DayVectors

* 22 entries including: Joe Biden (series), animal communications & AI (series), BRICS revisited (series), Mayhem hypersonic | Transwing drone | boom-refueling pod, critical minerals end-run around China, Trump circles the drain | Japan & ASEAN | old-time things, electrolyzing hydrogen from sea water, Hunter Biden pushes back on MAGA | Jill Biden's Xmas video, transparent & perovskite solar cells | China recycles renewables, hydrogen-fuel hubs | popular solar, Israeli-Palestine settlement? | deflated Trump | 1920s STAR TREK, enzymes against COVID-19 | sauna planets | age of Saturn's rings, EVs starting to take off, Zelenskyy assesses the war in 2023 | a Briton talks of Trump,

[THU 30 NOV 23] GALACTIC TIME PROBE

* GALACTIC TIME PROBE: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Here's The Best Timeline Yet For The Milky Way's Big Events" by Ken Croswell, 23 March 2022), a analysis of almost a quarter million stars puts firm ages on the most significant pages from our Galaxy's history.

The Milky Way consists of a flat spiral of stars and nebulas, with the study identifying that the stars in the spiral disk were born not long after the Big Bang that created the Universe. In contrast, the tenuous spherical halo enclosing the spiral disk is loaded with relatively young stars.

Xiang Maosheng and Hans-Walter Rix -- both astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany -- performed a survey of almost 250,000 subgiant stars to trace the history of our Galaxy, with Xiang saying: "We are now able to provide a very clear timeline of what happened in the earliest time of our Milky Way."

Subgiants are stars that are growing larger, cooler, and redder after using up the hydrogen fuel at their centers. The temperatures and luminosities of these stars reveal their ages. Xiang and Rix traced the origins of the Milky Way's thick disk to about 13 billion years ago, or 800 million years after the universe's birth. The thick disk, which measures 6,000 light-years from top to bottom in our Sun's vicinity, kept forming stars for a long time, until about 8 billion years ago.

The first generation of stars were made of hydrogen and some helium. Heavier elements were synthesized in these stars; during this period, the thick disk's iron content shot up by a factor of 30 as exploding stars enriched its star-forming gas. At the beginning of the thick disk era, a newborn star had only a tenth as much iron, relative to hydrogen, as the Sun; by the end, 5 billion years later, a thick disk star was three times richer in iron than the Sun.

Xiang and Rix also found a close relation between a thick disk star's age and iron content, meaning gas was thoroughly mixed throughout the thick disk. Over time, newborn stars inherited increasing amounts of iron, no matter whether the stars formed close to or far from the galactic center.

The Milky Way's evolution was also shaped by a collision with another galaxy, reported by researchers in 2018. This collision gave the Milky Way most of the stars in its halo, which engulfs the disk. Halo stars have little iron. Xiang says: "We found that the merger happened 11 billion years ago," a billion years earlier than thought. As the intruder's gas flowed into the Milky Way's gas, it triggered the creation of so many new stars that our Galaxy's star formation rate reached a record high 11 billion years ago.

The merger also threw some thick-disk stars up into the halo, which can be identified by the stars' higher iron abundances. These "splash" stars, the researchers found, are at least 11 billion years old, confirming the date of the merger.

The thick disk was depleted of gas 8 billion years ago and stopped making stars. Fresh gas around the Milky Way then settled into a thinner disk, producing new stars ever since -- including our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun and most of its stellar neighbors. The thin disk is about 2,000 light-years thick in our part of the galaxy. There have been no further encounters with other large galaxies since then, Xiang saying: "The Milky Way has been quite quiet for the last 8 billion years."

[WED 29 NOV 23] VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (9)

* VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (9): The most obvious way to get users involved with the storylines of games is to set up an arena where they can compete and collaborated, as in MMOs like "Fortnite" or "League of Legends". Allen Adham of Blizzard Entertainment says: "Because players are infinitely creative, you can make the sandbox, throw some people in there, and the player stories that come out of that emergent play are endless." Instead of being a passive observer of a TV show, with MMOs the players make the show themselves. Tom Wijman of Newzoo, a game analyst firm, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Indeed, sometimes players collaborate to come up with better stories. Players of "Grand Theft Auto" may organize elaborate role-playing scenarios, such as bank heists or police chases, before playing them together, often broadcasting the action on video platforms such as Twitch. If players can modify the game environment -- inventing new weapons, for example -- so much the better.

The complexity of implementing enhancements to a game environment does impose limits on the creativity of players. There is an expectation that AI technology will make things much easier. Roblox has demonstrated an upcoming feature that will let developers use Ai to program games with simple text prompts, such as "make it rain". Microsoft has reportedly come up with a voice-activated AI assistant for "Minecraft" that builds structures on demand. In any case, user contributions to game environments are growing. Craig Donato, Roblox's chief business officer, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

* A few years back, the push was on to set up diverse online environments, establishing a "metaverse". Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook's name to Meta and called it a "metaverse company". Today, Meta is suffering through job cuts. What happened?

Okay, the metaverse was an overblown idea in the first place, but it also suffered from the slow pace of improvement of virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) technologies to bring the virtual environments to life. VR headsets are widely used, but they're mostly seen as a novelty; good ones cost thousands of dollars. They also have a persistent problem with motion sickness AKA "VR sickness", the problem getting worse with older users, and it seems glossed over by VR advocates. AR has suffered from similar problems.

For now, the real action is with 3D graphics on high-resolution displays. The gaming environments have become centers of online interaction. Roblox has staged concerts and fashion shows, as well as educational events for organizations like the Museum of Science in Boston, which organized a virtual mission to Mars. FIRST, an educational outfit which organizes robot-building contests for children, runs them on Roblox too. There is increasing leverage off TV, with gaming environments allowing user participation in TV-show environments.

Gaming is increasingly becoming a central activity in modern life. Jim Ryan, chief executive of Sony's gaming division, says: "Perhaps one day, we won't even have the term 'gamer', because everyone will play in some form or other." [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 28 NOV 23] FERMI HUNTS GRAVITY WAVES

* FERMI HUNTS GRAVITY WAVES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Astronomers Find A New Way To Detect Gravitational Waves" by Daniel Clery, 7 April 2022), gravitational-wave astronomy has come of age, with Earth-based gravity-wave detectors picking up the traces of the mergers of black holes from the distant cosmos.

Now researchers have come up with an alternate way to detect gravity waves. Physicists first sensed waves in 2015 with laser-based detectors, and other scientists have been hunting for them with Earth-based radio telescopes. Now a study shows that data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (GST), launched in 2008, can in principle also sense a gravity wave. Although the technique is not yet accurate enough, it is already making contributions to research.

Gravitational waves occur when immense masses, such as black holes or neutron stars, spinning tightly around each other finally crash into each other. Since 2015, two large Earth-based detectors -- the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the USA and Europe's Virgo, have detected dozens of black hole mergers and a single merger of neutron stars. The detectors shoot lasers through two evacuated tubes at a right angle whose length is altered by gravity waves, with the change detected in interference between the two beams.

Radio astronomers are thinking bigger, searching for "megamergers", the crash of supermassive black holes found in the cores of galaxies. The size of these dual supermassive black holes means that, even when close, they take years to orbit each other, and so Earth-based laser interferometers aren't much use. Astronomers have instead looked to pulsars -- fast-spinning neutron stars that generate radiation from their poles, resulting in a regular period flash. Some fast-spinning pulsars generate flashes hundreds of times a second, with a regularity like that of an atomic clock.

A passing gravity wave can change the distance of a pulsar from Earth, resulting in a momentary variation in the pulse interval. Astronomers can observe a set of pulsars -- a "pulsar timing array (PTA)" -- over a period of many years to see the PTA has been affected by a gravitational wave.

In 2021, using data obtained over more than a dozen years, PTA teams in North America and Europe announced they had picked up faint statistical traces of something known as the "gravitational wave background (GWB)", a collective rumbling of all the supermassive black hole mergers across a large swath of the universe. The teams are analyzing more data to reinforce those claims.

That's where the Fermi observatory enters the story. Pulsars emit gamma rays, in addition to their flood of radio waves, but astronomers doubted the gamma-ray signals would be strong enough to be useful. Matthew Kerr -- a gamma ray astronomer at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) -- and colleagues decided to investigate. They sifted through 12.5 years of Fermi's archive for gamma-ray photons from about 30 suitable pulsars. Unlike the radio PTAs, which have a narrow and targeted field of view, Fermi is a wide-area observatory, meaning several pulsars are always in the field of view.

Gamma-ray signals were not easy to see in the data, Kerr saying: "Fermi can look all week and see no [gamma-ray] photons." However, the research team found enough signals to establish a PTA, though they didn't have enough data to firmly establish the GWB. More data will give results in time, Kerr saying: "if Fermi doesn't fall out of the sky, we will have comparable sensitivity" in 5 to 10 years.

Maura McLaughlin -- of West Virginia University, a leader of NANOGrav, one of the radio PTA teams -- says that though the gamma-ray effort isn't as far along as the radio effort, it's still valuable: "One very useful thing the gamma ray data can do is help us understand the effect of the interstellar medium," which is a major source of noise in PTA searches. The thin interstellar haze of particles and radiation can bend the path of radio waves and slow some frequencies more than others, smearing out the signal. Gamma rays, however, are scarcely impeded by the interstellar medium, and so they can provide a reference to help clarify the radio signals.

In any case, once the PTAs -- radio and gamma-ray -- have identified the GWB, the next goal will be individual supermassive black hole binaries, to find out how they affect the galaxies around them.

[MON 27 NOV 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 47

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: An essay in ECONOMIST.com reported, or seemed to report, that Russia's economy has not been hurt by Western sanctions. That didn't sound right to me, so I asked Microsoft's Bing Chat -- run by the ChatGPT generative-AI search system: "Are sanctions hurting Russia's economy?" I got back this answer:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Later I got to wondering about the monetary sanctions, and asked Bing about them:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

This was a demonstration of GAI search at its best -- though for the second example, the search results didn't make much or any sense in a few cases and had to be edited a bit. Anyway, there's been much talk about its hazards, particularly a tendency to give wrong answers -- though as is generally pointed out, that's the breaks with any internet search scheme. The truth is that GAI search is a big step up: I ask it a specific question, it scours the internet and gives me about as good an answer as can be had.

It is, of course, necessary to give GAI search well-formed questions -- and the better-formed the question, in general the better the answer. If I can't get a good answer, that's a big hint that there isn't one available on the internet -- which is useful information in itself. It also references its answers, allowing me to follow up to specific online articles. It's getting smarter over time: early on, if I asked a too-picky question, it would just give me an answer on the general topic, but these days it gives me an answer on the general topic, and then apologizes for not being able to answer the exact question. It will keep getting smarter.

* On my morning walk, I make a loop past a filling station to check current fuel prices. On this frosty Sunday morning, I found out to my pleasure that fuel prices had dropped below $3.00 USD a gallon. This related to troll comments on X/Twitter, targeting Joe Biden, that inflation is out of control -- with a long stream of annoyed replies, for example pointing out that US inflation is, at 3.2%, now below the long-term average.

One FOX commenter got particular mockery for playing up a Thanksgiving turkey with a pricetag of over $90 USD. It was a specialty item from a high-end store, with replies describing more ordinary prices as in the $20:$30 USD range. To make matters worse for the commenter, that same turkey cost over $150 USD last year -- and Thanksgiving dinner was, overall, about 4.5% cheaper than last year.

As for fuel prices, on the basis of inflation, $3.00 per gallon in 2023 corresponds to about 45 cents per gallon in 1973. It was actually 39 cents per gallon, though it jumped to over 50 cents with the oil embargo the next year -- which was the first warning shot that the oil economy was becoming unstable. It should be noted that fuel prices will very likely increase once spring comes and people travel more, but nonetheless fuel prices are not that burdensome.

No sensibility stops the trolls, of course, in their determination to bring down Joe Biden. That is very hard to do, of course, given Donald Trump's deep legal problems and his only-too-obvious meltdown into paranoid dementia. In any case, I've noticed that people are less willing to argue with trolls these days, going straight to mockery instead. Trolls love to argue; they hate to be mocked.

[FRI 24 NOV 23] JOE BIDEN (1)

* JOE BIDEN (1): Joseph Robinette Biden JR was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town, on 20 November 1942. Joe SR was of mixed ethnic derivation, broadly of Anglo-French origins -- the French "Robinette" name was from his maternal line -- with a touch of Irish, while his wife, Jean Biden -- originally Catherine Eugenia Blewitt -- was of solidly Irish extraction. Joe JR would always identify as Irish-American.

At the time of Joe JR's birth, Joe SR was doing well for himself, helping to manage the Sheen Armor Company -- which had been established by Bill Sheen, an uncle of Joe SR's who had developed a sealing used in merchant marine ships and important to America's war effort against the Axis. Joe SR was driving Cadillacs and even had a private plane for a time. Joe SR became manager of the Boston office of the firm, with the family relocating, and a daughter, Valerie, being born there in 1945.

After the war ended, Joe SR's fortunes went into decline, suffering a series of business reversals, leaving him struggling to make a living. The family returned to Scranton, moving in with Jean's parents -- Ambrose and Geraldine Finnegan. Two sons were added to the family in Scranton -- Jimmy Biden in 1949 and Frank Biden in 1953.

Joe JR spent his early years in the heavily Catholic city, attending a parochial school named Saint Paul's. He wasn't a star student, though he loved sports. His childhood friends later remembered him as "an aggressive guy, a leader, he was a risk-taker", "a good guy, a friend, with a sense of fairness", the "go-to guy". One remembered how Joe, on a bet, climbed one of the giant "culm heaps", the mountains of coal-mine tailings that littered Scranton -- which was dangerous, because they often had deep internal voids that could swallow up the incautious. The one noticeable problem that Joe was that he had a stutter. His friends would give him a hard time over it, but didn't fault him about it, and it was clear it wasn't going to hold him back.

When Valerie Biden got old enough, Joe got to taking her around with the gang. She later said:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Joe and Valerie had each other's back, and would remain "accomplices in crime" through their lives. Joe was close to Jimmy and Frank when they got old enough, though it seems quite not as close as Valerie. Joe SR and Jean were upright parents, attentive to their kids and never hit them, preferring instead to express disappointment when they didn't live up to the standards the parents set for them. With the Irish family background, unsurprisingly the family was solidly Democratic, though in his childhood Joe JR had no great interest in politics.

Joe SR was only getting by in Scranton, taking various jobs. In 1953, he got a job in Wilmington, Delaware, cleaning boilers for a heating / ventilation / air-conditioning firm, and relocated his family there. Joe JR kept in touch with his Scranton friends through the rest of his life. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 23 NOV 23] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from FORBES.com ("Super-Upgraded M-55S Tanks Have Arrived In Ukraine" by David Axe, 10 December 2022), Ukraine's allies have been sending the country floods of weapons to fight back against the Russian invaders. Much of this weaponry is older and retired gear, but that hasn't generally been a problem.

Case in point are the "M-55S" tanks sent by Slovenia. The Soviet T-55 tank first entered service in the late 1950s. In the 1990s, the Slovenian Army contracted with the Israeli firm Elbit and the Slovenian STO RAVNE company to update a batch of its T-55s to modernized M-55S spec, with the last updated tank delivered in 1999. In the early 2000s, the Slovenian Army replaced the M-55S tanks with Yugoslavian M-84 tanks -- the M-84 being a variant of the Soviet T-72 tank -- and put the older tanks in reserve.

In September 2022, Germany cut a deal with Slovenia, with Germany providing Slovenia 40 military trucks, and Slovenia in turn providing 28 M-55S tanks to Ukraine -- enough tanks for a single battalion. The M-55S has reactive armor, an uprated engine, an improved fire-control system -- and in particular a stabilized, British-made L7 105-millimeter main gun in place of the original Soviet 100-millimeter gun.

The 105-millimeter gun is particularly important, since it fires NATO ammo that can be supplied by Ukraine's allies, instead of Soviet-style 100-millimeter ammo that isn't so readily obtained. It is true that Ukrainian industry is manufacturing ammo locally, it appears primarily in Soviet pattern to fit the quantities of Soviet-style weapon systems that equip the majority of Ukraine's forces. However, it is the NATO weapons that will win the war, it being said that "the worst tank given to Ukraine is better than the best tank the Russians have."

* As discussed in a press release from drone-maker SYPAQ -- of Melbourne, Australia -- Ukrainian military are now obtaining SYPAQ's "Corvo" drone AKA "Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS)", which is a tailless cargo drone featuring a cardboard airframe.

Corvo drones are delivered as flatpack sets, and then assembled, it appears with tape, glue, and rubber straps. The most elaborate tool required for assembly is a wrench to mount the tractor motor / propeller. Once completed, the drone has a rectangular wing, a boxy fuselage, and a tailfin. It can carry a 3-kilogram (6.6-pound) payload and fly up to 120 kilometers (75 miles), flying a pre-programmed course with waypoints. SYPAQ says that a Corvo drone is also adaptable to surveillance missions and can drop grenades.

* As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Navy Electronic Warfare Container Could Go On Ships, Aircraft, Trucks" by Joseph Trevithick, 19 September 2022), there's been a push in recent years towards development of weapon systems based on standard shipping containers, allowing them to be hauled on ships, aircraft, trucks, or trains. The US Navy is now working on an electronic warfare / signals intelligence (EW-SIGINT) system packed into a shipping container.

Systems Engineering Associates Corporation (SEAC) has obtained a contract from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) worth up to just over $24.5 million USD to work on the "Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare Modular Suite (EMWMS)" -- described, not very usefully, in Pentagon documents as a ...

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Nothing much more is known about the program, the rest remaining a matter of speculation.

[WED 22 NOV 23] VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (8)

* VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (8): China's success in mobile games has led to concerns over security. As with TikTok, a Chinese-owned social-media app popular in the West, Chinese games are seen as tools gathering data for China's government. Games often seek personal information -- such as name, date of birth, payment details -- or record voice clips. Online games go further, with users directly connected to servers in China. "Genshin Impact" was accused of leaving spyware on their PC, though it appears the game developers just didn't do a good enough of job of cleaning up when the game was deleted.

American firms with Chinese investment haven't escaped suspicion. In 2020 America's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Treasury-chaired security committee that is investigating TikTok, reportedly wrote to Riot Games and Epic Games -- respectively wholly and partly owned by Tencent -- to ask how they handle personal data. Epic was fined hundreds of millions of dollars for illegally collecting children's data. CFIUS hasn't concluded Chinese games represent a security threat, but security concerns are growing as the applications of game technology expand. Game tech is now being used for everything from airport management to war-gaming simulations for the armed forces.

Another worry is that games give China undue influence. The chat function in "Genshin Impact", for instance, blots out such sensitive words as "Taiwan" and "Falun Gong" -- as well as "Hitler" and "Putin". And some Western developers kowtow to the Chinese government, altering games to eliminate sensitive elements and banning political talk from game tournaments. That's not too surprising, but the question remains of how far developers will go to keep China happy.

* The evolution of video entertainment in the 21st century has led to a boom in "user-generated" video content, as seen on TikTok and YouTube. Smartphones give everyone a way to record and publish home videos in seconds. Today, American youngsters spend more time on those service than on Netflix and Disney+.

Could the same thing happen with gaming? "Roblox", a gaming environment where users can put together blocky constructions, boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns, with Roblox estimating that three-quarters of American 9- to 12-year-olds were using the platform. "Minecraft", 120 million monthly players. As with YouTube and TikTok, most user-made stuff is schlocky, but there's a lot of variety, with the system promoting the most interesting things.

There's professional content on these environments as well, some small developers finding it profitable. Big brands use it as a place to reach new audiences. Sega has licensed a Sonic game to Roblox. Some players have graduated to the pro league as well. Simple Games, which makes such Roblox titles as "War Simulator", began as a hobby for its founder, Nathan Clemens, and now employs his whole family.

One big difference between films and gaming is that game developers have proved more competent at incorporating user-made content into their productions. Youtube videos are in competition with professional video developers, while game studios have made it part of their business model, monetizing it themselves.

Since the earliest days of PC gaming, players with programming expertise have "modded" games by taking the source code and altering it, sometimes trading their "mods" online, with various degrees of consent from the developer. Built-in features such as map editors let players make their own designs, and it has become standard to allow players to customize in-game avatars. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 21 NOV 23] GRAVITY LENSING & THE HUBBLE CONSTANT

* GRAVITY LENSING & THE HUBBLE CONSTANT: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("A Reappearing Supernova Offers A New Measure Of The Universe's Expansion" by James R. Riordon, 11 May 2023), astronomers have found that images of a supernova named "Refsdal" have appeared up multiple times in the constellation Leo, thanks to the bending of light from the distant event by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies. Inspection of the images has yielded a new measurement of the "Hubble constant" -- an index of how fast galaxies are flying away from each other as the Universe expands.

In 2014, astronomer Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis discovered the Refsdal supernova in images from the Hubble Space Telescope. However, according to Kelly: "We saw four images of it." They formed a pattern known as an "Einstein Cross", due to the presence of a cluster of galaxies between the Earth and Refsdal that acted as a "gravitational lens". The coordinates and arrival times of the images depended on three things:

• The distribution of matter in the galaxy cluster.
  
  
• The distances between Earth, the lens and the supernova.
  
  
• The Hubble constant.

Kelly examined the four images and, considering the system of masses that created them, suggested that another image would pop up a year later, having taken a longer path through spacetime. Indeed, another image of Refsdal appeared in 2015.

This validation of the modeling allowed Kelly and colleagues to greatly improve a 2018 measurement of the Hubble constant using Refsdal's appearances, putting it at about 66.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec (KSM). Astronomer Vivian Miranda -- of Stony Brook University in New York, who was not involved in the study -- says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

There have been many efforts to estimate the Hubble constant, but the estimates tended not to agree with each other. One method that relies on ancient light left over from early cosmic times suggests that the universe is expanding at about 67 KSM. That's close to the value Kelly's group found -- but an expansion estimate that uses the distances to supernovas based on their brightness comes in around 74 KSM. Miranda says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Settling the discrepancy between different values of the Hubble constant would do much to resolve outstanding questions in cosmology, such as nailing down the "dark energy" postulated to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

Another supernova and lens will be needed to get a more reliable estimate. Kelly says: "This is the first example of this kind of measurement. It sets the stage for additional measurements and increased precision."

[MON 20 NOV 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 46

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week was quiet in a sense; there was plenty going on -- fighting in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump in court -- but nothing conclusive happened. The NEW YORK TIMES PITCHBOT continues to satirize the media's determination to tear down Joe Biden at every opportunity, but as of late the NYT-PB seems to never be as absurd as the media.

The media seems determined to spread the belief that the 2024 election will be a contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and that it will be close. Meaningless polls are cited, with the results of special elections -- overwhelmingly tilted in favor of the Democrats -- simply ignored or dismissed. It is preposterous to believe that Donald Trump will be a credible presidential candidate in 2024. How can he run a campaign when he'll be in court much of the time? His public utterances have become increasingly demented, ensuring that only the crazies will vote for him. Worse for the Republicans, they don't have anyone else that credible.

Of course, the sniping at Joe Biden focuses on his age, but it has also become increasingly obvious that the hidden issue is Vice President Kamala Harris. The MAGA Right does not, for obvious reasons -- think "gender" and "ethnicity" --- like the idea of Harris becoming the 47th US president. Myself, before she became VP I never thought of her as president, but now that her prospects for being so are much more evident, I don't have a problem with the idea. Certainly, as the saying currently goes: "The worst plausible Democratic candidate is much better than the best Republican candidate."

As for Joe Biden's position, the economic news continues to be good, though it seems to not be impressing the public. Fuel prices have been dropping as of late, which should move the needle on public perceptions, and this last week Biden had a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at an estate near San Francisco, with agreements including re-establishment of the military hotline between the USA and China -- cut since Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022 -- and measures to suppress the opioid epidemic. There was also agreeable talk about dealing with climate change and regulating artificial intelligence.

However, there was still a lot of distance between the two sides, with China not ruling out the reunification of China with Taiwan by force, and Biden telling reporters after the meeting that Xi is a "dictator" -- well, he is, though the Chinese denounced the remark as "extremely wrong and irresponsible." Of course, such comments from Biden complicate the troll narrative that he's a stooge for China, not that the trolls worry about the sense of the nonsense they talk.

This last week Japan got approval to buy 400 Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles from the USA, with initial deliveries in 2025. That was also sending a message to Xi. It appears that the Chinese have already complained about it.

* When I go on walks in the morning, I usually listen to ambient music on headphones. I've got headphones that can accommodate a micro-SD flash chip to store the tunes. It works well, but with the colder weather, I can't wear the headphones under a winter hat.

I tried using an old clip-style MP3 player with wired earbud headphones, but it seemed inconvenient. Maybe I should get one with bluetooth capability? I already had two sets of sports-style bluetooth earphones. What I wondered was if they still made MP3 players. I must've had like a dozen of them over the years, but I suspected that the smartphone had rendered them obsolete.

I checked on Amazon and, to my surprise, found out they were alive and well. I bought a DODOSOUL MP3 player with 128 GB flash memory for about $35 USD. It was physically solid, about the size of a very small phone. It didn't appear to have built-in memory, just a slot for a micro-SD card, which came with the product -- 128 GB being like an order of magnitude more than I needed. Music files can be loaded to the card from a PC, using a PC slot or USB adapter.

Getting it to work with my sports bluetooth headphones wasn't particularly difficult. The only problem I found was that the menus were a little confusing. It took me a long time to figure out how to set music shuffle; the trick is that the menu for setting play mode was only accessible when the play screen for a tune was visible. Once set, the play screen displayed an icon for the operating mode.

It also has voice recorder and FM radio capability, not that I need them. I kind of wish it could play video downloads; the display is tiny, but it might be fun to watch cartoons on it. More significantly, it would be nice if it had a cheap camera in it; it's always nice to have another camera on hand.

More recently, I decided to get a multicolor lamp with USB audio capabilities for my gym room, and so I bought an "Aiscool" lamp / bluetooth speaker with both micro-SD and USB storage music inputs, for about $25 USD. It looks like a big egg on a tripod base, with a touch cap and audio control buttons up front. Works fine too, in particular having easy touch controls that work predictably. Touch controls can be troublesome.

* Sigh, I'm always buying new gadgets, to end up taking some of the older ones to Goodwill for recycling. Incidentally, why gadgets from China tend to have funny names like "DODOSOUL" and "Aiscool" on Amazon.com. An article from SLATE.com by one Cleo Levin from 2020 commented:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The trick is that the funny names don't run into trademark collisions; they may be generated automatically, with a search then conducted to check for collisions. Of course, there are a lot of gadget-producers in China, and it seems they change their silly names fairly often and use several of them at one time -- possibly to keep a low profile, preventing Amazon from becoming concerned about and investigating their business practices. In any case, it does seem curious that producers may not want brand recognition.

[FRI 17 NOV 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (73)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (73): Of course, the digital electronics revolution continued at full steam in the Biden Administration, with ever greater digital connection via fiber optics, next-generation wireless, and global satellite networks such as SpaceX's Starlink. Video downloading became the norm, with cable TV withering, while video games became more significant than the movie industry and crept up on TV. Social media, however, was in difficult shape, with governments fighting monopolization and working towards content moderation -- against stubborn resistance.

Automation continued on its rise, though it seemed to be running into diminishing returns, industrial productivity coming to a plateau. Goods such as cars, farm machinery, and aircraft were increasingly wirelessly enabled, both to allow them to receive software updates and to return diagnostic information. The diagnostic information, in some cases, was used to refine "virtual twins" -- software models of machinery, such as aircraft engines, to support servicing and improve on the design. Increased wireless enabling, of course, raised data security issues, but there was perception that data security, though a serious problem, was one that could be solved.

The most important innovation of the time, however, was "generative artificial intelligence (GAI)", in which AI was used not to interpret data but to actually produce new material: music, documents, images, and video. It presented the possibility of a scriptwriter entering a general specification for a TV episode of a given length, and have a GAI system generate the video, complete with theme music. Possible applications of GAI appeared open-ended. There was a great deal of public panic over GAI, though most of it seemed overblown; it was clearly a threat to content creators, leading to a lengthy Hollywood screenwriter's strike in 2023, supported by prominent actors.

* This tale of economic society leaves off at the introduction of GAI. It doesn't stop there, of course, but it's hard to say where the road goes after that. Of course, the Biden Administration has its work cut out for it, the future agenda including:

• Addressing income inequality and reducing budget deficits -- the two are related.
  
  
• Promoting American industry by encouraging technological development -- while discouraging monopolistic conduct in US industry while striving for balanced trade deals with allies.
  
  
• Boosting higher education, with help from new technologies, across socioeconomic fault lines, with universal access to the internet playing a part. Efforts to deal with online disinformation will also play a part.
  
  
• Regulating public health, by improved medical care and access to medical care, with responsible gun-safety regulation playing a part.
  
  
• Working to address climate change by focusing on renewable energy, along with protection against climate-related catastrophes.
  
  
• Coping with shifting demographics as the American population continues to age, being confronted with decline.

As far as the science of economics goes -- and it is a science, if a loose one -- it can be expected to advance as it always has, both reflecting the economic status quo and proposing new areas of investigation. It can be said that capitalism has become the unchallenged conventional economic wisdom, statist socialism having proven a dead end. Capitalism today is more challenged from the Right, with its insistence on weeding out progressivism, never realizing or caring that progressivism is not socialism, instead being a form of capitalism. The alternative is corruption in the form of oligarchic capitalism, crony capitalism, in the limit fascism and kleptocracy. How well that challenge is addressed remains to be seen.

Thinking beyond this battle for the soul of capitalism, what are the long-term goals of economic development? One particularly interesting scenario was visualized by Franco-American economist Manu Saadia in his 2016 book TREKONOMICS: THE ECONOMICS OF STAR TREK -- which took its cue from the universe of the long-running STAR TREK TV meta-series.

In the STAR TREK Universe, at least in its later manifestations, the advanced worlds of the Planetary Federation had no hunger, no want of anything. Anyone who needed something got it from a matter replicator; any activity they were interested in, including sexual activities, could be performed in a virtual-reality holodeck. What would such a "post-scarcity society" really look like? Something like the dull societies envisioned by 19th-century utopians? Or more like a world of unlimited license that ultimately corrupts itself to extinction?

The reality, of course, will be between those two extremes. That being an extremely broad space to cover, we can hardly have credible ideas of what it would really be like, any more than Adam Smith could envision the world of the 21st century. Nonetheless, it can be said that the history of economics can be seen as that of the struggle between the "haves" and the "have-nots". Maybe that struggle is not eternal, and the day will come when everyone is among the "haves". It's not a realistic notion at present, but it's hard to see any sensible reason to object to it. What it will be like? We'll know when we get there. [END OF SERIES]

[THU 16 NOV 23] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for October included:

[05 OCT 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2D / YAOGAN 39-03A,B,C -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Xichang at 0024 UTC (local time - 8) to put the three "Yaogan 39-03A:C" satellites into orbit. Apparently they were a "flying triangle" to perform SIGINT tracking of adversary naval assets.

[05 OCT 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-21 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0536 UTC (local time + 4) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[06 OCT 23] USA CC / ATLAS 5 / KUIPERSAT 1,2 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1806 UTC (local time + 4) to put the two "Kuipersat 1,2" demonstrator comsats into orbit for Amazon subsidiary Kuiper. These were the first prototype satellites, the intent being to fly a constellation like that of SpaceX's Starlink.

[09 OCT 22] EU KR / VEGA / THEOS 2, TRITON & -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0136 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put into orbit the "THEOS 2" Earth-observation satellite for Thailand, Taiwan's "Triton" AKA "FORMOSAT 7R" weather satellite, and ten small satellites.

THEOS 2 was an Earth remote sensing satellite from Thailand's government-run "Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA)" as part of the "Thai Earth Observation System (THEOS)". The 417-kilogram (920-pound) satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space, based on the AstroBus-S platform, and had a design lifetime of ten years. It carried an imaging payload with a resolution of up to 0.5 meters (20").

THEOS 2 is a replacement for the original THEOS satellite, now known as THEOS 1, which was launched aboard a Dnepr rocket in October 2008. THEOS 1 was designed to operate for at least five years; it remains in service and continues to return valuable data fifteen years after its launch. A companion to THEOS 2, named "THEOS 2 SmallSAT", has been built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) and is expected to be launched at a future date to join THEOS 2 in orbit. The THEOS-2 SmallSAT spacecraft is smaller than THEOS 2 and will carry a lower-resolution imaging payload to complement the higher-resolution sensor aboard THEOS 2.

Triton was a lightweight experimental weather satellite from the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA, formerly the National Space Organization / NSPO). The first weather satellite to be built in Taiwan, this 241-kilogram (531-pound) satellite was intended to gather data that will help to forecast typhoons. Triton observed signals from navigation satellites reflected by the ocean surface to measure wind speeds in the lower atmosphere throughout a five-year mission. The ten other payloads were CubeSats, including:

• Proba-V Companion CubeSat (PVCC): A 12-unit (12U) CubeSat in 3x2x2 format from the ESA, carrying an imaging payload with short-wave infrared (SWIR) and visible / near-infrared (VNIR) sensors. It was originally built as a ground spare for three identical instruments making up the Vegetation (VGT) payload aboard the "Proba-V" mission that was launched by a Vega's in May 2013.
  
  
• ESTCube 2: A 3U CubeSat from the University of Tartu in Estonia. It carried four payloads, including an electrically-charged tether for orbital adjustment, as well as twin cameras operating at different wavelengths to map the "normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)", a measure used to study the health and density of vegetation. ESTCube 2 also served as a prototype for a satellite series.
  
  
• Passive REflecTomeTry & DosimetrY (PRETTY): A 3U CubeSat, a joint project between the ESA and a consortium including the Technical University of Graz in Austria, Seibersdorf Laboratories, and Beyond Gravity. It carried twin forward facing antennae to pick up signals from navigation satellites close to the horizon. One picked up the signal direct from the satellite, the other picked up the signal bounced off the Earth. Comparison of the two signals allowed measurement of the height of ice or seawater to an accuracy of 50 centimeters (20 inches).
  
  
• Advanced Nanosatellite Systems of Earth Observation Research (ANSER) 1:3: A triplet of 3U CubeSats from Spain's national aerospace agency, Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial (INTA). The "ANSER Leader" satellite handled communications with the ground, while the ANSER "Follower 1 & 2" CubeSats relied on the Leader to relay communications via inter-satellite links. The three satellites flew in formation, about ten kilometers apart, using deployable wings and flaps to maintain their formation through lift and drag in the extremely thin atmosphere at their orbital altitude.
  
  Each ANSER satellite carried part of the constellation's imaging payload, named CINCLUS. The Leader was equipped with a panchromatic camera to allow observation conditions, such as cloud cover, to be checked, while the Follower satellites each carried dual hyperspectral Very Near Infrared (VNIR) spectrometers. INTA planned to use the ANSER constellation to monitor water quality and pollution within lakes and reservoirs on the Iberian Peninsula.
  
  
• Nanosat 3U pur la Surveillance du Spectre (N3SS): A 3U CubeSat from the French space agency CNES. It was built to show how a satellite can detect and identify sources of radio-frequency jamming.
  
  
• CubeSat Carrier (CSC) 1 & 2: 6U CubeSats from Dutch-based ISISpace, carrying a variety of payloads for ISISpace customers.
  
  
• MACSAT: Another 6U CubeSat from ISISpace, operated by Luxembourg's OQ Technology, to test satellite-based 5G connectivity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Vega is a four-stage launch vehicle, consisting of three solid-propellant stages with a liquid-fueled upper stage, the "Attitude Vernier Upper Module (AVUM)". AVUM provides precise final orbit insertion for the satellites via a restartable RD-843 engine.

Vega is being replaced with the upgraded Vega-C rocket, which increases payload capacity and sports a new, bigger first-stage P120C solid rocket motor that has been developed for the next-generation Ariane 6 vehicle. Vega first flew in February 2012 and has launched twenty times to date, eighteen of its previous missions having been successful. Two additional missions have been flown by Vega-C: one of which was successful, while the other failed.

[09 OCT 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-4 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0743 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 21 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[13 OCT 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / PSYCHE -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1419 UTC (local time + 4) to send the "Psyche" asteroid probe into deep space. Psyche's target is the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche; it will be the first "M-type" (metallic) asteroid to be given a close inspection. It is suspected that it was once a planetary core.

The Psyche spacecraft was intended to perform a 21-month primary science mission at Psyche, following its arrival at the asteroid after a six-year journey, which will include a gravitational-assist flyby of Mars. Psyche was based on the Maxar SSL-1300 platform, with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory handling the development of all communications, command, and data handling subsystems, as well as flight software. Psyche had a launch mass of 2,610 kilograms (5,570 pounds), was propelled by four ion thrusters, and had a payload of four science instruments.

Psyche was the 14th mission in NASA's Discovery Program, which supports solar system exploration missions that are lower in cost than NASA's New Frontier and Flagship programs. It was selected in 2017, along with the companion Lucy asteroid mission.

[15 OCT 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2D / YUNHAI 1 04 -- A Chinese Chang Zheng (Long March) 2D booster was launched from Juiquan at 0054 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Yunhai-1 04" weather satellite into orbit.

[18 OCT 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-23 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0039 UTC (next day local time + 4) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[21 OCT 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-5 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0823 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 21 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[22 OCT 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-24 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0217 UTC (next day local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[23 OCT 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2D / YAOGAN 36-04A:C -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Xichang at20220 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the secret "Yaogan 36 Group 4" payloads into orbit. It was a triplet of satellites and may have been a "flying triangle" naval signals intelligence payload.

[26 OCT 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2F / SHENZHOU 17 -- A Long March 2F booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0314 GMT (local time - 8) to put the "Shenzhou 17" crewed space capsule into space on a Tiangong China Space Station support mission. The three-taikonaut crew included commander Tang Hongbo, operator Tang Shengjie, and system operator Jiang Xinlin.

[27 OCT 23] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1B / LOTOS S1 (COSMOS 2570,2571) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0400 UTC (local time - 3) to put the "Cosmmos 2570,2571" satellites into orbit. They were believed to be the seventh "Lotos S1" electronic intelligence satellite twin. The Lotos S1 satellites are built by KB Arsenal, a Russian military contractor in Saint Petersburg, in partnership with TsSKB Progress. According to the manufacturer, the Lotos S1 satellites have a launch mass of about 6,000 kilograms (13,000 pounds).

[29 OCT 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-6 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0900 UTC (local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[30 OCT 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-25 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2320 UTC (local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[31 OCT 23] CN TY / LONG MARCH 6A / TIANHUI 5A,B -- A Long March 6A booster was launched from Taiyuan at 2250 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Tianhui 5A,B" twin cartographic satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit.

[WED 15 NOV 23] VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (7)

* VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (7): There is a nationalist component to gaming. Japan's gaming industry has a following approaching the religious. In Tokyo foreigners flock to Akihabara, the "electric town" of game arcades, or buzz around by go-kart in homage to "Mario Kart". Osaka has a Super Nintendo World theme park. Picking up the Olympic torch in Rio in 2016, its then prime minister, Abe Shinzou, did so dressed as Super Mario.

Pop culture has long had "soft power", Hollywood movies having long dominated the world. In 1950 Walter Wanger, an American producer, said film exports were more important "than the H bomb". Every movie reel exported was an American ambassador, he said, calling this "Donald Duck diplomacy". A new soft power is now on the rise: "Super Mario" diplomacy -- and the USA isn't in the driver's seat.

Japan invaded Western living rooms in the 1980s when Atari, an American game pioneer, collapsed and Nintendo saw an opening. Japan's anime cartoons had a niche following in the USA, but gaming was the cultural export "that would really monetize and become an influential cultural phenomenon," according to Nakamura Akinori of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. The university's Center for Game Studies, which archives 10,000 video games and 150 items of hardware, demonstrates how Japan led the gaming market by the 1990s, with Nintendo, Sega and later Sony dominant. More American children recognized Mario than Mickey Mouse. The Japanese simply knew how to make games that people liked.

Japanese games have stylistic roots in traditional Japanese art. The "loot box", a now-universal monetization feature that allows players to buy a package of random power-ups, is derived from the Japanese market for "gacha", vending machines that sell surprise toys. Japanese games have a greater emphasis than Western ones on co-operative play and less on firearms, with the katana -- blade -- playing a greater role.

However, the Americans fought back. Microsoft's Xbox gave America a share of the console market; the Xbox was based on Microsoft's Windows OS, making development easier, and also giving the games a PC market. Sony and Nintendo still have a lead in consoles. But gaming has shifted to mobile, and the two main operating systems, Google's Android and Apple's iOS, are American-owned.

There are other big players in games besides the Japan and the USA. The 20 highest-grossing mobile games of 2022 came from nine different countries. Japan has a peculiar disadvantage in that it has a big domestic market, but games tailored for domestic use don't necessarily travel well elsewhere. Dating games are popular in Japan, but there's almost no interest in them in other countries, even when they veer into pornography.

South Korea is the emerging power in mobile games, taking a more internationalist view -- encouraged by a government that has declared games part of the "Hallyu", the Korean cultural wave that includes K-pop music and hit video productions like SQUID GAME. Korean games have tended to be rooted in Japanese games, but are gradually acquiring their own voice.

However, it is China that is now dominant in mobile games, having produced six of 2022's top 20, including two of the top three: Tencent's "Honor of Kings" and miHoYo's "Genshin Impact". Chinese movies rarely port elsewhere, being made for the domestic market, but Chinese games are made for an international market -- partly because the Chinese government tends to regard them as corrupting youth. "Honor of Kings" has a medieval European look, while "Genshin Impact" looks so like modern versions of the Japanese "Zelda" series that "Zelda" fans have protested. Chinese games tend to be seen as "copycats", but the fans don't mind; the Chinese are skilled at the craft, the fans enjoying the lavish scenery and beautiful characters. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 14 NOV 23] CALIFORNIA RECHARGE SYSTEMS

* CALIFORNIA RECHARGE SYSTEMS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("California Tries To Harness Megastorm Floods To Ease Crippling Droughts" by Sharon Bernstein, 15 November 2022), the state of California is suffering from extreme weather -- afflicted by drought, interrupted by rains that cause dangerous floods.

As an illustration, consider the town of Huron, halfway between Sacramento and Los Angles. The farms outside of Huron are being confronted with extremes of weather, suffering from drought some years, flooded in others. A coalition of local farmers & the city of Huron are trying to turn former hemp and tomato fields into massive receptacles that can hold water as it percolates into the ground during wet years. This project -- and others like it across California's Central Valley breadbasket -- are designed to capture floodwaters that would otherwise rush out to the sea, or damage towns, cities and crops.

With parts of California suffering a historic drought, water was so scarce in the Central Valley in 2022 that Huron was allocated only a quarter of the water it was contracted to receive from the US Bureau of Reclamation. The city was forced to buy water on the open market, raising the bills of water users.

The new project, known as a "recharge system", turns unused fields into large ponds to hold water so that it can percolate into the porous rock and earth below, creating or restoring an aquifer rather than rushing to the sea. Consultant Alfonso Manrique says that the city is building a new well to be fed from the aquifer. Capturing runoff will also help protect the city of less than 7,000 people from catastrophic floods.

The project near Huron is one of about 340 recharge systems that have been proposed by water agencies in California. If they are all built, they will save an amount of water each year equivalent to that needed to provide water service to 4.4 million households. Outside the USA, countries including India are also beginning to increase the use of recharge ponds to store water in natural or human-made aquifers.

Such projects have become increasingly common in California. In the small community of Okieville about 65 kilometers (40 miles) east of Huron, the Tulare Irrigation District is building a new recharge pond on land purchased from a local farmer. During the last drought, which lasted from 2012 to 2016, some Okieville residents ran out of potable water; the recharge pond should give some relief. The project costs about $2 million USD, including about $1.8 million USD in state grants.

In addition to the comparatively small projects being built by rural water districts and farmers, the massive Metropolitan Water District -- a regional water wholesaler that serves Southern and parts of Central California -- is building a giant recharge pond in the high desert near Palmdale, in partnership with local water authorities.

California has an extensive system of reservoirs, but new reservoirs are hard to approve, and expensive when they are. The recharge ponds have plenty of public support, and are easier to approve and finance. Sarah Woolf -- a water consultant whose family owns some of the farmland being used for the Huron project -- says that these human-made aquifers and underground water banks will not solve all of California's water problems, but they can make a significant dent in them: "These are needed all over the place."

[MON 13 NOV 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 45

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: General Valeriy Zaluzhny, commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), recently released a white paper on the current status of the war there that had a number of interesting insights.

The paper began by reviewing the status of the conflict, showing how the AFU stopped the Russian offensive in 2022 and was able to perform a successful counter-offensive later in the year. However, in 2023 the war settled down into a "positional battle" that favors the Russians, with their much greater manpower. The critical elements in the battle include:

• Air power: AFU air defenses have improved markedly from the outset of the war, thanks to air defense systems provided by allies. Neither side can now overfly the forward lines of the other with piloted aircraft without being shot down. The war has become heavily dependent on drones -- and the Russians have been, after a slow start, able to obtain drones in quantity and make effective use of them.
  
  
• Minefields: The Russians also have plenty of mines and have made good use of them, with dense minefields up to 20 kilometers deep. Russian drones can thwart AFU mine-clearers, and the Russians also are quick to augment or replace minefields by dispersing mines with artillery and other mine-laying systems. The AFU has limited tech for clearing minefields, and it hasn't been increased at a fast enough rate. It should be said that the AFU is equally competent at setting up minefields.
  
  
• Artillery: The Russians started out the battle with a significant advantage in artillery, but the AFU was able to level the balance with the introduction of GMLRS rockets and other smart munitions. However, the Russians reacted quickly, setting up electronic warfare (EW) systems to negate GPS guidance of smart weapons, and dispersing their own assets to make them harder to target.
  
  
• Reserves: Russia's greater manpower remains a significant advantage, though Vladimir Putin has been somewhat hobbled in mobilization by its lack of popularity. Ukraine remains somewhat hobbled not merely by its smaller population, but by the necessity to train soldiers in other countries where they aren't vulnerable to attack.
  
  
• Electronic warfare: The Russians have been able to construct, if with difficulty, a layered EW defense.

Solutions to these challenges are available. As for air power, responses include:

• Use of "drone swarms", including both decoys and kamikaze drones ("k-drones") to overwhelm Russian defenses.
  
  
• Use of interceptor drones to drop nets on or ram Russian drones. Interceptor drones are cheap and, to a degree, reusable.
  
  
• Use of EW-resistant drone technology, for example with frequency-hopping datalinks that are hard to jam and hard to detect.
  
  
• EW to disrupt attacks with glide bombs dropped by piloted aircraft.
  
  
• Stroboscopes to confuse infrared night-vision devices on Russian drones, along with more use of EW and active (shooting) defenses against such drones.

As for minefields, responses include:

• Use of new sensors, such as lidar, to detect mines, plus smokescreens to protect mine-clearing teams.
  
  
• Use of old jet engines mounted on vehicles to blow away mines that haven't been buried, as well as pressure hoses, and rockets with fuel-air explosive warheads.
  
  
• Use of burrowing robots to clear buried mines.

As for artillery, there's a general question of obtain new tubes and more ammunition, but lead times are long. GPS having been neutralized, now the AFU is obtaining smart munitions that don't rely on GPS. As for reserves, it's mostly a question of organization and automation thereof, with a wider net cast for conscription. As far as EW goes, both defensive and offensive EW systems have to be deployed in quantity.

Ukraine has had automated command and control systems from the outset -- of which nothing has been said -- but they need to be refined to make them more powerful and universal. Ukrainian logistics similarly needs to be improved -- but the AFU also needs long-range precision weapons to attack Russian logistics. These weapons will need to be built in Ukraine, since the allies generally don't want their weapons to be used against Russian territory. The allies will provide technical assistance in that effort.

* Along with the release of the paper, ECONOMIST.com interviewed General Zaluzhny, with a number of interesting comments. Concerning the grinding pace of the war during 2023:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

There is, in short, no "wonder weapon" to win the war -- the AFU simply having to "up its game" with a range of improved technologies, along with the ability to put them to effective use. This article, though very informative, seemed to suffer from a number of misunderstandings of certain fundamental realities of war:

• The defender is never adequately prepared when the war breaks out.
  
  
• Starting from a disadvantage, it is very hard to get ahead of the power curve against an adversary. Getting the logistics system to work takes time and is troublesome, with shifting priorities as emergencies come up that shove other needs to the side. It's always "a day late and a dollar short", the inevitable result of the "tyranny of logistics".
  
  
• Defense is easier than offense, and so taking offensive action requires, as Zaluzhny understands, getting an "edge" of some sort against the defender, in this case improved weapons and new tactics. The difficulty remains that it takes time to prepare the offense, and the defender gets exactly the same amount of time to prepare the defense.
  
  
• In coalition warfare, it is easy to blame allies for not doing enough, while the allies may blame the defender for being incompetent. It's kind of like in a difficult marriage, where both husband and wife each think they are carrying the burden of the relationship.

There is another reality that has yet to be seen: nobody realizes that the adversary is as bad or worse off until he caves in.

* In other Ukraine War news, it appears that Russian forces in Ukraine have been using the Telegram app to obtain battlefield intelligence about the disposition of forces. Telegram is a messaging service with encryption capabilities, devised by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov, about a decade ago. It has international reach, but it is the go-to communications / social media app for Russians.

Using Telegram for battlefield intelligence, however, is not a good thing. It appears Russian officers do not necessarily know where their troops are, one result being "friendly[?] fire" casualties. That led to reminiscences on X/Twitter of a well-known audio intercept from some time ago, involving a Russian soldier and a forward controller, callsign "RAMBO", desperately trying to get in touch with a misguided artillery battery, callsign "GRANIT":

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The audio clip is as hilarious as it is horrific, one X/Twitter poster commenting when it was released: "Good job, GRANIT!" With the release of the article on the misuse of Telegram, another poster commented: "GRANIT, NOT AGAAAAAIN!:

In the meantime, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban is promising to veto new EU funding for the Ukraine War, but EU officials are not so concerned: if he does, they'll coordinate contributions from the individual states. Meanwhile, here in the USA, there's uncertain movement towards getting a budget through Congress. New House Speaker Mike Johnson appears willing to pass a budget without trying to cut it, but the MAGA representatives there may make trouble.

Incidentally, the House MAGA are persisting in their attempts to find some pretext for impeaching Joe Biden. They haven't really found anything, but did manage to scrounge up a 2018 personal check for $200,000 USD from Joe's younger brother Jimmy, being a repayment for a loan. There's nothing problematic about the check, but the House MAGA want to make a big deal of it. They've gone so far as to subpoena Jimmy Biden and Joe's son Hunter.

It is likely the subpoenas will be ignored. Odds are not good that the House could pass a contempt vote, and even if they could, the DOJ wouldn't act on the congressional equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit. In the meantime the House Democrats, having had enough, investigated Comer and found that he had received a personal check for $200,000 USD from his brother, rather embarrassingly linked to a shell company. The House Democrats then subpoenaed Comer.

Will the House MAGA give up? Most of them can't tolerate being investigated -- but then again, they don't get clues easily. As Senator John "Gentle Giant" Fetterman said of the MAGA in Congress: "They're not sending their best."

[FRI 10 NOV 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (72)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (72): The most significant foreign-policy event in the Biden Administration was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Vladimir Putin had expected to occupy the country in three days, but ended up in a grinding and protracted slugfest. Ukraine was heavily backed by the USA and the rest of NATO, though inevitably supply of weapons and other necessary materiel was never fast enough. One particular problem was that the war ended up being skewed towards an artillery battle, with vast numbers of shells being expended by both sides. Shell production by Ukraine's allies was hard-pressed to keep up, and expanding the production base simply could not be done fast enough -- one ironic problem being that high US employment levels made it hard to find workers.

Sanctions on Russia, originally imposed after the 2014 seizure of Crimea, were greatly ramped up, putting Russia under a severe economic crunch. Hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country, fearing they would be conscripted and used as cannon fodder.

Russia had become Europe's primary supplier of natural gas before the war, with plans to ship more gas through a new pipeline called the "Nord Stream". The USA had particular concerns over the Nord Stream, with fears that Europe was becoming too vulnerable to Russian economic blackmail. Those fears were proven right when Putin attempted to use the "gas weapon" against Europe -- the Nord Stream was mysteriously sabotaged -- but the weapon was a dud. European nations, particularly Germany, reacted decisively, obtaining alternative sources of natural gas by setting up liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, and emphasizing production of heat pumps and other tech not reliant on gas. The German government saw LNG as a stepping stone towards a "green hydrogen" economy, based on hydrogen generated by renewable energy.

Russia did get support from its allies, particularly China, though the Chinese kept the war at arm's length. Xi Jinping continued to be preoccupied with intimidating Taiwan -- though the war in Ukraine suggested that invading a neighbor state might be extremely risky, all the more so because the USA ramped up its support for Taiwan and augmented forces in the region, while heavily backing Ukraine. It was an impressive demonstration of American power.

* Technological change in the USA did not come to a halt during the Trump Administration, but thanks to Trump's doctrine of opposing anything new -- Trump had a particular problem with wind turbines, claiming for example that they killed whales -- innovation was somewhat obscured during his administration. Although Joe Biden, as a progressive, was much more enthusiastic about regulation and trust-busting, he was still a capitalist, and wanted to expand American economic power.

The push towards a "greener" industrial system, based on renewables, represented a long-term reorganization away from the increasingly unstable oil economy towards a more sustainable future. That was going to be a long-term effort, involving not merely a move towards renewable energy, but towards electric vehicles, new schemes for heating of residences and other structures, use of alternative fuels in air and sea transport, plus general improvements in energy efficiency ("negawatts").

One aspect of the move towards sustainability that emerged during the Trump Administration was a push towards vegetable-based meat substitutes. Animal husbandry not only generated a lot of emissions, it was much less efficient than raising crops. Vegetable-based meats -- and dairy products -- promised not only to be "greener", but in principle cheaper as well. Alas, by the time Biden became president, the vegetable-based meats had progressed through the "early excitement" phase of the hype cycle into the "trough of disillusionment" -- which was, over the longer term, very likely to go on to the phase of "progressive refinement". [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 09 NOV 23] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("World Bank To Help Fund 1,000 Mini Solar Power Grids In Nigeria" by Abraham Achirga and MacDonald Dzirutwe, 5 August 2023), sunny Africa presents opportunities for solar power development, if the will can be found to pursue it.

The World Bank is aiming to help fund construction of 1,000 mini solar power grids in Nigeria, Africa's biggest economy, in partnership with the government and private sector. Nigeria's power grid is inadequate and unreliable, leaving millions of households and businesses reliant on fuel generators. Mini solar grids promises to relive the strain. The mini grids typically range in a size from a few kilowatts to up to 10 megawatts, enough to power some 200 households.

Speaking during a visit to a mini grid site on the outskirts of the capital Abuja, World Bank President Ajay Banga told reporters that nearly 150 mini grids had been built in Nigeria, partly funded by the World Bank, to bring power to communities without access to electricity. Banga says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

World Bank data shows that in sub-Saharan Africa, 568 million people still lack access to electricity. On a global basis, almost 80% of people without electricity are Africans.

* As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Could Floating Solar Farms Survive Out At Sea?", 10 January 2023), offshore wind power is well-established. Now there's a push towards offshore solar power.

Indonesia is a nation made up of more than 10,000 islands, making setting up a national electricity grid problematic. More than a million Indonesians are not connected to the electricity grid. Research is underway on floating solar panel arrays to help fill the need.

Floating solar arrays have been set up, but only on lakes and rivers. Bad weather and high seas make oceanic solar arrays a more troublesome proposition -- but companies are seeing if they can get it done. Dutch-Norwegian company SolarDuck, for example, is working with German energy company RWE to build a floating solar plant at a North Sea wind farm. The company says it will have the capacity to power a few hundred homes. The solar panels will sit on platforms raised several meters above the ocean surface. The plant, due to be operational in 2026, will use the existing cabling for the wind farm to send electricity back to the shore.

Ocean Sun of Norway has instead developed a floating rig, where the solar panels rest on a base that flexes as the waves pass underneath. Both companies are looking at siting solar farms alongside wind turbines, to allow power generation when the wind is not blowing. Another scheme being pushed by Solar2Wave -- a group including Cranfield University in the UK, plus academic and commercial partners in Indonesia -- also uses floating panels, but protects them from waves with a breakwater.

All such oceanic solar schemes are more expensive than land-based schemes, but still a practical option in places with seashore and not much land. Luofeng Huang at Cranfield says: "There's definitely a lot of potential. Everyone wants to solve this, so we are working quite hard and it's like a competition to see who can bring the first successful design."

* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Wind-Turbine Industry Should Be Booming. Why Isn't It?", 18 May 2023), renewable energy has been going from strength to strength, with wind power being an important player in the renewable-energy mix. By all indications, wind power should be booming: America's Inflation Reduction Act gave a big boost to renewables in the USA, while European leaders have pledged to increase the North Sea's offshore-wind capacity to 300 gigawatts by 2050, triple what it is today. However, for the moment the wind-power industry is feeling gloomy.

The reason is an industry shake-out. The four biggest Western makers of wind turbines -- GE Renewable Energy, Nordex, Siemens Gamesa, and Vestas -- supply about 90% of the market outside China, and collectively made about $46 billion USD in 2022. However, although wind-farm operators benefited from high electricity rates after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the turbine-makers are bleeding red ink, with billions in losses.

The turbine-makers have been competing to offer ever-bigger turbines at ever-lower prices to wind-farm developers, a group that includes big utilities and private infrastructure investors. That leaves the manufacturers with slender profit margins if the market for turbines slows down -- and it has. Although wind power is growing rapidly, setting up a wind farm has long lead times: the lag between signing a contract to actually erecting the turbines and getting paid is as much as three years on average for onshore projects and five for offshore ones. In the meantime, the producers are stuck with economic dislocations such as supply-chain disruptions, lack of raw materials and components, inflation, higher interest rates and geopolitical tensions.

The industry also wants to avoid the fate that befell Europe's solar-panel industry, which lost an early lead to cheaper state-subsidized Chinese rivals. China's turbine-makers are growing quickly; they mostly serve the domestic market, but they are also now looking for export customers, particularly in countries along China's Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure projects. Suspicion of the Chinese has been steadily growing in Europe and the USA, of course, so it seems likely that governments will consider measures to help their manufacturers and keep them solvent.

[WED 08 NOV 23] VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (6)

* VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (6): Along with encroaching into the domain of TV and movies, videogames have become a competition sport. At Seoul Game Academy, a chain of schools in South Korea's capital, 3,000 students aged nine and up -- almost all of them boys -- work to master nine games, in hopes of becoming "e-sports" competitors. The school, which charges about $500 USD a month for three sessions a week, advertises itself as "the quickest way to become a pro gamer".

E-sports are unusually popular in South Korea, where Lee Sang-hyeok, a "League of Legends" player with the nom de guerre of "Faker", reportedly makes than any player in the country's football league.

The director of the academy, Park Se-woon, says parents were skeptical when it opened in 2011 -- but now graduates can often make good livings, and those who end up dropping out often get careers in game development. Park adds that parents are increasingly gamers themselves: "Some even come in for lessons."

Game publishers are enthusiastic about e-sports, one big reason being that they can get paid for broadcast and sponsorship rights. Riot Games, the California-based, Tencent-owned company behind "League of Legends", has sold five years' streaming rights for its Chinese league to Huya, a Chinese streaming service, for a reported $310 million USD. . Its Korean league is sponsored by businesses ranging from a local barbecue-chicken brand to the jeweler Tiffany & CO. Of course, publicity from e-sports helps sell games.

Most of the interest in e-sports is in Asia, Western audiences not being so enthusiastic. About 20% of Americans take an interest, according to a poll by Morning Consult, a bit less than those who follow horse-racing. Westerners are, however, fond of gaming videos, including tutorials and gameplay videos. YouTube counts gaming as its second-largest content category after music -- and in music, game music is a popular genre. Nonetheless, few Westerners envision a career in gaming, at least right now.

* Content moderation for games has been around since early on. Censors at the British Board of Film Classification were pioneers; traditionally, the BBFC reviewed films and videos, but in 1986 the BBFC judged the game "Dracula" to be too bloodthirsty for children. The game's publisher, CRL, was not upset, instead enjoying the publicity, and sought an "18" certificate for its next game, "Jack the Ripper".

Games were crude in the 1980s, but in the next decade they became more sophisticated. The home release in 1993 of the brutal "Mortal Kombat" game led the US Congress to push a ratings system for the games industry, which led to the establishment of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board -- followed ten years later by the Pan European Game Information rating. Game ratings ended up being similar to movie ratings, specifying age ranges. Game-makers were not unhappy with the scheme, since it generally spared them unwanted trouble.

Today, MMOs pose a different moderation challenge; they're a form of social media, and have the same sorts of problems, After the Christchurch shootings in 2019, users of Roblox, a platform on which they can create games of their own, began re-enacting the event before the company intervened. Roblox employs "thousands" of human moderators, as well as artificial intelligence, to check user-submitted games and police chat among its 60 million daily users, who have an average age of about 13.

In 2018 Germany introduced a new law holding social networks responsible for content on their sites, treating them like publishers. Politicians debated including video games as well, before deciding in-game chat was more like one-to-one conversation, which is protected by the constitution.

MMOs now tend to be designed to restrain bad behavior. In "World of Warcraft", players join either the "Alliance" or the "Horde". They can talk to their own team, but if they try talking to the other side, their speech is translated into unintelligible orcish or elvish. The result, says Allen Adham of Blizzard Entertainment, which makes the game, is that "players play really nicely with each other, because they have a common enemy." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 07 NOV 23] LITTLE EVS FOR ASIA

* LITTLE EVS FOR ASIA: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Electric Two-Wheelers Are Creating A Buzz In Asia", 16 September 2023), electric vehicles (EV) are only slowly catching on in the West, but they are thriving in Asia -- in the form of electric two- and three-wheelers. A wave of cross-border ventures for such vehicles, along with the infrastructure needed to power them, is surging across the continent.

Not too surprisingly, the electrification of scooters, motorcycles, and auto-rickshaws in poor and middle-income countries is moving along much more rapidly than for larger vehicles. In China, the world's biggest market for EVs, in 2021 about half of 2&3-wheeled machines sold were battery-powered, compared with 16% of new passenger cars. In India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam -- where two-wheelers outnumber cars by between three and 30 to one -- electrifying them can not only reduce carbon emissions, but also cut air pollution (and noise) in urban areas.

In September 2023, GoTo Group of Indonesia announced a deal with Selex Motors, a Vietnamese producer of electric bikes and networks of "battery ATMs", meaning automated battery-swap stations. The plan is for Gojek, GoTo's GoTo's ride-hailing arm, to use Selex's bikes and charging infrastructure in Vietnam. A month before Kymco a large motorcycle-maker from Taiwan, announced a deal with a Thai state-owned energy firm, PTT, to produce new electric two-wheelers and the battery-swapping services to go with them. At about the same time another Taiwanese company, Gogoro, sewed up a joint venture with Ayala, a Philippine conglomerate -- to expand what Gogoro claims is the largest single battery-swapping network in the world, with more than 12,000 racks, carrying between eight and ten batteries each, at more than 2,500 locations in Taiwan.

The biggest prize is India, with its huge market for electric motorcycles. Although some subsidies for the purchase of e-motorcycles have been phased out, sales of electric 2&3-wheelers are booming, with millions sold every year and sales now seeing a growth rate of about 50% a year. Gogoro has cut big deals with Indian food-delivery companies, Swiggy and Zomato, for battery-swapping and scooter technology -- and has also signed a deal with the government of the state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, to invest $1.5 billion USD over eight years in what is being called the "Ultra Mega Project".

Although there has been some effort towards battery-swapping for passenger cars and such, the logistics are much simpler for 2&3-wheelers -- the battery packs being much smaller and easier to handle, and the stations aren't so expensive to set up. Research generated by Arthur D. Little, a consultancy, found that total lifetime cost of ownership is lower for two- and three-wheelers with a battery-swapping arrangement than for similar vehicles which are fossil-fueled or home-charged. The reality that EVs are simpler and easier to maintain than fossil-fuel vehicles helps with the bottom line.

To make a go of electric 2&3-wheelers with battery-swapping demands a lot of capital investment to set up the swap stations. The system can only work if there are many vehicles that use a common battery scheme, while people are reluctant to buy the vehicles without the swap station infrastructure. Solving this chicken-and-egg problem is easier in Taiwan, a densely populated and relatively wealthy nation, than in India, a poor and vast one -- noted for inefficient bureaucracy and resistance to change.

[MON 06 NOV 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 44

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week was marked by the testimony of Donald Trump's adult children at his civil-suit tax-evasion trial in New York State. Testimony by sons Don JR and Eric was along the lines of: "We don't worry about the financial details, that's somebody else's job." It didn't fly well. Their sister Ivanka has been trying to beg off from testifying, but the court isn't buying it, so she will show up in time. One X/Twitter commenter noted:

Dr. Mike Davis / @FrankMikeDavis1: New Federal Holiday declared by Trump: "Take Your Family to Court Week"!

Eric Trump announced to the world that the Trumps would "win the case", oblivious to the reality that they've already been judged guilty of fraud, the current trial being to assess the penalties. Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who is now a noisy Trump enemy, suggested the two sons lied under oath and were "emulating their father" -- adding: "I mean, the guy lies the way you breathe, and the kids are doing the same thing. How stupid do they have to be?"

In the meantime, the judge in charge, Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York City bench, has been growing increasingly irritable with Trump's legal counsel. Trump attorney Chris Kise complained about the judge passing notes back and forth to his clerk, Allison Greenfield -- a perfectly normal courtroom procedure -- with Justice Engoron angrily shooting back: "I have an absolute unfettered right to get advice from my principal law clerk!"

Justice Engoron ended up expanding his existing gag order against Donald Trump to include his legal counsel. Of course, the Trump gang appealed the gag order.

Eric Holder, previously Obama's attorney general, told MSNBC's Jen Psaki that former President Trump would be thrown in jail if he were a "normal person" for violating a gag order. However, Holder said he does not expect the judge will discipline Trump in such a way.

Holder said he expects Trump will eventually violate his reinstated gag order -- which he described as pretty limited and reasonable -- but said the judge will have to make tough decisions about how to respond: "Would a judge actually do that which would happen to a normal person, and put somebody in jail for violating a ... gag order? I suspect that's not likely to happen with this defendant, but any other defendant would probably be facing [jail time]."

Holder noted there is a range of possible disciplinary options to consider if Trump violates the gag order, such as imposing fines or restricting Trump's access to his social media platform, Truth Social. Holder emphasized, however, that he would be "extremely reluctant" to put Trump in jail for violating the gag order, which Judge Tanya Chutkan reinstated Sunday in the Federal case related to Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The gag order specifies Trump cannot attack certain people involved in the case, but it does not restrict his right to discuss the case generally.

Holder said: "I'd try to be as creative as possible if I were the judge, but I'd be extremely reluctant to take a person who's a former president, the leading candidate of one of our major parties, and actually put him in jail." He commented: "This is already a pretty divided nation, and to do something like that -- to take somebody off the campaign trail, to put him in jail. I just would be very reluctant, really reluctant to do that."

There's a lot of frustration over the reluctance of the courts to jail Trump, but there's a major factor involved: tilting a jury towards Trump. Trump's only defense against all the crimes he's been indicted for is to scream: POLITICAL PERSECUTION! Lending that any weight might be a bad idea.

Incidentally, Trump has, in the midst of his many ramblings about such things as whales, somehow, being killed by wind turbines, has compared his persecution to that of Nelson Mandela. Stephen Colbert said he didn't mind that, "especially the part where he goes to jail for 27 years."

We're in the Trump end game. End games can be protracted, but the outcome is not in doubt. Life will be much quieter after he drops out of sight, but quiet will be good; the moving finger, having writ, will move on. Adam Kinzinger, previously a House Representative who participated in the House investigation of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, commented: "I think in 10 years, if you could fast-forward, there's not going to be a single person on Earth that ever admits that they believed that Donald Trump was innocent."

Probably sooner than later, Trump is going to check out, with one X/Twitter poster commenting:

Sundae_Divine: I hope when Trump dies he gets cremated, and the guy working the oven says: "You're fired" -- and laughs.

I thought that was cruel, and very funny. Incidentally, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's flagging presidential campaign took another hit in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC NEWS -- when he talked about falling crime rates in Florida, and Welker shot back that Florida's firearms deaths had actually increased under DeSantis. He tried to rebut her, but she just moved on to the next question, to slap him around again.

Welker was criticized for not paying attention to the rebuttals, but she played that right. He told a whopper lie, she called him on it, he would come up with more whoppers in response. He was trying to regain control of the narrative. "Don't let him do it." She cut him down to size.

* My nephew Graham got a Harry Potter wizard outfit for Halloween, so I decided to get myself an Uncle Sam outfit, including stars & stripes socks and star & stripes tennis shoes with LED lights around the soles. It cost me almost $100 USD all told, but I have plenty of money and nothing particularly compelling to spend it on, so why not?

Alas, I only got about a half-dozen trick-or-treaters. It was chilly and having to bundle up seems to have discouraged them. The outfit was well-received, however. The suit itself felt spiffy, but the top hat was kind of a clumsy contraption and didn't fit well. Amazon offers alternative-style Uncle Sam hats, more along the lines of Dr. Seuss hats, so I'll have to buy one of those and see if works better.

One politically-oriented X/Twitter poster said he was going to take a Reagan-like approach to trick-or-treating this year:

Jeff Tiedrich / @itsJeffTiedrich: This Halloween, I'll be giving all my candy to the richest child in the neighborhood. I'm sure it will trickle down to all the other kids.

Tiedrich is notably caustic and foul-mouthed, but had to think that was one of the best encapsulations of supply-side economics I'd ever seen.

There was a video of Halloween festivities at the White House, with President Joe Biden clowning around with the kids. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was there with his wife and two little kids, the boy wearing fatigues like Volodymyr Zelenskyy's, and the girl wearing a pretty dress in Ukrainian yellow-blue flag colors. I bet that got a lot of attention in Kyiv. Incidentally, it was not possible to find the names of the two kids online -- the Blinkens keep a lid on their personal lives. That makes great sense from a security standpoint.

[FRI 03 NOV 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (71)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (71): Joe Biden called his economic policy, of course, "Bidenomics". He described it as follows:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Biden didn't come up with the name himself, it simply bubbled up as the policy was refined. The first major action, following the emergency American Rescue Plan, was the 2021 "Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act", which authorized investment of $1 trillion USD total over a decade for roads, bridges, airports, seaports, rail, broadband internet, water, and public transit. The act was passed with strong bipartisan support, Members of Congress knowing their voters would like the money being passed around.

That was followed in 2022 by the "CHIPS & Science Act", which invested $280 billion on research into AI, robotics, advanced semiconductors, and other leading-edge technologies. One thrust of the effort was to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the USA, since one of the many negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic had been to throttle chip imports, with a knock-on effect through industry in general. On other fronts, the Biden Administration worked to limit Chinese access to advanced semiconductors and other high tech.

The CHIPS Act was quickly followed by the "Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)" which specified:

• Incentives, including tax credits and rebates, for renewable technologies.
  
  
• Bracing up the Affordable Care Act, and notably allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with manufacturers for key drugs, in an effort to leash in rising drug costs. Giving Medicare negotiating power had been pushed for a long time, in the face of tough opposition from pharmaceutical companies and their allies in Congress.
  
  
• Boosting the budget of the IRS by $80 billion USD to update antiquated systems, and in particular to enhance enforcement of tax dodging by high-income citizens. The IRS had long gone after tax dodging by low-income citizens because it was easy, they didn't fight back as effectively as high-income citizens.
  
  
• Increase corporate taxes by implementing a 15% minimum tax on income and a 1% tax on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks were a sore point, since they took profits that were supposedly to go into investment and used them to reinforce company control over itself.

The IRA represented one of the most significant government investments in renewable energy to that time. The Biden Administration wanted to go further on taxing of billionaires with massive deferred assets by imposing a tax on the expected windfall from the assets, but it didn't get through Congress. In the meantime, however, the FTC ramped up antitrust enforcement.

Bidenomics seemed to be effective, with employment remaining high and inflation slowly being reduced. There was persistent talk of a recession, but it wasn't quick to materialize. Unfortunately, Joe Biden didn't have enough political support to go as far as he wanted with his agenda, envisioning a major expansion of the social safety net. The opposition to Biden sometimes went into the absurd, with Members of Congress publicly taking credit at groundbreakings for Biden-funded projects they had voted against. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 02 NOV 23] SCIENCE NEWS

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("DNA Reveals Donkeys Were Domesticated 7,000 Years Ago In East Africa" by Freda Kreier, 8 September 2022), the donkey has been a servant to humans for a long time. A new genetic analysis shows just how long. The genomes of over 200 donkeys from countries around the world were decoded, to show that the beasts were domesticated about 7,000 years ago in East Africa, about 3,000 years before the domestication of the horse -- and there was only one donkey domestication event.

Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, says: "The history of the donkey has puzzled scientists for years." In 2021, Orlando and his colleagues used DNA from the bones of horses to track their domestication to the Eurasian steppes, in what is now southwestern Russia, more than 4,200 years ago. The history of the donkey (Equus asinus) remained unclear.

A dwindling number of wild asses in Asia and Africa, these being the closest wild relatives of donkeys, pointed toward one of those continents as the likely donkey homeland. Archaeological evidence, including a 5,000-year-old Egyptian tablet depicting marching asses, sheep and cattle, tagged Africa as the most probable source -- but genetic studies on donkey origins were generally inconclusive. According to Orlando, that was likely because researchers didn't have donkey genetic samples from around the world. To get broader sampling, Orlando and his colleagues gathered 207 genomes from donkeys kept in 31 countries, ranging from Brazil to China, along with DNA belonging to 31 donkeys that lived between 4,000 and about 100 years ago.

Comparing these genomes with those of wild asses, the researchers found that all donkeys trace their lineage back to a single domestication event in East Africa, possibly in the Horn of Africa, around 5000 BCE. From there, domesticated donkeys spread to the rest of the continent and into Europe and Asia, where they formed genetically distinct groups within regions. Humans then took donkeys, along with their genetic legacy, to everywhere on Earth.

The timing of donkey domestication matches the expansion of the Sahara, and Orlando thinks they may be connected: "Donkeys are champions when it comes to carrying stuff and are good at going through deserts." He concludes: "Donkeys still provide tons of support for people living in low- and middle-income countries."

Emily Clark -- a livestock geneticist of the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh -- appreciates the research, saying: "Donkeys are extraordinary working animals that are essential to the livelihoods of millions of people around the globe. As humans, we owe a debt of gratitude to the domestic donkey for the role they play and have played in shaping society."

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Planets Without Stars Might Have Moons Suitable For Life" by Bas den Hond, 3 March 2023), about a hundred "rogue planets" -- planets not associated with a star -- are known. It might be thought such rogue planets would be permanently frozen, but now research shows that may not be true, thanks to tidal forces.

A study shows that the flexing of a moon in orbit around its parent planet could allow liquid water to exist on that moon, raising the possibility that life might arise on it. Astrophysicist Giulia Roccetti -- of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany -- and her colleagues created a computer simulation to reveal that, given the right orbit and atmosphere, some moons orbiting rogue planets can stay warm for over a billion years. Roccetti says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Rogue planets may have been formed on their own from gas and dust clouds, just like stars form, while others were torn from their parent star systems by some cosmic calamity. Computer simulations suggest that there may be as many of these free-floating planets as there are stars in the galaxy. Such orphaned planets might also have moons. In 2021, researchers proposed that these moons need not be cold and barren places.

Tidal forces stress a moon following an elliptical orbit, warming it up. A sufficiently thick, heat-trapping atmosphere, likely one dominated by carbon dioxide, might then keep the surface warm enough for water to remain liquid. However, over time the orbit will become more circular, with the gravitational force on the moon becoming more constant, and the heating will end.

Roccetti and her colleagues ran 8,000 computer simulations of a sunlike star with three Jupiter-sized planets. These simulations showed that planets that are ejected from their solar system will often fly off into space with their moons. The team then ran simulations of those moons, assumed to be the size of Earth, to see if there were heating and how long the heating would last.

Since an atmosphere would be required to retain heating. The researchers did simulations with three different atmospheric scenarios:

• For an atmosphere as dense as Earth's, the heating would last only 50 million years.
  
  
• Multiply that density by 10, the heating would last 300 million years.
  
  
• Multiply that density by 100, the heating would last 1.6 billion years.

The moon of a rogue planet might still not be a very good place to find life, but Roccetti still wants to investigate the possibility: "There are many environments in our universe which are very different from what we have here on Earth, and it is important to investigate all of them."

[WED 01 NOV 23] VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (5)

* VIDEO GAMES GO BOOM (5): Turning games into films and the reverse is getting easier as the two use the same technology. The best games feature 3D-modeling to define environments and the elements in them, such as spaceships, robots, and monsters. For now, game and film modeling are somewhat mismatched: a game's environment is more interactive than a film's, and films' backdrops are higher fidelity than games'. However, the technology is converging, primarily from the game side, one Hollywood executive saying:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The growing cost of gamemaking makes them like Hollywood in another way: sequels. Film fans often complain about the prevalence of sequels and remakes, as studios become less willing to risk blockbuster budgets on unknown products. All of 2022's ten highest-grossing movies in the USA were part of a franchise, from AVATAR to THE BATMAN. Games, whose lead time makes it even riskier to try something new things, have also become repetitive. One of 2023's big releases is the 16th installment of Square Enix's "Final Fantasy", a Japanese series that started out in 1987.

The push towards subscription game environments gives game developers an option that movie-makers don't have: instead of having to periodically release a game again, they can update a game on a continuous basis. Blizzard's "World of Warcraft", for example, features regular updates to maps, missions, and characters for those willing to pay. This scheme, which is called as "games as a service", keeps gamers engaged, and spending, year after year -- without having to keep introducing new hits. Having failed to crack the game-streaming business with its defunct Stadia platform, Google has repositioned itself to focus on helping developers run "live-service" games.

The closely-related model of offering gameplay for free and charging for extras has also proven lucrative. PUBG from Krafton of South Korea has been raking in billions since it went to a "pay for extras" model. This can degenerate into a "pay to play" model that looks like a sneaky version of a subscription model, but it can alternatively allow users to budget their gaming as per their interest level: casual players pay little or nothing, serious players are willing to invest the money.

* As a footnote before going further, an article from ECONOMIST.com ("How AI Could Disrupt Videogaming", 18 April 2023), the "generative AI" revolution stands to massively accelerate the production of text, music, and imagery. It promises to be particularly important to gaming, which uses all three of them. Consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in "Red Dead Redemption 2", a recent cowboy adventure.

Gamemakers are already developing AI tools. Ubisoft, a French developer of blockbusters such as "Assassin's Creed", has unveiled Ghostwriter, a tool that generates dialogue for in-game characters; while Roblox, an American platform for DIY games, launched one that draws materials from text commands.

AI represents an "explosion of opportunity", says Steve Collins, technology chief of King, which makes "Candy Crush Saga", a hit mobile game. King, which bought an AI firm called Peltarion last year, uses AI to evaluate the difficulty of game levels, to see if they are too hard or not hard enough. Collins says: "It's like having a million players at your disposal." Electronic Arts, another big gamemaker, and Google have both received patents for using AI in game testing.

Thanks to AI, it is becoming ever easier to develop games, meaning smaller companies are getting more opportunities. The big players can also get a boost from AI, and have bigger budgets for advertising. However, the people who work for game companies are leery of being replaced by AI, and are letting the bosses know they are willing to fight back. [TO BE CONTINUED]