DayVectors

* 23 entries including: Joe Biden (series); ancient supernova traces on Earth (series); animal communications & AI (series); US government shutdowns; Budanov speaks again | Corey Forrester rants | more Trump follies; Cortex Typhon drone-killer | RQ-28A drone | Sling mortar; peak China; Ukraine drone attacks on Russia | American Climate Corps | Cyrillic; solving homelessness; Taiwan elections | big Russian fire | black Twitter; penn-e farthing bike | bioplastic | Arch-lock structures; remote work evolves; Trump floundering | carbon pricing; birds make nests of bird spikes | proviruses | sub-Neptunes; Russian economy suffers | China purge | Japanese misadventures.

[WED 31 JAN 24] BLAST FROM THE PAST (3)

* BLAST FROM THE PAST (3): Supernova remnants dissipate in a few tens of thousands of years, and the neutron stars or black holes they leave behind are not easy to spot -- meaning it's not easy to find evidence for supernovas in Sco OB2. However, the arrival direction could provide clues. That won't work with Fe60 atoms obtained from the Earth's seafloor, because the Fe60 was carried on the wind or ocean currents -- but it could work from the poles of the Moon.

Korschinek's team is no longer alone in the hunt for supernova Fe60: a group led by Anton Wallner, a former postdoc of Korschinek's, has used an upgraded ASM at Australian National University (ANU) to analyze several ferromanganese crusts dredged off the Pacific Ocean floor by a Japanese mining company.

Wallner's team has probed the timing of the recent supernovas more precisely than ever by slicing a crust sample into 24 1-millimeter-thick layers, each representing 400,000 years. The 435 iron-60 atoms they obtained pinned the most recent supernova at 2.5 million years ago and confirmed the hints of an earlier one, which they determined happened 6.3 million years ago. Comparing the abundance of iron-60 in the crust with models of how much a supernova produces, the team estimated the distance of these supernovas as between 160 and 320 light-years from Earth.

Wallner's team also found 181 atoms of plutonium-244 (Pu244), another radioactive isotope, but one that may have been produced by the supernova blast itself instead of the precursor star. However, there is not a consensus on how such heavy atoms are produced, some researchers maintaining they are primarily generated by collisions of neutron stars, not supernovas. These collisions, called "kilonovas", are 100 times less common than supernovas, but are much more efficient at making the heaviest elements.

Rebecca Surman -- a physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana -- suspects that supernovas did play a role in bringing the Pu244 to Earth. She sees the reported seafloor Pu244 as an indicator sign that a kilonova, far in the past, dusted our interstellar neighborhood with heavy elements. When the two recent supernovas went off, they may have swept up and delivered some of that interstellar Pu244 along with their own Fe60. Korschinek, however, says it will take more data on the plutonium signal and its timing to come to any firm conclusion on the matter.

What other measurable impacts might nearby supernovas have had? In 2016, a team led by Melott and Thomas estimated the flux of various forms of light and cosmic rays likely to reach Earth from an explosion 300 light-years away. They concluded that the most energetic, potentially damaging photons -- x-rays or gamma rays -- would have little impact. The bright light of the supernova at night could disrupt sleep patterns until it faded out.

Cosmic rays -- particles accelerated to near light speed by shock waves in the supernova's expanding fireball -- are a different story. Since they are charged, they can be deflected away from Earth by galactic magnetic fields. However, the local bubble is thought to be mostly devoid of fields, so cosmic rays from just 300 light-years away would fly straight.

Melott and Thomas found out the Earth's atmosphere would have endured a protracted bombardment of particles that would ramp up over decades, reaching a peak 500 years after the supernova flash, resulting in a tenfold increase in ionization of atmospheric gas that would persist for 5000 years. Using an atmospheric chemistry model developed by NASA, they estimated that chemical changes caused by the ionization would deplete ozone by about 7% or more in places and would boost the creation of fertilizing nitrogen oxide compounds by 30%. The resulting surge in plants might be enough to cool the climate and bring in an ice age. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 30 JAN 24] SHUT IT DOWN

* SHUT IT DOWN: The USA was recently faced with a government shutdown, due to obstructionism in Congress, which was headed off by a continuing resolution to keep the government going for a few more weeks. That was not a great solution, but it was better than nothing. It did raise the question of exactly when government shutdowns became fashionable -- the answer being given by an article from HISTORYCHANNEL.com ("How Many Times Has The US Government Shut Down?" by Becky Little, 28 September 2023).

A US government shutdown happens when there's a gap in Federal funding, and the government furloughs workers without pay. There are exceptions for certain "essential" employees, including the president and members of Congress. Shutdowns are a new sort of thing; they never happened before Congress gave itself deadlines to pass Federal budgets in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. The first federal funding gap occurred two years later in 1976 when President Gerald Ford vetoed a bill to finance the Departments of Labor and Health, Education & Welfare. After that, there were five more funding gaps under President Jimmy Carter, but none of these six funding gaps led to a shutdown.

However, in 1980 Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued a legal opinion stating that if there were a gap in Federal funding, the government had to shut down. The next year, Civiletti said that essential services should remain open. He made those opinions on the basis of the letter of the law; he later expressed dismay that shutdowns would become so common and politically weaponized.

[1] 20:23 NOVEMBER 1981: President Ronald Reagan triggered the first government shutdown when he vetoed a funding bill because he wanted it to cut more from domestic spending. Reagan worked out a temporary fix with the Democrat-controlled House, and the shutdown only lasted a few days.

[2] 30 SEPTEMBER TO 2 OCTOBER 1982: The next year, Congress provoked another shutdown by missing the deadline to pass a government spending bill, even though the terms for the bill had already been agreed on. There appears to have been a mixup; the shutdown only lasted a day, and not all government agencies furloughed their employees.

[3] 3:5 OCTOBER 1984: The next three funding gaps in 1982, 1983 and 1984 did not lead to federal shutdowns, but a second one in 1984 did. The first funding gap in 1984 was from 30 September to 3 October, with an emergency bill passed that kept the government from shutting down -- but the follow-up deadline was missed again, leading to a half-day shutdown in which the government furloughed around 500,000 employees. Democrats made significant concessions to Reagan to end the shutdown.

[4] 16:18 October 1986: The 1986 shutdown was effectively a replay of the 1984 shutdown, with 500,000 government workers furloughed for half a day, the shutdown ending when the Democrats made concessions to Reagan.

[5] 5:9 OCTOBER 1990: There was a funding gap in December 1987, but Democrats hastened to pass a bill with concessions, and there was no shutdown. President George H.W. Bush had made it clear in his 1988 presidential campaign that he wouldn't raise taxes, but once in office he did raise taxes. Minority Whip Newt Gingrich led a Republican rebellion against a funding bill, triggering a shutdown that led national parks and museums to close. A deal was cut and the shutdown ended.

[6] 13:19 NOVEMBER 1995: Newt Gingrich became House Speaker in 1995, and then sent President Bill Clinton a funding bill he expected Clinton would veto because it raised Medicare premiums and cut environmental regulations. Clinton did veto it, and the government had to furlough 800,000 employees. Once again, a deal was hammered out and the shutdown ended.

[7] 15 DECEMBER TO 6 JANUARY 1996: The November shutdown led to another shutdown a month later, the first that lasted more than a week; 280,000 workers were furloughed. The public backed Clinton, with Gingrich played up in the media as throwing a tantrum, and the Republicans caved in.

[8] 30 SEPTEMBER TO 17 OCTOBER 2013: After going on two decades without a shutdown, the Republicans then tried to defund President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA), leading to the furlough of 800,000 workers. Again, the Republicans got the blame, and they finally caved in after Obama made minor tweaks in the ACA.

[9] 19:22 JANUARY 2018: The government shut down over a weekend when Democrats in Congress when the Democrats objected to President Donald Trump's intent to kill off the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) law, passed in the Obama Administration, which allowed children of illegal immigrants to remain in the country. The shutdown ended when Republicans agreed to a vote on DACA later in the year. DACA would go up and down since then, and is still up in the air.

[10] 21 DECEMBER TO 25 JANUARY 2019: The longest shutdown was entirely provoked by Donald Trump, who demanded that Congress fund his wall along the border with Mexico. The shutdown led to the furlough of 800,000 workers. Trump believed the public would blame the Democrats, but the public more strongly blamed him, and the Democrats didn't budge. The five-week shutdown demonstrated that shutdowns didn't buy much for those who created them, but it's hard to say nobody will ever try it again. It might be nice to go back to ignoring funding gaps, but it's probably not that easy any more.

[MON 29 JAN 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 4

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Ukrainian General Kyrylo Budanov, boss of the HUR military intelligence service, is always interesting to listen to, as shown here back in September. Christopher Miller of the FINANCIAL TIMES of the UK spoke with him in Kyiv, with Miller's report published on 20 January 2024.

Budanov, 38, has masterminded Ukraine's covert war against Russia, becoming one of the most public figures in the struggle. He is best known for conducting attacks behind enemy lines in Russian-occupied territory and Russia itself. In his department's latest feats, it flew attack drones as far as Saint Petersburg, striking an oil terminal, and targeted a gunpowder factory and an oil depot in the Bryansk region, just north of the Ukrainian border.

Budanov rarely says much about the missions, of course preferring to keep Moscow and the rest of the world guessing about the HUR's reach and abilities. There are tales some of Ukraine's backers are nervous about the attacks, but they seem exaggerated, Budanov being unconcerned: "We do not foresee any drastic changes in the near future. Everything we have done, we will continue to do."

The general admits that the progress of the war through 2023 was not everything desired, but it wasn't a failure, either: "To say that everything is fine is not true. To say that there is a catastrophe is also not true." If Ukraine failed to make much headway, Russia is going nowhere; Budanov says Ukraine has already proven that "the whole legend of [Russian] power is a soap bubble".

A former spetsnaz (special forces) soldier who fought in the Donbas in 2014, when the fighting with Russia began, Budanov has himself taken part in secret missions, and been wounded multiple times. He was appointed to run the HUR by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2020. His covert operations have invigorated the agency, which long played second fiddle to Ukraine's much bigger domestic security service, the SBU. He has attained cult status among Ukrainians and their foreign allies, becoming a popular figure on social media.

The Russians have repeatedly attempted to assassinate him, though he says the efforts were "nothing special". The closest he came to injury was in 2019, when a bomb placed beneath his vehicle exploded prematurely, failing to do him injury. His wife Marianna Budanova was less fortunate when she was intentionally poisoned with heavy metals in November 2023, along with several HUR officers. Budanov says: "She's getting treatment, she feels better now."

Budanov didn't want to comment on Ukraine's current military operations, saying such questions should be referred to the army. He did say that further mobilization of troops is an absolute necessity. Zelenskyy has said his army chiefs asked him to mobilize about 400,000 to 500,000 new soldiers to replace those killed or wounded, and to rest those involved in the most intense fighting.

He also commented on Russian arms production, saying Russia was expending more weapons and munitions than it can make, while struggling with quality control: "This is precisely what explains Russia's search for weapons in other countries." He says that North Korea has become Russia's biggest arms supplier: "They did transfer a significant amount of artillery ammunition. This allowed Russia to breathe a little. Without their help, the situation would have been catastrophic." However, the reliance on outside help is a sign of Russian desperation: "This has always been considered beneath them, it's an indignity."

Similarly, Russia is losing troops faster than it can recruit them, with the result that mercenary groups, such as Wagner, have become more important. Budanov is not sure that Wagner's boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was really killed in a plane crash in 2023: "I'm not saying that he's not dead or that he's dead. I'm saying that there's not a single piece of evidence that he's dead."

Another favorite Budanov meme is the health of Putin. He often has claimed that the Russian president has cancer, and also says that many public appearances of Putin are actually doubles. Budenov says it's obvious: "It's not that difficult." Indeed, some of the doubles are easily recognized, one with a weaker chin having been tagged long ago, though some are harder to identify. One giveaway about the doubles is that when Putin confers with foreign leaders, he does so sitting far from them on a long table, presumably to ward off infection -- and hinting that his immune system has been depressed, possibly by chemotherapy. Videos of Putin mixing with people suggest fake Putins.

Finally, did Budanov have any predictions for the course of war in 2024? He replied: "No. I hope that our success will be greater than theirs." -- and then took his leave.

* I've mentioned Clay Bennett, cartoonist for the CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS, in earlier columns. One of his new cartoons had an evangelical in a MAGA hat and a TRUMP sweatshirt, kneeling and praying: "Thank you for sending us Donald Trump."

A voice comes up from the ground: "You're welcome." I had to comment that evangelicals will live to regret backing Trump. Mainstream churches have been shrinking, evangelical churches have been thriving. Their thriving days are coming to an end.

In other Trump-related news, reports are that Trump doctor Ronny Jackson -- a notoriously loud-mouthed and particularly nasty MAGA troll -- allowed the pharmacy in the White House to dispense controlled drugs like they were candy to anyone who wanted them, running up huge charges. It seems this was uncovered by a Pentagon investigation. It's the kind of thing that I find hard to believe, except that the unbelievable was normal for the Trump Administration. I'll still have to wait on details. In the meantime, Jackson has been nicknamed "Candyman".

There are still a lot of worries about Trump winning in November, but people are finding that idea ever harder to take seriously. Trump is decaying physically, mentally, legally, financially, and politically. He has no future, and neither do the people who still follow him. What comes after Trump? It's hard to say, but it will be a changed world they won't like. Unfortunately, for the moment we're still stuck with Trump. We just have to be patient a while longer.

[FRI 26 JAN 24] JOE BIDEN (10)

* JOE BIDEN (10): Joe was going all-out on his Senate campaign, Rich Heffrom comparing him to the Energizer Bunny: "Keeps on going and going and going." Jimmy proved adept at raising funds, though Joe's insistence on principle sometimes proved hard to deal with. Jimmy managed to line up a $5,000 USD contribution from one Bill Holayter, an official with the machinist's union -- but when Holayter talked to Joe and asked him how he'd vote on issues of importance to the union, Joe was not happy. As Jimmy said later:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Jimmy managed to grab Joe at the elevator and bring him back, but he refused to take the check from Holayter. Jimmy took it instead, and said: "Thanks, Bill." It worked out: Joe got the money, but kept his hands clean. Joe also approached the Democratic Party apparatus, to get a good wire-brushing -- which he survived, and then got funding.

Joe got a particular boost when he called his old law school pal Jack Owen, who was an aide to Milton Schapp, the first Jewish governor of Pennsylvania. Via Jack, he got Schapp to talk to Jewish leadership at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington. The crowd was not as big as expected, largely because there was a Jewish wedding in parallel not too far away. Shapp just said: "Let's go!" -- with him and Joe driving over to the wedding, and getting an enthusiastic reception.

The Republicans finally snapped out of their complacency and started pushing back on Joe, who in the last stretch of the campaign had to get a $20,000 USD loan to keep it afloat. It paid off: on election day, Joe got 115,528 votes to 112,542 for Boggs. Boggs called him with congratulations: "Good race, Joe." Joe was uncharacteristically at a loss for words -- thinking of "Returns Day", a Delaware traditional ritual, to take place in the town circle two days later. The ritual involved the town crier reading the election results, followed by the ceremonial burial of a hatchet, and the contenders for the election riding in a horse-drawn carriage around the circle.

Giving Joe a nudge, Boggs said again: "You ran a good race, Joe."

Joe was happy to have won but not so happy to have defeated the likeable Boggs, and all he could choke out was: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Senator." Joe tried to beg off from Returns Day, claiming bronchitis, but Boggs saw right through him: "Joe, I rode many times as a winner. I'd be proud to ride with you."

Part of what put Joe over the top was the passage of the 26th Amendment of the US Constitution in 1971, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote. However, the Biden family had run a very competent and energetic campaign that brought in voters of all ages. He told a local reporter on election night:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Joe actually turned 30 on 20 November, with a big party at the Pianni Grill in downtown Wilmington, him and Neilia cutting the cake while news photographers took shots. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 25 JAN 24] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: Kongsberg of Norway has obtained a contract from the International Fund for Ukraine for the delivery of CORTEX Typhon counter-UAS (drone) defensive systems. CORTEX Typhon includes a Kongsberg Remote Weapon System (RWS) turret, integrated with a sensor system from Teledyne FLIR. Apparently the turrets are to be mounted on Dingo 2 4WD light combat vehicles.

The turret appears to be based on the RWS4, with a 12.7-millimeter machine gun, and with at least daylight and infrared imagers, possibly laser rangefinder or lidar. It almost certainly has automatic target acquisition, tracking, and engagement. What makes this interesting is that, these days, combat vehicles need drone defenses -- could we see Ukrainian Bradleys fitted with CORTEX Typhon or the like?

* As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Army Fields Its New RQ-28A Quadcopter Recon Drone" by Emma Helfich, 7 December 2022), infantry quadcopter drones have been a star of the Ukraine war. The US Army has now obtained their own quadcopter drone, the Skydio "RQ-28A".

The Army has been using small drones for a long time, but they've traditionally been fixed-wing, hand-launched drones. The RQ-28A is intended for short-range surveillance; it appears to be based on the company's X2D drone, which is about the size of a pizza box unfolded, weighs about 1.5 kilometers (3.3 pounds), and has a flight endurance of 35 minutes. It will be flown by a handheld controller over a 5 GHz wireless connection; it doesn't appear the link will have frequency hopping.

The company has designed the drone with 360-degree obstacle avoidance and an artificial intelligence-enabled ability to detect both humans and vehicles using its 4K-resolution navigation cameras with 16x digital zoom. It has a dual sensor payload that includes a 12MP color camera and FLIR thermal sensor. It is being obtained as part of a set of drones with various levels of capability.

* As discussed in an article from TASK&PURPOSE.com ("Green Berets Are Testing A New Highly Mobile 120mm Mortar System" by Jared Keller, 16 December 2022), the US Army Special Forces is now working with Elbit Systems of Israel to "develop, test, & field" a highly-portable 120-millimeter mortar system named "Sling".

The mortar is carried by a light tactical vehicle, with an arm system that swings it down to the ground for firing. Elbit claims the system can be set up for firing in less than a minute, with a sustained fire rate of at least 3 rounds a minute, several times that in a burst mode. M933 HE rounds fired by the Sling system will have a range of up to 7 kilometers (4.3 miles). The US Army currently operates three variants of Elbit's 120-mm mortar weapons system:

• M121, mounted on the M1064 Mortar Carrier and the upcoming XM1287 Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle's mortar carrier variant.
  
  
• The Recoiling Mortar System used with the Stryker's mortar carrier variant.
  
  
• The M120A1 Towed Mortar System.

The Sling mortar system is clearly optimized for rapid "shoot & scoot" fire missions. The Army is working towards an "Extended Range Mortar System (ERMS)", with a range of 20 kilometers (12 miles), of which the Sling will clearly be an element. There has been work on guided 120-mm mortar rounds, but so far nothing useful has happened. The push towards ERMS suggests the idea is not dead, since extended range implies a guidance system to ensure useful accuracy.

[WED 24 JAN 24] BLAST FROM THE PAST (2)

* BLAST FROM THE PAST (2): It wasn't until the 1990s that astrophysicists figured out how to identify traces of relatively recent supernova explosions on Earth -- by focusing on radioactive isotopes generated by the blasts with half-lives of millions of years, and so not persisting long in Earth's history. One key tracer is iron-60 (Fe60), forged in the cores of large stars, which has a half-life of 2.6 million years.

In the late 1990s Gunther Korschinek -- an astroparticle physicist at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) -- decided to hunt for Fe60, assisted by the powerful accelerator mass spectrometer (ASM) at TUM. Separating atoms of Fe60 from nickel-60, with nearly the same mass but different electrical charge, is particularly challenging, but TUM's ASM, built in 1970, is one of the few in the world capable of distinguishing them.

To find clues of ancient supernovas, Korschinek also had to find appropriate samples: a geologic deposit laid down over millions of years in which an iron signal might stand out. Antarctic ice cores wouldn't work: they only go back a couple of million years. Most ocean sediments accumulate so fast that any Fe60 is diluted to undetectable levels. Korschinek ended up using a ferromanganese crust dredged from a North Pacific seamount by the German research ship VALDIVIA in 1976. These crusts grow on patches of seabed where sediments can't settle because of slopes or currents. When the pH of the water is just right, metal atoms selectively precipitate out of the water, slowly building up a mineral crust at the rate of a few millimeters every million years.

Korschinek and his team sliced their sample up into layers, corresponding to increasing age, then chemically separated out the iron from each layer and ran it through the ASM. From the literally astronomical numbers of iron atoms they found using the AMS, they obtained 23 atoms of Fe60, with the highest abundance from a time less than 3 million years ago. That broke the ice for further studies. Others followed. Iron-60 was found in ocean crusts from other parts of the world, and also in ocean sediment microfossils -- remains of living things that, helpfully for the supernova hunters, had taken up and concentrated iron in their bodies. The results suggested a supernova between 2 million and 3 million years ago, with hints of a second one a few million years earlier.

Although the fronts of these blasts are long gone, a drizzle of the atoms they spewed out continues. In 2019, Korschinek's team ran iron from a half-ton of fresh Antarctic snow through its ASM and found a handful of Fe60 atoms, which he estimates fell to Earth in the past 20 years. Another team found a smattering of the atoms in cosmic rays detected by NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer satellite at a position partway between the Sun and Earth. Researchers have even found Fe60 in lunar soil brought back by the Apollo missions, helping confirm that they weren't created by some terrestrial process.

Dieter Breitschwerdt -- an astronomer at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) -- has been trying to find where the Fe60 came from. When he found about Korschinek's research, he was investigating the "local bubble", a region of space about a thousand light-years in diameter in which the Solar System resides that has been swept clear of most of its gas and dust. It is generally believed that supernovas cleaned out the local bubble, and so he began to track gangs of stars in the Solar System's neighborhood to see whether any passed close enough to the Sun to deposit Fe60 on Earth when some of their members exploded.

Using data from Hipparcos, a star-mapping satellite flown by the European Space Agency, Breitschwerdt looked for clumps of stars on common trajectories and rewound the clock to see where they would have been millions of years ago. Two clumps -- now a part of the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association (Sco OB2) -- were in the right place about 2.5 million years ago, about 300 light-years from Earth. Supernovas result from the deaths of massive stars; based on the ages and masses of the 79 stars remaining in the clumps, Breitschwerdt came up with an estimate that a dozen former members exploded as supernovas in the past 13 million years. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 23 JAN 24] PEAK CHINA?

* PEAK CHINA? As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("How Soon And At What Height Will China's Economy Peak?", 11 May 2023), there was a time when China seemed like an unstoppable economic juggernaut. In recent years, that perception has faded: its population is shrinking, its housing boom is over, and the government is cracking down on its e-commerce billionaires. Jack Ma, once a teacher and then arguably China's most famous entrepreneur, has gone back to teaching -- in Japan.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now stresses control over prosperity, imperial greatness over growth, and economic independence over foreign trade. To no surprise, foreign investors have become cautious, seeking to relocate or at least diversify their supply chains. The USA, on its part, is attempting to limit Chinese access to "foundational technologies". The era of beneficial cooperation between the China and the USA is over, being replaced by an era of mutual suspicion -- with murmurings of war in the background.

Economic analysts have according cut their long-term forecasts for China's growth. The conventional wisdom, both within and outside China, was long that China's economy would soon eclipse America's, with China also becoming the top military power. This belief still remains widespread, particularly in China. Yao Yang, an economist at Peking University, believes China's GDP can overtake America's by 2029.

Increasingly, however, economists believe that China's economy is headed for a peak, with the country then gradually falling behind its rivals. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, two American political scientists, say that China's rise is already coming to a halt. In 2011 Goldman Sachs projected that China's GDP would surpass America's in 2026 and become over 50% larger by 2050. At the end of 2022, the bank revisited its calculations, estimating that China's economy will not overtake America's until 2035, and at its high point will be only 14% bigger.

Others see that as optimistic. Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, believes that China's economy will never be number one, instead reaching 90% of America's size in 2035, and then losing ground. This scenario is not seen as outrageous.

The projections for China's economy are based on three factors: population, productivity, and prices. As for population, China's workforce has already peaked, according to official statistics. It has 4.5 times as many 15- to 64-year-olds as America. By 2050 it will have only 3.4 times as many, according to a UN forecast, and by 2100 the ratio will drop to 1.7.

However, the trajectory of China's demographics has been known for some time, and hasn't been the critical factor in projections expecting a "peak China". In fact, Goldman Sachs's latest predictions assume a slower decline in China's workforce than the earlier ones, since improvements in health may keep older workers on the job for longer. The bank believes the labor supply in China will drop by about 7% from 2025 to 2050.

Productivity is seen as a more important factor. Back in 2011, Goldman Sachs thought labor productivity would grow by about 4.8% a year on average over the next 20 years -- but now thinks it will grow by about 3%. Mark Williams of Capital Economics similarly believes China will fall "off the path of an Asian outperformer onto the path of a solidly respectable emerging economy."

The fall in productivity is partly linked to demographics. As China ages, the economy will become more dedicated to serving the elderly, leaving less to invest in new infrastructure and industry. In addition, investments are reaching diminishing returns as the "low-hanging fruit" is gone. A new high-speed rail line across mountainous Tibet yields far smaller benefits at much greater cost than connecting Beijing and Shanghai, for instance.

China's increasingly heavy-handed regulations are also a dead weight on productivity, with Capital Economics pointing out: "Get to a certain size, and companies have to give as much thought to meeting the needs of officials as those of consumers." Add to that American efforts to limit the flow of advanced technology to China -- which could become more effective and economically injurious.

Of course forecasts -- as the saying goes -- are always difficult, particularly of the future. The third factor, prices, makes projections particularly difficult, since they can be highly unpredictable. At the moment, a basket of goods and services that costs $100 USD in America costs only about $60 USD in China. That suggests the yuan, is undervalued. Goldman Sachs believes the gap will narrow, either because the yuan strengthens or because prices rise faster in China than in America. That will add about 20% to China's GDP by 2050. If the gap doesn't narrow, then China's GDP will be hard-pressed to overtake America's.

Adding up these three elements gives plenty of opportunities for China's economy to falter. If China's labor productivity grows just half a percentage point slower than Goldman Sachs envisages, its GDP, everything else constant, will also never surpass America's. The same is true if America grows half a point faster, as Capital Economic projects. If China's fertility rate declines further, to 0.85 children per woman by mid-century, it might obtain a modest lead in the 2030s only to lose it in the 2050s. Even if China does get a lead, it won't be a big one, with China and the USA stuck in a position of near-parity.

Lurking under these estimates for growth is Beijing's insistence on taking control of Taiwan. Russia's comparable effort to conquer Ukraine has been an economic disaster for the Russians -- but Chinese leadership doesn't seem to be drawing any negative lesson from it, continuing their efforts to intimidate Taiwan. Right now, an invasion of the island would be a disaster for China; given a continued military build-up there, it will be even more difficult in the future as defense costs much less than offense. In case of war, the issue won't be a peak; it will be an abrupt crash.

[MON 22 JAN 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 3

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) pulled off a major coup against Russia by using kamikaze drones to attack the oil terminal at Ust-Luga, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, to the west of Saint Petersburg. The fires raged for days. According to Ukrainian sources: "The Ust-Luga oil terminal in the Leningrad region is a crucial target for the enemy. They process fuel there, which, among other things, is supplied to the Russian military."

Ukraine is stepping up their attacks on strategic targets in Russia, with reports of a near-simultaneous attack on the Russian city of Tula -- the target apparently being the Shcheglovsky Val plant, which produces the Pantsir air defense system. There are also reports that a Russian corvette of the Black Sea Fleet was crippled or sunk by sea drones in late December.

The SSU claims to have k-drones with a range of 1500 kilometers (930 miles). The warheads appear to be on the small side, about 3 or 4 kilograms (6.6 to 8.8 pounds), about the size of an 81-millimeter mortar bomb. Presumably the warheads have a combined-effects capability, with incendiary as well as blast effects. I'm thinking that an attack on the Russian Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome, where Russian military satellites are launched, is in order. It's within range, and rocket fuel tanks would make a very good target.

Given far-reaching k-drones, Russia is a target-rich environment, and impossible to effectively defend. From the time the war started, I was thinking k-drones would prove a very useful weapon, Yemen's Houthis having inflicted severe pain on Saudi Arabia with their Iranian-supplied k-drones and cruise missiles. It just took longer to work up the capability than I expected.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.com ("The American Climate Corps Wants You" by Kate Yoder, 28 September 2023), some months back, the Biden Administration authorized the creation of the "American Climate Corps (ACC)" via an executive order. The program would hire 20,000 young people in its first year, putting them to work installing wind and solar projects, making homes more energy-efficient, and restoring ecosystems like coastal wetlands to protect towns from flooding.

The idea of the ACC has been around from the start of the Biden Administration. It was originally to be called the "Civilian Climate Corps", a nod to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)", created in 1933 to help deal with the Great Depression. It hired young people, housed in work camps run by the US Army. The CCC was responsible for building hundreds of parks, as well as many hiking trails and lodges found across the country today.

Establishing the ACC required a little fancy political footwork; it was killed off at one time, then revived. The ACC is not merely intended to implement environmental measures, but -- as the executive order put it -- "ensure more young people have access to the skills-based training necessary for good-paying careers" in clean energy and climate resilience efforts. There are ideas to link it with AmeriCorps, the national service program, and leverage several smaller climate corps initiatives that states have launched in California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington.

The program is still being worked up. The public is very supportive, with 84% of Americans supporting the idea in polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2022. With the goal of hiring 20,000 a year, the new program is much smaller than many activists had hoped. The original CCC employed 300,000 men in just its first three months; women were excluded until Eleanor Roosevelt's "She-She-She" camps opened in 1934. Some progressives, like House Member Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, were hoping Climate Corps could employ 1.5 million people over five years. If the initial program goes well, it could be scaled up.

* I've been following the Ukraine War closely, and one thing that finally started annoying me was renderings of Ukrainian names. Is it "Volodymyr Zelensky?" Or "Zelenskiy"? Or "Zelenskyy"? So I decided to learn how to convert Cyrillic text to roman text.

That turned out to be trickier than I thought it would be. One of the issues is that Cyrillic alphabets vary from language to language more than roman alphabets do. True, there's a lot of variation in roman alphabets, but it's with modifiers like accents and umlauts and such, the basic letters remaining the same. Not so with Cyrillic: Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabets have 33 characters each, but only 29 characters are common to both, with each alphabet having their own four characters. One Ukrainian character that looks like "I" with two dots on top has become a national symbol, scribbled by the resistance in Russian-occupied areas as a symbol of defiance.

To add to the confusion, the conversions of characters can vary between the two sets, and there are a good number of different romanization schemes, for example French conversion not being exactly the same as British conversion. After a good deal of muddling around, I settled on a passport conversion scheme for Russian and the US Board of Geographical Names (BGN) scheme for Ukrainian. So now I've got a set of flashcards I can review, and am moving along nicely. By the scheme I selected, the name is "Zelenskyy". I doubt there is any one perfectly satisfactory scheme of conversion, but at least I can be consistent.

Incidentally, transcription from the Japanese "kana" phonetic character sets is totally straightforward, there being no ambiguity in how kana characters are converted into roman characters. The conversion scheme was devised a 19th-century American missionary in Japan named James Curtis Hepburn. The Japanese later tried to establish their own conversion scheme -- but it didn't catch on, since Hepburn's was as good as could be had. Partly that's because Japanese phonetics are surprisingly close to English phonetics, which is not so true for Russian or Ukrainian. Japanese is even closer to Spanish, having soft "Rs".

[FRI 19 JAN 24] JOE BIDEN (9)

* JOE BIDEN (9): By the spring of 1971, Joe was laying the groundwork for his Senate campaign. He was active on a commission set up to reform the Democratic Party in the state and make it more effective. Neilia came up with the idea of hosting dinners for Democratic leadership at Joe SR's house, with Valerie and Jean doing the cooking and cleanup. In the meantime, he'd set up his own law office. His family continued to grow, with Naomi Biden born in November 1971; Joe had got his little girl.

Joe didn't go active in running for the US Senate until early 1972, and in his memoirs he claimed the state Democratic Party approached him to run. That was very likely technically true, but anyone who knew Joe Biden well was perfectly aware that he wanted to be senator, and had been preparing himself for the effort.

To this time, Joe, Neilia, and the three kids were still living in the tiny cottage at the country club, which was becoming an intolerable situation. Family weekend outings often took the form of cruising around in the car, checking out houses -- and they finally found what looked like an ideal home in the village of North Star, near the Pennsylvania border -- a large colonial house, originally built in 1723, but in move-in condition.

Obtaining it was tricky, however, because Joe had to sell off some of his rental properties to make the down payment -- and it was also out of the county council's district, meaning he couldn't move there while he was still a county councilman. Joe's solution was to get Joe SR and Jean to move to the North Star home, while he took theirs; Jean was appalled -- "We just moved!" -- but they went along. Jimmy simply showed up a few days later with a rental truck and moved them, with Jean calling up Joe SR at the car dealership to tell him to come back to the new home. He was exasperated: "Darn these kids!"

Anyway, that done, the campaigning for the Senate went to full steam, with Valerie again being campaign manager, Jimmy raising funds, and the Bidens wearing out shoe leather to get in touch with voters. Nothing could be spared to defeat the popular Cale Boggs -- but unknown to Joe, Boggs had been planning to retire, with the encouragement of his wife, and had to be encouraged to run again. President Richard Nixon even flew to Delaware to convince Boggs to run again. Boggs agreed, but his heart wasn't really in it, and he figured it wouldn't take much effort to beat Joe Biden. As a result, Boggs didn't put that much effort into the campaign. A fresh Republican face might have been harder to beat.

In contrast, Joe and his siblings were putting their all into the campaign, with a brigade of young people enlisted to help -- one of them, Rich Heffron, later saying: "We were a bunch of kids. We were too stupid to think we couldn't win the race."

As Joe later wrote in his memoirs:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

It is interesting to wonder if Joe realized at the time that he had basically set out an agenda that would consume his life. He was very careful not to attack the well-liked Cale Boggs, instead praising him but saying Boggs didn't have a real agenda for the future. In any case, Joe cut a neat and charismatic figure, easy to like and trust. He was physical, with a politician's instinct to "press the flesh", and was a good orator, not being so inclined at that time and place to be long-winded. He was careful to trim to the center-Left, while carefully maintaining contacts with the noisy Left. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 18 JAN 24] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for December included:

[01 DEC 23] RU BK / SOYUZ 2-1A / PROGRESS 86P (MS 25 / ISS) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 0926 UTC (local time - 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It was the 86th Progress mission to the ISS.

[01 DEC 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / KORSAT 7 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1819 UTC (local time + 8) to put 26 payloads into orbit. The primary payload was a spy satellite, "KORSAT 7", for South Korea's "Agency for Defense Development (ADD)", carrying an electro-optic / infrared imaging payload with best resolution of 30 centimeters (a foot).

This was the first launch in the batch of five reconnaissance satellites, the remaining four to be synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. Those additional four SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellites were to be developed by Thales Alenia Space in partnership with Aerospace Industries, LTD and Hanwha Systems Corporation.

In addition, D-Orbit flew one of its "ION SCV" space tugs, named "Daring Diego" carrying a set of microsat payloads. Other payloads on the launch included (not a complete list):

• GNSS Navigation and Occultation Measurement Satellites (GNOMES) 4: A weather-observation satellite from PlanetiQ, part of an ongoing constellation.
  
  
• uHETSat: A microsat from SITAEL SPA, carrying a Hall-effect thruster. The mission was backed by the ESA.
  
  
• KOYOH: A microsat from Kanazawa University in Japan.
  
  
• Educational Irish Research Satellite (EIRSAT) 1: A studentsat 2U CubeSat designed by the University College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast in collaboration.
  
  
• SPace Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal (SPIRIT): A nanosatellite from the University of Melbourne in Australia to determine the location of X-ray and gamma-ray in space using its X-ray and gamma-ray spectrometers. SPIRIT was built by the Italian Space Agency in collaboration with multiple Australian space industry companies, Inovor Technologies, Sitael Australia, Nova Systems, and Neumann Space.

Other payloads included "Bane" from York Space Systems; "Pono" from Privateer Space; "NanoFF A & B" from the Technical University of Berlin; "ALISIO 1" from IAC; "ENSO" from the University of Montpelier; "Hayatsat 1" from Bazoomq; "Lilium 1" from UNISEC Taiwan; "LOGSATS" from Patriot Infovention; "MDQubeSat 1" from Innova Space; "Unicorn 2L,M,N" from Alba Orbital; and six undisclosed satellites.

[03 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-31 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0400 UTC (local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[04 DEC 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2C / MISRSAT 2, XINGCHI 2A & 2B -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0410 UTC (local time - 8) to put three Earth remote sensing satellites into orbit, including "MisrSat 2" for the Egyptian Space Agency, as well as the twin "Xingchi 2A & 3B"satellites for Ellipse Spacetime of China.

[04 DEC 23] CN JQ / CERES 1 / TIANYAN 16, XINGCHI 1A -- A Ceres 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2333 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put two Earth remote sensing satellites into orbit, including "Tianyan 16" for MinoSpace, and "Xingchi 1A" for Ellipse Spacetime.

[05 DEC 23] CN YS / JIELONG 3 / HULIANWANG JISHU SHIYAN 3 -- A Chinese Jielong 3 booster was launched from a barge in the Yellow Sea at 1924 UTC (next local time - 8) to put the "Hulianwang Jishu Shiyan 3" comsat into low Earth orbit.

[07 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-33 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0507 UTC (local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[08 DEC 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-8 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0803 UTC (local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[08 DEC 23] CN JQ / ZHUQUE 2 / HONGHU 1,2 & TIANYI -- A Zhuque 2 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2339 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put three technology demonstrator satellites into orbit, including "Honghu 1 & 2" and "Tianyi 33".

[10 DEC 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2D / YAOGAN 39-05A:C -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Xichang at 0158 UTC (local time - 8) to put the secret "Yaogan 39 Group 5" payloads into orbit. It was a triplet of satellites and may have been a "flying triangle" naval signals intelligence payload.

[14 DEC 22] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2F / SECRET SPACEPLANE -- A Long March 2F booster was launched from Jiuquan at about 1410 GMT (local time - 8) to put a reusable spaceplane into orbit. No specifics were released. This was the third launch of the spaceplane.

[15 DEC 23] NZ / ELECTRON / QPS-SAR 5 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 0405 UTC (local time - 13) to put the "QPS-SAR 5" satellite for the company iQPS. This satellite was a small, synthetic aperture radar satellite weighing only about 100 kilograms (220 pounds), providing high-resolution Earth imagery. It joined other satellites in the iQPS constellation. Once completed, the constellation will consist of 36 satellites capable of monitoring specific points of the Earth as often as every 10 minutes.

[15 DEC 23] CN WC / LONG MARCH 5 / YAOGAN 41 -- A Long March 5 booster was launched at 1345 UTC (local time - 9) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to put the "Yaogan 41" geostationary surveillance satellite into orbit.

[16 DEC 23] RU BK / SOYUZ 2-1A / ARTIKA-M 2 -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 0917 UTC (local time - 6) to put an Arktika-M remote sensing and emergency communication satellite into highly elliptical "Molniya" orbit. It had a launch mass of about 2100 kilograms (4,630 pounds).

[17 DEC 23] CN JQ / HYPERBOLA 1 / DEAR 1 -- A commercial Hyperbola 1 light booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0400 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "DEAR 1" recoverable spacecraft into space for AZSPACE of China.

[19 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-34 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0401 UTC (local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[21 DEC 23] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1B / COSMOS 2573 (BARS-M) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0640 UTC (local time - 4) to put the fifth "Bars-M" optical spy satellite into orbit for the Russian military. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 2573".

[22 DEC 23] USA VB / FIREFLY ALPHA / VICTUS NOX -- A Firefly Alpha light booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1732 UTC (previous day local time + 8) on the "Victus Nox" -- Latin for "Conquer the Night" -- mission to put a payload into orbit for the US Space Force. It was a demonstration of a "quick launch" capability, in which a payload is put into orbit with minimal lead time. The payload was named "Tantrum", intended to test fast calibration of a wideband Electronically Steerable Antenna (ESA) developed by Lockheed Martin.

[23 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-32 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0553 UTC (local time + 5) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[24 DEC 23] US VB / FALCON 9 / SARAH 2 & 3 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1256 UTC (local time + 8) to put the "SARah 2 & 3" radar remote sensing satellites into polar orbit for the German military. They completed a constellation of three synthetic aperture radar satellites for the German military. They replaced German military's five-spacecraft SAR-Lupe constellation, which launched from 2006 through 2008. The booster 1st stage performed a soft landing at Vandenberg; it was its third flight.

[25 DEC 23] CN JQ / KUAIZHOU 1A / TIANMU 1 11-14 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0100 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianmu 1 11-14" small meteorology research satellite into orbit.

[25 DEC 23] CN YS / LONG MARCH 11H / SHIYAN 24C-01,02,03 -- A Chinese Long March booster was launched from an ocean platform in the Yellow Sea to put the three "Shiyan-24C 01,02,03" technology demonstration satellites into orbit.

[26 DEC 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 3B / BEIDOU-3 M25,M26 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 0326 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Beidou 3 M25 & M26" navigation satellite into geostationary orbit. It was the 46th Beidou satellite to be put into space. The satellite was built by the China Academy of Space Technology, part of China's government-owned aerospace industry, and was based on the DFH 3B satellite platform. The Beidou satellites also have a communications store-&-forward ability.

[27 DEC 23] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1B / COSMOS 2574 (VKS) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0733 UTC (local time - 4) to put a "VKS" spy satellite into orbit for the Russian military. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 2574".

[29 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON HEAVY / USSF 52 (OTV 7) -- A Falcon Heavy booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1314 UTC (local time + 4) to put the USAF "USSF 52" payload into space for the US Space Force. The primary payload was an X-37B / Orbital Test Vehicle spaceplane, on the program's seventh flight.

[29 DEC 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-36 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0401 UTC (local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[30 DEC 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2C / GUOWANG x 3 -- A Chinese Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0013 UTC (local time - 5) to put what was believed to be three "internet in the sky" satellites for the emerging Guowang constellation.

[WED 17 JAN 24] BLAST FROM THE PAST (1)

* BLAST FROM THE PAST (1): As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Exploding Stars May Have Assaulted Ancient Earth" by Daniel Clery, 15 July 2021), giant stars live short lives, ending their lives in a huge bang, exploding as a supernova. A supernova will throw out intense radiation that could have effects on star systems relatively near the blast.

2.5 million years ago, when our prehuman ancestors were roaming Africa, the sky lit up with a supernova. It was at its peak as bright as the full Moon, casting shadows at night and visible during the day. What they thought about the curious event cannot be known -- it caused the Earth no particular harm and was forgotten -- but the supernova did leave detectable traces that are now being uncovered.

Over the past two decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from the supernova, which accelerated nuclei of hydrogen and helium to near lightspeed. These "cosmic rays" arrived decades later, ramping up into an unseen rain that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the Earth's atmosphere and life on the planet.

A cosmic ray barrage might have boosted mutation rates by eroding Earth's protective ozone layer and generating showers of secondary, tissue-penetrating particles. The particles could have created pathways for lighting, with the increased level of lightning strikes -- while atmospheric reactions set off by the radiation could have led to a rain of nitrogen compounds, which would have fertilized plants, drawing down carbon dioxide. The loss of CO2 could have cooled the climate and helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago, at the start of the Pleistocene epoch.

Brian Thomas -- an astronomer at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas who has studied the earthly effects of cosmic catastrophes for nearly two decades -- says that even taken together, the effects were "not like the dinosaur extinction event. It's more subtle and local." Some skeptics wonder if the supernova had any noticeable effects on Earth.

However, the supernova hunters believe that, further in the past, there were blasts closer to Earth that could explain extinction events not linked to, say, volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts. Adrian Melott -- an astronomer at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, who explores how nearby cosmic cataclysms might affect Earth -- believes it would be worthwhile to dig through the history of the Earth to find evidence of ancient supernovas. That would be useful for astrophysicists, who could learn more about how the blasts shaped the neighborhood of the Solar System and seeded it with heavy elements, and well as provide new insights for paleontologists concerning processes that have shaped the planet. Metott says: "This is new and unfamiliar, It will take time to be accepted."

A few supernovas go off in our Galaxy every century. By the odds, a handful must have exploded close to the Earth -- within 30 light-years -- since its formation, with potentially catastrophic effects. Even blasts as far as 300 light-years away should leave traces in the form of specks of dust blown out in the shell of debris known as a "supernova remnant".

In the 1970s, physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter Alvarez studied the sediment layers associated with the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- to find an excess of the element iridium, rare on the surface of the Earth, abundant in asteroids, pointing to an asteroid impact. They were actually looking for traces of supernova explosions, focusing on the heavy elements produced in the blasts. The problem was that Earth had been salted with those heavy elements from its birth, and it was impossible to determine if heavy elements in a sediment layer had come from space, or just come in on dust from someplace else on Earth. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 16 JAN 24] HELPING THE HOMELESS

* HELPING THE HOMELESS: One of the modern blights of society is the problem of homelessness, which seems to be out of control. An article from THEGUARDIAN.com ("The Charity Tailoring Its Donations To Help People Out Of Homelessness" by Rachel Hall, 25 December 2023) focused on the UK charity named "Greater Change".

As a case study, one "Halima" decided when she was 19 that she didn't want to go back to Somalia with her parents. By the time she was 20, she was the "hidden homeless", couch surfing with friends. Officials in the London borough where she lived didn't think she was vulnerable enough for social housing, but her lack of fixed address meant she couldn't get "universal credit", a monthly payment to help with living costs.

A homeless youth center helped her obtain a hotel job, but Halima had always dreamed of working in TV. She managed to get a BBC internship, planned to do it on top of night shifts. However, once the pandemic hit, the internship went online -- and she didn't have a laptop. Fortunately, she found out about Greater Change, which fronted her the money for one. Now she's enjoying success in the industry.

Greater Change takes a personalized approach: the charity crowdfunds donations for someone's specific needs, whether it is rent deposits, mental health treatment, skills courses, and equipment -- whatever is needed to get out of the homelessness trap.

Donors are then kept up to date with what the people who get the money are doing, providing reassurance that the money won't be blown on drugs. The charity will contact donors for extra help if necessary. Halima found that dealing with Greater Change was straightforward: "It was so quick. Sometimes it can take three months to get help, you have to provide statements and so on, but with Greater Change you explain the situation, and it's a simple yes or no."

Jonathan Tan, the charity's founder, says flexibility is the key to its success. According to its latest impact report, 86% of the more than 200 people it has helped were in stable housing a year later. Among the charity's clients is Joe, who needed 500 GBP so he could buy tools to start working as a carpenter after leaving prison; Valentine, who needed 1,000 GBP for help with rent arrears while she looked for a job after a relationship breakdown; and Amir, who needed 400 GBP in help with training fees and ID so he could work in construction.

Nearly half of those helped make it into sustained employment, while most report improvements in their motivation, self-care, mental health, and social networks. Ex-offenders supported by the grants had re-offending rates seven times lower than the national average. Tan said the approach was most effective for the "hidden homeless", who far outnumber people who sleep on the streets. He thinks people unhelpfully think of homeless/not-homeless as a binary -- when in fact there are "stages where you're facing worse and worse inequality and poverty".

Greater Change's impact report estimates it costs about 1,300 GBP on average to get a person out of the hole, but this generates savings averaging 35,000 GBP for each person annually. Greater Change calculated that it saved 7.4 million GBP in public money in 2023. The charity hopes to help another 1,000 people in the next two years, and to scale up to 40,000 by 2033.

* In a related article from ECONOMIST.com ("Newark May Have Found a Fix for Chronic Homelessness", 20 December 2023), every year the US Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) sends out an army of volunteers to scour parks, tunnels, and city alleys to count Americans living without shelter. The latest tally, released in December 2023, gave a headcount of about 650,000 people, a 12% increase from 2022, and the highest count since it started in 2007. The HUD count is generally seen as an underestimate and lagging.

New Jersey conducts its own homelessness count in real time, and saw an increase of 20% between 2022 and early 2023. In consequence, current programs were changed and more money was spent on rental assistance to help those living on the edge. Also in late 2023, New Jersey's Office of Homelessness Prevention released the state's own figures that showed unsheltered homeless falling across the state by 23% year on year.

Newark, New Jersey's biggest city and accordingly with the state's biggest homeless population, recorded the biggest decrease. In 2022 Mayor Ras Baraka, generated a plan bringing together state, local and private-sector financial support to reduce street homelessness, improve the shelter system and expand housing and prevention services. Mobile crisis teams, behavioral-health providers, community leaders and the police formed a coalition. It's getting results: in a year, Newark cut its homeless population in half.

The mayor converted an old local primary school into a 166-bed facility. He built transitional housing out of shipping containers, common in the nearby port. A second cluster of containers with supportive services, called "Hope Village II", is ready to go. The containers have been jazzed up to look like little cottages. A third cluster is in the works. Mayor Baraka wants to create a pipeline from shelters to transitional housing to giving "section-eight" vouchers (a Federal housing program) to getting chronically homeless people into permanent housing.

Legal teams offer free counseling and court representation to people who risk being illegally evicted. The city also provides money for back rent -- on the principle that it's cheaper to give $200 USD to help make rent than to pay thousands later. The city also relies on data, updated daily by those working with Newark's homeless. As with Greater Change, flexibility and responsiveness are keys to effectiveness.

[MON 15 JAN 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 2

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Defying China, Taiwan elects William Lai Ching-te as president", 13 January 2024), Taiwan has just gone through a national election, with the result that William Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has become president -- giving the DPP an unprecedented third term in the top office. Lai told a victory rally: "Taiwan is telling the whole world that between democracy and authoritarianism, we choose to stand on the side of democracy." For the term "authoritarianism", obviously read "China".

Lai is continuing on the path set by his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, who defined Taiwan as a sovereign, democratic nation, the "world's Taiwan", not rather than China's Taiwan. That mindset infuriates Beijing, with Chinese President Xi Jinping recently proclaiming unification with Taiwan a "historical inevitability". Chinese propaganda called the election a choice between "war and peace, prosperity and decline", and denounced the DPP as separatists. In response, about 70% of Taiwan's voters turned out -- for comparison, in US presidential elections turnout is typically about 60%.

Most Taiwanese support neither immediate unification nor independence, but the status quo of de facto independence. There's a considerable difference of opinion about how to do that, however, and Lai won with only 40% of the vote. In his victory speech, he was careful to maintain the status quo:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Lai has the full backing of the USA. President Joe Biden has made it clear that "independence will be the choice of the Taiwanese people", while also making it clear that a Chinese attack on Taiwan will provoke a US response. US military assistance to Taiwan nonetheless keeps a low profile.

The opposition Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), doesn't trust America as much, preferring instead to engage in friendly dialogue and trade with China, based on a rejection of Taiwan independence, as a way to lower tensions. The KMT candidate, Hou Yu-ih, came in second with a third of the vote. A third-party challenger, Ko Wen-je, of the new Taiwan People's Party (TPP), won a respectable 26% of the vote. His platform focused on domestic issues such as housing and wages, not on China -- while quietly promoting a cross-straights policy that was much like the KMT's. Ko picked up younger voters from the DPP and KMT who found the two parties stodgy and outdated.

The DPP also lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan's parliament. It is now split between all three parties, with the TPP's legislators as a decisive minority. That could greatly compromise Lai's ability to upgrade Taiwan's defenses.

China is not happy with the election, with the government issuing a statement saying the mixed election results showed the DPP "does not represent mainstream public opinion", and that China remains set on "national unification". Since Tsai came to power eight years ago, China has cut off communication with Taiwan's authorities, blocked independent Chinese travel to Taiwan, and ramped up military pressure on the island. Lai does not want to provoke Beijing, making it clear that there is no push to declare independence. DPP leaders like to say that Taiwan is already independent in fact, so there is no reason to declare it.

China is not placated, though there was no immediate military response. The USA will soon send an unofficial delegation of former officials to meet with the incoming president -- which is nothing new, having been done since 2000. The White House line is that the purpose of the visits is to help keep cross-strait relations stable, but Beijing might use the occasion to make trouble. The Chinese may also make trouble on 20 May, when Lai is inaugurated. Odds are they will make trouble sooner or later, there being no hint that Beijing will simply decide to accept the situation.

* Also in late-breaking news, Russia has it Amazon.com clone, named "Wildberries" -- with the huge Wildberries distribution center in St. Petersburg burning to the ground in a massive fire. Rumors are circulating about what happened, one conjecture being that the warehouse was supplying Russian forces in Ukraine under contract, and so saboteurs targeted it. Apparently, the reality was that Russian press gangs raided the warehouse to grab workers and send them to Ukraine, so the workers set fires to evade capture.

It appears that response from fire-fighters was weak at best, possibly because too many of them have been sent to Ukraine, but nobody was hurt. Things are not going well in Russia; along with the disastrous war, sanctions are proving economically brutal. It is hard to see how the war can be sustained, but Vladimir Putin cannot and will not quit. Tyrants are like that.

* Here's a little item I picked off X/Twitter, apparently originating from Instagram:

Mr. Kyle has some serious tats there. There's long been a "black Twitter", and Spoutible -- the brainchild of black software guru Chris Bouzy -- has a definite black cast to it as well. Spout's primary selling point is its comfortably secure environment, there being no trolls and even very little dispute, so I'm hoping it will be the successor to X/Twitter as it falls apart.

However, X/Twitter is dying very slowly, and may not have a single successor. I also picked up accounts on Threads and Bluesky, while thinking of getting one on Post. Since my first purpose is to promote and sell my ebooks, I might as well exploit every opportunity I get. I think Spout has a feature to allow me to cross-post to other services, which may prove useful to that end.

[FRI 12 JAN 24] JOE BIDEN (8)

* JOE BIDEN (8): During 1969, Joe witnessed a case conducted by Prickett involving a lawsuit by an injured welder against a construction firm. Thanks to Prickett's efforts, the welder lost the case. Joe did not like that at all, and promptly quit, to immediately get a job as a public defender. Since he defended who couldn't afford a lawyer, that brought him into further contact with Wilmington's black community, since many of his clients were black.

The public defender job was only part-time, so he got a job with another law firm, Aerenson & Balick, that was more public-spirited. His boss there, Sid Balick, took a flexible view of Joe's work, having no objections to Joe contemplating political office, and indeed getting him in touch with the local Democratic Party apparatus. The Democrats had long been largely powerless in Delaware, but they were beginning to become more active. One of the Democrats was John Daniello, who was on the New Castle County Council and was considering a run for the US Congress. He suggested Joe run for the seat.

Joe hadn't considered the idea before and balked, believing he should set his sights higher. Daniello told him: "You've got to start somewhere if you're going to get known." When Joe said he wasn't sure he would have the time, Daniello said the council met two nights a week, in the building across the street from the law office. Joe talked to Neilia about it and she was enthusiastic; when he talked to Valerie, she was just as enthusiastic.

Valerie became Joe's campaign manager, collecting relevant voter data and setting up an organization, with Jimmy and Frankie working as foot soldiers, organizing a volunteer brigade to go door-to-door, while they all wore out shoe leather themselves. Neilia provided support, but Joe wanted her to focus on raising their growing family. As he told a reporter later:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Joe loved kids, always would, and Neilia wanted a little girl, too. In the meantime, the Bidens pulled out the stops for the election. Valerie said: "We knocked on every door. There was a Biden at every door." Joe won the election by two thousand votes -- an impressive feat, since Delaware was largely under the control of the GOP, and the county leaned Republican. Daniello commented later: "He did a nice job. His sister and two brothers really came together and worked the district, and he did all the right things."

In office, Joe proved himself willing to take on big corporate interests. When Shell Oil quietly bought up beachfront property to build a refinery, Joe raised concerns over the threat of pollution to Delaware's fine beaches. He made it clear he wasn't opposed to commerce, he just wanted to make sure the corporations were good citizens, saying: "Let Shell prove to us they won't ruin our environment." If Shell couldn't, the company needed to go someplace else. Joe also took on what he saw as misguided superhighway developments that promised to destroy neighborhoods.

Joe found it somewhat dull work, however, seeing himself cut out to do more substantial things. He'd long had his sights set on becoming a US senator, and was impatient to move up, gradually committing to a campaign for the 1972 election. There was the consideration that he had to be 30 to be sworn in as a senator, but a little thought showed he would turn 30 only weeks after the election. A more significant difficulty was that he was up against a popular incumbent, Republican Senator Caleb "Cale" Boggs, who had also been Delaware's governor and was familiar to everyone in the state. Boggs promised to be very hard, seemingly impossible, to beat, not having lost an election in 26 years. However, at the same time, Delaware's 1970 redistricting ensure that Joe's state district became even more solidly Republican than it had been, and he was unlikely to be re-elected. Republican colleagues did not conceal their gloating from him. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 11 JAN 24] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Hubless-Wheel Electric Penny-Farthing is a One-of-a-Kind Masterpiece" by Ben Coxworth, 17 December 2023), the "penny-farthing bicycle" was one of the first workable bicycles, comical and impractical in appearance, with an oversized front wheel and a small rear wheel. It looks like it was a pain and hazardous to ride. It does have a certain amusement value, however, with one Christopher Terpstra deciding to make an electric-powered version, the "penn-E-farthing".

Terpstra lives outside Chicago, and has a degree in Industrial Design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He likes to tinker with fanciful design concepts as a hobby, and the penn-E-farthing is definitely fanciful. It features a hubless front wheel -- rotating on three sets of rubber rollers on the upper rear, with a wooden laminate frame rimmed with solid rubber -- and a motorized rear wheel. It has a tubular steel frame and a motor, battery, and rear drive wheel from a Razor MX350 Dirt Rocket children's electric motorbike.

He has no intention of building another one, saying:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

* As discussed in a press release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ("Bacteria Recruited To Build Endlessly Recyclable Plastic"), there is a great deal of work in progress on developing honestly recyclable plastics.

In 2019, Berkeley Labs announced a new type of plastic named "polydiketoenamine (PDK)", in which the bonds between the molecules can be broken down more easily when needed, with the result being a useful chemical feedstock. Originally, they made PDK out of ordinary petrochemicals, but now they've figured out how to synthesize it from a renewable source.

The team engineered the E. coli bacterium -- the colon bacterium, a long-standing "lab rat" -- so that it could convert sugars from plants into a molecule called "triacetic acid lactone (TAL)", which can then be processed with other chemicals to produce PDK. The end result is a plastic material that can be tuned to be flexible, tough, or even adhesive as desired. Not only is this new PDK more sustainable, but the team found that it can also handle hotter working temperatures than the earlier version -- up to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit), expanding its range of possible uses.

At present, the PDK is made up of around 80% bio-content, but the researchers believe they can approach 100%. Further work also includes finding ways to get bacteria to convert a wider range of plant sugars and compounds into the raw materials, and speeding up that conversion.

* An online video demonstrated the "Zipper Truck System (ZTS)", from the Canadian company Lock Block LTD of Vancouver, BC. The company provides precast concrete blocks, roughly along the lines of like Lego blocks, if not with a snap fit, that can be stacked and nested to create structures without using mortar.

One of the variations on the technology is "Arch-Lock", which is used to build arched tunnel support structures. The idea is to dig a trench for the tunnel, use precast blocks to build walls, and then back a truck between them. The truck's rear bed is a half-cylinder, covered by roller wheels; precast blocks in the shape of truncated wedges are laid down to create an arch roof, with the truck supporting the blocks until the arch is complete. Once it is, the truck rolls forward, with the arch settling into place. Scaffolding can also be used to set up the arch.

The scheme is not new, having been around for at least a decade. It is often used in mining, but has also been used for highway and railway over/underpasses, tunnels, hurricane/tornado shelters, wine cellars, culverts, ditches, and creek crossings. One of its nice features is that the support structure can later be dismantled, with the precast blocks used to build a new tunnel support.

[WED 10 JAN 24] ANIMAL TALK & AI (4)

* ANIMAL TALK & AI (4): Learning how to talk to animals leads to ethical questions. Karen Bakker, a digital innovations researcher and author of THE SOUNDS OF LIFE, which examined such questions, says there could be unintended consequences.

Commercial industries could use AI for precision fishing by listening for schools of target species or their predators; poachers could deploy these techniques to locate endangered animals and impersonate their calls to lure them closer. For animals such as humpback whales, whose songs can spread across oceans with remarkable speed, the creation of a synthetic song might, Bakker says, "inject a viral meme into the world's population" with unknown social consequences.

At present, the organizations involved in advanced animal communications are nonprofits like the Earth Species Project -- committed to open-source sharing of data and models, staffed by enthusiastic scientists. So far, nobody has seen the field as commercially profitable. That might not always be true. In a published essay, Rutz and his colleagues noted that "best-practice guidelines and appropriate legislative frameworks" are urgently needed.

There are subtler issues. Designing a "whale chatbot," as Project CETI is trying to do, isn't as simple as figuring out how to replicate sperm whales' clicks and whistles. It's hard to learn a human language without understanding the culture and mindset of its speakers; similarly, understanding animal talk means understanding the lives of animals.

Humans actually share many basic forms of communication with other animals. The cries of mammalian infants, for example, can be very similar, to the point that white-tailed deer will respond to whimpers whether they're made by marmots, humans, or seals. Humans have no problem understanding the cries of puppies or kittens when they are in distress. Both baby songbirds and human toddlers engage in babbling -- which Johnathan Fritz, a research scientist at the University of Maryland's Brain and Behavior Initiative, describes as a "complex sequence of syllables learned from a tutor."

Of course, it's arguable, and argued, that animal talk really is a language. "Some would assert that language is essentially defined in terms that make humans the only animal capable of language," Bakker says, with rules for grammar and syntax. Skeptics worry that treating animal communication as language, or attempting to translate it, may be simply unworkable.

Raskin is not concerned. He doubts animals are saying "pass me a banana," but he suspects we will discover some basis for communication in common experiences, saying: "It wouldn't surprise me if we discovered [expressions for] 'grief' or 'mother' or 'hungry' across species." After all, the fossil record shows that creatures such as whales have been vocalizing for tens of millions of years. In evolutionary terms, if vocalization didn't have a survival value, it would have been discarded; if it's not discarded, it will evolve and enhance its value.

Ultimately, real translation may require not just new tools but the ability to see past our own preconceptions. We may find that trying to force-fit the language of animals to meet our expectations just doesn't work -- so we'll have to adjust our expectations until it does. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 09 JAN 24] REMOTE WORK EVOLVES

* REMOTE WORK EVOLVES: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Remote Work Isn't Killing Business Travel" by Elizabeth Bennett, 3 January 2024), one of the transformations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was the rise of remote work, with videoconferencing replacing commuting and business travel. Since the end of the pandemic, there's been some backtracking on remote work, but it appears that it's still here to stay.

During the pandemic lockdowns, companies found virtual alternatives to once-essential business trips. As video calls became normal, technology provided a workable stand-in for face-to-face meetings with clients. When the world reopened again, the leadership of many companies realized that much of their pre-pandemic business travel was no longer necessary or made financial sense.

The business travel industry took a hit as a result. In their 2023 earnings reports, many airlines, especially US budget carriers, reported major financial losses, partly due to a decline in corporate travel. However, some experts believe that as people settle into the practical realities of hybrid and remote work, business travel is headed towards a rethinking and a resurgence. An August 2023 report from the Global Business Travel Association showed that the worldwide business-travel industry is expected to surpass its pre-pandemic spending level of $1.4 trillion USD, well ahead of projections.

Working with HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, American Express Global Business Travel surveyed 425 US professionals, and found companies have backtracked from the pre-pandemic focus on sales-driven travel, to focus on "non-customer travel" -- to bring company staff together after they had been forced apart. Patricia Huska, chief people officer at Amex GBT says: "In the pandemic, many people relocated, which has shifted the demographics of organizations."

While virtual meetings remain a norm, the Amex GBT data survey shows they're not necessarily enough, with 70% of respondents agreeing a primarily remote-work model can make employees feel disconnected, and 88% saying that meeting in-person is critical for building good long-term relationships among workers. Huska says: "Connections between employees are easily stretched, so bringing people together through travel regenerates bonds, strengthens culture within organizations and creates enthusiasm."

Deirdre McGettrick -- founder of UFurnish, a UK-based online furniture platform -- agrees. Since the pandemic, her team of 16 employees has been working fully remotely, but come together twice a year for company-wide meetings. She says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

McGettrick says these off-sites have a "huge impact" on both business morale and team motivation:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The Amex GBT report points to other important benefits of business travel as well. Six in 10 respondents said they believe business travel is a key component of professional development, and half agree their leaders believe the same. Huska says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

[MON 08 JAN 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 1

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Now that it's 2024, the USA is stumbling towards the national election in November -- which is, by all evidence, going to be a disaster for Donald Trump, as well as the GOP in general. His lunatic behavior on the campaign trail almost defies description, and tales of his conduct as president now circulating are hard, if not impossible, to believe. Back in July, Miles Taylor -- a Department of Homeland Security staffer during Trump's time in office who published a highly visible anonymous critique of Trump in 2018 -- said in a podcast:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

This last week was the 3rd anniversary of the 6JAN21 Capitol riot, with reports being recycled of how Trump watched the riot on TV with satisfaction, and would do nothing to call it off. When an aide told him Vice President Mike Pence was in danger, Trump said: "So what?"

It is impossible to believe that anyone with at least half a brain is going to vote for Trump in November; he's lost all the swing vote. As further evidence of the disintegration of the GOP, also this last week the Michigan Republican Party threw out state Chairwoman Kristina Karamo. She was an election denier, which led to major donors withdrawing their support and the financial ruin of the party there. There will be a very different socio-political environment a year from now, but it's very hard to say how it will be.

* As discussed in an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("How Carbon Prices Are Taking Over The World", 1 October 2023), the world is fitfully working to reduce carbon emissions to head off global warming. One of the approaches in use is "carbon pricing", the conceptually simple measure of placing a price on greenhouse-gas emissions. Economists generally like it, since it makes use of market mechanisms to drive down emissions. Europe was a leader, introducing carbon pricing in 2005.

Carbon pricing is not popular in the USA; although the American Right never tires of proclaiming its grand enthusiasm for capitalism, that does not at all carry over to using the "magic of the market" to deal with climate change, which the Right insists is a hoax. Centrists are not always enthusiastic about it either. Lacking support in Congress, the Biden Administration is focused on regulation, subsidies, and tax cuts to reduce emissions.

Carbon pricing is faring better elsewhere -- for example, Indonesia. The country is the world's ninth-biggest polluter, releasing 620 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent a year, with almost half its soaring energy consumption coming from coal. Indonesia is planning to change its ways. On 26 September, at the launch of its first carbon market, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, played up the country's prospects as a hub for the carbon trade, with local banks stepping up to buy credits from a geothermal-energy firm. Indonesia also introduced an emissions-trading scheme in early 2023, requiring large coal-fired plants to buy permits for emissions above a threshold. Carbon taxes are planned down the road.

Carbon pricing is on a roll. By the beginning of 2023, 23% of global emissions were covered by a carbon price, up from a mere 5% in 2010, and more countries are coming on board. According to the International Monetary Fund, 49 countries have carbon-pricing schemes, and another 23 are considering them. The European Union has launched a groundbreaking policy, the "carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM)" which will, by 2026, levy a carbon price on all the bloc's imports. This will push suppliers around the world to reduce emissions, and maybe even encourage laggards such as the USA to retaliate with carbon pricing of their own.

Japan is now augmenting an existing regional cap-&-trade policy with a voluntary national market for carbon offsets. Participants, accounting for 40% or so of the country's discharges, will have to disclose and set emissions targets. Over time the scheme will become stricter, with auctions of carbon allowances for the energy industry due to begin in 2033. To the south, Vietnam is working on an emissions-trading scheme to be established in 2028, in which firms with emissions above a threshold will need to offset them by buying credits.

China's National Climate Strategy Center is updating the country's emissions-trading scheme, the biggest in the world, to impose more comprehensive tracking of emissions on coal power plants -- linked to a carbon-credit market, allowing power plants to meet obligations by purchasing credits for renewable power, planting forests, or restoring mangroves.

Australia implemented a carbon-price scheme in 2014, but scrapped it in 2014 after a shift in government, with opposition to pricing coming to the lead. Now Australia has reformed a previously toothless scheme called the "safeguard mechanism". Now industrial facilities that account for 28% of the country's emissions have to reduce them by 4.9% a year against a baseline; if they can't, they must buy offsets, which trade at a price of around $20 USD a tonne.

Cross-border schemes like the EU's CBAM provide international leverage. In CBAM's pilot phase importers of aluminum, cement, electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, iron, and steel will need to report "embodied emissions" -- those generated through production and transport. From 2026, importers will have to pay a levy equivalent to the difference between the carbon cost of these emissions in the EU's scheme, and any carbon price paid by the exporter in their domestic market. Free permits for sectors will also be phased out, and the housing and transport industries will be brought into the market.

Nobody is expecting that carbon pricing will have an immediate impact, all the more so because not all the programs, particularly in Asia, are effective. Half the coal plants covered by China's emissions-trading scheme enjoy a "negative carbon price", since their emissions are below the national average, meaning they are being subsidized to pollute. In 2022, a study by Australian researchers at argued that reforestation used as carbon credits in Australia's scheme either did not happen or would have happened irrespective of payments for offsets. Nobody wants to impose carbon pricing on emissions from cars or residential housing, since that antagonizes the citizens.

Rightists do not like carbon pricing, and many environmentalists do not like it either. There's a certain instinctive dislike of companies being given a "license to pollute", with the dislike given support by the way that companies can exploit weaknesses in carbon-pricing systems to game the system. It can be argued that they are irrelevant, that regulation and incentives can do the job. The Biden Administration has proposed a rule that all businesses selling to the Federal government must disclose emissions and have plans to reduce them. Many large firms have set voluntary net-zero targets as part of their marketing efforts. Apple, the world's largest, has pledged to make its supply chain entirely carbon neutral by 2030.

However, the Biden Administration does have an oblique interest in carbon pricing. In 2021 the USA and the EU paused a trade dispute, begun by President Donald Trump, by starting negotiations on a "Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum". America wants the two trading partners to create a common external tariff on polluting steel producers. How that works out remains to be seen. Governments also have an incentive to impose carbon pricing because they make money at it -- and, once cross-border schemes are in place, it is much more sensible for a government to make money with carbon taxes than for other countries to take it away with tariffs. In addition, industries hit with carbon pricing have an incentive to lobby to make sure that competing industries are hit as well and not obtain a competitive advantage.

Ultimately, the success of measures to head off climate change is dependent on getting a consensus among citizens that climate change really is a problem, and that dealing with it makes economic sense. As the damage climate change inflicts becomes more obvious, so too will the recognition that something needs to be done about it.

* In closely related news, a study from Imperial College London (ICL) suggests that the USA will see job growth from taking action against climate change, but some US states will see more advantage than others. Lead author Judy Jingwei Xie -- from the Center for Environmental Policy and the Grantham Institute at ICL, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The analysis was based on the "Regional Energy Development System (ReEDS)" energy system model developed and maintained by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The researchers generated 70 future energy system scenarios and then modeled of how thy would impact employment across states based on their energy profile and demographics.

The wide range of scenarios included the "US Long-Term Strategy", which aims for a 100% reduction of electricity system carbon emissions by 2035 and showed consistently positive job growth. The research team made the model publicly available.

[FRI 05 JAN 24] JOE BIDEN (7)

* JOE BIDEN (7): Immersed in work, Joe Biden's three years at Syracuse Law School flew by. During the summers he worked various jobs, such as hotel night clerk, working at a marina, driving a school bus, delivering beer to stores. As graduation approached, Joe and Neilia considered whether they should stay in Syracuse or live in Wilmington, but Joe SR got them to choose Wilmington -- by the simple expedient of arranging for Rod Ward, of the Wilmington law firm of Prickett, Ward, Burt, & Sanders, to interview him for a job. The interview went well; Ward wasn't impressed by Joe's second-class intellect, but was impressed by his first-class temperament, and hiring him on. He started out with minimal pay, it being made clear to him that his acceptance was provisional, with the prospect of moving up after he passed the Delaware bar.

Of course, being drafted for the war in Vietnam would have greatly interfered with his plans, but that stopped being a problem for him in 1968. Joe had received five student deferments to that time, to finally be given a physical and obtaining a Selective Service classification of "I-Y", meaning he would only serve in the case of a national emergency. The I-Y classification was due to a bout of asthma as a teenager -- a matter for which there is little record, and which seems odd since he was always so physically active. In any case, Joe had no interest in going to Vietnam; by that time, few people did.

Joe and Neilia initially rented a farmhouse in the Wilmington suburb of Mayfield, but then he bought a house near the University of Delaware in Newark, just south of Wilmington, for $11,000 USD. Joe and Jimmy Biden -- Jimmy was at the University of Delaware at the time -- fixed up the house.

At the time, Wilmington was in a condition somewhat resembling a war zone. From the mid-1960s into the 1970s, urban rioting took place in American cities every summer with a depressing regularity. They reached a peak after 4 April 1968, when civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Rioting took place in Wilmington from 8 April; Delaware Governor Charles Terry called out the National Guard and they locked down East Wilmington, where the black population was heavily concentrated, until early the next year.

Joe was preoccupied by graduating, moving back to Wilmington, and getting started in his job, so he wasn't directly involved in all the chaos. However, it was impossible to overlook. As he said later:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The bullying didn't sit well with him, but at the time Joe had personal matters on his mind. The couple's first son, Joseph Robinette Biden III, was born on 3 February 1969; he would be called "Beau" in practice. With a growing family -- within months, Neilia was pregnant again -- Joe needed to find a bigger place to live. He found one, but it was more than he could afford, so he talked Joe SR into buying it, while buying Joe SR's house for himself. While that exercise was in progress, Joe JR got a lead at a rent-free cottage at a country club, the strings attached being that he had to take care of the club's pool and play lifeguard.

Joe, Neilia, and Beau moved into the cottage, with Joe renting out the other two homes. The cottage was a tight fit, with Joe building a small addition for expansion. He continued his house-hunting, finally finding a middling-sized farm in Elkton, Maryland, across the state line. He bought it for $55,000 USD, partly on a loan from Neilia's father and partly by selling off a section of the acreage. The house on the farm was large, and Joe wanted to make it a place where Valerie and Jimmy would live, too.

Valerie later pointed out that, in some alternate history, Joe would have gone into business with Jimmy buying up homes, fixing them up and landscaping them for resale. Joe liked to buy and upgrade homes, while Jimmy had an artistic sense of interior design. That wasn't their future, however. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 04 JAN 24] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Some Birds Use Antibird Spikes To Build Their Nests" by Luis Melecio-Zambrano, 17 July 23), it is said that "evolution is cleverer than we are" -- or at least just as clever, as demonstrated by birds that have been stealing human-made antibird spikes, often installed on eaves, to make nests that discourage unwanted visitors.

The study began when a hospital patient in Antwerp looked out his window and saw such a spiky nest. He took a shot of it and sent it to biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra who studies nests and plastic pollution at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. After breeding season was over, Hiemstra and his team went to Antwerp to pick up the nest. He later got reports of four more similar bird nests in cities in the Netherlands and Scotland.

The nest from Antwerp was built by Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) and had about 1,500 antibird spikes. Hiemstra says: "That is really like a bunker for birds." Some of the other nests were built by carrion crows -- it appears just as structural elements. The magpie nests were more clearly for defense.

Magpies build domed roofs over their nests to protect their eggs and hatchlings from avian predators. Often, the magpies adorn their roofs with thorny branches for extra protection -- but spiny vegetation isn't so common in big cities, so they take what they can get, such as nails, screws, or knitting needles. Antibird spikes are in plentiful supply and so are handy to the magpies.

Hiemstra is getting more reports of spiky nests, and hopes to obtain enough of a sample size to determine if such nests actually improve the survival of magpie eggs and hatchlings. He finds the nests amusing: "I just love the irony of it all. It's just the perfect comeback of the birds."

* As discussed in a press release from the University of Innsbruck, Austria ("Built Into the Genome of the Microbes, Scientists Uncover Over 30,000 Hidden Viruses", 10 June 2023), it is well known that the human genome contains the broken genes of viruses that infected humans in the distant past. Obviously, other organisms have such "fossil" genes embedded in them, and Innsbruck researchers decided to go hunting for them in eukaryotic microorganisms -- that is, single-celled microorganisms with a nucleus, as opposed to bacteria that don't have a nucleus.

Metagenomic research demands a lot of computing power to sort through large numbers of genomes and search for viral genomes embedded in them. Using a high-performance computing cluster known as "Leo" at Innsbruck, the researchers identified more than 30,000 new viruses embedded within the DNA of unicellular organisms. They found that up to 10% of microbial DNA can consist of built-in viruses.

Dr. Christopher Bellas, Marie-Sophie Plakolb, and Professor Ruben Sommaruga from the Department of Ecology were carrying out a study of unicellular microbes when they stumbled upon this extraordinary finding. While many of these "provirus" genomes were broken by mutations, many were in principle able to give rise to active viruses under the right circumstances. These active viruses were not necessarily harmful to the host cell, and could in some cases help defend the cell, infecting attacking microorganisms.

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Six Planets Found In Synchronized Orbit May Help Solve Cosmic Puzzle" by Will Dunham, 29 November 2023), in recent decades there have been hundreds of discoveries of planets in distant star systems. The most common type observed is two to three times the diameter of Earth but smaller than Neptune, and orbiting closer to its parent stars than our Solar System's innermost planet Mercury does to the Sun.

Of course, there are no "sub-Neptunes" in the Solar System, leaving many questions about their nature. However, astronomers found six of them in synchronized orbits around a star about 20% smaller in mass than the Sun, providing clues about them. Their synchronization is due to "orbital resonance", in which the gravitational couplings of the planets end up making their orbits interdependent.

University of Chicago astronomer Rafael Luque, the research lead, says: "What these sub-Neptunes are made of is an active topic of research in the field since there are multiple combinations of rock, water and atmospheric composition that can reproduce the bulk properties -- mass, radius and density -- of the planets."

The newly discovered sub-Neptunes range from 1.9 to 2.9 times Earth's diameter. All appear to possess a large atmosphere. They and their star are located around 100 light-years from Earth. The innermost planet takes about nine days to orbit the star, while the outermost planet takes about 54 days. The planets orbit the star between 6% and 20% of the distance between Earth and the Sun -- though since the star is dimmer than the Sun, they don't get as hot as they would in the Solar System.

Whether they are habitable or not remains unknown. An Earth-like planet would certainly be uninhabitable, but the sub-Neptunes may have more "options" for habitability. The researchers want to inspect them with the James Webb Space Telescope to obtain more data.

[WED 03 JAN 24] ANIMAL TALK & AI (3)

* ANIMAL TALK & AI (3): Researchers investigating animal languages see potential applications in helping preserve endangered species. There is also interest in deciphering the language of pets. Con Slobodchikoff -- author of CHASING DOCTOR DOLITTLE: LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF ANIMALS -- did research in prairie-dog calls before becoming a consultant to help deal with misbehaving dogs. He found out that many of his clients just couldn't figure out what their dogs were trying to tell them, failing to understand that a bark wasn't enough, it had to be linked to facial expression and body posture.

Slobodchikoff is now working on an AI model aimed at translating a dog's facial expressions and barks for its owner. He believes that as researchers expand their studies to domestic animals, machine-learning advances will reveal surprising capabilities in pets. The same approach is being used with farm animals. Elodie F. Briefer, an associate professor in animal behavior at the University of Copenhagen, has created an algorithm trained on thousands of pig sounds that uses machine learning to predict whether the animals were experiencing a positive or negative emotion. Briefer says a better grasp of how animals experience feelings could spur efforts to improve their welfare.

However, it remains a challenge to figure out what the language models actually tell us. Benjamin Hoffman, who helped to develop the Merlin app before joining the Earth Species Project, believes that one of the biggest challenges researchers now face is figuring out how to learn from what these models discover. Hoffman says: "The choices made on the machine-learning side affect what kinds of scientific questions we can ask." For example, Merlin Sound ID, he explains, can help detect which birds are present, which is useful for ecological research -- but it isn't very useful in determining behavior, such as what types of calls an individual bird makes when it interacts with a potential mate. That demands integrating observations of behavior into the language model.

Daniela Rus, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, once designed remote-controlled robots to collect data for whale-behavior research in collaboration with biologist Roger Payne, whose recordings of humpback whale songs in the 1970s helped to popularize the Save the Whales movement. Now she's working with project CETI, leveraging off improved sensors for underwater monitoring, and new AI models capable of analyzing those data.

Rus started out at CETI isolating sperm whale clicks from the oceanic noise background. Once that was done, she applied machine learning to find patterns in extended sperm whale "codas", to establish the foundational structures in them, "analyzing whether the [sperm whale] lexicon has the properties of language or not."

However, one of the tricks of modern AI is that understanding a language is not a prerequisite for using it. An AI can absorb a few seconds of human speech, and be able to use that as a simple basis for generating speech on its own. The more speech the AI absorbs, the better the speech generation. In the near future, Raskin says, "we'll be able to build this for animal communication." The Earth Species Project is already developing AI models that emulate a variety of species, with the aim of having "conversations" with animals.

In collaboration with outside biologists, the ESP plans to perform playback experiments, playing an artificially generated call to zebra finches in a laboratory setting and then observing how the birds respond. Raskin says that soon "we'll be able to pass the finch, crow or whale Turing test," meaning the animals won't be able to tell the difference between talking with a machine or with one of their own. He adds: "The plot twist is that we will be able to communicate before we understand." Analysis of the behavior of the AI system then can lead to greater understanding. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 02 JAN 24] NEW MATERIALS BY AI

* NEW MATERIALS BY AI: As discussed in an article from SCIENCE.org ("Materials-Predicting AI From DeepMind Could Revolutionize Electronics, Batteries, and Solar Cells" by Robert F. Service, 23 November 2023), modern technologies make use of about 20,000 different inorganic materials, with the "library" mostly established by trial-&-error. There has been work to find new materials with software, but it has struggled along -- until artificial intelligence (AI) systems arrived. Now a research team has announced they have used an AI system to predict the ingredients and properties of 2.2 million new inorganic materials. Another research team has used AI to show how such new materials can be synthesized more readily.

The predictive AI system was a product of AI researchers at DeepMind, an offshoot of Google, and follows other DeepMind efforts -- such as an AI system that can run on laptop computers that predicts the weather at least as well as weather simulations run on supercomputers; and the well-known "Alphafold", which predicts 3D protein structures. Andrew Rosen -- a computational materials scientist at Princeton University -- says the new AI system "is the AlphaFold equivalent for materials science."

As is typical of machine learning systems, the materials prediction system had to be trained on mountains of data. The researchers started with the Materials Project -- a database of all known and predicted inorganic crystals, including not only each material's crystal structure, but also properties such as its electronic structure, magnetic behavior, and hardness. In addition, over the past decade Materials Project teams have fed data on the 20,000 known inorganic crystals into pattern-matching machine learning algorithms to predict another 28,000 inorganic crystals that are presumably stable.

DeepMind researchers, led by Dogus Cubuk -- who heads materials discovery for the company -- used the data on those 48,000 known and predicted compounds, as well as data from other related databases, to train their AI model. The model, called "Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME)", uses the training data to predict new stable crystals, and determine their properties. The research team took a batch of predictions and fed them back into GNoME, then repeated the cycle until they had 2.2 million new materials.

The calculated "formation energy" -- a measure of stability -- for 381,000 of them suggested that if they were synthesized, they would be stable and not decompose. Benchmarks suggest GNoME's success rate at predicting stable structures reaches 80%, up from the 50% achieved by previous schemes. DeepMind researchers note that independent experimenters have already made 736 of the predicted materials, verifying their stability.

Among the finds were layered materials like those used in battery electrodes. While the Materials Project identified 1000 such compounds, GNoME predicted 52,000, including 528 lithium-ion conductors, a kind of material critical to today's best batteries. Cubuk also notes that in contrast to previous predicted crystals, which mostly combined two, three, or four elements, many of DeepMind's predicted structures contain five and even six elements. Cubuk says even materials not certain to be stable might be extremely long-lasting, just as diamond survives a billion years or more before decomposing into graphite.

Predicting the materials amounts to little if they can't be synthesis, and synthesis of new materials tends to be laborious and slow trial-&-error. Separate AI work promises to help. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by materials scientist Gerbrand Ceder, built an AI-driven robotics lab to make predicted new materials. He and his colleagues report that this setup quickly learned to refine recipes for synthesizing new compounds predicted by the Materials Project algorithm. In 17 days, the robots successfully synthesized 41 materials out of 58 they attempted.

DeepMind researchers are planning to immediately release data on the 381,000 compounds predicted to be stable, and make the code for its AI publicly available. The rest may follow later. Ganose is impatient, saying that even predicted materials that may not be stable are useful targets for lab investigation. Cubuk replies that, with hundreds of thousands of new materials to investigate, there's not much need for more right away.

[MON 01 JAN 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 52

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The Ukraine War sputters on, with Russia performing a massive missile and drone attack on Ukraine this week, with Ukraine retaliating with a barrage against Russia. The war drags on, and there's a lot of defeatism going around, saying the prospects for Ukraine are dismal, that Russia remains strong and cannot be beaten.

It is typical of wars that the defenders, in feeling the pain they suffer, fails to realize just how bad off the aggressors are until they collapse. An article from BUSINESSINSIDER.com ("Russia's Economy Is Paralyzed, Yale Researchers Say" by Jason Ma, 26 December 2023) spotlighted a commentary by Yale Professors Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian that blew holes through the myth of Russian strength -- saying that Western sanctions and the mass exodus of multinational companies from Russia that followed have inflicted great pain on Russia's economy.

Sonnenfeld and Tian wrote: "We cannot fall into the trap of thinking that all is good for Putin, and we cannot jettison effective measures to pressure him." Putin's expropriation of Western assets in Russia as they exited the country may have seemed decisive, but the assets are hollow and almost worthless, doing nothing to halt Russia's tailspin. They pointed to other difficulties:

• Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, at least a million Russians have fled to other countries, including top tech talent. That's contributed to a labor shortage that's nearing 5 million workers and has led to high inflation.
  
  
• According to Russia's central bank, $253 billion USD in private capital left Russia between February 2022 and June 2023.
  
  
• Russia has lost access to Western technology and expertise that its companies relied on, while foreign direct investment has nearly completely dried up.
  
  
• Tight capital controls have rendered Russian assets valued in rubles almost worthless on global markets.
  
  
• Sanctions that cut off Moscow from much of international finance have prevented Russian companies from issuing any new stock or any new bonds in Western markets.

Yes, the Russians have figured out ways to bypass sanctions, but they are improvisations and inefficient; they cannot change the dismal fundamentals of the Russian war economy. Sonnenfeld and Tian wrote:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Add to this list the reality that, among the other consequences of the Ukraine War that Vladimir Putin didn't think of at the outset, Russia is now under attack by Ukrainian drones and missiles, as well as a mysterious but clearly active sabotage campaign. How much damage they're doing is hard to say, but they're at the very least forcing Putin to allocate military resources to defending Russia instead of attacking Ukraine.

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Chinese Military Purge Exposes Weakness" by Yew Lun Tian & Laurie Chen, 30 December 2023), it is not always easy to figure out what is going on with the opaque Chinese government -- but this last week, nine senior military officers were sacked, with many of them being from the Rocket Force, the arm of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in charge of tactical and nuclear missiles.

Since Xi Jinping became China's president in 2012, he has conducted on a wide-ranging anti-corruption crackdown among Communist Party and government officials, with the PLA being one of its main targets. Exactly why the nine generals were removed was left unsaid, but it is suspected by outside observers that it was due to corruption over equipment procurement, particularly in the PLA Rocket Force. The Rocket Force has been a high priority for the government in Beijing, with the heavy funding translating into plenty of opportunities for graft.

Alfred Wu -- associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore -- says: "More heads will roll. The purge that centered around the Rocket Force is not over."

Wei Fenghe, a former defense minister who used to head the Rocket Force, has also gone invisible. When asked about his whereabouts, a defense ministry spokesman said in August that the military has zero tolerance for corruption. His successor, Li Shangfu, was abruptly removed as defense minister in October without explanation after also disappearing for months. Yun Sun -- director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington DC-based thinktank -- says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The issue of corruption in the military is not new, one of the root causes being the opacity and loose accountability in the Chinese government. Chen Daoyin -- formerly an associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, now a political commenter in Chile -- said that the ongoing crackdown might dissuade Xi from risking serious military confrontations for years:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

China has the problem with military action against Taiwan in that it is much easier to reinforce a defense than to build up for offense. If the Chinese government isn't in a position to attack Taiwan at present, Beijing's position will get steadily worse, until taking action would be simple lunacy.

* In my efforts to learn Japanese, I've taken to downloading anime video clips with Japanese dialog from YouTube and attempting to decode them. I'm having some success, but occasionally I get stumped. I thought maybe I could find someplace to ask questions, and first tried "r/LearnJapanese" on Reddit forums. I wasn't really expecting much from it -- Reddit's never worked very well for me in the past. I figured it was still worth a try, so I posted a question.

It didn't work well this time either. One of the issues is that, whenever first posting to a new forum, there is a high probability that the replies will be unfriendly. There are people on forums who, for whatever reasons, go far out of their way to troll newcomers. I make sure I know how to block posters before I make my first post. As I expected, I got a pompous, condescending, and useless reply; I blocked the poster right away, thinking: "I knew it!". Beyond that, I didn't get any useful response, and it didn't seem like there was a lot of activity on that subreddit anyway. Having taken a chance on Reddit one last time and finding, as I more or less expected, it didn't work, I deleted my Reddit account, so I wouldn't make the same mistake again.

There things sat for some days -- then I found out about language exchanges, in which people from different countries ask about each other's language. That seemed like a great idea, and on checking found out that there were a number of popular language exchanges available. I probed them and soon found out they weren't such a good idea, either. The problem is that they aren't really set up for general chat with a group, instead they are set up for establishing penpal-like relationships between posters. I wasn't comfortable with that idea at all, it sounded awkward. Worse, I found online comments that language exchanges are often trolled by scammers and the like. It wasn't going to work.

What to do? I finally wondered if there were Japanese language forums online besides Reddit, so I looked around and found a number of them. However, on examination they were all "cobwebsites", the most recent postings being several years old, no ongoing activity at all. It seems that between Reddit and Facebook, there's no interest in forums these days.

So, I'm outa luck, if maybe not forever. I've got used to using ChatGPT on Bing, and found it actually can give some insightful answers on use of Japanese. In practice, ChatGPT is good for clearing up misunderstandings and clarifying the rules of the language, but unsurprisingly not at all good at helping me when I'm completely stumped. However, one of these days it seems plausible there will be an AI chat system focused entirely on the Japanese language -- as part of a global network of AI chat systems, each focused on a specialized topic. Alas, although that's a plausible future, it's not going to happen for years.