys to get to Jupiter. JUICE's first flyby will be of Earth, in August 2024. It will change JUICE's trajectory from the near-equatorial plane to one suitable for continuing the mission to its next target, Venus. This first Earth flyby will actually leverage off the Moon, this being the first time such a thing will be done; it's called a "Lunar-Earth Gravity Assist (LEGA)". Juice will then perform a flyby of Venus in August 2025, followed by two more flybys of Earth, September 2026 and January 2029. JUICE teams are currently evaluating the possibility of the spacecraft performing a flyby of an asteroid named 223 Rosa.
After the long journey to Jupiter, JUICE will arrive at the Jovian system in July 2031. After arriving at the Jovian system, the spacecraft is expected to perform at least 35 flybys of the icy moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. After completing the flybys, JUICE will enter into orbit around Ganymede in December 2034 -- remaining there until the end of the mission in 2035, then crashing into Ganymede's surface.
[15 APR 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / TRANSPORTER 7 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 0648 UTC (local time + 5), on the "Transporter 7" mission, a rideshare flight to low-Earth orbit, carrying 51 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 biggest payload on Transporter 7 was the Earth remote-sensing satellite IMECE, the highest resolution imaging satellite designed and built in Turkey with 1-meter (3.3-foot) panchromatic and 5-meter (16.14-foot) multispectral capabilities. The satellite was built by Tubitak Space Technologies Research Institute (Tubitak UZAY) and had a launch mass of 800 kilograms (1,765 pounds). Other relatively large payloads included:
The rest of the payloads were CubeSats and PocketQubes. Many were carried on two space tugs:
The CubeSats and PocketQubes included, this not necessarily being a complete list:
The launch vehicle's booster returned to SpaceX's landing zone approximately seven and a half minutes after launch. The payload fairing was recovered from the ocean downrange by ship NRC QUEST. This was the first Transporter mission to launch from Vandenberg, as well as the first Transporter mission to launch at night.
[16 APR 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 4B / FENGYUN 3G -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0136 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Fengyun 3G" polar-orbiting weather satellite for the China Meteorological Administration.
[19 APR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1431 UTC (local time + 4) to put 21 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship. The payload fairings were also recovered.
[20 APR 23] USA SX-SB / STARSHIP / TEST FLIGHT 1 (FAILURE) -- A SpaceX Starship heavily-lift booster performed its first all-up test flight. It lost several Raptor engines, went out of control, and was destroyed by range safety.
[22 APR 23] IN SR / PSLV / TELEOS2 & -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0849 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "TeLEOS 2" radar-imaging satellite into orbit for the government of Singapore. The "Lumelite 4" CubeSat was also deployed, while seven additional payloads rode attached to PSLV's upper stage -- which remained in orbit after completing the deployment of the two satellites.
TeLEOS 2 carried a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload. Built by ST Electronics, it was based on the same SS-400 bus as the earlier "TeLEOS 1" electro-optical satellite, launched in 2015. TeLEOS 2 had a mass of 740 kilograms (1,635 pounds), and could obtain images with resolution of a meter.
Lumelite 4 was a 12U CubeSat, launched for the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and other industrial and government partners. It was designed to perform an on-orbit demonstration of a space-based VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) for maritime users.
The orbiting upper stage was named the "PSLV Orbital Experimental Module 2 (POEM 2)". POEM 2 carried seven attached payloads for multiple users, including a particle analyzer, an onboard computer and its software, an electric propulsion system, a CubeSat communications system, a CubeSat orbital deployer, and a star tracker. The upper stage had solar arrays to power the payloads. It remained in orbit for about a month.
[27 APR 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 3-5 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0743 UTC (local time + 8) to put 46 SpaceX "Starlink v1.5" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The booster stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.
[28 APR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / O3B MPOWER 3 & 4: -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2212 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "O3B MPOWER 3 & 4" medium Earth orbit (MEO) comsats into orbit. This was the second launch of second-generation O3B satellites. The Falcon 9 booster landed on the SpaceX recovery barge.
The company's original constellation consists of 20 satellites, all in MEO, which were launched aboard five Soyuz missions between from 2013 to 2019. O3b was originally owned by the company O3b Networks before being acquired by SES in 2016. The satellites making up this second-generation constellation are built by Boeing and are based on the Boeing 702X satellite bus, with electric propulsion.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (6): The modern battlefield is dominated by a type of "cloud computer", with sensors and processors collaborating to form a greater whole, the software linking all the nodes being able to coordinate and allocate them, and find things in the sea of data that humans can't. Britain has such a system, named "Odyssey", with one official associated with it saying: "You'll be amazed at the patterns it picks up when you put bulk data together from different sources and run AI algorithms across them,"
Such systems can keep an ongoing eye on every individual battle element they notice. That was not possible in the past. On the afternoon of 15 April 2015, Doug Hughes, a postman from Florida, decided to deliver letters of protest to America's Congress by flying his gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to the lawn of the Capitol. Radar systems did observe segments of his journey, but it tripped no alarms. As a test, an AI system named Pathfinder later examined the data relevant to his flight, and reconstructed its path.
Pathfinder uses commercial flight plans and weather reports to help sort things out; not surprisingly, the integration of such open-source data is crucial to a lot of intelligence and surveillance. In 2021 America's National Security Commission on AI -- chaired by Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google -- said that the country's intelligence agencies would need to build "a continuous pipeline of all-source intelligence analysis" into "continually learning analytic engines". The group labeled the system "Omniscient Neural-net Engineering for Reconnaissance, Intelligence and National Goal-achievement (ONERING)".
Some workers at tech companies have objected to working on such military "big data" projects, with protests at Google and Microsoft. Of course, we're a long ways from anything as capable and comprehensive as ONERING, since organizationally it's hard to get everyone moving in the same direction: different military services and government agencies contracting with different companies to build their own clouds and AI systems, and they may not play well together. Old-school defense contractors are not noted for their ability to deal with advanced cybertech, and highly structured defense procurement unlikely to improve matters.
* Of course, devising a smart cloud to cover a battlefield implies the development of countermeasures. They fall into four categories: destruction, deafening, disappearance, and deception. Destruction is a straightforward approach, involving blowing up the sensors. Anti-radar missiles, homing in on the emissions of radar or other "emitters" have been around a long time.
However, passive sensors -- particularly visible and infared imagers -- don't give away their presence, and they are generally much cheaper than radars. Small drones can carry such imagers, and such drones can be obtained in such quantities as to frustrate attempts to destroy them, particularly with interceptors more expensive than the drones are. Unfortunately, the ease with which American drones wandered the skies above Iraq, Afghanistan and other post-9/11 war zones led to a mistaken impression that drones were invulnerable. The war in Ukraine shows that at least the larger drones are not, being vulnerable to adversary air defenses. The small cheap drones are still effective, with "kamikaze" attack drones proving lethal battlefield weapons. Nonetheless, countermeasures are certain to reduce their effectiveness as well. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ARMY LASER WEAPON: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("US Army Commissions 300-kW, Target-Tracking Laser Weapon" by Loz Blain, 27 October 2021), Boeing and General Atomics (GA) have been awarded a US Army contract to develop a new high-power solid-state laser air defense system, with a remarkable power output of 300 kilowatts.
Late in 2020, Boeing and GA teamed up to demonstrate a 100-to-250-kW-class laser weapon, to show the military GA's distributed-gain laser design was the solution to cooling problems that tend to impose severe limits on high-energy laser weapons. At the time Michael Perry, GA's VP for Lasers, said that the company's distributed gain system sits in a "Goldilocks zone" for solid-state lasers:
The US Army liked the solution, with the Boeing-GA team awarded a "Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO)" contract to prototype a 300-kW version of GA's laser, with Boeing's beam director and precision acquisition, tracking and pointing software integrated. It isn't clear if the laser system will be compact enough to be crammed into a pod for aircraft carriage, but it certainly will be suitable for carriage on trucks or warship.
Beyond this system, there's talk floating around of an "Ultra-Short Pulse Laser" system that would produce a staggering 5 terawatts of power, bursts as short as 30 femtoseconds, up to 50 times a second. We'll see what happens on that.
* In related laser news, the Lockheed C-130 turboprop transport was introduced over half a century ago, and is still going strong, having been adapted to many different roles -- for example, close-support gunship, in the form of the "AC-130" series. As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("The AC-130J Gunship's First Solid State Laser Weapon Has Arrived For Testing" by Thomas Newdick & Joseph Trevithick, 8 October 2021), the current incarnation of the AC-130, the "AC-130J Ghostrider", is now being evaluated with the initial prototype of the Lockheed Martin "Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL).
Full details of the AHEL are not available, but it is said to be in the 60-kilowatt (kW) class, comparable to the Lockheed Martin "High Energy Laser & Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS)" laser built for the Navy. While the Ghostrider has an impressive array of traditional weapons, the laser would provide a high degree of operational flexibility.
In one scenario described to NATIONAL DEFENSE magazine by Lieutenant General Brad Webb, then the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), an AC-130J armed with a high-energy laser, even one with relatively modest power output, would pick out and destroy an electrical transformer, the engine of a pick-up truck, communication equipment, and a parked drone. Webb provided a narrative:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Without the slightest bang, whoosh, thump, explosion, or even aircraft engine hum, four key targets are permanently disabled. The enemy has no communications, no escape vehicle, no electrical power, and no retaliatory intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. Minutes later, the team emerges from the compound, terrorist mastermind in hand. A successful raid.
END_QUOTE
The Air Force has tinkered with this concept before. There were tests in the 1990s and 2000s that demonstrated the potential value of adding a laser weapon system to an AC-130 gunship. A number of live-fire tests of one system, known as the "Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL)" were conducted using a C-130 testbed aircraft. The 100 kilowatt-class chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) weapon demonstrated that it wasn't ready for operational service. The AHEL system appears much closer to fielding -- or at least it did, recent reports suggesting the program has run into difficulties.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Will Japan Fight?", 10 May 2023), Japanese leadership has made it clear that Japan regards the defense of Taiwan against China as in Japan's interests, backing up American defense of the island. In the event of a crisis, according to Otsuka Taku of the Japanese Diet, or Parliament: "There's no way Japan won't be involved ... We will fight with the US."
However, exactly what that means remains deliberately hidden in "strategic ambiguity". The Japanese government has given no indication of being "all-in" on a Taiwan fight. If war comes, the USA will use forward bases in Japan to support the conflict, but will require the permission of the Japanese government. The government would be strongly inclined to grant permission, one Japanese ex-official saying: "If we don't say yes, the alliance is over."
The next decision for Japanese leadership would be commitment to Japanese action. It might not be difficult to provide non-combat support, such as providing fuel, medical care and logistical assistance. Traditionally, Japan's Self-Defense Forces could only fight if Japan itself were attacked. A law passed in 2015 also permits the use of force if another country is attacked and the Diet judges it "survival-threatening" for Japan. However, getting to that judgement would not be a simple matter.
Assuming that Japan did decide to fight, then the issue would become one of the appropriate way to do so. Unlike NATO member states, Japan is not set up to engage in combat along with US forces, with no command that links both their militaries together. There's no inherent unity as there is between the US and South Korea, where the forces answer to a single combined command boasting the mantra "fight tonight".
Japan does plan to create permanent joint headquarters, but that may take years. At present there's little infrastructure to support it, and there's not much public support for a closely-knit command.
Polling finds robust support for the alliance in Japan, but the public is opposed to a more active military role for the SDF. One survey offered respondents choices for how to react to a conflict between America and China: 27% said the SDF should not work with America at all; 56% said it should limit itself to rear-area support; and just 11% said Japan should fight alongside America.
Left out of these considerations is the prospect of Japan providing weapons to Taiwan, such as cruise missiles. Japan is not an arms exporter and has barriers to being one -- but if there's a will, there should be a way. How much will Japanese have for helping the defense of Taiwan remains to be seen.
* A recent leader essay in ECONOMIST.com blamed America's inflation on Joe Biden, for having issued stimulus checks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and passed major spending bills. The argument was misguided and annoying -- as an essay from VOX.com from last year ("Is The Stimulus To Blame For High Inflation?" by Madeline Ngo, 17 October 2022) pointed out. The difficulty with blaming Biden for the recent inflation is that it is a global phenomenon; the USA, although above the median, is not close to the top either. The conclusion is that Biden's policies had, at most, a limited effect on inflation, and it is impossible to persuasively pick out a causal relationship.
It should be noted that Ronald Reagan's first year in office was a time of high inflation, running at 9%, with inflation in subsequent years dropping to an average of slightly less than 4%. It was 7% in Biden's first year, dropping to 6.5% in the second year, and is now dropping below 5%. The current inflation was caused by a "forcing function" -- the pandemic, which disrupted businesses and particularly supply chains. The subsequent Ukraine war also disrupted global food distribution. The damage has largely been fixed, and now the challenge is mostly psychological, to convince businesses they shouldn't raise prices without cause. In any case, inflation is on the way out; once it goes away, business is likely to return to booming. However, we'll see.
* Armed Forces Ukraine are poised to begin their spring offensive against the Russian occupation, with one sign being release of deliberately bewildering comments by the government. Nobody really knows when things are going to happen.
In the meantime, AFU has been striking back in Bakhmut, the target of persistent Russian offensive drives since August 2022, with the Russian Wagner mercenaries playing a major role in the fighting. The AFU was clearly reluctant to commit any more resources to the defense of Bakhmut than necessary, to make sure that offensive preparations wouldn't be disrupted. AFU troops were gradually forced back, inflicting heavy losses on the Russians, though suffering heavily themselves.
It is clear the AFU has now put in reinforcements, with Russian forces being driven back from the town. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has taken to releasing videos, complaining about a lack of support and incompetence at the top. It is not so clear why the AFU decided to throw in resources, with the Ukrainian spring offensive about to begin. My own suspicion is that the Ukrainians want to crush Wagner and Prigozhin for good, taking a major piece off the playing board and throwing chaos into the already-chaotic Russian command. Prigozhin, it seems, is unlikely to be around in 2024. [ED: He was killed in a plane crash on 23 August 2023, the general belief being that it wasn't an accident.]
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (46): In 1988, Ronald Reagan was followed in office by his vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush -- son of an elite New England family who made his own fortune as a Texas oil company advocate, with a long and distinguished history of government service. Bush's administration was a follow-on to Reagan's, adopting much the same policies and, in particular, continuing the effort for rapprochement with China and the USSR.
Bush had been brought onto the Reagan ticket in 1980 because he was seen as a moderate Republican, balancing Reagan's position farther to the Right. Bush, however, inevitably tilted farther to the Right in his association with Reagan -- though like Reagan, Bush was for (limited) government action, signing into law bills to support the disabled, requiring employers and public accommodations to have facilities with access for the disabled; help deal with the HIV-AIDS pandemic; reforms to the financial regulatory system; implement minor educational initiatives; and update the Clean Air Act, as well as implement other environmental regulations. He also was willing to raise taxes; since he had made a campaign promise not to, that would cost him.
Relations with China hit a stumbling block in 1989, when a pro-democracy movement led to a crackdown, with violence in Tianemen Square. Relations with the West remained positive, but there was greater wariness in the USA and elsewhere.
The Bush Administration was initially wary of dealing with Mikhail Gorbachov, but in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, as the central event of the collapse of all of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Gorbachov decided not to use force to support those regimes, and supported the reunification of Germany. Gorbachov was not so lenient in the Baltic States, being willing to use force to prevent their secession from the USSR. In a 1991 speech, Bush came out in support of maintaining the integrity of the USSR, in large part because of the dangers of social breakdown in a nuclear-armed state. The speech became notorious on the Right, being labeled the "Chicken Kyiv" speech.
In August 1991, a military coup attempted to overthrow Gorbachov; it failed, but the end result was the collapse of the Soviet state, with nations emerging from the ruins -- including the Baltic States, Ukraine, and a clutch of Central Asian countries. Russia was the biggest of the states, forming a Russian Federation stretching from Eastern Europe through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Boris Yeltsin (1931:2007) became the first president of the Russian Federation, with the Bush Administration attempting to work with him -- and, at the end of Bush's term in office, establishing an enhanced arms-limitation treaty.
In the meantime, Bush achieved high public esteem for leading a "coalition of the willing" to liberate Kuwait after its conquest by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1937:2006), with the 1990:1991 Gulf War proving a resounding victory.
In 1987, while Reagan was in office, the USA and Canada had signed a free-trade agreement, with the Bush Administration pursuing a more comprehensive agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico. The "North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)" not only cutting tariffs, but also normalizing patents, copyright, and trademark policies between the participants. However, Bush was unable to complete NAFTA; the USA had slipped into a mild recession in 1990, with his popularity falling as a result -- the Right also remembering that he raised taxes and defended the integrity of the USSR. Bush was not re-elected in 1992. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from WIRED.com ("Microsoft's Security Copilot Sics ChatGPT on Security Breaches" by Lily Hay Newman, 20 March 2023), as of late the tech world has been excited about a new generation of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools, the leading edge being "ChatGPT" from OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed startup.
GAI is now having an impact on computer security. There has been work on software to protect computer systems from intrusion all along, but GAI promises to supercharge it. Microsoft, in partnership with OpenAI, has rolled out "Security Copilot", a high-level security field notebook that integrates system data and network monitoring from security tools such as Microsoft Sentinel and Defender, as well as third-party services.
Security Copilot can provide alerts, map out in both words and charts what may be going on within a network, and provide steps for investigation. Copilot tracks the history of its operations and generates summaries of activities, for auditing and to allow newcomers to an effort to get up to speed. It can automatically generate slides and other presentation materials for organizational communications.
Of course, Copilot includes access controls, so only authorized users can interact with the system -- and it can generate instructions and provide hints so users can be more efficient with it. If something Copilot is suggesting during an investigation is wrong or irrelevant, users can click the "Off Target" button to further train the system.
Security Copilot is mostly driven powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 model, but Microsoft officials add that it also leverages Microsoft's security expertise. They comment that while machine learning security tools have been effective in specific domains -- notably "endpoint security", monitoring email or activity on individual computing nodes -- Security Copilot covers all aspects of security, dealing with the big picture.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Perovskite Artificial Retina Can Read Handwritten Numbers" by Michael Irving, 23 February 2022), perovskite compounds have been used to make low-cost solar power cells. Not too surprisingly, they are also being used to make imagers.
A research team embedded perovskite nanocrystals into a polymer, and then sandwiched a layer of the material between two electrodes -- aluminum on the bottom, indium tin oxide on top, with the construct mounted on flexible polymide. This upper electrode was etched into a grid to let light into through to the perovskite layer, creating an array of photoreceptors.
To process the light input, this photoreceptor array was backed up by a CMOS sensor -- it appears to measure and encode the electrical signals generated by the array, the CMOS element apparently not being an imager in itself -- with the output fed to a neural network with 100 output neurons. Tests on a 4x4-pixel array using LEDs showed the optical response to be similar to that of the human eye. The system was even able to recognize handwritten numbers with an accuracy of 72%. It was also very stable, with no change in the response to light after 129 weeks.
The researchers don't envision the array as useful for eye transplants. Khaled Nabil Salama, one of the authors, says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The ultimate goal of our research in this area is to develop efficient neuromorphic vision sensors to build efficient cameras for computer vision applications. Existing systems use photodetectors that require power for their operation and thus consume a lot of energy, even on standby. In contrast, our proposed photoreceptors are capacitive devices that don't consume static power for their operation.
END_QUOTE
* A report from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland says that a research team has developed a new "dye-sensitized solar call (DSC)" with unprecedented efficiency.
DSCs are not new, but the EPFL cells are well in advance of earlier efforts, capable of extracting light energy from much of the visible light spectrum, Their conversion efficiency runs to about 30%, and they have maintained stability over 500 hours of testing. That's not a lot of time, but it suggests they can hold out for much longer. The new transparent cells are also flexible and can be fabricated with conventional roll-printing techniques.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (5): There are limits to what the "all-seeing eye" of battlefield sensing can accomplish. Mick Ryan, until recently the head of Australia's defense college, says: "You could put forward a thesis that Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battlespace in the history of humankind. And that didn't seem to help us."
Just pulling in torrents of data isn't good enough: it has to be usefully assessed and reported as quickly as possible. Consider radar, which proved revolutionary in World War II, being useful for not only tracking enemy aircraft in darkness and foul weather, but also for hunting submarines on the surface, and even for proximity fuzes that made anti-aircraft guns more effective. However, radar was part of systems -- the most notable being the air-defense system used in the Battle of Britain, where radar, ground spotters, and data from other sources was phoned into a control room, where workers plotted the movements of enemy aircraft and directed fighters to attack them.
In those days, everything was done by hand. Today, we have artificial intelligence to integrate battlefield data and keep warfighters in touch with what's going on. In a recent exercise in Poland, the British Army experimented with a command and control system built over eight weeks in collaboration with Anduril, a California-based company that provides sensors and systems to handle the data they return. The system could spot targets, determine what aircraft were available to take them out, and list options for warfighters using the system. The system was very fast and only required five people, instead of the 25 used previously. One officer involved said: "You're operating at a ridiculously different speed."
America's armed forces, helped by Palantir -- an AI company which, like Anduril, takes its name from THE LORD OF THE RINGS -- and other contractors, is working on systems that can assess a complete battlefield and provide direction for the battle. Given the limitations of communications channels, both in terms of bandwidth and vulnerability to jamming, much of the processing needs to be done "on the edge", meaning the platforms that perform then sensing.
In 2016 a Pentagon project called Maven tried to address the "lots of surveillance but not much to show for it" problem identified by General Ryan. The idea was to automate the identification of people and objects in the floods of video footage sent back by surveillance drones. It ended up producing software that could be run on the drones themselves. In SCARLET DRAGON, a recent AI-focused US exercise in which a wide range of systems were used to comb a large area for a small target, things were greatly sped up by allowing satellites to provide estimates of where a target might be in a compact format readable by another sensor or a targeting system, instead of transmitting high-definition images for humans to sort out.
There are fears that delegating more of the data handling to machines will return in dangerous blunders, but the need to manage the data flows means that the trend will continue, with cloud-computing increasingly involved. In 2019 the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion USD contract for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). In 2021 Amazon, which has been supplying the CIA with such services since 2013, got the contract annulled. The exercise will be restarted with a mix of firms, with plenty to go around among them. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ZOONOMIA PROJECT: As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Huge Cache Of Mammal Genomes Offers Fresh Insights On Human Evolution" by Max Kozlov, 27 April 2023), the first mammal genomes -- of mouse, human, rat, and chimpanzee -- were first published in the early 2000s, opening the door for geneticists to compare the sequences and learn more about how mammals evolved.
Two decades on, we've decoded the genomes of 240 mammals. From this data, biologists have learned more about why some mammals can smell particularly well, why others hibernate, and why some have developed larger brains. The effort to obtain and interpret this genomic data, named the Zoonomia Project, has been productive in generating papers and reports as of late.
The research highlights not only which areas of the genomes are similar, but also when, on the scale of millions of years, their genetic sequences diverged. Katie Pollard -- Zoonomia Project member, a data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco -- says: "This really wasn't possible without this scale of data set before."
Kerstin Lindblad-Toh -- one of the Zoonomia leaders, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden -- says the early mammalian genomes were a good start. However, she and her colleagues realized that they would need more than 200 genomes to obtain a statistically significant understanding of how mammalian species had changed over time, particularly if they wanted to go down to the bottom level detail of changes in single DNA base pairs.
The Zoonomia consortium includes more than 150 scientists and 30 research teams from around the world. The project made its 240 genomes available to the public for the first time in 2020, with researchers then digging into them to find similarities and differences.
The researchers believed that if certain segments of the genomes were similar, and had remained so over tens of millions of years across species, then those segments must serve important for these animals. In one analysis, a team used this aide to estimate that at least 10.7% of the human genome is identical to those of nearly all the mammal species in the set. Most of these "conserved" areas are "regulatory genes", which modulate how and when other genes are transcribed and ultimately translated into proteins.
Hunting for differences suggested how certain traits such as the sense of smell evolved, and also pointed researchers to which genes contribute to disease. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have already compared thousands of human genomes to identify variants that are linked with disease -- but finding the precise genes that aren't just linked to, but cause a disease, was not easy, particularly for conditions linked to millions of associated genes. Lindblad-Toh says that seeing how those genes have evolved over time in all mammals can help to narrow the search "by an order of magnitude",
Using Zoonomia data, researchers have also constructed a phylogenetic tree that estimates when each mammalian species diverged from its ancestors. The analysis lends support to the belief that mammals had already started evolutionarily diverging before Earth was struck by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago -- but that they diverged much more rapidly afterwards.
The Zoonomia Projct is not alone in the effort to sequence animal genomes. Another big effort is the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), with the goal of obtaining genomes for roughly all 71,000 living vertebrate species, which include mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and amphibians. The two projects are independent, but some researchers are members of both.
Zoonomia's database currently has a bias towards species with large bodies and those not from tropical regions, but the effort is ongoing and breaking out of the limits.
Having so many mammalian genomes is a feat, says Walter Jetz, an ecologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but Zoonomia's database so far has a bias towards species with large bodies and those that are not from tropical regions. Sequencing a greater diversity of mammals will allow researchers to draw more authoritative conclusions about mammalian evolution, he says. Lindblad-Toh says the project aimed to select a wide range of species to sample, but that the more mammals added to this data set, the more powerful it will be.
Nathan Upham -- an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not part of Zoonomia -- says: "We're entering an exponential phase of genome sequencing with mammals and other groups." He adds that Zoonomia is "only the beginning." The past two decades were about learning how to sequence genomes, and: "Now we're just starting to really dive deep into the genomes."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Armed Forces Ukraine appears to be on the threshold of jumping off on their long-awaited spring offensive against the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine, with strikes being performed against high-value targets all along the battle line. In the meantime, in Russia itself Ukrainian drones have set fuel storage facilities on fire -- with, it seems, saboteurs contributing to the destruction.
Exact details of anything are hard to come by, being cloaked in disinformation. However, it was released that a Patriot PAC-3 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) did shoot down a Russian Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile -- a remarkable achievement, Patriot having only arrived in Ukraine. The PAC-3 ABM is not particularly new, reinforcing the belief that Russian weapons like the Kinzhal are not as impressive as that they had been made out to be by Russian propaganda. It appears that, although the air raids haven't been stopped by any means, they have been seriously blunted, with Russian kamikaze drones almost always being shot down.
Speculation on the intent of the offensive is all over the map, with the diversity of opinion encouraged by the authorities. One popular suggestion is that the AFU will advance to the shattered city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, cutting the Russian occupation of the Don Basin region in half, with the southern half isolated. That done, Crimea would be easily isolated, by destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge, and could not withstand a determined offensive, aided by guerrillas. Even if the Russians were not evicted from northern Donbas, would Putin be able to survive the loss of Crimea. All this is conjecture; we'll have to see what happens. "And so it begins."
* Conjecture is of course running wild, with many commentaries on the failures of management of the war on the NATO side -- including complaints that NATO was not pro-active enough at the start, being too slow to provide support. A blogger named Branislav Slantchev wrote an essay showing exactly why this view is mistaken, being presented in a brutally edited-down version here:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the American response to it remain a source of controversy. Why did the USA seem to abandon Ukraine on the eve of the Russian invasion, only to come back roaring a few days later? Wouldn't it have been better to warn Putin of the response that actually took place? Possibly he would have had second thoughts? The answer to both questions is NO, with reference to the last century to help explain why.
Consider the question of whether Neville Chamberlain was wise when he engineered the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938, abandoning Czechoslovakia to German demands, and leading to the dismemberment of the country. The popular view of Chamberlain today echoes that of Winston Churchill at the time, with Churchill saying that Chamberlain had been "given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war." Churchill was correct: Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and Hitler invaded Poland a year later, setting World War II in motion.
However, in 1938 Chamberlain had no benefit of hindsight, no real knowledge of the future. Hitler was making an argument for his position that could seem reasonable: he was trying to protect the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia, and only proposed limited measures for doing so. Could Britain, then in a state of poor military preparedness, have justified going to war in that case?
Churchill warned that Hitler was lying, but Churchill had a reputation as a loudmouth and a hothead. Hitler's destruction of an independent Czechoslovakia and then his invasion of Poland proved Churchill right, with Britain declaring war -- even though Britain was hardly in a better position to fight a war in 1939.
The situation in the 2022 crisis was not completely different from that in 1938. To be sure, US intelligence had informed President Joe Biden that the odds of an invasion were high, but the rest of the world had at most selective access to US intelligence. The Russians were loudly denying any intent to invade up to the hour they did it, and Putin's forces had been camping out at Ukraine's border for months without doing anything. An invasion of Ukraine was far more ambitious than any of Putin's other military adventures.
Given the context, neither NATO nor the European Union could conclude that there was any basis for taking drastic action. Putin was making every effort to play up his goals as reasonable, and the EU was still dependent on Russian gas supplies. Joe Biden could not, under the circumstances, convince the EU that the threat was great and imminent. In addition, the USA could not give Putin any more than the most general warnings, since the response that would be made was dependent on Russian actions.
The USA therefore took no overt action before 24 February, instead making secret plans that would go into effect immediately once the hammer fell. When it did, Putin's intent became clear to everyone involved -- eliminating all ambiguity, guaranteeing unified NATO / EU support of the fight. The battle plan went into action, with an airlift of light smart munitions -- Stingers, Javelins, NLAWS -- into Ukraine, with plans being laid for longer-term supply of heavier weapons that could not be so quickly delivered, with those plans adjustable as needs would dictate.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine was blunted with astonishing speed, the big Russian war machine proving surprisingly inept. Nonetheless, Putin pushed on against Ukraine, fanatically redoubling his efforts, knowing he could not afford to lose the war. The idea that Putin would have been deterred by a more specific threat is ridiculous: he would have discounted it, and proceeded exactly as he did. Putin wanted the war and will continue it until he is no longer in a position to do so.
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Incidentally to the war, when it appeared that Vladimir Putin might attend the BRICS (Brazil Russia India China South Africa) summit in Gauteng, South Africa, South African authorities issued a public warning that he should not come. South Africa is a member of the International Criminal Court, the ICC has a warrant out for Putin's arrest, and so South African authorities would have to arrest him. That must have not gone over well with Putin.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (45): What was driving Reagan's budget deficits was of course defense spending, with Reagan determined to confront global communism. He treated Fidel Castro's Cuba as a pariah -- nothing new there, the American government couldn't stand Castro, but Fidel aggravated the hostility by sending Cuban troops to support revolution in Africa. Africa was a stage for confrontation between the two superpowers in Reagan's era, with the two sides backing "dirty little wars" that, as was realized later, did no one much good. In any case, when a communist government took over Nicaragua, Reagan similarly worked to undermine the regime there.
Reagan's strongest hostility was towards the USSR, which he called the "evil empire". The Soviet Union was in a state of flux at the time, Leonid Brezhnev having died in 1982 -- though he had suffered a stroke in 1975 and hadn't been particularly functional in office from that time. He was followed as General Secretary by Yuri Andropov (1914:1984), who died two years later, and then Konstantin Chernenko (1911:1985), who died a little over a year after that. The Soviet leadership was plagued by economic troubles, internal dissent -- which was suppressed by the KGB, the current incarnation of the security service -- plus unrest in Eastern Europe, and particularly by the hostility of the USA.
Although Jimmy Carter had begun to aid the Afghan Mujahedin in their war against the Soviet invaders, Reagan ramped it up with a literal vengeance. As mentioned earlier, he also increased defense spending -- in particular, beginning a program that would be called "Star Wars" to build a defense shield against missile attack.
Reagan rejected the long-standing doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, reasonably judging the mutual threat of annihilation as immoral. However, few thought a "leakproof" missile shield was possible. Even if the USA were able to intercept 90% of 100 Soviet missiles launched at America -- which would be a very high "kill rate" -- that would still mean the complete destruction of ten US cities, and the deaths of tens of millions of Americans. That would be a casualty level much greater than all of America's wars put together.
In addition, if the Americans built up missile defenses, it would be easier for the USSR to add decoys and other countermeasures to frustrate the defense than it would be to improve the defense to deal with them. Nonetheless, the Soviets were very paranoid about Star Wars, believing that the USA was plotting to build a missile shield and then attack the USSR with impunity. Reagan's talk about an "evil empire" suggested to them that he really wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. Their paranoia blinded them to the reality that such a missile shield was not practical.
After the death of Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachov (1931:2022) became the Party Secretary of the USSR. It gradually became apparent that Gorbachov was not cut from the same mold as his predecessors. Although he remained committed to communist ideals, he believed that the system could be reformed, adopting a policy of "glasnost (openness)". Feeling his way, Gorbachov loosened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, most particularly in Poland, though with all of the states there moving towards independence. Reagan engaged with Gorbachov, telling reporters that he no longer believed the USSR was an "evil empire". Although early conversations between the two leaders were exercises in miscommunication -- hobbled by their complementary failures to realize the impracticality of Star -- they were able to sign an agreement in 1987 to limit intermediate-range nuclear forces.
There was little tension between the USA and China on Reagan's watch. China was emerging from the disorder of the Mao years, under the tutelage of Deng Xiaoping (1904:1997) -- the paramount figure in the reform effort, even though he was never China's head of state, nor head of the Chinese Communist Party. In particular, Deng gave a much looser leash to private enterprise, and sought to integrate China into the world economy. Deng liked to quote an old proverb: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice." The Reagan Administration encouraged the process.
Ironically, there was at least publicly more tension with Japan, a staunch American ally. Japan was going from strength to strength at the time, having become an export powerhouse -- with much of the credit going to the Japanese government's Ministry of International Trade & Industry (MITI). Americans often perceived that the Japanese were taking advantage of open trade into the USA and elsewhere, while raising barriers to imports. Books warning of a Japanese threat were popular in the USA, while books promoting Japanese assertiveness were popular in Japan. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE`* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in a NASA press release, the space agency is now working on the "Dragonfly" mission to Saturn's moon Titan, which will fly a rotorcraft drone to the world carrying a miniature science lab. Titan is of great interest to astrobiologists due to its carbon-rich chemistry and the fact that liquid hydrocarbons exist on its surface. Dragonfly, proposed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), was selected by NASA as the fourth NASA "New Frontiers" effort in 2019. The mission is now in preliminary design phase, with work on rotor design and testing.
Dragonfly will be powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which will also provide heating when necessary. It will descend to Titan in an aeroshell and then land by parachute. The RTG doesn't have the power to allow the probe to fly, so it will land, perform observations, recharge its batteries, and then fly off to another locale.
The quadcopter probe -- with four pairs of dual rotors -- will carry a miniaturized science lab. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the design, fabrication, and testing of Dragonfly's cruise stage as well as the aeroshell, backshell, and thermal protection systems. The mission will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034.
Incidentally, NASA is also funding "blue sky" studies for future programs -- one of the more interesting ones in this context being "TitanAir" a seaplane from Morley that could both fly through the nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan and sail its oceans. The "flying boat" would collect methane and complex organic material for study by sucking it in through a porous leading edge.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Mathematicians Have Finally Discovered An Elusive Ein Stein Tile" by Emily Conover, 24 March 2023), in the 1970s the theoretical physicist Roger Penrose devised two simple tile patterns that could be laid down together to form an extended tiling pattern that was "aperiodic" -- it never repeated. From that time on, mathematicians sought to find a single tile that could do the same trick.
The single pattern -- "ein stein (a stone)" in German, the label having nothing to do with Albert Einstein -- is a 13-sided piece named the "hat". It was tracked down by David Smith, an amateur mathematician who describes himself as an "imaginative tinkerer of shapes." The hat is a "polykite", made up of identical four-sided polygons in the shape of a kite. Smith got help from professionals who proved that a hat-based tiling truly is aperiodic.
* As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("How CRISPR Rice Could Help Tackle Climate Change" by Justine Calma, 22 June 2022), climate change is demanding and driving improvements in agricultural technology, which is a major emitter of greenhouse gases. To that end, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has provided $11 million USD to a research group to investigate the use of CRISPR gene-editing in developing new agricultural processes to help deal with global warming.
The effort is being led by the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), which was founded by Nobel laureate and co-inventor of CRISPR Jennifer Doudna, with Brad Ringeisen being the executive director. The IGI has three targets in their gene editing:
The money from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds three years of research, though Ringeisen sees that is only a first installment, not expecting any major return on the effort for a decade or so.
Major contributors to the carbon footprint of agricultural emissions are livestock and fertilizer. Rice cultivation also had a big contribution, since soggy rice paddies are good environments for methane-producing microbes. IGI is working on this problem as well, again looking at altering roots and microbes in the soil. Ringeisen says that the rice genome is relatively easy to manipulate, because it is well understood. Pamela Ronald, who is involved in the IGI initiative, has already led research to develop rice varieties that have considerably improved tolerance to flooding, with those varieties used by millions of farmers in India and Bangladesh.
Ringeisen says research will be performed on other crops -- for example, modifying sorghum to sequester more carbon, and hopefully have improved yields. The research group expects field trials of updated crops will be in progress by the end of the current three-year cycle.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (4): The battlefield revolution of the 21st century stands to apply to the oceanic domain, though it hasn't attracted much public attention. It got some attention in the UK in 2020, when a strange sea-going drone washed up on the shores of Tiree, the westernmost island in the Inner Hebrides. It was quickly identified as a "Wave Glider", built by Liquid Robotics, a California company owned by US aerospace giant Boeing.
Others have washed up on the shores of islands in the Outer Hebrides. The Wave Glider resembles a surfboard, with an elaborate moving array of fins under the water that can obtain forward propulsion from the motions of waves. It had a solar panel to power its electronics, and a radio mast to report on what it finds. It was originally developed for scientific observation, but there are other things in the ocean that it can observe. These Wave Gliders were unmarked, with Liquid Robotics saying nothing about who owned them. However, it is known that in 2016, Wave Gliders were used to detect and track a Royal Navy submarine in an exercise; and the Wave Gliders were in a good position to track British ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) en route from their base at Faslane, near Glasgow, to the open ocean.
Submarines at depth are difficult to spot, particularly because modern submarines are very quiet. That is why SSBNs are the preferred platform for nuclear deterrence, being mobile and hard to target. For now, they are generally invulnerable; but they may not remain so for long. In 2020, a panel of experts assembled by the National Security College of the Australian National University concluded: "The oceans are, in most circumstances, at least likely ... to become transparent by the 2050s."
From the 1980s, the USA and its allies have relied on the hydrophone arrays of the "Fixed Distributed System (FDS)" for detecting submarines. The sensors are anchored to the sea floor, floating at a "critical depth" where acoustical geometry shields them from extraneous noise and makes the faint sounds of a submarine passing overhead stand out. FDS arrays have been set up in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, with naval sea and air assets ready to follow up their cues.
The problem with FDS is that the arrays have short range; they can't track submarines over an entire ocean basin. They are instead being used at chokepoints, such as the gaps between Greenland and Iceland and Iceland and Britain, or the entrances to the Philippine Sea. Arrays towed behind ships are used in locales where FDS can't reach. Towed arrays have been in use for decades and have been highly refined, with "vector" sensors that can detect the direction of a sound wave instead of just hearing it. Modern signal-processing systems have also made them more perceptive, with contemporary IC technology providing the necessary computing power in a small package.
The problem with towed arrays is that their coverage is proportional to the number of arrays. Ken Perry -- a retired rear-admiral and vice-president of ThayerMahan, a Connecticut-based firm which builds maritime-surveillance platforms -- says that a fleet of array-towing robot vessels could cover vast reaches of ocean for "a fraction of the cost of a single frigate or submarine."
ThayerMahan has tested the concept in exercises with the US Navy. More ambitiously, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" studies office -- has envisioned an "Ocean of Things" project, involving thousands of floats, acting as a distributed sensor network. Ultimately, they would be tied into a wider network of sensors, including fixed arrays, sonobuoys dropped from the air, and small robot submarines. DARPA has worked on related projects, including a robot surface vessel named "Sea Hunter", which would follow a submarine indefinitely, carefully obeying the laws of the sea.
Other notions are sensors dropped from aerial drones. Of course, communications bottlenecks are an issue, with communications facilitated by seafloor fiber-optic cables. Such grand sensor networks will be expensive, and so only the major powers could afford them. However, they could also be used locally for defensive purposes, for example in the seas bordering Taiwan. Of course, with every measure there is a countermeasure, and adversaries are likely to come up with schemes to frustrate the sensors -- leading to response with counter-countermeasures. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WET CALIFORNIA: As discussed in an article from NEWSWEEK.com ("California Lake Flooded for First Time in 110 Years" by Jess Thomson, 3 April 2023), the great state of California has been suffering from long-term drought -- until this year, when "atmospheric rivers" coming in from over the Pacific dumped floods of water on the land, one consequence being that usually dry lakes have filled up.
One such usually dry lake is Owens Lake in Inyo County, 355 kilometers (220 miles) north of Los Angeles. Owens Lake was naturally full of water until the Los Angeles Aqueduct was constructed in 1913, which drew so much water from the Owens River that the lake began to dry up, finally drying up completely in 1930. It remained generally dry until March 2023, but is now full. The flooding also breached the Los Angeles Aqueduct for the first time. The atmospheric river that hit California on 9:10 March 9-10 dump resulted in between 13 and 33 centimeters (5 to 13 inches) of rain onto central California, filling up the aqueduct until it overflowed at Pleasant Valley Dam, flowing into the Owens River at a massive rate.
Back on 27 September 2022, 53% of California was under a "severe drought", 24.32% was under "extreme drought", and 16.57% was in the highest classification of "exceptional drought." Now less than 2% is under "severe drought". Tom Corringham -- a research economist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego -- says:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
When people ask if California is getting wetter or drier, the answer is both. Rising temperatures in California dry out our landscapes, leading to longer droughts and more severe fire seasons. Higher temperatures also allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, leading to more intense storms. This has been described as "hydroclimate whiplash" or "weather on steroids".
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Refilling Owens Lake has produced a particular benefit, since when dry it is one of the biggest sources of dust air pollution in the USA, releases tens of thousands of tonnes of dust into the air each year -- with the dust containing carcinogens such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic. Things got so bad that, about 20 years ago, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) diverted a small flow into the dry lake from the Owens River, with the dust problem largely contained by 2022. Now it's been eliminated, for the time being.
Other dry lakes have filled up, including Lopez Lake in San Luis Obispo County and Tulare Lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The record-breaking snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas is dumping more water into the lowlands with the spring thaw, presenting the threat of flooding. In addition, if too much water flows in a short period of time, much of it will run off into the ocean instead of being retained in reservoirs.
However, current wet conditions in California haven't ended the state's drought problem, since the groundwater there has been depleted and must be replenished. Lara Fowler -- an environmental and energy issues attorney and interim director of the Penn State Sustainability Institute at Penn State University -- says:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
It will take several years of above normal precipitation -- both rain and snow during the appropriate times of the year. As soil moisture and surface water supplies have become depleted, more and more groundwater pumping has also led to a decline in aquifer levels in many places. Such groundwater contributes to baseflows in streams. So not only would surface water -- streams and rivers -- need to refill, so does soil moisture and groundwater levels, the second of which can be very slow to recharge.
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California isn't out of the woods yet, and may need to refine its ability to deal with drought.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, on cyber-security, suggesting that the war in Ukraine was providing big lessons on cyber-defense. She began with:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Nearly two years ago, I had the opportunity to chair the first official UN Security Council meeting on cyber-security. Almost everyone at the meeting stressed what all states have already agreed: international law, including the UN Charter in its entirety, applies in cyberspace. Russia did not.
END_QUOTE
There was a perception before the war broke out that the fighting would be intense in cyberspace -- but it was only really intense on the battlefield, with the cyberwar muted. Nonetheless, it was still going on:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... there are four things of which we need to take note, and four things all free nations must do.
END_QUOTE
In response to the threats, democratic nations need to be prepared to continue to deal with cyber-warfare after the shooting stops, and invest in defensive measures. That implies developing new methods and setting up new systems. The bad actors need to be identified, neutralized, and held accountable. Finally, cyber-defense needs to become a function of democratic society as a whole:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... we must build connections beyond current institutional limitations. It is clear that security for liberal democracies can no longer happen in silos. We must set standards with those we can trust, especially as new technologies like artificial intelligence, 5G and quantum computing become realities. Governments must better link with counterparts in other countries, as well as building partnerships with businesses and civil society.
Tyrannies like Russia will keep trying to turn technology into a tool of oppression and a means to destabilize free societies. Our job is to prevent that, to help Ukraine win the war and to build solid alliances. We must ensure impunity does not prevail in any sphere, and cyberspace is no exception.
END_QUOTE
* This last week, President Joe Biden announced, as expected, that he was running for re-election -- with, also as expected, a loud chorus of complaints that he's too old to take on a second term.
Personally, that doesn't worry me at all. The Biden Administration is not a one-man show; it's a collective effort, with Joe Biden as the chairman. I have little doubt that, if his cabinet tells him he can't do the job any more, he will promptly resign. I suspect many of his critics know that, and their real problem is that Vice-President Kamala Harris will become president, and they don't like that idea.
Incidentally, there was also a "Take Your Kids To Work" day at the White House this last week, with Joe Biden showing off his new Secret Service detail -- four kids in black, with shades and earphones. Joe Biden just loves kids. Biden then followed up that act with a deft performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, with Vice President Kamala Harris and both their spouses in attendance:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... Let me start on a serious note. Jill, Kamala, Doug, and I, , and members of our administration are here to send a message to the country and, quite frankly, to the world: the free press is a pillar -- maybe the pillar -- of a free society, not the enemy.
... Folks, I know a lot has changed in the press. I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of you. This is not your father's press from 20 years ago. No, I'm serious. And you all know it better than I do. But still, it is absolutely consequential and essential.
After all, I believe in the First Amendment -- not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it. [LAUGHTER]
In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office. I'll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away. [LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I know, I just announced my reelection campaign. ... And, look, I get that age is a completely reasonable issue. It's on everybody's mind. And everyone -- by "everyone" I mean the New York Times. Headline: "Biden's advanced age is a big issue. Trump's, however, is not." [LAUGHTER]
Sorry, that was the NEW YORK TIMES PITCHBOT. I apologize. [LAUGHTER]
... I want everybody to have fun tonight, but please be safe. If you find yourself disoriented or confused, it's either you're drunk or Marjorie Taylor Greene. [LAUGHTER]
... I love NPR [LEANS INTO THE MICROPHONE] because they whisper into the mic like I do. [LAUGHTER] But not everybody loves NPR. Elon Musk tweeted that it should be defunded. Well, the best way to make NPR go away is for Elon Musk to buy it. [LAUGHTER]
This dinner is one of the two great traditions in Washington. The other one is underestimating me and Kamala. Well, the truth is we really have a record to be proud of. Vaccinated the nation. Transformed the economy. Earned historic legislative victories and midterm results. But the job isn't finished. I mean -- it is finished for Tucker Carlson. [LAUGHTER] ... We added 12 million jobs, and that's just counting the lawyers who defended [Trump].
I had a lot of Ron DeSantis jokes ready, but Mickey Mouse beat the hell out of me and got there first. [LAUGHTER] Now, look -- can't be too rough on the guy. After his reelection as governor, he was asked if he had a mandate. He said, "Hell no, I'm straight." [LAUGHTER]
... Look, you all keep reporting my approval rating is at 42 percent. But I think you don't know this: Kevin McCarthy called me and asked me, "Joe, what the hell is your secret?" [LAUGHTER]
... Look, it's great the cable news networks are here tonight. MSNBC owned by NBC Universal. Fox News owned by Dominion Voting Systems. [LAUGHTER] Last year, your favorite Fox News reporters were able to attend because they were fully vaccinated and boosted. This year, with that $787 million settlement, they're here because they couldn't say no to a free meal. [LAUGHTER] And hell, I'd call Fox honest, fair, and truthful, but then I could be sued for defamation. [LAUGHTER]
... As I said last year at this dinner, a poison is running through our democracy and parts of the extreme press. The truth buried by lies, and lies living on as truth.
Lies told for profit and power. Lies of conspiracy and malice repeated over and over again, designed to generate a cycle of anger, hate, and even violence. A cycle that emboldens history to be buried, books to be banned, children and families to be attacked by the state, and the rule of law and our rights and freedoms to be stripped away. And where elected representatives of the people are expelled from statehouses for standing for the people.
... At this inflection point in history, let us commit that we'll be a nation that will embrace light over darkness, truth over lies, and finally, finally, finally restore the soul of the nation.
... I'm going to turn this over to [comedian Roy Wood JR]. Roy, the podium is yours. I'm going to be fine with your jokes, but I'm not sure about Dark Brandon. [PUTS ON SHADES / APPLAUSE] All yours, pal.
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