DayVectors

* 21 entries including: Joe Biden (series); generative AI arrives (series); ancient supernova traces on Earth (series); Ripsaw robot tank for air defense; 2-faced white dwarf star; Julian Assange | Michael Mann wins lawsuit | 4-eyed sunglasses; brain stimulation examined; huge fine for Trump | Syrskyy speaks | steampunk Taylor Swift; fediverse; Zaluzhny retires | adventures in new social media; ersatz dairy | AI for thermal vision | iron-air batteries; drones intercept drones; US strikes IRGC | Ukraine sinks IVANOVETS | quorum-breaking busted; & Cambrian fossils | giant viruses | bacteria in coral reefs.

[THU 29 FEB 24] RIPSAW ADS

* RIPSAW ADS: As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Ripsaw Mini Tank Emerges In New Air Defense Configuration" by Joseph Trevithick, 10 October 2023), the Ukraine War has pushed the development of light, mobile, air-defense systems (ADS), primarily to deal with drone attacks. Light robot vehicles, it seems, are becoming a platform of choice for such systems.

One such robot vehicle, the "Ripsaw" -- built by the Howe & Howe arm of defense giant Textron -- is now being adapted to the anti-drone role. The Ripsaw has been around for about a decade and has been built in a number of configurations, the most stereotypical looking like a classic light tank. Rheinmetall of Germany has taken the Ripsaw M5 chassis and slapped its "Skyranger 30" turret on it, featuring an automatic Oerlikon KCE revolver-type 30-millimeter cannon with a magazine of 250 rounds.

The KCE fires "Advanced Hit Efficiency And Destruction (AHEAD)" programmable airburst ammunition, with the rounds wirelessly given a timer setting in the barrel to detonate at the desired range, scattering a cone-shaped cloud of tungsten sub-projectiles to hit the target.

The turret can also fire short-range surface-to-air missiles from a pop-up launcher at the upper rear section of its turret. The launcher can accommodate two missiles, such as the US-made Stinger, the European MBDA Mistral, or the SkyKnight from Halcon in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The turret can be fitted with a light machine gun, mostly for self-defense.

Of course, anti-air systems require sensors for tracking and targeting. The Skyranger 30 has an S-band radar array with five flat-faced active electronically-scanned array antennas positioned around the turret to provide 360-degree coverage. In addition, it also has a passive "Fast Infrared Search and Track (FIRST)" targeting system, useful for spotting stealthy targets, or for use when radar might be a give-away. The two sensor systems can collaborate. Skyranger 30 has an integrated command and control system with automated targeting functionality, with the ability to be linked with offboard sensors, or other air defense nodes. It is capable of a degree of autonomous operation; it could be sent into a battle area to engage aerial targets on its own.

The Ripsaw M5 chassis underneath the Skyranger 30 turret has also been seen with a smaller turret armed with a 30-millimeter cannon that has been evaluated by the US Army. There are other variants in the Ripsaw series, including some that are crewed, which occasionally appeared in Hollywood movies. The M5 drone version has a base weight of 9,500 kilograms (10.5 tons) and a payload capacity of 3,600 kilograms (4 tons) -- more than enough to handle the Skyranger 30, which has a weight of 2,250 kilograms (2.5 tons).

The M5's hybrid electric propulsion system can get the Ripsaw ADS up to speeds of over 40 KPH (25 MPH), though unarmed versions can go over twice as fast. The vehicle may have a "silent" mode where it runs off battery power, reducing its noise and thermal signatures. This class of weapon is well-suited to the Ukraine War, with Ukrainian forces moving towards the widespread adoption of drone systems in air, sea, and ground environments to compensate for a relative lack of manpower.

The cannon turret has also been fitted to the German 8-wheel crewed "Boxer" armored fighting vehicle as the "Skyranger 35", while the Ripsaw Skyranger 30 system can be regarded as a self-contained, miniature version of the Rheinmetall "Skyshield Air Defense System", which includes as individual elements a radar / sensor platform, a command shelter, two revolver-cannon turrets, and a small SAM launcher. An expanded version of the same system, with six cannon turrets and named the "Modular, Automatic and Network capable Targeting and Interception System (MANTIS)" has been adopted by the German Army.

[WED 28 FEB 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (3)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (3): Along the prospect of making cheating easier, schools and universities need to figure out how to educate their students to make use of very smart AIs like ChatGPT, since they will become an essential tool in many lines of work. They can also make teacher's lives easier -- for example, by quickly producing lesson plans and quizzes.

ChatGPT is not an artificial general intelligence -- whatever that really means -- and if it can be called "sentient", it is only in a specialized way. However, it is nonetheless revolutionary, and OpenAI was forward-looking in opening it up to the world. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman understands just how revolutionary ChatGPT is, telling TechCrunch in 2019 that he didn't know how OpenAI would make money with it, and didn't care:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Nobody knows where ChatGPT is going to go, though there are worries that it could easily become a torrential source of disinformation, with OpenAI's engineers working hard to prevent it from being misused. Trolls have already tricked ChatGPT into generating violent, sexual, obscene, false and racist content in violation of its terms of service -- for example, getting it to role-play as an evil alter ego called DAN that has none of ChatGPT's "eThICaL cOnCeRnS." Even if OpenAI can keep ChatGPT under control, the prospect remains of other companies lacking in scruples, likely based in a country that doesn't care about moderation, making an equivalent that doesn't care about the bounds.

Further questions concern the professional application of ChatGPT, which are clearly revolutionary. Lawyers might exploit its ability to read and process limitless numbers of prior cases, and highlight relevant precedents. ChatGPT could in principle even conduct the entire courtroom argument. ChatGPT could have similar capabilities in medicine, architecture, psychology, even warfighting. ChatGPT, in short, has open-ended possibilities, with nobody yet able to determine what it can do.

[ED: After the introduction of ChatGPT, a certain amount of disillusionment has set it. It writes in clumsy boilerplate, and its inability to assess the credibility of sources means it can indiscriminately pass on disinformation. Microsoft's Bing chatbot has led to defamation lawsuits, and Microsoft has been forced to scale it back -- for now, by refusing to answer controversial questions. Similarly, image generators are constrained from producing images of specific people to steer clear of copyright problems. GAI does promise to be extremely useful, but obviously the use model will have to be rethought.]

[TUE 27 FEB 24] TWO-FACED WHITE DWARF

* TWO-FACED WHITE DWARF: As discussed in an article from ARSTECHNICA.com ("This White Dwarf Star Has Two Faces", by Jennifer Ouellette, 20 July 2023), astronomers have discovered an unusual blue-tinted white dwarf star with two distinct "faces": one side is hydrogen and the other side is helium. Of course, the star was named "Janus", after the two-faced Roman god of duality and transition.

A white dwarf is the dense glowing white core of a burned-out star. One of the first white dwarf stars discovered, named "40 Eridani B", has a density over 25,000 times that of the Sun, packed into a volume roughly the size of the Earth. When it was discovered, astronomers thought they'd got it wrong, that such an object was impossible. A second white dwarf, "Sirius B" (of course orbiting the star Sirius), was discovered soon after and appeared even denser.

Once a star uses up all the fuel available to support fusion, it must collapse in on itself. With a white dwarf, the matter of the burned-out star is so compacted that all the electrons are smashed together. The more mass the white dwarf has, the smaller it gets because the pressure is greater. Since the star's surface gravity is 100,000 times that of Earth, heavier atoms in its atmosphere sink, leaving lighter atoms at the surface. Typically, white dwarf atmospheres are typically composed of pure hydrogen or pure helium.

Janus, as noted, is not typical. Astronomer Ilaria Caiazzo, a postdoc at Caltech, first spotted Janus while using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) to look for highly magnetized white dwarfs. ZTF is a robotic survey camera attached to the 70-year-old Samuel Oschin telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County.

Follow-up observations with the CHIMERA instrument at Palomar and Spain's Gran Telescopio Canarias revealed that Janus spins on its axis about every 15 minutes. However, it was the observational data from the WM Keck telescope in Hawaii that found one side of the dwarf was covered with hydrogen, the other with helium.

Caiazzo and her colleagues believe this may be a white dwarf caught in the midst of a rare transition from a hydrogen- to a helium-dominant surface. Astronomers suspect asymmetry in the dwarf's magnetic field is creating the imbalance -- the magnetic field either slowing down mixing, or reducing the pressure on one side to allow hydrogen to predominate. The search is on for more "two-faced" white dwarfs to help unravel the mystery.

* As discussed in a NASA press release ("Using Hubble, Researchers Measure The Mass Of A Single White Dwarf" by Haygen Warren, 6 February 2023), white dwarf stars -- the glowing, dense cinders of stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel -- are common in the Universe. Traditionally, astronomers the masses of white dwarfs within binary star systems, starting with their orbital velocity, then working back to the size of the orbits, and then the masses of the two stars. With help from the joint NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope, a team of researchers directly measured the mass of an isolated white dwarf outside of a binary star system.

To measure the mass of the white dwarf, named LAWD 37, the team used the modern technique of "gravitational microlensing" -- the bending of light from the distant Universe as the light passes around a massive object on its way to Earth. The greater the bending, the more massive the object. Gravitational microlensing had already been used to measure the mass of a white dwarf, named Stein 2051 b, back in 2017, but Stein 2052 b was part of a binary system, giving a crosscheck on the gravitational microlensing technique.

LAWD 37 is very close to Earth, only 15 light-years away from our solar system in the constellation Musca. The relatively close range helped in making the exacting microlensing observations. Using multiple observations from ESA's Gaia star-mapping observatory, the team was able to predict when LAWD 37 would pass in front of a background star. That happened in 2019, with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope performing the observation. As it turned out, LAWD 37 was 56% the mass of our Sun. Coupled with the determined radius of the star, that will give clues to the inner structure of the white dwarf. Observation of other occultations is in planning.

[MON 26 FEB 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 8

* SUN 18 FEB 24: It appears that Palestinian-American Representative Rashida Tlaib of Wisconsin is telling Arab-American citizens of that state not to vote for Joe Biden. I can only marvel at how deluded she must be to think that will amount to anything.

In similar news, it appears some truck drivers are declaring they won't deliver cargoes to New York State, after the state hit Donald Trump with a $350 million fine. Something tells me that won't amount to anything, either.

* MON 19 FEB 24: Reports are that the "Pineapple Express" -- the wet "atmospheric river" from the Pacific Ocean -- is dumping water on California at an alarming rate. Will the Central Valley get flooded out? The Great Flood of 1862 turned it into a lake, at a time when the population density was far lower. I got an email from a contact in San Diego who said: "We haven't floated away yet."

Of course, the irony is that California has been suffering from prolonged drought. Does this mean the end of the drought? Possibly, but it turns out that it takes a lot of rain for a long time to restore depleted groundwater reservoirs, so California may not have escaped the drought just yet. At least, California isn't having a winter fire season.

* In Ukraine War news, a Russian helicopter pilot named Maksim Kuzminov made a splash in August 2023 by defecting to Ukraine with a Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter. He got his family out as well, with Ukraine promising him security -- but Kuzminov decided he didn't want to live in a war zone, so he went to Spain. Spanish authorities have now found his body in an underground parking lot; he had been shot at least five times. Putin has a long memory and a long reach.

* TUE 20 FEB 24: Australian "hacktivist" Julian Assange, who founded Wikileaks and achieved notoriety by using it as a weapon to help defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election, ended up in a British prison, with the Americans pushing for his extradition. His advocates say he is being persecuted for exercising free speech, but the US charges against him are derived from the Espionage Act, targeting his efforts to illegally obtain secret US documents -- spying, in a word.

The British government approved his extradition. Now Assange's lawyers are down to their last appeal in British courts to stop it, saying his health is poor and he might not survive a stay in an American prison. He is not getting much sympathy these days; while he does have a fan club on the Redlined Left, more Americans remember with displeasure how he helped Donald Trump get elected. However, even that disdain is muted these days, because Assange is simply irrelevant: few care what happens to him.

* WED 21 FEB 24: Regarding comments above on Julian Assange, a reader tipped me off to a 2013 movie titled THE FIFTH ESTATE on Assange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I didn't watch it, but I did go through IMDB reviews. Many reviewers were indignant at the rough handling Assange got in the movie, but those less invested in him suggested it was the true story -- of a person who started out with what looked like high ideals, which were then corrupted by hubris and a cavalier attitude towards ethics.

I failed to point out in yesterday's posting three significant facts about Assange:

• Assange refused to redact material that put people at hazard when other outlets did redact.
  
  
• He uncritically took material from Kremlin-linked hacker groups.
  
  
• He never blew the whistle on dictators, knowing it would be bad for his health.

Many publications are saying that Assange shouldn't be extradited, since it would have a chilling effect on journalists around the world. Then again, it might make them more cautious about crossing lines they shouldn't cross.

* THU 22 FEB 24: Spoutible's Chris Bouzy, who likes to make election forecasts, ran a thread on Spout today pointing out that Donald Trump's Federal trial for his Clown-Car Coup will start in March and he is likely to be convicted by May or June. That suggests the GOP will end up offering an alternative -- Nikki Haley being first in the list -- who will lose by a landslide, which will crush the GOP down-ballot as well.

Of course, as I added in reply, if the GOP runs Trump anyway, he'll be facing more trials, and won't be able to run a real campaign from criminal court. That suggests a landslide loss as well. The GOP national convention in July is going to the mother of all train wrecks.

It seems likely Nikki Haley is not expecting to win in 2024; she may well be lining herself up for 2028. The problem for the GOP is that they will be in worse demographic shape then than they are now. Trump won by the slimmest margin in 2016, and it's all downhill from there. "Apres Trump, la Deluge."

Incidentally, a reader gave that a nice spin translation: "After Trump, the Dump."

* AND SO ON: Climate change is upon us, and inevitably has led to climate-change trolling. As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Climate Scientist Awarded More Than $1 Million" by David Goldman and Paradise Afshar, 9 February 2024), prominent climate scientist Michael Mann has pushed back on the trolls.

In 2012 Rand Simberg, then a writer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and Mark Steyn, a TV and radio personality who wrote for the NATIONAL REVIEW, generated blog posts ridiculing Mann's climate-change warnings and comparing him to Jerry Sandusky, the former Pennsylvania State football coach who was convicted of child molestation. The two wrote: "Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet,"

They also ridiculed Mann's research on the "Hockey Stick" chart that shows the dramatic rise in average global temperature since pre-industrial times. Mann sued them, and also sued the NATIONAL REVIEW and CEI. A 2021 court decision dismissed the suit against the NATIONAL REVIEW and CEI, but allowed the suit against Simberg and Steyn to proceed. A jury in the Washington DC Superior Court awarded Mann $1 million USD in punitive damages, and a dollar from each defendant in compensatory damages. Mann intends to appeal the decision that he can't sue the NATIONAL REVIEW and CEI.

In the USA, defamation suits are difficult to win, but as of late plaintiffs have been scoring big hits -- against conspiracy troll Alex Jones, FOX News, and Donald Trump. They got too fond of trolling and went way beyond the limits.

* The weather's getting nicer, and I'm starting to take a ride on my Razor A6 kick scooter after lunch. From early on, I had problems with rear view: the scooter is too unstable to allow me to turn around and look back. I bought a helmet-mounted mirror from Amazon, but it didn't work out -- one problem being that I'm nearsighted in my left eye (farsighted in the right) and it had to be mounted on the left to work. I don't think it would have worked well even if my left eye was better, since the mirror was too tall and unstable.

That failing, I bought some handlebar-mounted mirrors -- but they arrived broken, and on examining them I didn't think they would work very well mechanically. I returned them. I was at a loss, until I ran across Amazon listings for aviator-style sunglasses with outside mirrored segments. I figured they were worth a try, so I ordered them.

On getting them and examining them, they looked like conventional aviator's shades, except they were flat across, no curvature. The outboard mirror segments can't be seen from the front, and they're partly transparent from the back. They turned out to work very well, except that they had a learning curve, being something like having four eyes, two forward and two back, and not something I was at all used to.

First problem was learning how to aim my head so I could target the mirror segment, viewing through my right eye. The next, bigger problem was visually making sense of the world behind me. When we're driving about the town and seeing things, we have a map of sorts in the mind to make sense of where things are, but it was hard at first to register the rear view with the map. It takes a lot of practice to make sense of the rear view. Finally, I have the forward and back view in sight at the same time, and switching between them can be confusing. The confusion is enhanced by the partial silvering of the mirror paneling, since I have to screen out forward visual signals leaking through. I'm learning, but it takes time.

Incidentally, the kick scooter gives me a fair workout. I'm too old to run any more, my legs won't stand it, but the kick scooter gives me a nice substitute. I've actually put on a bit of muscle weight, enhanced by upping my calisthenics as well. I'm a little surprised that I can put on muscle weight, now that I'm in my 70s.

[FRI 23 FEB 24] JOE BIDEN (14)

* JOE BIDEN (14): Joe Biden was a long way from getting over the deaths of Neilia and Naomi, but then life took a completely unexpected turn. Brother Frank gave him the number of a woman to call for a date, saying: "You'll like her, Joe. She doesn't like politics." Joe wasn't inclined to follow up, but the next day he decided it was worth a shot, and called her. After a bit of wrangling, she agreed to the date, so he took her to Philadelphia for dinner and a movie.

Her name was Jill Tracey Jacobs, a tall slender blonde, 24 years old, eight years younger than Joe, from Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. She was divorcing and getting ready to start a teaching job. To his surprise, Joe realized he'd seen on a poster in the Wilmington Airport, as a model in an ad for the New Castle County Park. They hit it off right away, largely because -- as Frank had said -- she wasn't interested in politics, instead talking about books and such.

Something clicked on in Joe, and he repeatedly went out with her. Before long he asked her to stop going out with other men, and she guardedly agreed. Jill later said: "He was fast. I could tell he was definitely interested in me." She was not put off by it. Soon she was often eating at the Biden house and hitting it off with the two boys, saying later that she felt like she was "dating three guys". She became increasingly integrated with the Biden clan, and took Joe along with the boys to meet her own parents.

At that time, Joe decided to upgrade from the North Star house and bought an old, somewhat run-down mansion that had been originally built for a DuPont executive. The "Station", as he named it, was huge, with 87 windows; Val and Jack Owen moving along with Joe and the boys. There was plenty of room for everyone, though it was something of a sink for money and labor. Joe didn't mind much; he liked the big house, and liked fixing it up.

Joe and Jill went out with each other for two years. One morning in 1976, while Joe was shaving, Hunt and Beau -- then six and seven -- came up to him. Beau was the more awkward of the two and didn't want to lead off, so he said: "You tell him, Hunt."

Hunt replied: "No, YOU tell him." -- then reconsidered and said: "Beau says we should marry Jill."

Beau, the ice broken, chimed in: "We think we should marry Jill. What do you think, Dad? ... D'ya think she'll do it?" Joe thought it was a great idea, and never felt more affection for his sons. He popped the question to Jill the next time they got together; she put him off, saying she wasn't ready. She wasn't sure she wanted to really be the wife of a prominent US senator, and she also wasn't sure she'd be a good mother to Beau and Hunt. She liked them too much to want their relationship to go south. Joe kept on popping the question, Jill kept saying she wasn't ready.

* 1976 was of course an election year, and the Democrats were feeling confident that they could retake the White House. One outsider candidate after the ring was Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and once governor of Georgia. By early in the year, Carter was gaining momentum. Joe decided to help out, making campaign appearances for Carter across the USA. He looked to crowds, still being very young by Senate standards, with his looks improved by a hair transplant to deal with creeping baldness. However, there was clearly something of a mindset difference between Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter; it wasn't very noticeable at that time, but it would become so later.

Carter won the election by about 2 percentage points, with an unspectacular voter turnout. Gerry Ford had to struggle with the shadow of Watergate, a poor economy marked by painfully high inflation, and a bruising primary election; his pardon of Nixon did him no favors with the voters. All in all, the Republicans were in a bad condition, and Carter looked like a welcome alternative. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 22 FEB 24] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("New Stealth Fighter Will Be Developed Jointly By Japan, Britain, Italy" by Thomas Newdick, 9 December 2022), Britain, Japan, and Italy have teamed up to develop a next-generation fighter jet. The "Global Combat Air Program (GCAP)" collaboration's is to introduce a sixth-generation fighter (6GF) by the mid-2030s.

Britain has been working on a 6GF labeled "Tempest", as discussed here in 2018, with the UK arm of the Leonardo group of Italy being involved, while Japan flew an "X-2" demonstrator for an "F-X" 6GF in 2016:2018. Notional concepts presented for GCAP follow those of Tempest, with modest changes -- but they're strictly concepts and subject to change.

Industrial partners include, as a partial list, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce in the UK; Mitsubishi and Ishikawa-Harima Heavy Industries in Japan; plus Avio Aero, Elettronica, and MBDA Italia in Italy. Other countries may join GCAP, Sweden having been suggested as a possible partner. Britain and Italy were members of the group of countries that developed the Eurofighter Typhoon, which proved difficult, primarily because of vacillation by Germany. Those backing GCAP likely want things to go more smoothly this time around.

Rolls-Royce and Ishikawa-Harima have been working on a joint engine program since 2021. Similarly, the UK and Japan have been collaborating on a "Joint New Air-to-Air Missile (JNAAM)" program -- which will be the MBDA Meteor beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile (BVRAAM) with a Japanese-developed seeker, developed for the AAM-4 missile. The USA is collaborating with Japan to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems for "Loyal Wingman" drones to complement the GCAS fighter.

* As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Airshow China 2022: New Reusable Hypersonic UAV Displayed" by Akhil Kadidal & Akshara Parakala, 10 November 2022), one of the exhibits at the Airshow China 2022 was a display showing off the "MD-22" hypersonic, reusable, and multimission drone, now being developed umbrella of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Imagery of the MD-22 showed it features a single engine and a near- flat bottom design. The aircraft also had highly swept cropped delta wings, a V-tail, and trailing edge control surfaces for those flight surfaces. An engine inlet was positioned on the bottom rear of the airframe. The effort is being conducted by the Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics of the Institute of Mechanics (CAS), the Guangdong Aerospace Research Academy (GARA), and their partners.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com "US Air Force Taps JetZero To Build Prototype Blended Wing Aircraft By 2027" by David Szondy, 20 August 2023), there's been talk of "blended wing body (BWB)" cargolift aircraft for decades. A BWB is a sort of stingray-like flying wing, meaning effectively the whole airframe contributes to lift, resulting in high fuel efficiency.

NASA flew two large flying models of an "X-48" demonstrator from 2007 to 2013, but nothing but concepts happened after that. Now the US Air Force has contracted with JetZero of Long Beach, California, to build a full-scale flight prototype, to fly by 2027. Not many other details are available; presumably "full scale" means a piloted aircraft, but not one as big as a production aircraft.

[WED 21 FEB 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (2)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (2): ChatGPT is not the last word in natural language generators. Google has been working for years on its system, named the "Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA)", which got some media attention when an over-enthusiastic engineer described it as "sentient". Following the enthusiasm over ChatGPT, Google quickly built a lightweight version of LaMDA, named "Bard", into its search system. Google has also thrown $400 million USD at Anthropic, another AI chatbot company founded by a couple of ex-senior employees at OpenAI. Anthropic's bot Claude has been developed as a direct rival to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT still dominates the stage for the moment. It has impressive capabilities, but also serious limitations; it can give good answers to simple straightforward questions, but has trouble with picky questions, instead giving answers to more general straightforward questions. It also has little ability to check the credibility of its sources, and can give obviously wrong answers -- resulting in litigation, with the result that its use has been constrained.

It also is poor at voice communications. Voice interaction is certain to be fixed, and it will only be a matter of time before Apple, Google, and everyone else peddling voice assistants will upgrade them to products with a high level of conversational capability, backed up by the ability to answer almost every reasonable question, and retaining a perfect memory of past experiences with a user. Of course, that will imply interfacing with external apps and websites:

• "Hey Google, transfer $5000 from my bank account to my Paypal account."
  
  
• "Hey Google, what's the best airline fare I can get for a trip to Seattle?"
  
  
• "Hey Google, write an apology for the late delivery and tell the customer the parts will be there by Wednesday. Read the letter back to me before you send it."

Given an ability to write excellent essays and responses to questions, ChatGPT grants extraordinary cheating powers in the hands of students. Not only can it crank out a history homework assignment quickly, but it can also pass exams. A study at the University of Minnesota found it consistently performed at about a C+ average when graded blindly against human students in four different law school exams involving multiple choice and essay questions. At Wharton it fared even better on business school test questions, scoring a B to B- despite occasionally giving grossly wrong answers using elementary math.

When run through Google's interview process for software developers, ChatGPT performed well enough to earn itself a job as a level 3 coder. It outperformed 85% of the 4 million users that have taken one particular Python programming skills assessment on LinkedIn. There are many other examples. Obviously, schools and universities will need to rethink their processes in the face of a technology that can easily game them.

It should be noted that those working on natural language generators are also developing tools to detect the output of one. OpenAI itself has done work on the subject -- though at present, they've only got a 26% success rate, with a 9% false positive rate. Actually, the face-off between an NLG and an NLG detector is not surprising, since many such tools learn their capabilities using "adversarial networks" -- that is, one system trying to create work and pass it off as human, the other trying to guess which work is real and which is AI-generated. Over millions of iterations, the first system gets more convincing at generating output, while the second gets better at detecting an AI. There's some talk of seeding AI-generated text with some kind of hidden code that makes it easier to detect, but it's hard to see how it could be made to work without brain-damaging the NLG. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 20 FEB 24] BRAIN STIMULATION?

* BRAIN STIMULATION? For a decade or more, there's been discussion of using electrical stimulation of the brain to, so the idea goes, improve cognition and well-being -- the scheme being discussed here in 2014. The idea behind "transcranial electrical stimulation (TES)" is to deliver a painless, weak electrical current to the brain through electrodes placed externally on the scalp, in hopes of exciting, disrupting, or synchronizing signals in the brain to improve function. There are two variants, one using AC electricity, the other using DC electricity, of course being designated "TACS" and "TDCS" respectively.

TES is controversial, there being an argument over its effectiveness. An article from NATURE.com ("Does Brain Stimulation Boost Memory & Focus?" by Emily Waltz, 26 May 2023) discussed a "meta analysis" that says: "Probably."

A team under Robert Reinhart -- director of the cognitive and clinical neuroscience laboratory at Boston University in Massachusetts -- inspected over a hundred studies of TACS. They concluded that TACS leads to moderate improvements in attention, long-term memory, working memory, the ability to process new information and solve problems, and other high-level cognitive processes.

The meta-analysis may prove useful in refining future work on TES. The report found that improvements in cognition were generally better after completion of treatment than during treatment, and that higher intensity stimulation isn't necessarily more beneficial. The report also found that researchers who used simulations to predict how electrical currents would move through the brain led to more effective ways to arrange the electrodes on the head of a patient.

The report also pointed out that 98 out of 102 studies were not "pre-registered" -- meaning investigators hadn't mapped out their experiments in journals or on websites like "clinicaltrials.gov" at the outset. This can lead to "publication bias", in which positive results are more likely to be published than negative ones. That's because journals are likely to ignore studies that are not pre-registered and then fail.

Not everyone has been impressed by the meta-analysis. Alvaro Pascual-Leone -- a neurologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston -- says: "The problem I have with this paper is that it lumps together studies that are effectively different interventions." He says that studies in the report differed greatly from each other in terms of which parts of the brain were targeted, the arrangement of the electrodes on the scalp, and the frequency and intensity of the electrical current. In addition, the cognitive tasks that the participants performed were different in each study, and the participants themselves varied just as widely: young and old, healthy and with disease.

Pascual-Leone says: "This [report] is a comprehensive effort that provides a nice overview of the field as a whole, and that is all commendable, but it's a mixing and matching of different things, so I'm not really sure we learn a whole lot." Grover replies that the team aimed to perform an "expansive analysis" of its general effectiveness. But he acknowledges that future analysis should be more specific.

The jury is, in effect, still out. The ambiguity of the results suggests that if TDCS has any effect, it isn't dramatic. The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved a TES therapy for any disease -- but other regulators, such as those in Europe, Brazil, China, Australia and Mexico, have approved tDCS for treatment of some conditions, such as depression or pain.

[MON 19 FEB 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 7

WED 14 FEB 24: An article from REUTERS.com was titled: "Do Not Read Too Much Into Biden, Trump Verbal Stumbles, Experts Caution". With the proper response being: "Sensible people don't. They do, however, pay attention to Trump's fascistic rhetoric." Even that shouldn't be taken too seriously, because the odds of Trump going back to the White House instead of jail are very low.

Donald Trump is pushing for his daughter-in-law Lara to become co-chair of the GOP, with Lara saying that if she is elected, "every single penny" of party funding will be spent toward Donald Trump. Never-Trumper Ron Filipkowski replied on X/Twitter: "I just want to make sure as many Republican candidates around the country can see this as possible. Suckers."

I replied to him: "I had to think about that for a second. Not only will Trump funnel all the money into his legal defense, he will drain all the money for the campaigns of down-ballot GOP. To which I ask: SO WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE?"

* There was actually an election yesterday, in New York's 3rd Congressional District, to replace disgraced Congressman George Santos. Democrat Tom Suozzi trounced Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip by roughly 54% to 46%, in a district that leans Right. The polls had been saying the race was "too close to call", but it was not close. Following the election results, some of the media kept harping about Democrat weaknesses. Somehow, it has not soaked in to everyone that Trump's Clown-Car Coup ensured his doom.

As I commented on Spout: It stinks to be MAGA these days -- they're all downwind of Big Skunk Trump. And the media is like: "Smell? What smell?"

* In Ukraine War news, the AFU hit the landing ship CESAR KUNIKOV of the Black Sea Fleet with five kamikaze drone boats, sending it to the bottom -- to join the BSF corvette IVANOVETS, sunk by six k-drone boats about a week earlier. It appears the Ukrainian offensive against the Black Sea Fleet is picking up pace, and the prospect of the Black Sea becoming a Ukrainian lake is getting closer. The AFU showed off a small drone submarine, nicknamed the MARICHKA, a few months ago, but has said nothing about it since. We may hear more about it soon enough.

THU 15 FEB 24: The US Department of Justice has indicted one Alexander Smirnoff for "false statement & obstruction crimes" -- specifically related to the tales Smirnoff told about alleged corrupt activities of President Joe Biden. Federal investigators do not like being lied to.

The driving force behind the indictment was Special Counsel David Weiss, who has been conducting an investigation of Hunter Biden, the president's son. Originally, Weiss had proposed to let HB off easy on charges of tax evasion and illegal ownership of a firearm, but the courts didn't accept that. With nothing else to do, Weiss then threw the book at HB.

Now it gets devious. HB's indictment was so over-the-top that seems implausible, if not impossible, that a jury will find HB guilty. Weiss may be banking on it. Smirnoff has been a key figure in the House MAGA's efforts to impeach Joe Biden; could Smirnoff's indictment be a shot in their direction? It almost seems like Weiss has pretended to cave in to MAGA, while then working to cut them off at the knees. More to come.

* Less significantly, there was a LINCOLN PROJECT video on YouTube that mocked Trump's mental decline, with an online commenter saying: "I'd rather have a president with 80 years of experience behind him, than one with 91 felony charges ahead of him."

FRI 16 FEB 24: The death of Russian dissident Aleksey Navalnyy in prison from an ailment was announced today. He was 47 years old. With his death, it would seem that all protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime have been snuffed out. The only glimmer of resistance that persists is in the form of the campaign of sabotage being conducted to undermine the Russia war effort against Ukraine. Nobody really knows what's going on there, however, so I tend to attribute such events to poltergeists.

Of more direct concern to Americans is the judgement passed down by New York Justice Arthur Engoron to assess penalties for Donald Trump in his fraud case. It came to $355 million USD -- $450 million USD after interest charges were factored in -- and Trump can't do business in New York State for three years.

I was wondering before the trial was announced: "Whatever happened to NY AG Tish James' civil fraud suit against Trump?" I asked, and now I have been answered. This is a big deal: it's hard to see how Trump's bogus business empire can survive it. It isn't enough to just lock him up: he needs to be ruined so he has no more capability to do harm. That almost feels vindictive, but he deserves every bit of it.

A GoFundMe was established for Trump's legal fund. It was pointed out that GoFundMe's rules prohibit fundraising for criminal defense, and it is likely GoFundMe will step on it. I commented: "What's next? A GoFundMe for Islamic terrorists?" It's amazing that people honestly think Trump has a chance to become president. I also commented: "Trump's fallen from the top of the loser tree, and is hitting every branch on the way down."

* Today was something of a landmark: I finally bailed out of X/Twitter, it was just too much of a trashpit to put up with any more. I probably wasn't alone: groups that track trollbot activity say that it reached 75% of traffic on X/Twitter on Super Bowl weekend. 50% is seen as very bad. Reminded me of seeing PCs back in the 1990s that were infected by malware and reduced to uselessness. I thought that I would retain my X/Twitter account, just in case, but I later decided enough was enough, and deleted it. It was a relief.

SAT 17 FEB 24: Ukrainian officials have now announced that the city of Avdiivka, near Donetsk City, has fallen to Russian forces. The Russians will crow, but they paid in buckets of blood to take a wrecked city, no doubt strewn with booby-traps. In the meantime, the AFU fell back to a pre-prepared line of defense. Rinse & repeat.

* Having abandoned Twitter, I'm still trying to figure out how best to use Spoutible and Mastodon. One thing I've now fully realized is that Spoutible is currently dominated by the hysterical Left, who are long on intense emotion, short on good sense, and can't deliver. I don't engage them any more, and block them if I can't avoid them. It's quiet now. I think the road is upwards in my new world of social media, but it will take time to get there.

Not so incidentally, today I got a follower on Spoutible and checked it out. It was an obvious fake, a brand-new user with no hint of being a real person. I immediately reported it; to my surprise, it was gone about a minute later. That says a lot for Spoutible.

AND SO ON: German TV channel ZDF interviewed General Oleksandr Syrskyy, the new head of Armed Forces Ukraine, who had a number of interesting comments about the asymmetric tactics being used by the AFU:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Unsurprisingly, the general made no mention of escalation of the special-operations war in the Russian rear, nor of the strengthening drone war against Russia's military assets and oil infrastructure. The AFU may remain on the defense on the battlefield, but a passive defense won't win the war.

* Pop star Taylor Swift has gone mega-viral and is on top of the world these days. Likenesses of her are everywhere, with some mentions made of AI-generated porn shots of her causing trouble on social media. I fortunately haven't run across such things, but I was pleasantly surprised to find her rendered as a steampunk heroine, like out of the BIOSHOCK games. Further investigation showed there are dozens of Taylor Swift steampunk images out there, produced by GAI hobbyists.

Copying one such image here presents no problems because copyrights for GAI images are such a dodgy business -- and they're copying Taylor Swift in the first place. Incidentally, of course GAI pinup girls are flooding the internet these days, most of them being to a similar pattern, playing up comic characters like Wonder Woman or Supergirl, as well as game and cartoon characters. However, I ran across one, "Bouff123" on DeviantArt, that was definitively out of the box, and had to follow up.

Bouff123 is a Briton, I think male, focused on high-glamour images, photo-realistic except for preposterous bouffant hairdos. What was unusual was that his subjects tended to be older -- in their 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s in a few cases -- to show that older women can be gorgeous, too. He also likes to play up hefty women, built round and heavily but not fat, and that worked as well. As of the moment, however, he's playing up pirate queens. That made me think of one such character from an anime, named "Umi-Hebi" -- "Sea-Snake". Great name for a pirate queen.

[FRI 16 FEB 24] JOE BIDEN (13)

* JOE BIDEN (13): At the outset of Joe's first term in the Senate, Congress was increasingly preoccupied by the disintegration of the Nixon Administration. On 17 June 1972, five men were busted by DC police during a night-time break-in of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate Building. They had links to the Nixon White House, and very slowly the trail was traced back towards the Oval Office. There's actually no evidence that Nixon ordered the break-in, his reaction to the news of it being that it was idiotic, but under Nixon's direction, efforts to cover up the trail became more and more criminal.

Joe Biden had little to say about it, other than to counsel caution in the investigation, saying that it should proceed, but there should be no jumping to conclusions. Nixon, under threat of impeachment, finally resigned on 8 August 1974, to be replaced by his vice president, former House Speaker Gerry Ford. Ford gave Nixon an unconditional pardon on 8 September 1974 -- much to Joe's outrage.

There was a widespread belief that Ford had made a deal with Nixon, but nobody familiar with Ford thought he was corrupt -- in fact, those who knew him well regarded him as reasonable, fair, and generous, a "congressman's congressman". Ford believed that Nixon, having resigned, had acknowledged his failings and been punished enough. Ford saw no reason to drag him and the Republican Party through the thornbrush any longer. Like it or not, Ford did exactly what would have been expected that he would do, and may well have been expected by Nixon all along without discussion with Ford.

Joe was still a freshman in the Senate and was primarily focused on Delaware affairs, but as a new young face he had enough public visibility to be seen as an asset to the Democrats. In an interview, he made his priorities clear:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

His patrons in Congress understood that, but still felt he had a lot of promise. In the lead-up to the 1974 mid-term elections he was on the road, delivering speeches at a wide range of venues across the USA, even in Hawaii. It was a hectic exercise, with Joe trying to ensure he was prepared for the events while shuttling from city to city, stealing sleep when he could.

Senate Majority Leader Mansfield boosted Joe by giving him a seat on the high-profile Foreign Relations Committee, Joe having made it clear he was particularly interested in foreign affairs. He was still proceeding cautiously, making sure of his footing, but he wasn't feeling timid; Joe was rarely timid.

Not long after he became a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, the members had a meeting with Dr. Henry Kissinger, Ford's secretary of state, inherited from the Nixon Administration. Joe got mixed up on where the meeting was supposed to be, and dashed in late. When the floor was opened to questions, Joe was recognized -- but when he spoke, the instinctively and notoriously arrogant Kissinger cut him off, saying to Mansfield: "Mr. Chairman, I thought no staff were allowed."

An aide scribbled on a note: "BIDEN, D-DEL" -- and passed it to Kissinger, who said to Joe: "Oh, I apologize, Senator BID-DEN."

Joe shot back: "No problem, Secretary DULLES." The awkward moment passed, and the meeting moved on. As far as President Ford went, Joe had little directly to do with him. One thing that couldn't have escaped Joe's notice was that Ford, having done a few clumsy things on camera, then became marked by the news media as a clumsy oaf. He wasn't; like Joe, Gerry Ford had been an accomplished athlete in his prime -- but Ford's every little fumble was played up nationally, and he became the butt of jokes. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 15 FEB 24] SPACE NEWS

[01 JAN 24] IN SR / PSLV / XPOSAT -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0340 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "XPoSat" X-ray astronomy satellite into orbit. The POEM 3 payload assembly was also flown as a component of the upper stage. XPoSat had a launch mass of 470 kilograms (1,025 pounds) and a design life of five years. It carried two instruments: "Polarimeter Instrument in X-rays (POLIX)" and "X-ray Spectroscopy & Timing (XSPECT)".

The POLIX instrument was designed to study medium-energy X-rays, with energies between eight and 30 kilo-electronvolts. POLIX was developed by the Raman Research Institute (RRI) and ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Center (URSC). It used a collimator to limit its field of view to a single bright X-ray source at a time. X-rays passing through the collimator then scattered electrons. Four detectors around the scatterer measured the scattered X-rays, inferring their polarity by recording the direction in which they were scattered. XSPECT was an X-ray spectrometer that supported POLIX's observations. XSPECT observed X-rays at energies between 0.8 and 15 kilo-electronvolts.

The PSLV's upper stage was fitted with solar panels to support the POEM 3 payloads, which included:

• "Dust Experiment (DEX)", to measure levels of interplanetary dust in low-Earth orbit.
  
  
• "Fuel Cell Power System (FPCS)" to test a fuel cell in orbit.
  
  
• Two propulsion-test payloads from Bellatrix Aerospace, including "RUDRA 0.3 HPGP" and "ARKA-200" -- the first with a monopropellant thruster using environmentally friendly propellants, the second with a Hall-effect thruster.
  
  
• Another "green" thruster from Inspecity Space.
  
  
• "Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Technologies / Technology Demonstrator (LEAP-TD)" from Dhruva Space to demonstrate smallsat technologies.
  
  
• "Radiation Shielding Experimental Module (RSEM)" from TakeMe2Space, to investigate the use of tantalum coating to protect satellite components from radiation.
  
  
• "BeliefSat 0", an AMSAT from the KJ Somaiya Institute of Technology.
  
  
• "Women Engineered Satellite (WESAT)" from the LBS Institute of Technology for Women in Mumbai to perform solar research.

[03 JAN 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-9 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0231 UTC (local time + 8) to put 21 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[03 JAN 24] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / OVZON 3 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2304 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "Ovzon 5" geostationary comsat into orbit.

[05 JAN 24] CN JQ / KUAIZHOU 1A / TIANMU-1 15-18 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0909 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianmu-1 15-18" satellite into orbit.

[08 JAN 24] USA-C CC / VULCAN CENTAUR / PEREGRINE (FAILURE) -- A Vulcan Centaur was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0718 UTC (local time + 5) to sent the "Peregrine" lunar lander to the Moon. The lander malfunctioned and could not land.

[09 JAN 24] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2C / EINSTEIN -- A Long March 2C booster was launched at 0703 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Xichang launch center to put the "Einstein" X-ray observatory into orbit.

[11 JAN 24] CN JQ / KUAIZHOU-1A / TIANXING-1 02 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0352 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianxing-1 02" space environment satellite into orbit.

[11 JAN 24] CN YS / GRAVITY-1 / YUNYAO-1 18:20 -- A Gravity-1 Ceres booster was launched from a Yellow Sea platform at 0053 UTC (local time - 8) to put the three "Yunyao-1 18:20" satellites into orbit. This was the first flight of the Gravity-1 booster. Gravity-1 had three solid-fueled stages and four solid-fueled strap-on boosters. The booster's payload to low Earth orbit was 6,500 kilograms (14,330 pounds).

[12 JAN 24] JAPAN TG / H2A / IGS OPTICAL 8 -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0444 UTC (local time - 9) to put the "Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) Optical 8" military surveillance satellite into orbit.

[14 JAN 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-10 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0852 UTC (local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[15 JAN 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-37 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0152 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[17 JAN 24] CN WC / LONG MARCH 7 / TIANZHOU 7 -- A Long March 7 booster was launched from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island at 1427 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianzhou 7" freighter capsule into orbit, on a supply mission to the Chinese Tiangong space station. The capsule payload included the "Nanjing (Baiyi 08)" edusat, for deployment later.

[18 JAN 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON AXIOM 3 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2149 UTC (local time + 5), carrying a Crew Dragon space capsule on its third commercial crewed flight to the International Space Station. The mission, managed by Axiom Space, left the crew on the ISS for eight days. The crew included commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, previously of NASA, along with Walter Villadei of the Italian Air Force, Alper Gezeravci of the Turkish Air Force, and Swedish test pilot Marcus Wandt of the ESA.

[20 JAN 24] IR / QAEM 100 / SORAYA -- An Iranian Qaem 100 booster put the "Soraya" satellite into orbit. Details were not announced.

[23 JAN 24] CN JQ / KINETICA 1 / TAIJING x 5 -- A Kinetica 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0403 GMT (local time - 8) to put five "Taijing" Earth remote sensing satellites into orbit for MinoSpace of China. They were designated "Taijing-1 03 / -2 02 / -2-04 / -3 02 / -4 03".

The Kinetica 1 booster was developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It was a four-stage solid propellant light launch vehicle, with a first stage apparently derived from the DF-31 long-range intercontinental ballistic missile. It could place about 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) into low-Earth orbit.

[24 JAN 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-11 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0035 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[28 JAN 24] IR / SIMORGH / SORAYA -- An Iranian Simorgh booster put the three "Hatef 1", "Keyhan 1", and "Mahda" surveillance satellites into orbit.

[29 JAN 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-38 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0110 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[29 JAN 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-12 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0557 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[30 JAN 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / CYGNUS 20 (NG 20) -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1707 UTC (local time + 5) to put the 20th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 20", into space on an International Space Station support mission. It docked with the ISS 40 hours later.

[31 JAN 24] NZ / ELECTRON / SKYLARK x 4 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 0634 UTC (local time - 13) to put four "Skylark" 16U CubeSats into orbit for space situational awareness (SSA) company NorthStar Earth & Space. The Skylarks were built by Spire and carry sensors to enable them to track objects as small as 5 centimeters (2 inches) across in low Earth orbit, and 40 centimeters (16 inches) across in geostationary orbit. The four satellites were the first in an initial constellation of 12 spacecraft, with the next eight to be launched on two future Electron missions by 2026.

[WED 14 FEB 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (1)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (1): As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("ChatGPT: The Friendly Face Of Your AI Replacement" by Loz Blain, 07 February 2023), artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been growing by leaps and bounds. In 2022, startup OpenAI released the "Dall-E 2" image generator, which could produce artwork from text descriptions -- and then followed it up late in the year with "ChatGPT", a "chatbot", or more generally a "natural language generator". It was an overnight success, acquiring more than 100 million users in its first two months.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and a number of other venture capitalists. OpenAI declared as a goal that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible."

ChatGPT is based on the OpenAI "generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)" system; it's essentially a delivery system for the GPT "engine". In any case, there had been multitudes of AI chatbots before, but not one like this. ChatGPT was an artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of billions of words, scouring the internet to the cutoff date of June 2021, to produce "GPT 3.5". ChatGPT was also trained in vast numbers of written human conversations, with its learning guided by supervisors to improve its output.

ChatGPT is an example of what is referred to as "generative artificial intelligence" or "gen-AI" -- meaning that instead of giving a bottom-line result when given data, it creates when given a request. ChatGPT can write as well as, or better than, most humans. It can generate authoritative-sounding prose on nearly any topic in an instant of such quality that it's often very difficult to distinguish from a human writer. It formulates arguments that appear well-researched, and builds key points toward a conclusion. Its prose seems coherent and fluid, never stilted or awkward,

It remembers an entire conversation, and clarifies or elaborates on points if asked to. If what it writes isn't satisfactory, it will rewrite the text, sometimes asking what it specifically needs to fix. It can write in a wide range of styles, generating as much text as desired. Websites like CNET, Buzzfeed and others are now starting to use ChatGPT to generate their material -- if cautiously. ChatGPT text always sounds confident, but it is focused on text manipulation, with the result that it can get things completely, sometimes generating "rampant factual errors and apparent plagiarism," as well as outdated information.

In other words, it's not well suited to generating texts on factual matters of complexity. It can generate fiction perfectly well: custom bedtime stories, teen fiction, screenplays, and elaborate adventure games. It can generate song lyrics, and then tweak the lyrics in any desired direction. It can also analyze, summarize or critique any kind of writing you throw into it. It can generate an instant book report, outlining major themes, scenes, and character studies.

ChatGPT is even capable of writing code in a number of languages, for a wide range of purposes. Given a plain English prompt, it can turn out working code snippets rapidly, It can step a user through building an application, and then provide dummy data to test the application. It can debug, comment, and document the code. It can, again, get things very wrong, and it only works well for straightforward programming jobs. It will improve in time as it learns more.

And then there's search engines, or maybe a step beyond them. We can already ask Google simple straightforward questions and get an immediate answer: "What is the distance from Los Angeles to New York City?" -- gives the reply: "2,796.5 miles". We could ask ChatGPT almost any question and get an answer in plain language -- and then ask follow-up questions, or enquire about sources, or ask it to refine its answer.

Microsoft has pumped about $10 billion USD into OpenAI, and has announced that the company has integrated a version of ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing. In normal usage, Bing still gives a list of links, but it also provides GPT-derived answer box on the side. There's also a "chat" tab that links to the normal ChatGPT interface. Microsoft is also building the AI tech into other of its products, such as Word, Powerpoint and Outlook, where it'll automate various writing tasks -- and also into its Edge browser. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 13 FEB 24] THE FEDIVERSE

* THE FEDIVERSE: As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("The Fediverse, explained" by David Pierce, 7 February 2024), there's a buzz going around on the internet about the "Fediverse", with consider muddle on what it means -- seeming reminiscent of the internet "multiverse" hype that came and went a few years ago.

Actually, it's a well-defined idea, if one with open-ended possibilities: the fediverse is an "interconnected social platform ecosystem" based on an open protocol called "ActivityPub", which allows users to port their content, data, and follower graph between networks.

In simpler terms -- using the classic example characters of Alice and Bob -- the fediverse is as if X/Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and made them all interoperable so Alice could post anything from anywhere, and all her followers would be guaranteed to see it. And if she wanted to leave one platform for another, she could bring all her content, all her followers, all her everything with her.

The concept has been around for decades, and the protocol has existed in some for about a decade. It's an idea whose time has come, however -- the number-one reason being Elon Musk's take-over of Twitter, turning it into a haven for trolls under the new name of "X". People who had found connection and community on Twitter suddenly found themselves stuck in a bad neighborhood. Millions of creators, who spent years building followings and businesses on these platforms, found out how quickly the ground could shift disastrously under their feet.

Mobility has suddenly become important: if one social platform doesn't work out, then just shift to another one. Users then have full ownership of their content; any one platform is just where it happens to reside for the time being.

The ActivityPub protocol has some similarities to an email system: it has specifications for senders and receivers, and supports a wide range of content, with postings in a universally-understood format. In principle, one user would have the same username on all platforms. ActivityPub isn't the only fediverse scheme: Bluesky uses one called the "AT Protocol", and there's also "Farcaster" and "Nostr", and possibly some others.

The fediverse will only work if there's a single standard, of course, but ActivityPub has a good chance of becoming that standard -- the big reason is that it's overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium. Threads, currently the most popular of the X/Twitter alternatives, is supposedly going to get on board ActivityPub. That hasn't happened yet, but Meta has been promising to federate Threads, so Alice would be able to read Threads posts in Mastodon, or post from Mastodon and see it in Threads, with Bob's replies on Threads being read by Alice on Mastodon.

Mastodon is a funny case, because it's a federated social platform unto itself. It has some resemblance to Reddit, which is a collection of semi-independent "subreddits", under a common roof. Mastodon is a collection of "instances", each running on its own server, federated among each other, and potentially federated with other social platforms. There are other players in the fediverse at present, including "Pixelfed", something like Instagram; "Lemmy", something like Reddit; "PeerTube", something like YouTube; "Friendica", something like Facebook; "BookWyrm", something like Goodreads; and "Misskey", something like X/Twitter, out of Japan. They're all small players right now, hoping to leverage the fediverse into greater success, but others players are coming on board.

With the collapse of X/Twitter, the question has been persistently posed: what comes after it? There may not actually be a single "replacement" for it as such, the new reality instead being a federation of specialized social platforms, focused on different categories of users. For the moment, however, X/Twitter -- as nasty as it has become -- is hanging in there, as it Facebook, and neither is likely to be federated. What happens over the horizon is hard to see, as is the impact of the fediverse on the all-important issue of social-media moderation. Will the fediverse make life easier for trolls, allowing them to carpet-bomb platforms? Or will there be protocols to ensure that the Black Hats aren't welcome anywhere? We will have to see.

[MON 12 FEB 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 6

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The big news in the Ukraine War this last week was the retirement of General Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, from the outset of the war the commander of Armed Forces Ukraine. This was a bit of a shock to those of us who follow the war, but retired US Army General Mark Hertling provided some perspective:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Zaluzhnyy is being replaced by Colonel-General Oleksandr Syryskyy, an officer with extensive combat service. He is Russian-born, incidentally, having come to Ukraine as a teenager, to serve with Soviet forces there. When Ukraine became independent, he elected to stay there, and has been with the Ukrainian Army from its inception.

Reading between the lines, the fall of Zaluzhnyy appears to have been driven by his insistence that the AFU needed hundreds of thousands of new troops. Zelenskyy could only reply that was politically and practically impossible: widening the net for conscription would have been very unpopular, and it would have also looted Ukraine of people who were needed to keep society running. Since Zaluzhnyy made it clear he could not win the war without the additional troops, Zelenskyy had no alternative but to find someone who felt he could win without them.

The key appears to be "asymmetric warfare": instead of fighting the Russians head-on in brutal shoot-outs, use tactics that require fewer resources and the Russians find it hard to counter:

• The Ukrainians dig in heavily along the line of contact and let the Russians smash themselves against Ukrainian defenses. The Ukrainians give up ground if they must, falling back to a new prepared line of defense. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians hammer the Russians with missiles, drones, and artillery; they also make limited attacks on weak points in the Russian lines to keep the Russians off balance.
  
  
• The Ukrainians send special forces teams deep into the Donbas and Crimea, supporting them with cargo drones and gliders, proving long-range fire support with missiles and drones. The special forces teams attack rail lines, blow bridges, call in strikes on ammunition dumps and Russian headquarters, and generally raise hell.
  
  
• The Ukrainians continue their drone strikes deep into Russian territory, in particular targeting oil infrastructure. Sanctions are already draining the Russian economy; crippling the oil infrastructure will bring it to its knees. Sea drone attacks continue to whittle down the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

Ukrainian asymmetric strategy is heavily dependent on drones, to compensate for Ukraine's lack of manpower -- including tactical reconnaissance and attack aerial drones, long-range attack drones, sea drones, and emerging ground drones. General Kyrylo Budanov of the Ukrainian HUR military intelligence service has demonstrated the capabilities of asymmetric warfare. He isn't really in a position to run the whole show, but it is likely he will have significant contributions to overall strategy as the AFU re-invents itself once again.

Incidentally, both Zaluzhnyy and Budanov were awarded the Hero of Ukraine medal. Zaluzhnyy received it gratefully, with some appearance of feeling a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Budanov was, as always, deadpan -- possibly excited, but nobody could tell.

* In the meantime, the push to drive Ukraine War funding through Congress is moving along ... slowly, as things generally do in Congress. A bill's going through the Senate, and then will go to the House.

Will Speaker Mike Johnson refuse to put the bill up to a vote? He would be in trouble. This last week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and 67 co-sponsors announced they were pushing a non-binding resolution declaring "former President Donald J. Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof."

Of course, since some of these people were at the Capitol Building on 6JAN21, this is pure trolling. The significant part is that 68 representatives are only a third of the GOP House caucus, and less than a fifth of the House. We can reasonably assume that's the number of MAGA in the House, and they make up the pro-Putin caucus. They don't have the votes to win.

The crunch is that, if Mike Johnson does allow the vote, the House MAGA are likely to evict him. He's doomed if he does, doomed if he doesn't. Stay tuned.

* The slow fadeout of X/Twitter has been driving my push into other social media. I've been upping my game on Spoutible, which is much like X/Twitter, but not nearly as popular. One thing I've started to do is block hostiles there; getting into fights with people works against my purposes for being on Spout, so I get rid of the hostiles without hesitation. It's less an issue of me not seeing them any more than them not seeing me: I have no trouble with them, we're all happy.

One of the problems with Spoutible is the lack of news media feeds, notably on sci-tech topics, so I've just taken to echoing articles every day. I've never concerned myself with followers before, but I think I should start building up a list. That will work well, giving me the opportunity to promote my ebooks.

Spoutible allows me to cross-post to the Bluesky and Mastodon social-media platforms; I post an article on Spoutible, it's automatically posted to them as well. Bluesky, however, is rinky-dink, being kinda braindead: I ship it a posting with an article link, it won't follow the link. There's not much interesting activity on it, either. However, I splashed into Mastodon like a duck into water -- it's a surprisingly rich environment -- and have been quickly expanding my footprint there.

Mastodon, not really incidentally, isn't a single social-media platform, but a set of different mastodons, each on its own server. I'm on the currently biggest one, "mastodon.social", but it doesn't matter which one I'm on, because they're all part of the same network. I was wondering what would replace X/Twitter, but now I doubt it will be any one social-media platform, instead a pile of interlinked social-media platforms. I'm getting in on the ground floor.

[FRI 09 FEB 24] JOE BIDEN (12)

* JOE BIDEN (12): Of course, in the Senate Joe Biden was not merely a freshman, he was also notably young for a senator -- so young that he was sometimes mistaken for a page. The Senate working on a seniority basis, he necessarily started out at the bottom. He did also get a fair amount of help from Democratic leadership in the Senate, with Mike Mansfield telling Joe to drop by once a week so Mansfield, as Joe put it, could "take my temperature". Hubert Humphrey also took an interest, early on taking Joe to Oxford in the UK as part of a delegation, while Teddy Kennedy liked to take Joe to the gym and introduce him to senior members of both parties. Joe found it a unique experience to introduced to his seniors, influential and nationally-known political figures, while they were buck naked.

Joe found Congress extraordinarily congenial, with good relationships across party and ideological lines. He met John Stennis of Mississippi, a long-time Dixiecrat and segregationist; when Stennis asked Joe what had brought him to Congress, Joe blurted out: "Civil rights, sir." Stennis merely smiled and said: "Civil rights? Good, good, good. Glad to have you here."

Joe rubbed along well with his Southern colleagues, though he didn't get off to a good start with James Eastland, another Mississippi Dixiecrat. When Joe delivered a speech proposing campaign finance reform, there was cold silence in response. Eastland commented that Joe was the youngest senator to ever come into Congress -- Joe didn't correct him by pointing out he was the second-youngest -- and then concluded: "Ya'll keep making speeches like this, and you gonna be the youngest one-term senator in the history of America."

Gradually, Eastland warmed to Joe, to the point where he'd occasionally drop into Joe's office to chat. Knowing how long Eastland had been in Congress, Joe asked what was the biggest change he had seen. Eastland simply said: "Air conditionin'." Eastland explained that, early on in his congressional career, come May the Capitol Building would turn into a ghastly hotbox, and so everyone went home in May and June. "Then we put in air conditionin', stayed year round, and ruined America."

Joe was making his adjustments into Congress, but his first priority was his two sons. They were something of his lifeline to the world; he would always tuck them into bed. Sometimes, on days when they weren't in school, they'd come with him to the Capitol, finding things to do to keep occupied, and also listening in on meetings -- but only listening, Joe having made it clear they were to be seen but not heard. Some in Congress thought Joe wasn't sufficiently dedicated to being a senator, which traditionally involved a lot of after-hours schmoozing. Over time, his colleagues pressured him to attend more dinners, and he did so selectively.

At the outset, Joe got seats in two low-profile committees: Public Works, along with Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs. He plodded away diligently at them both, and also did a fair share of international traveling -- generally at the insistence of "The Boss", which is what Joe called Hubert Humphrey. Jimmy often went along with Joe, sometimes at the suggestion of Humphrey, with Jimmy become an informal aide and travel companion.

With such time as he could spare, Joe also kept up his social connections in Delaware, attending baptisms, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. One gratification was that the City of Wilmington set up a new park with athletic facilities, to be named the "Neilia Hunter Biden Park". That did, however, underline the gaping hole in his life from the deaths of Neilia and Naomi. He often had to deal with deep, suppressed anger. Family helped a lot -- with a particular plus being that his close friend Jack Owen had become his brother-in-law.

Valerie's marriage to Bruce Saunders had gone south and they had divorced. It was amicable, as divorces go, but it was still a big deal for a good Catholic girl. She had met Jack on a visit to Syracuse Law School, and it hadn't gone well; they just did not get along, and when Jack was campaigning with Joe on his Senate campaign, they were careful to stay out of each other's way. However, one night Joe brought Jack home for dinner, with Valerie and Jack headed for yet another squabble when the dinner was over -- only to be overwhelmed by the absurdity and break out laughing. Valerie found Jack easy to confide in because the two knew where they stood with each other; one thing led to another and they finally got married. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 08 FEB 24] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Startups Are Producing Real Dairy Without A Cow In Sight", 22 July 2023), there's been intensive work on substitute foods in recent decades, for a big example vegetable-based meats. Milk alternatives are also available, made from soybeans, almonds, and oats. Players include Remilk of Israel and Perfect Day of California -- sells synthetic milk, ice cream and cream cheese.

A British cheese-making startup, Better Dairy, leverages off yeasts instead. These microbes are fed sugar, which they then convert into milk proteins, produced ersatz milk through a process called "precision fermentation". The approach has a number of advantages:

• No lactose in the synthetic milk, much of humanity being lactose-intolerant.
  
  
• No use of antibiotics needed to keep cows healthy.
  
  
• Can be set up in any place where humans live comfortably, while using substantially less resources than animal production.

Producing milk with steel fermenters does have drawbacks, however -- one being that buying a fermenter is much more expensive than buying a cow, another being that steel fermenters don't give consumers the same warm feeling as Holstein cows. There's also the issue of regulation. The startups are confident they will get approval for their products, since precision fermentation is already used for flavorings and insulin. However, there are picky labeling issues to be addressed, and the approvals take time: about nine months in the USA, twice that long in Europe.

[ED: Synthetic foods seem to be going through the classic technology "hype cycle", having been played up until recently, but now going through the inevitable "trough of disappointment" as they didn't catch on as the optimists expected they would. No worries, now we go up the road of gradual improvement.]

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("How Artificial Intelligence Sharpens Blurry Thermal Vision Images" by Luis Melecio-Zambrano, 24 August 2023), thermal infrared imaging systems are nothing new and familiar to the public. Their images give patterns of light and dark depending on how warm the elements in the image are. Since the images are based on "heat glow", they tend to be fuzzy.

Bao Fanglin -- a theoretical physicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana -- and colleagues used a thermal camera that can distinguish between different wavelengths of infrared light, then filtered its output through an AI network to untangle information from the device to reveal the temperature, texture and type of material of objects in an image, obtaining clear and detailed images.

The camera could also be used to measure distance, making it in principle a good choice for self-driving vehicles, which are more inclined to use expensive active-lidar sensors. However, the lab lashup is the size of a crate, costs about a million USD, and takes about a second to process an image. It's a start.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Form Energy's Ultra-Cheap Iron-Air Batteries To Get $760M Factory" by Loz Blain, 9 January 2023), an iron-air battery is much bigger than a lithium battery of comparable capacity -- but it's also much cheaper, making it well-suited to renewable energy storage installations.

Form Energy of Boston claims its iron-air battery systems will provide a hundred hour-plus grid-scale energy storage at a tenth the price of lithium "big battery" installations. Form Energy is now building a factory in West Virginia to produce its iron-air batteries, each of which is about the size of a washing machine and includes about 50 hefty iron-air cells, bathed in electrolyte. The company has major backers, including Bill Gates.

The cells effectively operate on a rust cycle, with the iron oxidizing to produce current, then being recharged to return the iron to pure metal. Iron being cheap and common, of course the batteries are cheap. They have long cycle lives and are readily recyclable as well. They don't charge or discharge very fast, suggesting that they will back up smaller arrays of lithium batteries that provide quick power. They are also much bigger than lithium batteries of comparable capacity, but in a fixed site that's not so much of a problem. Battery deliveries are expected to start in 2024.

[WED 07 FEB 24] BLAST FROM THE PAST (4)

* BLAST FROM THE PAST (4): When cosmic rays from a supernova hit the Earth's upper atmosphere, they generate cascades of secondary particles. Most fizzle out in secondary collisions, but muons -- heavy relatives of electrons that decay quickly, if much more slowly than most transient particles -- can reach the surface of the planet.

Organisms on Earth's surface would receive triple the normal radiation dose, equivalent to one or two CT scans per year. The team thought the effects were "not catastrophic" but could be detectable in the fossil record if, for example, certain vulnerable species disappeared while others survived.

In other research, Melott and two colleagues found that if a supernova exploded just 150 light-years away, instead than 300, the muon radiation would have hit marine animals surprisingly hard. Water blocks most particles that rain down from the sky, but muons can penetrate up to a kilometer. Marine creatures, usually shielded from nearly all radiation, would experience the largest relative increase in dose and suffer the worst. This links to an extinction of marine megafauna at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, only recently identified in the fossil record.

In 2022, supernova proponents suggested a similar scenario might explain a major extinction event 359 million years ago, at the end of the Devonian period. A team led by John Marshall of the University of Southampton had found that the spores of fernlike plants from the time suddenly became misshapen and dark. They blamed the changes on ultraviolet radiation, presumably caused by depletion of the ozone layer. A team of astronomers then suggested that a nearby supernova -- maybe a "mere" 60 light-years away -- could have overwhelmed the ozone layer and let the ultraviolet in

In a 2020 paper, Melott and Thomas took a further speculative leap. They noted that by ripping electrons from air molecules, secondary cosmic rays would have created pathways for lightning, making storms more likely, which would not only generate more nitrogen compounds but also spark wildfires. Intriguingly, a layer of soot has been found in the rock record in some parts of the world at the start of the Pleistocene. Melott and Thomas suggested that those supernova-induced forest fires may have pushed early humans out of the trees and onto the savanna, leading to bipedalism, larger brain size, and everything that followed.

Paleontologists weren't enthusiastic about that scenario, seeing it as having no particular justification. To see if they're any more traction to be had out of supernova speculations, more measurements are required. Tools for doing so are a concern; In 2019 TUM closed its AMS, leaving only ANU with an accelerator powerful enough to separate Fe60. Tracking down Pu244, which can probe further back in time, isn't easy either; it requires an AMS that emphasizes sensitivity instead of raw power, and Wallner says only a few in the world are up to the job. He secured funding to build a new AMS facility in Dresden, Germany, specializing in the heaviest elements, and is seeking funding for a new high-energy AMS to track down Fe60.

Astronomers would find direct observations of a nearby supernova very interesting, but it's not likely to happen for a long time. Betelgeuse, an unsettled red giant likely to blow up sometime in the next 100,000 years, has settled down recently and lies more than 500 light-years away. No star clusters with stars that are supernova candidates are approaching Earth. It can and will happen again, but not for a very long time. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 06 FEB 24] DRONE V DRONE

* DRONE V DRONE: Use of drones to intercept drones was discussed here in the past. As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Roadrunner Reusable Anti-Air Interceptor Breaks Cover" by Joseph Trevithick, 1 December 2023), US defense contractor Anduril has developed a jet-powered vertical take-off (VTOL) drone named the "Roadrunner", with performance that allows it to intercept subsonic cruise missiles as well as drones.

There are actually two versions, the "Roadrunner-R", which is reusable, and a version with a warhead, the "Roadrunner-M". In any case, the Roadrunner is a vertical take-off drone with curved delta wings and two little turbojet engines, plus four pop-out legs -- not fitted to the expendable Roadrunner-M -- to land on its tail. Performance is given as high subsonic. The Roadrunner-R can carry a variety of payloads. Anduril is coy about what targeting scheme and munition it uses to shoot down drones and missiles when operating as an interceptor.

The launch system for the Roadrunners is a self-contained box-like "hangar," also called a "Nest". The Nest performs monitoring of drone systems, plus environmental control. A single operator can use the nest to simultaneously launch and control multiple drones.

A company official says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

* In related news, as discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Drastic Increase In Army Coyote Drone Interceptor Purchase Plans" by Joseph Trevithick, 20 December 2023), the Ukraine War could be called the "First Drone War". Drones have been used in combat for decades, of course, but in the current conflict, they have become a decisive weapon.

Raytheon introduced the "Coyote" small drone almost two decades ago. It was powered by a pusher prop, had "switchblade" wings fore and aft plus twin pop-up tailfins, and could be used for intelligence-gathering or as a kamikaze drone. It was fired from a box launcher. More recently, the US Army acquired the Coyote as an anti-drone interceptor on a limited basis. The service has fielded mobile and fixed position Coyote counter-drone systems under the designations of the "Mobile, Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (M-LIDS)" and "Fixed Site LIDS (FS-LIDS)".

The current M-LIDS configuration consists of a 4x4 M-ATV mine-resistant vehicle with a turret armed with a two-round Coyote launcher, along with a 30-millimeter XM914 chain cannon. The turret has electro-optical sensors and a mast-mounted Ku-band radar for spotting and tracking targets. The all-up M-LIDS system also includes a second M-ATV vehicle equipped with additional sensors and electronic warfare systems. There's been talk in recent years about combining these capabilities onto a single platform, possibly one based on the 8x8 Stryker armored vehicle.

FS-LID is a two-part palletized system. One pallet has a four-round Coyote launcher and the sensor array, while the other has the Ku-band radar. The radars used on M-LIDS and FS-LIDS are related in design, but not identical, the palletized variant being bigger and more capable.

Now the Army wants to obtain 6,000 jet-powered Block 2 variants, which are fitted with an explosive warhead to destroy their target, and 700 more Block 3 versions with an unspecified "non-kinetic" payload -- possibly an electromagnetic pulse jammer, but nobody's saying. It has a radar seeker to hunt its target. The Block 2 Coyote looks very different from the original Coyote, featuring cruciform tailfins and strake wings. Performance is not known, but it may be able to intercept cruise missiles. In addition to the Block 2 and Block 3 interceptors, the Army plans to acquire 252 fixed launchers, 52 mobile launchers, 118 fixed Ku-band radars, and 33 mobile radars. Presumably, the new launch systems will be improvements of the existing LIDS systems.

[MON 05 FEB 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 5

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The fighting in Gaza has spilled over to the rest of the Middle East, with Yemen's Houthis launching drones and missiles at international shipping in the Red Sea. Counterstrikes from US and allied forces have inevitably followed.

Iranian-backed militias, supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds force -- more or less the special operations command of Iran -- have similarly been attacking US forces based in the region. The militias got lucky on 28 January, when they hit a US base in northeast Jordan, near the border with Syria, killing three American soldiers and wounding many more. Counterstrikes were of course expected, with the US government remaining generally mum on what was going to happen.

After US President Joe Biden stood on ceremony as the caskets of the three slain soldiers were brought home, around midnight on 3 February at least 85 targets in Iraq and Syria were attacked, the strikes spearheaded by Air Force B-1 bombers. Post-strike imagery shows some of the targets were flattened. Joe Biden issued a statement: "Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing."

The strikes were restrained; the US is engaged in continuous diplomacy to try to defuze the violence in the MidEast. There were complaints that the Biden Administration was timid in not attacking Iran directly -- but though the White House did announce that targets in Iran were not off-limits, that was clearly just to promote "strategic ambiguity". A direct attack on Iran would have been a disproportionate response. Besides, Iran is poised to build the Bomb any time the leadership wants to, being deterred primarily by the certainty that Saudi Arabia would get the Bomb, too. A direct attack on Iran might well push the leadership over the nuclear threshold.

* In news of the Ukraine War, on the night of 31 January / 1 February, five Ukrainian drone boats of the HUR intelligence service attacked the Russian Black Sea Fleet (RBSF) missile corvette IVANOVETS. Videos showed the vessel being hit with powerful explosions and sinking. Although the war may appear to be stagnant, the Ukrainians have clearly thrown the RBSF on the defensive, with estimates that it has lost at least a fifth of its strength. The Russians are no longer able to effectively interfere with shipping to and from Ukraine across the Black Sea, and it doesn't appear they are poised to regain the initiative.

In more startling news a Russian Air Force pilot, Major Oleg Stegachev, was gunned down in the city of Engels in Russia; the Russians did not say that he survived. He was the commander of a Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" bomber, flying out of the air base in Engels, that had been launching cruise missile strikes against Ukraine. A Ukrainian HUR announcement elaborated:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

European backing of Ukraine continues to be strong. EU has approved a 50 billion-euro support package, despite a threat by Hungary's Viktor Orban to veto it. He had to back off in the face of an effort to cancel Hungary's EU voting rights. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, inclined to the dry and droll, commented: "There is no problem with the so-called Ukraine fatigue issue. We have Orban fatigue now in Brussels."

In the USA, MAGA insurgents in the House of Representatives are still trying to hold Ukraine assistance hostage. It is unlikely they will succeed, because they don't have the votes and they're under extreme political pressure, with their behavior becoming increasingly erratic -- when it was erratic to start with. How long it's going to take to deal with them remains to be seen.

* In other tales of political obstruction, in 2023 MAGA senators in the Oregon state legislature staged a six-week walkout to deny a quorum for voting, the idea being to stall bills on abortion, transgender health care, and gun safety. However, in November 2022 Oregon voters had passed "Measure 113", which stipulated that legislators who had more than ten unexcused absences could not run for re-election.

A lawsuit challenging Measure 113 has been dismissed by the Oregon Supreme Court; ten MAGA legislators are now been barred from running for state office again. I had been wondering what was going to happen after the walkout. This seems like a tidy solution: what goes out does come back around.

[FRI 02 FEB 24] JOE BIDEN (11)

* JOE BIDEN (11): The next Congressional session was to start on 6 January 1973. Joe and Neilia had to find a place to live in Washington DC -- they planned to keep their remaining house in Delaware as well -- preferably near a school for the two boys. They found one on Chevy Chase Circle in northeast DC, making a down payment on the house with money from Neilia's father. In the meantime, Joe was lining up staff in a temporary Congressional office. Jack Owen bought out his law practice in Wilmington. Incidentally, Joe SR decided to stop selling cars, feeling that was inconsistent with having a senator for a son, and got into real estate instead.

On 18 December 1972, Joe was in the office with Valerie, Neilia having stayed in Wilmington, planning to go shopping that day with the three kids in the family's Chevy station wagon. In mid-afternoon, Val got a call from Jimmy. It was a brief call; she was pale when she rang off, telling Joe: "There's been a slight accident. Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home."

Everything about Valerie's state told Joe something was terribly wrong. He answered: "She's dead, isn't she?" They went back to Wilmington, Joe hoping for the best, expecting the worst. It was close to the worst: the station wagon had been hit by a tractor-trailer rig, Neilia and one-year-old Naomi being killed. Beau had a broken leg and other substantial injuries, while Hunter had a fractured skull, but they were not in critical condition. The truck fell over after the collision but the driver Curtis Dunn, was not seriously injured; the authorities investigated the accident and cleared him, saying there was no evidence he had been drinking or speeding, no evidence the truck had faulty brakes. Neilia, possibly distracted by trying to handle three small kids in the station wagon, had suffered a fatal moment of inattention.

Joe's world had collapsed; he no longer cared about being a senator, his only focus, his lifeline, being the need to care for his two sons. He informed the Senate majority leader, Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, that he wasn't going to be sworn in. The senior Democrats in the Senate -- Mansfield, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota -- did not like that idea at all, not merely because Joe looked promising, but because he'd flipped a Republican seat from traditionally Republican Delaware. Kennedy pulled strings to make sure the two Biden boys were given the best care, while Humphrey repeatedly called to check in on Joe, though he didn't often get through; Jimmy Biden was screening Joe's calls and would politely fob Humphrey off if Joe didn't feel like talking. Incidentally, even President Dick Nixon called up Joe to offer his condolences.

Mansfield persistently called up Joe, doing all he could to keep Joe from resigning his seat even before he was sworn in. Mansfield told Joe he was needed, telling him to try it for six months, even offering to put him on the Senate Democratic Steering Committee -- a high-profile position not often given to rookies. Joe, on reflection and in discussion with family and friends, realized that giving up on the Senate would make no sense, and that he could be both a father and a senator, in that order.

Joe was sworn in as a US senator on 5 January 1973, in the chapel of the medical center of Wilmington. Beau was still in traction at the time, but his bed was wheeled in so he could watch; Hunter had already been released, his skull fracture having done him no permanent damage, as had been feared. Joe SR and Neilia's father were there as well.

Valerie and her new husband, Bruce Saunders, helped take care of the boys. Once Beau was released from the hospital, he joined Hunter at the North Star house. Joe got on the schedule he would keep for much of the rest of his life, taking the 90-minute train ride from Wilmington to Washington DC in the morning, taking the train back in the evening to rejoin his family. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 01 FEB 24] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org "Fossil-Rich Welsh Quarry Yields Trove Of Soft-Bodied Animals At Dawn Of Modern Life" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 1 May 2023), between about 540 million and 485 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, there was a huge flowering of multicellular life -- the time being called the "Cambrian Explosion" or the "Biological Big Bang". However, by 400 million years ago, most of the species of the Cambrian Explosion were gone. Nobody's certain why, but fossils from 462 million years ago recently discovered in a quarry in central Wales are providing important clues.

The Welsh fossils were discovered by a paleontologist couple who live near the quarry. Joe Botting and Lucy Muir, who have doctorates in paleontology but mostly have worked as amateurs, found the site, known as "Castle Bank", a decade ago, but didn't pay much attention to it until the COVID pandemic restricted their mobility, did they inspect the 10-meter (33-foot) wide quarry in a sheep field. They found a layer of shale loaded with fossils, and realized they had a big find. However, most of the specimens were so tiny that they couldn't be inspected except with a high-power microscope. At first, they were hesitant when the quarry's landowner suggested the couple crowdsource funds to buy the instruments. However, an initial try quickly yielded about $20,000 USD, more than twice their original goal.

So far, about 170 species have been found, and that's seen as only a part of what's there. Many of the specimens are small, varying from the size of a sesame seed to that of a pencil eraser. They are news in that they show some Cambrian life forms held on for millions of years longer than paleontologists had thought before going extinct, and also show that certain classes of modern animals got arose earlier than expected. The fossil bed also includes some familiar creatures, including arthropods such as crustaceans and horseshoe crabs, along with as sponges, starfish, and worms. Many of them had been around a long time before the fossil bed was laid down and persist to today, so their presence isn't surprising.

However, the quarry also yielded strange creatures thought to have arisen and vanished during the Cambrian period -- including "opabiniids", which had five eyes and a long proboscis, and scaly slugs called "wiwaxiids". Newcomers found in the deposits include modern families of glass sponges and a group of crustaceans known as horseshoe shrimp, which were thought to have arisen much later. The specimens being small, it's not all that easy to know what to make of them. For example, Muir and Botting have come across a six-legged arthropod that they say could be a marine ancestor of insects. Botting says: "It can't really be an insect because it's marine, But we don't know where insects evolved from."

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("A Fantastical World Of Potential Giant Viruses Lurks Beneath The Soil" by Meghan Rosen, 4 August 2023), we actually don't know all that much about the viruses that exist on the Earth. Of necessity, we have focused on those that are significant to us, particularly those that cause disease in humans, and end up neglecting everything else.

Virologist Matthias Fischer -- of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany -- inspected a clump of forest soil to find hundreds of what looked like giant viruses, in a wild variety of shapes. One shape was named "haircut" for its fibers that bristled around it. "Gorgon" has tubelike appendages snaking from its shell, while flaps poking out of "turtle" resemble the reptile's head, limbs and tail.

Since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, scientists collecting genetic material from the environment have uncovered many of them. These viruses are about 10 to 50 times the diameter of viruses that cause the common cold. Genetic clues suggested that giant viruses are diverse, widespread, and abundant. However, just having the genomes isn't good enough. Using transmission electron microscopy, Fischer's team analyzed about half a kilogram of soil from Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, to get a better look.

Although they do have commonalities with known giant viruses, Fischer is careful not to say they really viruses, without closer inspection. Whatever they actually are, Fischer thinks he's going to find many more strange configurations: "If a handful of forest soil already contains so many different virus particles, this is clearly just the very tip of the viral Mount Everest."

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Coral Reefs Host Millions Of Bacteria," by Erin Garcia de Jesus, 1 June 2023), the great majority of the Earth's biomass is in the form of plants. Bacteria are well in second place, but their mass is still more than that of all other organisms combined. There are vast numbers of bacterial species that we don't know about.

Microbiologist Pierre Galand of Sorbonne University in Paris believes that bacteria may be seriously undercounted. He and his team have come up with a new count of bacteria living in the Pacific Ocean's coral reefs that is comparable to current estimates for the total microbial diversity of Earth, suggesting that there are vastly more bacteria living on the planet than previously thought.

Coral reefs are highly diverse ecosystems; microbes are essential for keeping them healthy, providing essential nutrients or guarding against disease. However, not much was known about the bacteria in coral reefs until Galand and colleagues conducted the Tara Pacific Expedition from 2016 to 2018. They visited 99 coral reefs; at each site, they collected samples from plankton, three coral species and two fish species, amassing 5,392 samples. The team then categorized how many varieties of bacteria they could find in each sample.

Genetic analyses identified more than 540,000 bacterial varieties living on the three types of organisms. That number alone, from a tiny fraction of Pacific reef fauna, accounts for up to about 20% of current estimates of all bacteria living on Earth, which range from 2.72 million to 5.44 million. Extrapolating from the sample, Pacific coral reefs may harbor at least 2.8 million kinds of bacteria, the team calculated.

Galand says that diversity may be a kind of "ecological insurance" for reefs. The mix of varieties gives the reefs a lot of options for dealing with environmental changes -- the mix of bacteria shifting with, say, heat stress towards bacteria better able to deal with the heat. Even the 2.8 million count may be an underestimate: It's hard to count things that are invisible to the naked eye, and molecular tools to look at genetic material often exclude organisms that nobody knows about.