DayVectors

* 21 entries including: Joe Biden (series); generative AI arrives (series); Turkish robot boats | US Navy wants drone killers | Javelin launcher; recycling cars; Trump sinking financially | US budget passed | Ukraine hits Russia; dark matter stars; Trump takes over RNC | Alabama against IVF | Kremlin Troll news outlets; satcom antennas as solar powerhouses | AI fake calls illegal | smart lock; asteroid hunters; Ukraine War, M113s & drones | GOP against lab meats | Biden SOTU speech; big gamma-ray bursts | finding meteorite falls by drone; decoupled electrolyzer; & Ukraine casualties | colonizing Spoutible | game controller fix.

[FRI 29 MAR 24] JOE BIDEN (19)

* JOE BIDEN (19): While Joe Biden was considering a 1988 presidential run, he continued to maintain a high profile in Congress, in particular working in the Judicial Committee to take on Reagan's judicial appointees. In 1986, on the retirement of Chief Justice Warren Burger, Reagan wanted to elevate Justice William Rehnquist to chief justice -- which caused concern among Democrats, since he was a solid conservative, having been involved in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. During the hearings, Rehnquist showed little enthusiasm for civil rights, giving "incomplete" answers to queries, though he was careful not to come out in opposition. The Judicial Committee gave Rehnquist a PASS, but five of the Democrats on the committee, including Joe, issued a critical minority opinion, writing that while ...

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Rehnquist was confirmed as chief justice by Senate vote. The Reagan Administration then nominated Judge Antonin Scalia, of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and a solid conservative, to take Rehnquist's vacated position as an associate justice. Joe did not make much of a fuss over Scalia's appointment, since he did not see Scalia as "significantly more conservative" than the man he would replace, and so Joe had no "undue concern about the impact of this appointment on the balance of the court."

That was possibly underestimating Antonin Scalia, who was the leading edge of a conservative drive, at the time with Ed Meese as a prime mover, to return the Supreme Court to its conservative past. This retrograde SCOTUS would strike down existing laws established during liberal administrations, and present an obstacle to laws passed by future liberal administrations.

Scalia's legal philosophy was generally known as "originalism", though other terms such as "textualism" and "constructionism" were also involved. These abstract legal terms were not always easy to pin down and were opaque to layfolk -- but in the simplest terms, he believed that the courts should not stray far beyond the intent of laws as they were originally established. In the case of the US Constitution, that meant the Framers who wrote it, and the courts had no legal basis for contradicting them.

There were several difficulties with this mindset:

• Disputes in constitutional law only occur where the constitution is ambiguous, capable of interpretation in different and possibly opposed ways. Asking what the intent of the Framers was in a particular dispute is not always helpful -- one reason being that the Constitution was shaped by compromises between Framers who had differing and sometimes opposed points of view.
  
  
• A much more significant difficulty with concern over what the Framers thought about what they wrote is that modern disputes over constitutional law often involve circumstances that the Framers never even imagined, much less had an opinion on one way or another.
  
  
• Last, the courts never contradict the clear will of the Framers. Where the Constitution is not ambiguous, it is followed without question. According to the Constitution's Article II / Section 1 / Clause 5, a President of the United States has to have been born in America. That directive is always obeyed. Not incidentally, nobody makes an issue of the original intent of the Framers -- which was to prevent foreign nobility, a king, from being installed as the head of America's government. That's not a thing any more, but the restriction stands anyway.

The irony in the Right's dubious push against the judicial status quo was that it was largely in reaction to the liberal judgements of Earl Warren's Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s, which had outraged the Right -- and, to a great extent, the Warren Court had been doing no more than following through on the 14th Amendment's dictates on civil rights, which had been frustrated by reactionary courts from the days of Reconstruction. The Right's judicial philosophy was little more than a smokescreen for turning the clock back to the days of the reactionary courts. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 28 MAR 24] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Meteksan Pitches Latest ULAQ USV Variant", by Nishant Kumar, 24 May 2023) Turkish firm Meteksan Defense has displayed a model of a new robot search-and-rescue (SAR) vessel, based on the company's ULAQ unmanned surface vessel (USV) series.

The ULAQ SAR USV has a length of 7.5 meters (24'7"), a beam of 2.3 meters (7'7"), and a draft of 70 centimeters (28"). Top speed is over 29 MPH (46 KPH / 25 knots), and range is 170 miles (280 kilometers / 150 NMI). The USV is fitted with electro-optical and infrared cameras, a laser designator, a rangefinder, and satellite communications. Although combat versions of the ULAQ USV can have cannon, light missile launchers, or torpedo tubes, the SAR version has no armament -- but it can launch a tethered drone. Meteksan officials at the SAR USV was developed for coastguard SAR operations, targeted for sales in Southeast Asia.

* As discussed in an article from THE WARZONE (TWZ.com), ("Navy Looking For Counter-Drone Systems That Can Be Rapidly Added To Its Ships" by Joseph Trevithick, 2 February 2024), combat drones are nothing new, but the Ukraine War has put them at front lines of military concerns.

Of course, the Ukraine War isn't the only combat zone where drones are being extensively used. The US Navy has been trying to block drone attacks on shipping in the Red Sea area by Houthi militants; drones are not hard to shoot down, but the Houthis have plenty of them, and they're generally much cheaper than the means used to destroy them.

As a consequence, the US Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has issued a request for information (RFI) to industry concerning anti-drone systems that can be quickly added to ships. The Navy is specifically interested in systems that can to counter drones of three categories that have been defined by the Pentagon:

• Group 3: Drones with maximum weights of no more than 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds), that can reach altitudes up to 5,485 meters (18,000 feet), and have top speeds of up to 465 KPH (285 MPH / 250 KT).
  
  
• Group 4: Weights greater than 600 kilograms, same altitude limit, no specified top speed limit.
  
  
• Group 5: Weights greater than 600 kilograms, altitudes above 5,485 meters, no specified top speed limit.

For examples, Iran's well-known Shahed-136 kamikaze drone is classified as Group 3, while the US MQ-1C Gray Eagle is in Group 4, and the MQ-9 Reaper is in Group 5. The NAVSEA contracting notice says that "demonstrated capability against other classes of UAS" is also "of interest." The NAVSEA document also specifies "mature" systems "in production" that can be deployed in a few months, or at most a year. One key requirement is "minimal integration requirements with Naval combat systems; with independent, self-contained capability [being] highly desirable."

One possible candidate is the US Army's "Fixed Site Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (FS-LIDS)", produced by Raytheon and based on the Coyote Block 2 drone; another similar option is the Anduril Roadrunner-M interceptor drone system, though that's not in production. A third possibility is "Next Generation Missile (NGM)", a new small low-cost surface-to-air missile concept unveiled by startup BlueHalo in 2023.

* As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("The Army Is Now Firing Stinger Missiles From A Javelin Launcher" by Thomas Newdick, 09 November 2022), the US Stinger infantry-portable anti-aircraft missile (IPAAM) and Javelin anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) have been stars of the Ukraine War.

The Javelin has been improved through a new launcher, the "Javelin Lightweight Command Launch Unit (LWCLU)". According to Raytheon, compared with the original Javelin launcher, the LWCLU can acquire targets at twice the sight range at night and three times the range during the day, regardless of weather conditions. The LWCLU is also much easier to move around on the battlefield, weighing 30% less than its predecessor, and is cheaper as well.

Since 2020, Raytheon has been testing use of the Stinger with the LWCLU. Why bother? One reason is that it gives troops greater flexibility to carry a single launcher instead of two launchers. Tom Laliberty -- vice president of Land Warfare & Air Defense, a business area of Raytheon Missiles & Defense -- commented: "Because LWCLU can defeat both land and aerial threats, it's easier for soldiers to use in complex environments."

Possibly more importantly, the LWCLU is much more capable than the Stinger launcher. The Stinger launcher itself only has an IFF (identification friend or foe) antenna for a separate IFF unit, while the simple optical sight is issued separately to the launcher. While a night-vision optical mount is available for the Stinger, it is cumbersome. The operator has to visually acquire a target and get the crosshairs on it, wait for the missile seeker to generate an audio tone indicating a target lock, then fire.

In contrast the LWCLU features an infrared optic as standard, and has a digital compass plus a datalink to a tactical radio. It can also be networked with a wide range of external sensors. Using a common launcher for Javelin and Stinger -- and the planned Stinger replacement, the "Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) Increment 3" -- would simplify training and logistics.

[WED 27 MAR 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (7)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (7): Back in 2020, OpenAI unveiled its GPT-3 engine, as a demonstration of the capabilities of GAI. Late in that year, a Reddit user answering questions in a user forum with 30 million members was identified as a bot powered by GPT-3. GPT-3's commentaries did not appear canned, indeed could appear spontaneous, and the only give-away was that it produced content much faster than any human could.

Earlier in 2020, as another demonstration, a team from MIT, Canny AI, and Respeecher produced a deepfake video of Nixon reading a contingency speech that had been prepared in 1969 in the event of a disaster with a Moon landing. The video took six months to put together and was extremely convincing.

So how does GAI really work, and where is it going? The roots trace back to computer scientist Ian Goodfellow, who invented the "generative adversarial network (GAN)" in 2016, with GANs proving useful in image generation. In a GAN, two neural networks are played off against each other. The first network, the "generator" network, optimizes parameters of images to best generate images that will fool a second network, the "discriminator" network, which in parallel optimizes its ability to detect fakes.

The generator network is like a forger whose forgery skills continuously improve, whilst the discriminator network acts as a forgery detector whose detective skills are also continuously improving and, crucially, who is providing feedback to the forger on the grounds for its decisions. The result is ever-improved forgeries.

In 2014, as an initial experiment, Goodfellow showed that such an approach could produce passable generated images of 28-by-28 pixel greyscale handwritten digits. By 2020, GANs were able to generate novel hyper-realistic, high-resolution faces merely given broad style requirements such as age, gender, skin color, hair style, and so on. In fact, GANs could generate images of anything for which sufficient training imagery was available.

Amongst many other things, GAN-based algorithms could convert hand sketches into equivalent photos, as well as enable image editing to generate new objects and features in images on command, StyleGAN can produce realistic composite faces from two distinct input faces. At the time, they could leave something to be desired, with weird artifacts such as double lips or irregular holes -- but since they are learning systems, the problems are being slowly weeded out.

Generating text, written or spoken, with GAI is different from generating images. It is harder to manipulate words than numbers, to which images are reduced, with the words in a document inter-related with each other; change one word, the meaning of a document can be turned upside-down. In addition, words are labels for things and actions in the real world -- or imagined worlds, in fantasy writings -- and understanding text means understanding the elements of the world being discussed.

In 2011, a leading-edge AI language generator was asked for the "meaning of life", and answered:

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A sensible human, of course, would instead answer: "42!" -- and be done with it, but it's hard, not impossible just hard, to give an AI a sense of humor. In any case, from that time, working through a series of language models, including a set named after Sesame Street and Muppets characters, ultimately led to the ground-breaking GPT-3, and its improved derivatives. Some language models could beat GPT-3 in certain areas, but its general capability was well ahead of the competition. Among other things that GPT-3 could do, it could reliably summarize large tracts of text, answer arbitrary questions on the contents of long texts, write computer code to a certain extent, and prove selected math theorems. Such improved language models would greatly enhance online search engines. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 26 MAR 24] JUNK CARS

* JUNK CARS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Scrapyards Adopt New High-Tech Ways To Dismantle Cars", 22 July 2022), there's nothing new about car junkyards -- but 21st-century car junkyards, or rather "vehicle-recycling centers", are nothing like those our fathers knew.

Marc Trent -- boss of Charles Trent, a vehicle-recycling company based in Poole on Britain's south coast, founded by Marc's great-grandfather -- likes to show off a photo from the 1920s with old junkers piled up on each other. In those days, motorists would often go to a junkyard, find a part they needed, negotiate a price, and remove the part themselves. Marc Trent says: "Those days are long gone."

Vehicle recycling now exists in the realm of online commerce. Typically, the parts are bought on the internet by professional mechanics and garages, with the parts they buy cleaned up, tested, often guaranteed, often shipped overnight. Buyers can just search for a part and get a list of resellers providing that part. Stricter rules, supply-chain snarls and higher prices for both cars and components mean that firms like Charles Trent, and even some big carmakers, are turning into sophisticated recycling operations.

At its Poole facility, for instance, Charles Trent has invested around 10 million GBP ($13 million USD) to set up a "deproduction line" for "end-of-life vehicles (ELV)", as scrap cars are now called. When fully operational, the plant will be able to break down more than 100 ELVs a day into their constituent parts. The company plans to set up five more plants, which will be able to disassemble 300,000 vehicles a year, around a fifth of the total number scrapped in Britain. Marc Trent says that just over 96% by weight of an ELV can be either reused or recycled.

The deproduction line looks like a modern car-assembly line run backwards. When an ELV arrives, it is assessed for parts that could be reused or refurbished, with the specifics logged into a computer system which controls the process. The car is then "depolluted", the wheels being taken off, while fuel, oil, and air-conditioning gases are drained and collected.

The vehicle is then loaded onto the line. Technicians methodically remove the panels, interiors, engines, gearboxes, and so on. Some of the elements are sent for recycling. Others are cleaned, tested and put up for resale. The bare shell of the vehicle is fed into a crusher to become scrap metal, before going off to be melted down and used again.

Worn parts, such as engines and gearboxes, can be refurbished or even "remanufactured", a more difficult process in which they are "zero-lifed", returned to original condition. LKQ -- a Chicago-based firm that operates 170 dismantling plants in North America that process 700,000 ELVs a year -- estimates that remanufacturing uses about 15% as much energy, and produces about 30% as much carbon emissions, as making a new part from scratch.

A number of factors are driving the transformation. Carmakers increasingly find governments more determined to regulate production processes, in particular to reduce emissions, and to set rules for the ultimate disposal, recycling, of cars. Persistently rising costs of raw materials and parts make recycled parts more attractive; they only cost about 30% as much as new parts. Carmakers are getting in on the act, too. The Stellantis group -- maker of Chrysler, Peugeot, and Fiat cars -- has converted a factory in Turin for reconditioning cars and parts.

A car deproduction line has a challenge in that it has to handle all sorts of different cars, while a production line builds just one. Deproducing electric vehicles (EV) is another challenge, with problems including lurking high voltages and batteries catching fire. Ironically, since EVs are relatively simple compared to internal-combustion vehicles, means the batteries are actually the most valuable part. The push is to refurbish old batteries if possible, or recycle their parts if not, with lithium seen as particularly valuable. In any case, scrapping cars is not at all what it was 50 years ago, and it will get more sophisticated.

[MON 25 MAR 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 12

DAYLOG TUE 19 FEB 24: One of the big buzzes going around yesterday was Trump's lawyers saying they couldn't get anyone to fund the $454 million bond needed for him to challenge the New York civil judgement for that sum against him. I found that unsurprising, and very amusing. I'm still a bit puzzled as to why he would have to post a bond matching the judgement against him to appeal the judgement. I don't have a problem with it, I'm just curious about the legal reasoning behind it.

There was chatter on Spout on various underhanded ways Trump might get the money anyway, for example selling government secrets. I was very dubious; Trump is under continuous surveillance -- nobody is saying that he is, the authorities never announce anyone's under surveillance, it just would be astounding if he wasn't -- and I don't see how it could happen. Yeah, Trump is clueless enough to do anything, but he's too clueless to pull off a stunt like that.

The objection came back that the surveillance is unlikely to be airtight. True -- but Trump, not knowing where the gaps are, would never know if the Feds were listening in or not. It was certainly implausible to think he could get his hands on tens of million, hundreds of millions of dollars, without the Feds noticing. Such money transfers leave a big footprint and paper trail.

DAYLOG WED 20 FEB 24: Trump being unable to raise the bond to challenge the $454 million USD New York judgement against him, it appears that the state may ultimately seize his New York properties, notably including Trump Tower. Seizing properties is troublesome, so the state would prefer to get the money, but it seems unlikely Trump has the money.

Word is that Trump thinks he can beat the rap on appeal to SCOTUS. I doubt it. Also, one anonymous source complained that such a seizure could have a "chilling effect" on New York business, since "it could happen to anyone". Yeah, anyone who got elected president as a hustle, and then performed a Clown Car Coup to stay in office.

The question has been going around Spout: "If Trump really was a billionaire, shouldn't he be able to pay the bond?" That's sarcasm, of course, since Trump was never really a billionaire. I used to think he was probably actually broke, but on consideration that was simplistic: Trump's Bogus Business Empire is based on dynamic financial juggling that makes it effectively impossible to place a solid value on it. However, it is apparent that any disruption to that house of cards will send it crashing down.

DAYLOG THU 21 MAR 24: Yesterday, one Lev Parnas -- a Ukrainian who had worked for Rudy Giuliani, in particular on efforts to smear Joe Biden, and did jail time after being caught short -- testified in the GOP-run House Oversight & Accountability Committee hearing titled: "Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden's Abuse of Public Office".

That testimony did not make the GOP on that committee happy, Parnas first saying that the media, except for FOX and the like, didn't want to touch the smears he and his associates were spreading about Joe Biden -- then added there were Members of Congress who were more enthusiastic: "There was also other people that were doing the bidding for the Russians -- people in Congress, like Senator Ron Johnson, like Congressman Pete Sessions, who sits here right now. [Sessions] was with me from the very beginning on this journey, into finding of the, giving dirt on Joe Biden."

Johnson and Sessions both rejected Parnas' claims, and indeed his background suggests his word may not be trustworthy. Nonetheless, the single-minded efforts of MAGA GOP to find something, anything, to pin on Joe Biden lends weight to those claims.

GOP Congressman Jim Comer of Kentucky, who has been leading the charge against Joe Biden, sat through the testimony, appearing glum and distant -- as well he might, since it appears that the GOP attempts to impeach Joe Biden are being given up. They were always futile, but that didn't stop the House MAGA from persisting. Something has changed as of late.

DAYLOG FRI 22 MAR 24: Today the House of Representatives passed a $1.2 trillion government funding bill and passed it on to the Senate for a final vote -- just hours before the government was scheduled to shut down. It probably won't be voted on before Sunday, but shutting down the government over the weekend is not a very big deal.

Both sides got things they wanted out of the bill -- most notably, more funds for border security -- but the House MAGA still wailed in indignation, with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatening to evict Speaker Mike Johnson for not following the MAGA line. "Good luck with that, MTG!"

Johnson's made a dramatic turnaround over the last week or two, no longer trying to simply obstruct everything, all the time. It seems Hakeem Jeffries, boss of the House Democrats, suggested that the Dems would back Johnson up as long as he acted like a mensch, meaning the House MAGA can't evict him.

Next up is the Ukraine aid package, though that won't be touched until Easter recess is over. Johnson has indicated he's all for it, and it is almost guaranteed to get through Congress if voted on. There's talk of making it a "loan" instead of a grant -- which is silly, since Ukraine can't pay it back, and the loan would be forgiven eventually anyway.

Senator Mitt Romney says he's agreeable to the loan idea: "That's fine. It's a distinction without much difference because it's unlikely Ukraine would ever have to pay it back. If it has to be done as a loan to get it through the House, so be it."

DAYLOG SAT 23 MAR 24: Ukraine has been conducting an increasingly effective campaign of air strikes against Russian oil infrastructure. That's very good -- but the FINANCIAL TIMES is saying the USA is opposed to the strikes. Huh? On investigation, the only thing FT points to is this:

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Well duh, of course the USA has a hands-off attitude toward Ukraine operations in Russia -- but the USA has never objected to them, either. FT is lying. Incidentally, as of late Russians fighting along with Ukraine, most significantly the "Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL)", have reportedly been making a serious nuisance of themselves through incursions in areas of Russia adjoining Ukraine. It's hard to know exactly what's going on there, since the FRL and the other anti-Putin Russian formations are entirely secret, with the Ukrainians essentially refusing to comment on them.

Also incidentally, Joe Biden signed the new budget into law today. It appears Congress didn't feel like wrangling any longer than they had to. Who wants to work weekends?

AND SO ON: The news media keeps pretending that the 2024 election will be a near thing for Joe Biden. There's something very wrong with the polls; it is unreasonable to think that Donald Trump can run an effective presidential campaign out of criminal court, and all the "ground truth" indicators aren't looking good for Trump. On querying MS Copilot on relative fund-raising, I got a somewhat scrambled reply -- generative AI is like that -- but the bottom line is: "Biden currently has $71 million USD cash on hand compared to $33.5 million USD for Trump's campaign."

In addition, Trump is obviously skimming all the money he can to support his legal bills -- and then there's the not-so-small matter of the $454 million USD New York judgement against him. Not only is Trump sinking financially, he's dragging down the Republican Party with him.

I don't think Joe Biden is sweating this election, but he's not taking any changes, getting in his shots he can at Trump. Down in Texas for a fund-raiser, Biden said:

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Maybe it's a little bit too easy to cut down Trump -- but again, why take chances?

[FRI 22 MAR 24] JOE BIDEN (18)

* JOE BIDEN (18): The 1984 Democratic convention was in San Francisco in July, with Joe in being demand as a speaker. The convention nominated Walter Mondale; Joe was not enthusiastic, but he was a good soldier for the Democrats and fell in line. He returned to stumping in Delaware, with the two candidates there exchanging the usual sorts of shots. When November came around, Biden trounced Burris, with a vote margin of 50%. Burris later said: "I was John Burris, he was Joe." The two men would remain on good terms, going golfing together.

However, the presidential election was a disaster for the Democrats, with Reagan crushing Mondale, carrying all the states except Minnesota in the electoral college. The only silver lining was that, despite Republican gains in both the House and Senate, the House remained under Democratic control. Democratic leadership would not forget the beating the party had suffered.

Reagan, as the victor, seemed almost unstoppable; Joe felt Reagan needed to be restrained. As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe made clear his opposition to Reagan's choice for attorney general, Ed Meese. There had been tales of questionable actions by Meese as Reagan's White House counsel, but there was nothing in the stories to get a firm grip on, and so no specific cause to reject Meese as attorney general. However, Joe didn't like Meese's style and said so, saying that he considered Meese "beneath the office" of attorney general -- concluding that: "I think [the office] should be occupied by a person of extraordinary stature and character."

The Right was infuriated at Joe's condescension and howled, but the Right had the last laugh: to no surprise with a Republican-controlled Senate, Meese was confirmed. Joe did manage to scuttle the appointment of the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, William Bradford Reynolds, to the position of associate attorney general. Reynolds had demonstrated a clear lack of interest in taking on state actions against civil rights, and so he didn't get the job.

During 1985, despite Joe's denials that had presidential ambitions, he was clearly sounding the waters for a run. In November 1985, Joe was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines -- which, not at all incidentally, was the same event that Jimmy Carter had used as a springboard for his own presidential campaign. Joe excited the crowd with high-flying rhetoric:

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That was not Joe declaring his candidacy, but it sounded very much like it. He still denied he was after the presidency in public, and in private worried about balancing presidential ambitions with family responsibility. He didn't want to neglect or impose on Jill, and absolutely did not want to neglect the three kids. Ashley, who was four at the time, recollected that Joe would call the kids twice a day and always wanted to be home at night to tuck them into bed, adding: "He had a rule that no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing, if us kids called, that was it. You got him out of the meeting." He took family along on some of his field trips to see how workable running for president would be. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 21 MAR 24] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for February included:

[02 JUN 22] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2C / GEESAT-2 x 11 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched at 2337 UTC (next day local time - 8) from the Chinese Xichang space center to put 11 satellites into orbit for China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group -- Geely being a major Chinese auto-maker. They were the latest installments towards a constellation of 240 satellites, intended to provide navigation and inter-vehicle communications for autonomous cars, with ocean remote sensing as a secondary mission.

Each "GEESat 2" had a launch mass of 130 kilograms (285 pounds), and a design life of five years. They carried navigation, communications, and multispectral remote sensing payloads. The first 72 satellites of the constellation will be launched by 2025. A second phase of deployment will add 168 more satellites to the fleet. Geely's first two prototype satellites were lost in a launch failure in 2021.

[03 FEB 24] CN YS / JIELONG 3 / CENTISPACE 1 S5 & S6 -- A Chinese Jielong 3 booster was launched from a barge in the Yellow Sea at 0306 UTC (local time - 8) to put a set of payloads into low Earth orbit. The payloads included:

• Zhixing-2A: A synthetic aperture radar satellite, part of a constellation of 12 satellites built Shaanxi Zhixing Space Technology CO LTD for China Electronics Technology Group Corporation.
  
  
• "Xingshidai 18 (Star Times 18)", also known as "Rongpiao," built by China Star Aerospace, along with "Xingshidai 19" and "Xingshidai 20".
  
  
• Other payloads included "Dongfang Huiyan-GFO1", "DRO-L", "NEXTSAT-1", and "Weihai-1 01,02".

Jielong (Smart Dragon) is solid-fuel, four-stage booster.

[08 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / PACE -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0633 UTC (local time + 5) to put the PACE ocean-studies satellite into orbit.

[09 FEB 24] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1B / COSMOS 2575 (VKS) -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0703 UTC (local time - 4) to put a "VKS" spy satellite into orbit for the Russian military. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 2575".

[10 FEB 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-13 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0034 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[15 FEB 24] RU BK / SOYUZ 2-1A / PROGRESS 87P (MS 26 / ISS) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 0325 UTC (local time - 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It was the 87th Progress mission to the ISS.

[15 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / PACE -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0325 UTC (local time + 5) to put the PACE ocean-studies satellite into orbit.

[15 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / ODYSSEUS (IM 1) -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0605 UTC (local time + 5) to send the "Odysseus" a lunar lander from Intuitive Machines into space. The "IM 1" mission was the first of three flights for the "Nova-C" class lander, which was designed and developed under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract to help support NASA's Artemis campaign and commercial development on the Moon.

The Nova-C lander was a hexagonal cylinder, 4 meters (13 feet) tall and 1.57 meters (5 feet) wide on six landing legs, with a launch mass of 1,908 kilograms (4,200 pounds). It was capable of carrying approximately 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of payload to the lunar surface and used solar panels to generate 200 watts of power. It was able to land on the Moon, though it tipped over. It was not designed to remain operational through the lunar night.

IM 1 carried payloads for several customers: six for NASA under CLPS, and a further six for commercial partners. One of the commercial payloads was the Embry-Riddle "Eaglecam", a free-flying device to capture the first third-person images of a lunar landing. Eaglecam was deployed at 30 meters above the lunar surface and photographed the lander as they both descend toward the surface.

NASA's Glenn Research Center provided one of the payloads under CLPS, the "Radio Frequency Mass Gauge (RFMG)". It was designed to provide an accurate estimate of fuel levels in spacecraft tanks using radio frequencies passed through the tanks and received via an external antenna. Another NASA CLPS payload photographed and measured the plume-surface interactions as Odysseus landed.

Other NASA science payloads included navigational instrument and radio astronomy trials, and the "Radio wave Observation at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES)" instrument, to measure plasma levels on the lunar surface around the lander.

[18 FEB 24] NZ / ELECTRON / ADRAS-J -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 1452 UTC (next day local time - 13) to put the "Active Debris Removal by Astroscale / Japan (ADRAS-J)" satellite into orbit. It rendezvoused with a spent Japanese H-IIA upper stage in low Earth orbit as a test for a future de-orbiting mission. ADRAS-J was part of JAXA's "Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration Program (CRD2)".

[20 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / TELKOMSAT HTS 113BT -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0500 UTC (local time + 4), to put the "Telkomsat HTS 113B" geostationary comsat into space.

[23 FEB 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 7-13 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0411 UTC (previous day local time + 8) to put 22 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[23 FEB 24] CN WC / LONG MARCH 5 / TJS 11 -- A Long March 5 booster was launched from Wenchang at 1130 UTC (local time - 8) to put the secret "TJS 11" satellite into geostationary orbit. It was suspected to be an intelligence-gathering satellite.

[25 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-39 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2206 UTC (local time + 4) to put 24 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[27 FEB 24] JP TG / H3 / VEP 4, SMALLSATS x 2 -- A JAXA H3 booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0137 UTC (local time - 9) to put the dummy "Vehicle Evaluation Payload (VEP) 4" into space, along with two smallsats. It was the second flight of the H3, after a failed launch in 2023. In addition to VEP 4, the launch also carried two small satellites:

• Canon Electric Satellite (CESAT) 1E: is part of a series of lightweight imaging satellites being developed by Canon Electronics, incorporating imagers based on Canon's range of commercially available cameras. Its primary instrument was based around a Canon EOS R5 camera, with a 40-centimeter reflector telescope, while a secondary imager was derived from a PowerShot S110 camera.
  
  
• TIRSAT: A three-unit (3U) CubeSat, built as a partnership between Japan Space Systems, Seiren Corporation, and several other organizations and universities, the satellite performed on-orbit validation of the "Uncooled Small Infrared Sensor", a thermal infrared imaging payload.

The two secondary payloads were mounted on either side of VEP-4 and separated into low-Earth orbit during a coast phase after the end of the second stage's first engine burn.

The H3 is a two-stage booster, with both stages burning cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. It can fly in several different configurations, varying the number of first-stage engines, the number of solid rocket boosters augmenting the first stage, and the length of the payload fairing. Each configuration has a three-character designation, with the first digit indicating the number of engines on the first stage, the second indicating the number of solid boosters, and the third character being either an "S" or "L" to denote the use of a short or long fairing, respectively.

In all configurations, the first stage is powered by LE-9 engines, with the second stage using a single LE-5B-3. In configurations that use solid rocket motors, IHI Aerospace's SRB 3 boosters -- not to be confused with the SRB-A3 used on H-IIA -- are attached radially around the base of the first stage to provide additional thrust.

The three-engine version of H3's first stage is flown without boosters in the "30S" and "30L" configurations. The "22S" and "22L" configurations have twin-engine first stages with two solid rocket motors, and the "24S" and "24L" use the same first stage with four boosters. The short payload fairing is 10.4 meters (34 feet) long, while the long fairing measures 16.4 meters (54 feet) in length. Both types of fairing have the same diameter: 5.2 meters (17 feet). The TF2 mission used an H3-22S, the same configuration that flew the maiden flight.

[17 FEB 24] IN SR / GSLV MK3 / INSAT 3DS -- An ISRO Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 was launched from Sriharikota at 1205 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "OneWeb #18" launch. INSAT-3DS weather research satellite into geostationary orbit.

This was the 7th flight for the INSAT series of satellites. INSAT 3DS is the successor to the INSAT 3DR satellite, which was similarly delivered to a geostationary orbit by a GSLV in 2016. Built by ISRO, INSAT 3DS was an advanced meteorological satellite intended to deliver weather surveillance, forecasting, and disaster warning services to India. The mission was funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences. An onboard six-channel imager was complemented by a 19-channel sounder, and the satellite carried a "Satellite Aided Search & Rescue" transponder, and a message relay for terrestrial data collection platforms.

[28 FEB 24] RU VS / SOYUZ 2-1B / METEOR-M 2-4 & -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 0543 UTC (local time - 9) to put the "Meteor-M 2-4" low-orbit weather satellite into space. The launch also flew a number of secondary payloads, including "Marafon-D-GVM", an IoT satellite; the "Pars 1" & "Zorkiy-2M 2" Earth remote sensing satellite; and 16 SITRO-AIS AIS ship-tracking CubeSats.

[29 FEB 24] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2C / WEIXING HULIANWANG GAOGUI 1 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from the Chinese Xichang launch center at 1303 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Weixing Hulianwang Gaogui 01" geostationary comsat into orbit.

[29 FEB 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 6-40 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1530 UTC (local time + 5) to put 23 SpaceX "Starlink v2 Mini" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit.

[WED 20 MAR 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (6)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (6): As an interesting backgrounder, in 2021 one Tarig Khatri wrote an essay on "AI Synthetic Media" -- "synthetic media" being the output generated by GAI. Khatri started out by suggesting that the "deepfakes" distributed during the 2020 US elections amounted to little, almost being lost in a sea of disinformation generated by traditional means. Possibly a bigger worry is "deeptweaks" -- including the automated generation of spam messages; the dialing up / down of image attributes such as age, emotion, gender, and so on; and adding dialogue or gestures to existing videos.

More positively, GAI design and production tools are becoming mainstream, their intent being to augment, not replace, human creativity. In time, the fear factor of GAI will decline as its utility becomes apparent. Even now, GAI can generate hyper-realistic fictitious human faces, compelling written narratives, and convincing clones of human voices. As GAI tools become more widely accessible, everybody will be able to generate content that had the domain of production departments with hefty budgets. Right now, there are already demos, apps, and subscription services to:

• Faceswap individuals into movies,
  
  
• Turn rough sketches into photorealistic images.
  
  
• Convert one voice into another.
  
  
• Personalize marketing videos.
  
  
• Age- and emotion-alter images.
  
  
• Generate face-synced videos of new or translated scripts.
  
  
• Play a video game, CYBERPUNK 77, with characters speaking any of 10 face-synced languages.
  
  
• Play a text-based adventure game, AI DUNGEON, with endless dialogue generated by AI.

GAI promises applications in a wide range of fields: advertising, architecture, interior design, gaming, song-writing, web design, education, software development, and pure mathematics. It is useful for any application based on structured or focused creativity.

Of course, GAI has criminal applications as well. A 2020 study by University College London -- based on input of academics, police, defense, the government, and the private sector -- ranked as among the highest AI-enabled future crimes:

• Audio-video impersonation, for example the impersonation of children to elderly parents over video calls to gain access to funds.
  
  
• Targeted phishing, with machine learning generating messages optimized to deceive.
  
  
• GAI-authored fake news generating many versions of fraudulent text content so as to seem to originate from multiple sources to boost visibility and credibility.

Relative to fake news, even back in 2017, an analysis of views on net neutrality submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission found that fewer than 800,000 of the over 22 million submitted comments were truly unique, that multiple millions of pro-repeal comments were likely to have been machine-generated, and that it was actually likely that more than 99% of the unique comments were in favor of keeping net neutrality. The fakery was unsophisticated, and so it could be detected by unsophisticated tools. The fakery is going to get more sophisticated. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 19 MAR 24] DARK MATTER STARS

* DARK MATTER STARS: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEW.org ("The James Webb Telescope May Have Spotted Stars Powered By Dark Matter" by Skyler Ware, 24 July 2023), there is a mysterious "dark matter" that seems to pervade the Universe, but is hard to directly detect. The lack of specifics on dark matter has led to wide-ranging speculation on the subject -- one speculative idea being "dark stars", or stars fueled by dark matter interactions instead of nuclear fusion.

Dark stars were first proposed in 2007 by cosmologist Katherine Freese, of the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues. They could have among the earliest stars to form in the Universe. Freeze says they would be "very weird looking".

The theory postulates that dark stars would have formed from clouds of hydrogen and helium that drew in locally abundant dark matter as they coalesced. Dark matter, whatever it is, shows little sign of interacting with normal matter; the only clue to its existence is from its gravitational effect on the cosmos. However, it's possible that dark matter could interact with itself, the dark matter particles annihilating each other when they collide and producing vast amounts of light and heat.

This would result in an energetic but diffuse object, very different from a normal star, possibly growing to monstrous size, even by stellar standards -- maybe ten times as big as Earth's orbit around the Sun. They could also be millions of times as massive as the Sun and shine billions of times brighter. They would not actually be "dark" by any means; as cosmic objects go, they should be relatively easy to spot.

Freese and colleagues inspected images of early galaxies obtained by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In such images, JWST has so far discovered over 700 objects that may have originated in the first few hundred million years of the Universe -- as determined by the "redshifting" of their light due to the expansion of the Universe. They found four very highly redshifted objects; to the extent that they were noticed, they were thought to be small infant galaxies. However, the images were too coarse to be resolved into stars, so it is possible that they are huge, ultrabright stars.

The researchers ran computer simulations of how much light a hypothetical dark star might produce at various wavelengths, and then compared the spectra to those from the objects in the JWST images. Three of the four objects were consistent with the dark star model. Sandro Tacchella, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, says known types of stars could also create the observed light from the three candidates. More detailed spectral observations would be needed to see if the candidates match the spectra determined by the simulation.

However, Cosmin Ilie -- an astrophysicist at Colgate University in Hamilton NY, and one of Freese's collaborators -- says that if dark stars can be found, they "would be revolutionary." It would certainly do much to nail down the nature of dark matter. Tracy Slatyer -- a theoretical physicist at MIT who was not involved in the research says that knowing dark matter could annihilate itself "would be really, really powerful."

Dark stars could also help explain the formation of supermassive black holes Once the dark matter inside the star has annihilated itself, the remaining hydrogen and helium -- millions of times the mass of the Sun in a relatively compact space -- would collapse in on itself and form a black hole. Those black holes could merge over time into black holes like the ones at the centers of most galaxies, millions or billions of times as massive as the Sun. Freese admits that she has no real proof yet that such dark stars honestly exist. She and her colleagues are continuing research to see if they do or not.

[MON 18 MAR 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 11

SUN 10 MAR 24: Last Friday, Lara Trump -- wife of Donald Trump's son Eric -- was voted co-chair of the Republican National Committee. It was not too dramatic to say that showed Donald Trump had taken over the Republican Party apparatus, and that no further evidence was needed to demonstrate the collapse of the GOP.

Lara Trump proclaimed that the RNC's first priority is "protecting the vote" -- meaning that if Donald Trump loses, the Democrats will be accused of cheating. That won't work for him: he's already played that card to death, and is staring down the muzzle of election-fraud charges that are very likely to put him away for the rest of his life.

There is an extraordinary unreality to the talk and actions of the Right. Trump is going down hard, and there's nothing they can do about it. He's been able to slow down his criminal prosecution, but is not able to stop it -- in fact, Trump's legal position has been getting ever worse, with his legal defense disintegrating. What happens to the GOP after the fall? There's no saying, except that it won't be anything good.

Polls keep claiming Trump and Biden are in a close race, but the polls seem afflicted by unreality as well. There are no more challenges to Biden's nomination for president, meaning complaints about him from Democrats are evaporating. In the 24 hours after Biden's SOTU speech last week, he pulled in $10 million USD in donations. It does seem like going all-out against Trump is like hitting a cockroach with a sledgehammer, but I'm not unhappy about that: Yes, Trump is going down, but best not to take any chances.

TUE 12 MAR 24: Republican Representative Ken Buck, from Colorado, had previously announced he would not run for re-election. Today, he announced that he was simply quitting now, and would leave Washington DC as soon as he was able. I got to thinking later: "Does that have anything to do with the ascendance of Lara Trump as co-chair of the Republican National Committee?"

On consideration, that seems only too plausible -- and it also seems plausible that the fallout from Trump's take-over of the RNC won't stop there. I've been thinking that the GOP national convention in July was likely to be a train wreck, but the convention will run according to the Trump script. Does the train wreck happen now? We shall see.

WED 13 MAR 24: Although I gladly bailed out of X/Twitter, I decided that I wanted to keep my account active -- the reasons being that there were some people on Twitter I wanted to follow, to sometimes link their postings to Spoutible, and place ads for my ebooks on occasion. I logged in with Google and, to my surprise, found my old account still active; it hadn't been deleted yet.

I'm not relapsing; on going back to X/Twitter, it stinks even worse than I remember. I'm not sure I'll make much good use of it. I've got alternate accounts on Threads and BlueSky as well, again primarily to post ebook ads, but neither has amounted to much; I tend to forget about them, and X/Twitter has become as forgettable. For now, Spout is the answer. I'll see what happens next year.

To my surprise, today I ran across somebody on Spout who was obviously a Kremlin-paid "Afro-troll", from Sierra Leone, who was persistently trolling for Trump. I reported him; it took a few hours, but finally he got blocked for a week. I'm wondering what happens to him after the week is up.

THU 14 MAR 24: Today I ran across people complaining online about the slow pace of the investigations of Trump, saying that the Robert Mueller investigation had been a let-down, and that too much should not be expected of the Jack Smith investigation.

For the gazillionth time, the Mueller investigation was highly successful: "A total of 34 individuals & 3 companies were indicted by Mueller's investigators. 8 pleaded guilty to or were convicted of felonies, including 5 Trump associates & campaign officials."

Yeah, Mueller didn't touch Trump, but it was apparent that he wouldn't from the outset: the Department of Justice cannot indict a sitting president. It would be equivalent to allowing the DOJ to overturn the government. "What COULD go wrong?!"

Yes, the current investigations drag out, but they were always going to take a long time. It took five years to indict gangster John Gotti, and two more years to convict him. Trump's status as an ex-president greatly complicates investigations, as does his instinct to file appeals, even on ridiculous pretexts. Either we wait on the court process, or we end up waiting on the appeals.

As a reality check, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is currently pursuing a felony case against Trump over "hush money" payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, has now asked for a 30-day delay in the trial start date -- just to have more time to screen possibly relevant documents in the case. The delays don't matter: Trump is going down, it can't be stopped.

* AND SO ON: Back on 16 February, the Alabama Supreme Court granted "personhood" to fertilized embryos for in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The case concerned an employee who dropped and destroyed a set of frozen embryos, with the couples who provided the embryos suing for the "Wrongful Death of a Minor". An Alabama court judged against the suit, the couples appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, which then judged for the couples.

This took almost everybody by surprise, but at the same time the judgement was perfectly consistent with the mindset of the TFUBs -- the "Trolls For the UnBorn". Everybody else finds it absurd, highlighting the absurdity of the TFUB position, with the Alabama legislature then passing a law to protect IVF providers, and Republican politicians tapdancing to dodge the bullet.

Representative Jasmine Crockett -- a notoriously sharp-shooting black Texas Democrat -- had some comments relative to the IVF controversy while talking with MSNBC's Ali Velshi. Velshi said:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Crockett came back with:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

* The NEW YORK TIMES reports on the latest intrusions of online Kremlin trolls:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

I'm not worried. Trolling has saturated the market and almost everybody recognizes it for what it is. Even if it's AI generated, trolling has an inescapable bad smell to it, and upping the quantity through mass production only makes the smell worse.

[FRI 15 MAR 24] JOE BIDEN (17)

* JOE BIDEN (17): The mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran -- codenamed EAGLE CLAW -- had been badly planned and executed, with one of the Sea Stallion helicopters colliding with a C-130 transport plane at a desert rendezvous location. Eight servicemen were killed, with the American public treated to a picture of the charred body of one of them lying in the sands. The only good thing that could be said about it was that it lent a great deal of weight to the modernization of America's special operations force.

It did Jimmy Carter no good. In the unlikely case it had succeeded, it would have done much to restore his fortunes, but there was no saving his presidency after that. Biden campaigned as best he could under the circumstances, but it was futile. Ronald Reagan -- previously Republican governor of California, once a movie star, and with a reputation as extremely Right-wing -- buried Carter in the 1980 election. Carter went back to Georgia and out of the Washington DC political loop, though he would continue services to the nation; he would ironically be remembered as a better ex-president than president.

The electoral failure of Carter inevitably led to a dramatic rethinking among the Democratic leadership on what to do next, with the 1984 election as a focus. Joe was floated as a possible candidate, particularly for the vice presidential slot, but he made it clear that wasn't going to happen: "I'd much rather be a senator than a vice president." He meant it, but he still had his eye on higher office; it just wasn't the time for it yet. Once the kids were out of the house, it would make more sense. Joe made it clear he would run for a third Senate term in 1984.

The 1980 election also resulted in the GOP regaining control of the Senate for the first time since 1954; the Democrats lost seats in the House, but retained control there by a healthy margin. The election resulted in a reshuffling of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Joe becoming the ranking Democrat, in a position to become chairman when the Senate changed hands again.

Joe's marriage to Jill enhanced his life in all respects -- particularly when Jill gave birth to a daughter, Ashley Blazer Biden, on 8 June 1981. The vacuum left in Joe's life with the deaths of Nelia and Naomi had disappeared. He would not, could not forget them, and indeed still had pictures of them in the house. If Jill had any problem with that, she gave no sign of it, by all evidence regarding them as members of family no longer present. Jill would say that she felt Neilia was still "watching over them".

With Jill helping run the family, Joe had more flexibility in his work, though family still came first. He could better afford to socialize in Washington DC on selective occasions, instead of having to run back to Wilmington every night to be with the boys. He still wasn't in sync with the traditional clubbiness of Congress, but it didn't harm him much; he was a workhorse who gave 100% while he was on the job. Jill, despite her dislike of politics, became more supportive of Joe's political life, often accompanying him on foreign trips.

* The Democrats did not regain the Senate in the 1982 mid-terms, though fortunately they retained control of the House. In June 1984, Joe announced that he was running for a third term in the Senate in June 1984, as always speaking in all three of Delaware's counties. Joe announced that it was time for a "new dawn to break over America," and channeled JFK to counter Reagan's campaign rhetoric, saying it was time to ...

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Biden's opponent for his Senate seat was one John M. Burris, a former majority leader in the Delaware House. Burris later said that he had been put up to running against Joe by Pete Du Pont, the current governor of Delaware, a member of the Du Pont aristocracy; Du Pont had presidential ambitions, but he was being pressured by the Republican apparatus to take on Biden. Du Pont figure that challenging the popular Biden Joe for the Senate would be a blunder. Burris felt that he had become a "sacrificial lamb" for Du Pont, clearing the way for Du Pont's presidential run -- though Du Pont would challenge that version of events. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 14 MAR 24] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com "Swiss Satellite Antennas Make A Comeback As Solar Powerhouses" by Denis Balibouse, 19 October 2023), the town of Leuk in the Swiss Alps had two big old satellite dishes that weren't getting any use. CKW Group, an energy services provider, worked with Leuk Teleport & Data Center, the owners of the antennas, to convert the antennas into solar arrays by carpeting the dishes with solar panels.

The antennas are 32 meters (105 feet) in diameter. Leuk is about 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) above sea level, meaning they get more intense sunlight -- and the arrays track the Sun for maximum exposure. Axpo Group, Switzerland's biggest producer of renewable energy and owner of CKW Group, says: "Switzerland is facing a major challenge: by 2050, there will be a shortfall of around 50 terawatt hours of electricity per year." The Swiss have not been big on renewables, but that's changing.

* As discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("The FCC Bans Robocalls With AI-Generated Voices" by Emma Roth, 8 February 2024), one of the consequences of the generative AI revolution has been to make it much easier to fake people's voices. This led to a robocall trying to smear President Joe Biden's election campaign with a faked message from "Biden".

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has, with surprising speed, moved to deal with the fakery, making it illegal for robocalls to use AI-generated voices. The ruling, issued in early February, grants state attorneys general the ability to take action against callers using AI voice faking.

Actually, the action was less dramatic than it seemed at first sight, since the "Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)", passed in 1991, limits the use of pre-recorded voice messages and automatic dialing for non-emergency purposes or without prior consent. All the FCC ruling did was label AI-generated voice messages as an "artificial or pre-recorded voice". FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Although state attorneys general could already go after the Black Hats behind robocalls based on the scam or fraud they're pushing, the new ruling also gives them the power to hold scam artists accountable just because they're using an AI-generated voice.

* A Chinese firm named "Shenzhen Centralspot Innovation" is now offering a "Mini Smart Fingerprint Padlock" with a fingerprint reader on the base. It's USB-rechargeable and has a low-battery alarm, automatically unlocking when it's about ready to run out of juice. It doesn't seem to have a key backup. It's only $25 USD, but there is the question of whether it's a good idea or just a silly gimmick. There may well be likely specific usage models where it makes sense.

In other news of interesting gimmicks, a Kickstarter effort is now in progress for "I'm Back", which is a scheme for converting old 35-millimeter film cameras into digital cameras. It consists of a module in the form of a 35-millimeter film can, with a 20-megapixel image sensor sticking out where the film would have rolled out in the good old days. The system also includes a base unit, to be attached to the camera, with a microphone and speaker, plus wi-fi for transferring images. It's not cheap, about $700 USD, but it makes sense: somebody has a really nice old film camera, be good to convert it into a really nice digital camera. Apparently, the same outfit has a range of products along this line, which are a bit confusing to sort out.

[WED 13 MAR 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (5)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (5): As OpenAI understands, ChatGPT and its emerging GAI rivals pose serious risks. ChatGPT obtains information, and left to itself it's not concerned with what kind of information: it could be used to plan terrorist attacks, make high explosives, fabricate well-crafted disinformation, devise smear campaigns against groups and individuals, or generate code for malware. OpenAI was accordingly careful to give GPT a "conscience" -- to restrict it from obscene, hateful, illegal or violent language and concepts, plus a range of use cases determined as "harmful" or "risky."

Then there are the issues around implicit bias; the model is trained on an enormous dump of human writing, and as a result, it tends to make assumptions that favor mainstream views, potentially at the expense of minorities. To take just one example, when asked about marriage or gender, it might slight LGBT values, simply because they are off the mainstream. OpenAI took measures to deal with these problems:

• Dubious material was not included in GPT's training data.
  
  
• A large number of sample question and answer pairs were included in the training data to teach GPT how to respond to certain types of queries.
  
  
• Reward schemes were implemented to steer GPT towards desired outcomes.
  
  
• Gray areas were given particular attention, the goal being to help the AI make confident decisions about questionable prompts without "over-refusing" things.

Then there was the issue of "jailbreaking", or in other words people trying to deliberately trick GPT into doing things its designers don't want it to do. This is a difficult problem because people can be imaginatively tricky. OpenAI established dedicated "red teams" to attempt to jailbreak GPT. Un-sanitized versions of GPT were used to see if they could provide ways to jailbreak sanitized versions, with GPT then tweaked to close the loopholes.

The bottom line of these considerations is that GPT attempts to conform to modern concepts of diversity and inclusivity, and is deliberately wired to be intolerant of narratives contrary to those concepts. Of course, that means people who don't like diversity and inclusivity cry "censorship!" They can complain all they like; OpenAI is liable for every misstep GPT takes, and can't afford to be tolerant.

OpenAI is confronted with a subtler problem called "power-seeking". If a powerful AI is assigned a task, it will determine the resources it needs to complete the task as fully as it can. To evaluate the problem, OpenAI has tested how an unshackled GPT, given money and access to the internet, might perform if given goals like self-replication, identifying vulnerabilities that might threaten its survival, delegating tasks to copies of itself, hiding traces of its activity on servers, and using human labor through services like TaskRabbit to get around things it can't do, like solving CAPTCHA challenges.

That's a long way from GPT being the basis of a world-conquering AI, but it is best to consider such issues while they're manageable. Right now, GPT lives on text and image inputs; moving up to real-time video analysis and generation would require a giant leap in processing power. Nonetheless, GPT is moving very fast, with GPT-5 in the wings. We may have trouble keeping up with what GPT can do.

[ED: ChatGPT is also now available with "plug-ins" -- meaning ChatGPT optimized for a particular application, such as the Expedia travel-booking service, with Expedia providing a front end and an application-specific knowledge base. So far plug-ins haven't amounted to much, but give them time. There is the question as to whether such applications need all that horsepower, and if a less ambitious GAI engine might do the job effectively as well.

Indeed, do we really need an all-powerful chatbot? Maybe it would work better to have a global network of specialized chatbots, with queries directed to the ones best suited to provide an answer. Different professional groups may well see it useful to construct their own chatbots -- chemistry professionals building a chemistry chatbot, for example.] [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 12 MAR 24] ASTEROID HUNTERS

* ASTEROID HUNTERS: As discussed in a press release from the European Space Agency ("The Asteroid Hunters: 10 Years Preparing for Armageddon", 4 March 2024), it is not all that rare for space objects to hit the Earth. The best-known asteroid strike in recent years was over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. The object disintegrated and exploded before it hit ground, sending out a massive shockwave.

With a mass of around 12,000 tonnes (13,200 tons) and a size of 19 meters (60 feet), the Chelyabinsk meteor was one of the biggest to hit Earth in modern times. The shockwave injured more than 1500 people and damaged 7300 buildings. Many of the injuries occurred because people looked out windows to see why the night was lit up, and were cut up by flying shards of broken glass.

Even before the incident, there had been efforts to track asteroids to see which might be a threat -- but the Chelyabinsk meteor accelerated that work. By a coincidence, the Chelyabinsk asteroid struck on the same day that the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Working Group on Near-Earth Objects met in Vienna to finalize a recommendation to the UN on how to defend Earth from possible asteroid impacts. At this meeting, experts laid the foundations for two international bodies to coordinate a global response to the risk of an asteroid strike:

• The "International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN)".
  
  
• The "Space Mission Planning Advisory Group" or "SMPAG", pronounced "same page".

Both groups met for the first time in early 2014, and have now passed their tenth birthday. IAWN is coordinated by the US NASA space agency: it is a global collaboration of asteroid observers, analysts, and modelers. When an asteroid is found on collision course with Earth, IAWN assesses the impact time, location, and severity. The IAWN searches the skies for possibly dangerous asteroids; if one is found, the network passes on a warning to national emergency response agencies through the United Nations, detailing the size of the asteroid, the likelihood that it will strike Earth, and the date of close encounter.

Of course, SMPAG is informed of the threats. SMPAG is chaired by European Space Agency, and coordinates space activities by the world's space agencies in response. It assesses the possibility of using spacecraft missions to study, deflect, or destroy an incoming asteroid larger than 50 meters (165 feet) in size and with an impact probability larger than 1%. It then advises decision-makers on possible actions to take.

During the last meeting of SMPAG in early 2024, one of the major topics of discussion was the asteroid Aphophis, which is about 350 meters (1,150 feet) in diameter. It will make a pass by Earth on Friday, 13 April 2029, with a closest approach of about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) -- over three times the diameter of the Earth, but still close by celestial standards. A number of space agencies are discussing a mission to Apophis to scout it out. As far as deflection goes, NASA sent a probe named DART to impact with the asteroid Dimorphous in 2022. The ESA is planning to send a follow-up mission named "Hera" to Dimorphous to observe the effects of DART,

International space agencies are also searching the skies for possible threats. The International Astronomical Union operates a "Minor Planet Center" in Paris that catalogs "near-Earth objects (NEO)", as they are called, with 34,000 of them known to date. ESA is developing an automated telescope for nightly sky surveys; the "Flyeye" is actually an array of 16 telescopes that can cover a wide area of the sky at one time to check for passing asteroids. It is expected to be part of a global network of other survey telescopes.

ESA is also working on a space observatory named "NEOMIR" that will be placed at the L1 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. It will use an infrared sensor to spot asteroids, and will be able to spot when they come from near the direction of the Sun -- which is impossible to do with ground-based telescopes, daylight tending to get in the way.

[MON 11 MAR 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 10

SUN 03 MAR 24: Ukraine inherited almost a third of the USSR's defense industry, including manufacture of military vehicles -- the most notable such operation being the Malyshev factory in Kharkov, which produced many of the USSR's tanks. In addition, there's an auto plant at Kremenchuk, on the Dnipro between Kyiv and Dnipro City, and a tractor plant in Kharkiv, both of which also produce military vehicles.

Ukrainian manufacturers have been able to produce analogs of the M113 APC, MaxxPro MRAP, and Humvee armored vehicles called Lys ("Fox"), Sikach ("Boar"), and Kharakternyk ("Warlock") respectively. The Lys actually appears to be a modification of old M113s provided by allies from stockpiles, brought up to a common modernized configuration.

They likely have got new radios and such, possibly some frontal armor -- M113s are thin-skinned, but there are videos of Ukrainian M113s shooting it out in frontline combat. One useful update, possibly in progress, would be putting a robot machine-gun turret on top, with a small radar, to allow an M113 to shoot down drones. The Ukrainians are ingenious; they may come up with even more interesting variations on the M113.

Ukraine's traditional arms industries have had big challenges. One was that they were networked with Russian firms at the outset, and withdrawal of Russian support made things very difficult for them. They also inherited Soviet traditions of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption that have proven frustratingly difficult to correct. Ukraine's military startups, notably those working on drones, are more agile.

MON 04 MAR 24: In more news of the Ukraine War, over the past few weeks the Ukrainians have shot down 15 Russian combat aircraft -- including an A-50 AWACS platform, the rest being Su-34 strike fighters and Su-35 fighters. That may be an indication of increased Russian willingness to take risks, but it is also possible that new weapons are in play.

One interesting possibility is the RIM-174 / SM-6 naval surface-to-air missile. It can also be fired from ground launchers, one being in the form of a standard cargo container -- rendering it hard to identify in space surveillance. The SM-6 is only supposed to have a range of 240 kilometers (150 miles), but it is thought to actually have up to twice that range.

TUE 05 MAR 24: The Ukrainians just sank another Russian corvette, the SERGEY KOTOV, with sea drones. The Ukrainian sea drone offensive against the Russian Black Sea Fleet shows no signs of slowing down, with longer-range drones being progressively introduced.

What is puzzling is that a few months back, it appeared that the Russians had figured out how to neutralize the "sea babies", as they are known, learning to detect them and destroy them with machine gun / automatic cannon fire. Obviously the Ukrainians have since improved their tactics, but it is hard to say in what way. There was talk of long-range robot torpedoes and robot submarines last year, but that's gone quiet. There is also the possibility that the drones are now launching torpedoes or missiles. Nobody's talking.

THU 06 MAR 24: Republican lawmakers get upset over the strangest things. Legislation is now being pushed in Florida and Alabama to ban the sale of lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat is barely a thing right now, but it is on the horizon, and some people are outraged. Florida Republican state senator Tyler Sirois, who is pushing a ban, says the tech is an "affront to nature and creation." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, staying on-brand, adds: "You need meat, okay? We're going to have meat in Florida. Like, we're not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn't work."

Actually, the push to ban lab-grown meat appears to be driven by worries that it will put livestock production out of business. That is indeed a worry, but it is ironic that Republicans, who complain endlessly about regulation of industry, are so quick to pass regulations against industries that rock the boat. The GOP does not like the vision of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who saw capitalism advancing through "creative destruction". The GOP backing of industry is selective, in favor of the old and stodgy, against the new and innovative -- with companies that push diversity and environmental responsibility regarded with particular disdain.

FRI 07 MAR 24: According to THEWARZONE.com, it appears the Russians are now using quadcopter kamikaze drones with "wire guidance" -- or more specifically, fiber-optic thread guidance -- instead of radio guidance. Wire guidance is not new, having been invented in WWII; it was generally used in 1st- and 2nd-generation antitank missiles, most notably the US TOW, and also in guided torpedoes.

The advantage of wire guidance is that it is jamproof, and also doesn't give the k-drone away with radio emissions. In addition, it can support more bandwidth, for example allowing video with higher resolution. The disadvantage is range limited to the length of the fiber-optic thread -- which is somewhat less of a problem than the fact that the thread can get tangled in the brush and hang up the k-drone. Wire-guided missiles like TOW were only used when they had a clear line of fire to a target, and incidentally late-model TOWs have a radio link -- with such TOWs in service with the Ukrainians. It appears that wire-guided k-drones are only useful at relatively short range, against targets that don't move around much.

* AND SO ON: President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union (SOTU) address on Thursday night. The SOTU is a good place for a presidential administration to describe its current agenda, and make a case for its actions. The address accordingly went on for over an hour. It began with:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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Of course, the primary threat to world freedom is Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, in his effort to subjugate Ukraine -- an effort that has been endorsed by Donald Trump:

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The war has led to the strengthening of NATO, establishing a unified front to oppose Putin. Back in the USA, Donald Trump threatened freedom on 6 January 2021, when he tried to overturn the 2020 election, with many of his supporters in Congress now pretending it didn't happen. The president took a shot at Trump's apologists:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The assault on freedoms also included the judicial nullification of the ROE V WADE decision, leading in recent weeks to the absurd effort to ban in-vitro fertilization in Alabama. That all traces back to Trump as well:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The president declared: "I promise you, I'll restore ROE V WADE as the law of the land again. Folks, America cannot go back."

Of course, another one of Donald Trump's failings as president was his mismanagement of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the attendant disruption of the economy. The president of course trumpeted the success of "Bidenomics" in bringing the economy back up again:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The president listed other efforts of his administration, including an initiative on women's health research; a grab-bag of efforts to make buying and owning a home cheaper; support for child education; investment in small business, particularly minority-owned small businesses; and cancellation of student loans. He went on to push for tax reform:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The president took a shot at the GOP mindset: "Republicans can cut Social Security and give more tax breaks to the wealthy." That got a roar of protest from the GOP in the audience, to which he replied: "I kind of thought that's what your plan was. Well, that's good to hear you're not going to cut another $2 trillion for the super wealthy."

The audience settled down, and the president spoke of his administration's efforts to clamp down on corporations that gouging and deceptive pricing. That said, the president spoke of the bipartisan border-security bill that the Republicans recently shot down: "In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we've ever seen."

That got another roar of protest, with the president answering: "Oh, you don't like that bill, huh, that conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I'll be darned."

The president pointed out the virtues of the bill, but said it was killed on the orders of Trump, who wanted immigration to remain unfixed so he could campaign on his. The president asked for discussion and progress on immigration reform: "We have a simple choice. We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it. I'm ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now."

Of course, there are also a lot of things that need to be fixed for Americans:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The president played up other administration efforts, to address the climate crisis, cutting emissions, creating clean energy jobs, and launching the Climate Corps; helping communities reduce crime and violence against women; and promote reasonable gun-safety laws, in a sharp contrast to the mindset of Trump:

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Of course, internationally, the conflict in Gaza is a big concern:

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Along with the fighting in Gaza, there are the accompanying Iran-driven attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, with Americans joining allies in a military response. In addition, the president said, the USA is standing up to China's unfair trade practices and its threats against Taiwan, and establishing closer alliances with allies around the Pacific Rim, with an eye to counterbalancing China.

Finally, the president listed other lesser, but still important, efforts of his administration: controlling fentanyl trafficking; ensuring moderation of social media; considering regulations on AI; and helping service folk, veterans, and their families. He concluded with:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The media described the public reaction to the speech as "mixed". Yes, it was: the GOP hated it and the Democrats ate it up. The ongoing talk of Biden's bad polling numbers was belied by the speech being accompanied by a tsunami of donations to the Biden campaign.

[FRI 08 MAR 24] JOE BIDEN (16)

* JOE BIDEN (16): Joe Biden ran for re-election in 1978, with his opposition to busing being a core issue, both for good and bad. It was a completely troublesome issue, but not really dangerous to Joe -- both because public opinion on it was so mixed, and because Republicans were effectively nowhere on civil rights. Jimmy Carter flew into Wilmington on a Marine One helicopter to attend two events and raise money for his campaign; Carter called him "a friend", but was compelled, in his prissy way, to add that Joe was "independent almost to a fault." Of course, Delawareans knew that, always expecting that "Joe will be Joe", and overall it helped him.

Joe's rival in the election ended up being a Delaware poultry farmer, James H. Baxter, who found Joe more than he could handle. When Baxter ran an ad in the newspapers attacking Joe's 14% attendance record, Baxter was informed that the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD showed that was the norm for senators of both parties. Besides, when Joe wasn't in Congress, he was generally back in Delaware, glad-handing his constituents. Nobody ever seriously accused Joe of being a slacker.

As election day approached, Baxter told the Wilmington Kiwanis Club that Joe was "a desperate man" who was "nowhere as good for Delaware as he says he is." The Biden campaign didn't take it seriously, nor did they need to: Joe slaughtered Baxter, 58% to 41%. It was a great contrast to Joe's first Senate run, which he had won by a narrow margin.

* However, the Democrats did not generally do very well in the 1978 elections, mostly because of Jimmy Carter, who was obviously out of his depth. One of the biggest problems afflicting Carter was inflation, which had gone high in the Nixon Administration, and seemed stuck there. That was bad enough, but Carter seemed unsteady and confused in the White House. He had particular problems dealing with Congress, even Democrats in Congress.

Carter had campaigned on being a "Washington outsider", and didn't seem to understand that he couldn't get much done without a good relationship with Congress. His administration didn't seem very interested in communication; Joe noticed irritably that when he did manage to get time with the president, Carter had an inclination to keep checking his watch. Carter had granted his vice president, Walter "Fritz" Mondale, once a Democratic senator from Minnesota, a high degree of authority in the administration, in part on the basis that Mondale understood and could navigate relations with Congress -- but the navigation never went well.

Carter's woes greatly increased in the fall of 1979. An Islamic revolution had overthrown the Shah of Iran; as fallout from the revolution, a group of Iranian students had seized the American embassy in Tehran and was holding the embassy staff hostage. Come 1980, Carter was looking at re-election, and Joe stumped for him again -- but there was a lack of enthusiasm in the exercise, in both directions.

In April 1980, Joe and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee visited the Persian Gulf region, primarily to assess the hostage situation. They were escorted by a naval officer named John McCain, who Joe took a quick liking to. Among their other stops, the group visited the aircraft carrier NIMITZ at sea, to be given a tour. Bill Bader, the committee's (non-elected) chief of staff, had been a Navy captain and didn't feel like being herded, so he explored on his own.

When Bader went to the aircraft hangar below decks, he was surprised to see eight big Sikorsky Sea Stallion helicopters tucked away there. The ship's executive officer caught Bader there and chewed him out, telling him to say nothing to anyone about what he had seen. Bader did not take orders from naval officers, and Bader told Joe what he'd seen at first opportunity. The helicopters wouldn't have been there except for use in some sort of amphibious assault, and the obvious conclusion was that they were supposed to rescue the hostages.

Bader ask Joe if he should tell Senator Frank Church, the committee chair, what was going on. Joe thought he should, and so Bader told Church; Church then raised a stink with the Carter Administration, insisting that Congress be kept in the loop for any such operation. True to form, the Carter Administration kept its own counsel. Indeed, the administration even kept Cyrus Vance, the defense secretary, out of the loop -- with Vance calling Bader on the evening of 24 April to say that "unbeknownst to me and against my best judgement, Jimmy Carter has sent this array of special forces to go rescue the hostages, and it has already failed." Vance didn't dare say a word about it ahead of time, lest he sabotage the operation, but with its failure he went public -- and would then resign. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 07 MAR 24] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("How To Kill A Star?" by Will Dunham, 23 June 2023), astronomers have spotted a massive gamma-ray burst (GRB) in a distant and ancient elliptical galaxy. They suspect it was caused by the collision of two compact and superdense neutron stars, in the densely-packed and chaotic environment near a supermassive black hole at the center of that galaxy.

The GRB, which lasted over a minute, was spotted by NASA's orbiting Swift observatory in 2019, with ground-based telescopes then zooming in on "GRB 191019A". Astronomer Andrew Levan -- of Radboud University in the Netherlands, a lead in the research of the event -- says: "The idea that stars ... can die through collisions in extremely dense regions has been around since at least the 1980s. So we've been waiting for 40 years for the signatures to be found observationally."

The researchers used data from orbiting and ground-based telescopes to study the gamma-ray burst in a galaxy about 3 billion light-years away from Earth, roughly in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. The galaxy quiescent, with star formation well past its peak, being populated mostly by stars several billion years old. It had a supermassive black hole in its center, with the galactic core having a density of stars millions of times greater than in our own stellar neighborhood. Levan said:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

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The jet was seen on Earth as a GRB. The compact size of the neutron stars meant the event was transient.

Incidentally, another GRB -- the "Biggest Of All Time (BOAT)" -- was observed by Swift in 2022. The burster, designated "GRB 221009A" was probably the result of a supernova giving birth to a black hole in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years from Earth Astronomers believe it released as much energy as about three Suns converting all of their mass to pure energy. It may not have been inherently more powerful than other GRBs that have been observed, but it was unusually closer to Earth, giving it greater apparent brightness.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("How Drones Are Helping Scientists Find Meteorites" by Katherine Kornei, 21 September 2023), meteors often fall to Earth. Planetary scientists like to find them, since they can provide clues to the origins of the Solar System. Unfortunately, trying to locate them is like searching for needles in a haystack. Even when a meteorite fall is tracked, it's still over such a wide area as to make a ground search futile.

Seamus Anderson -- a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia -- decided to take an automated approach. About seven years ago, he got the idea of using drones to hunt for meteorites in Western Australia and South Australia. In 2022, he and his colleagues reported their first successful recovery of a meteorite spotted with a drone, and have discovered more since. Anderson says: "You're going from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so."

The team is tipped off to a meteorite fall by networks of ground-based cameras. They pack up their kit into a 4WD vehicle and head off into the back of beyond, often on rough or nonexistent roads. Once they get to work, they fly the drone in a search pattern at an altitude of about 20 meters (66 feet), with the drone taking an image once a second. Every 40 minutes or so, the drone lands to have its batteries swapped out, with the images being downloaded.

A typical day of flying can net over 10,000 images, which are then chopped up digitally into 100 million or so smaller sections or "tiles", two meters on a side. They're inspected by a pattern-recognition system that was trained to recognize meteorites based on images of the real thing or terrestrial rocks spray-painted black. About 99% of the tiles contain nothing relevant and are discarded, leaving about 50,000 that have to be checked by a human.

Most of the time, those tiles contain things that certainly aren't meteorites: animal droppings, tin cans, snakes, sleeping kangaroos. They are flagged by the algorithm simply because it doesn't know what they are. Once interesting candidates are found, a smaller drone is sent out to inspect them at low altitude, about a meter. If they appear to be real meteorites, the team goes out on a personal investigation.

The researchers plan to train their algorithm to better to reduce the number of things flagged. They are also planning to make their code open-source so other researchers can freely use it. Anderson would also like to use drones to hunt for meteorites in Antarctica, but understands that the frigid environment will pose new challenges: "Antarctica is a whole different beast."

[WED 06 MAR 24] GEN-AI ARRIVES (4)

* GEN-AI ARRIVES (4): According to an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Beyond Text: GPT Has Evolved, And AI Is Now Flexing New powers" by Loz Blain, 15 March 2023), ChatGPT was introduced with GPT-3 as the engine, moving up to GPT-3.5. Now it's moved up to GPT-4, which is even more powerful.

However, the dataset used to train GPT-4 was not updated -- so while GPT-4 seems much smarter than GPT-3.5, it's just as clueless about anything that's happened since September 2021. And while it retains the full context of a given conversation, it can't update its core model and "learn" from conversations with other users.

While GPT-3.5 could handle text inputs up to 4,096 "tokens" in length, amounting to roughly 3000 words, GPT-4 launches with a maximum context length of 32,768 tokens, roughly 24,600 words, or about 50 pages of text. On the "HellaSwag" test, designed to quantify "commonsense reasoning around everyday events," a 2019 GPT model scored 41.7%, GPT-3.5 scored 85.5%, while GPT-4 scored a very impressive 95.3%. The average for humans in 95.6%.

In terms of factual accuracy, it scores some 40% higher on OpenAI's own "factuality" tests across nine different categories. It also did significantly better on many of the exam papers GPT-3.5 produced. Taking the Uniform Bar Exam as an extreme example, it leaps from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile when ranked against human students.

It's significantly less prone to what OpenAI calls "hallucinating" -- and the rest of us call "pulling wrong answers out of the dumper." However, it still does make things up, scoring between 65% and 80% accuracy on those factuality tests, which means it still gets a lot of things wrong. It will improve, though that will make it harder to notice wrong answers.

In one particular advance, while GPT-3.5 lived in a world of text, GPT-4 is "multimodal": capable of processing other media. However, while Microsoft speaks of potential video and audio use cases, OpenAI limited GPT-4 to just accepting images at launch. Even limited to images, its capabilities are impressive, particularly when it comes to understanding graphs, charts, diagrams and infographics -- which could make it useful for summarizing long reports and scientific studies.

It can do well more than that. It can be handed an image representing a meme and come up with an explanation of why it's funny -- not just being able to describe the elements of the image, but also the context and basis of their humor. It can solve simple mechanical puzzles, not out of any logical analysis, but because it can recognize other puzzles it resembles. Humans do more or less the same thing: "Oh yeah, we've seen something like this before."

At launch, GPT's visual capabilities could be only obtained in one application, the "Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer". A sight-impaired user can take pictures, with the app then telling the user what's in the image. That's relatively easy to do; more elaborate capabilities include the ability to construct a web page from an image providing a general hint of what's wanted, along with some scribbled text instructions.

GPT-4 takes another step forward by being multilingual. It's almost as accurate in Mandarin, Japanese, Afrikaans, Indonesian, Russian and other languages as it is in English. In fact, it's more accurate in Punjabi, Thai, Arabic, Welsh and Urdu than GPT-3.5 was in English. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 05 MAR 24] DECOUPLED ELECTROLYZER

* DECOUPLED ELECTROLYZER: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Type Of Water Splitter Could Make Green Hydrogen Cheaper" by Robert F. Service, 19 January 2024), hydrogen can be produced through the electrolysis of water:

   2H20 -> O2 + 2H2

A hydrogen economy requires a way to do this cheaply, but to date electrolyzers built to generate hydrogen have been expensive -- one of the reasons being an expensive membrane between the two poles of the electrolyzer. Now a group of researchers has devised a scheme in which hydrogen and oxygen are generated in completely separate chambers.

Electrolyzers have been around for over two centuries. Today's most popular variant, the "alkaline" electrolyzer, features a pair of electrodes in a chamber filled with a liquid "electrolyte" through which ions can pass. Applying an electric current to the negatively charged cathode splits the water into hydrogen molecules and negatively charged hydroxide (-OH) ions. The hydroxide ions diffuse through the electrolyte to the positively charged anode, where they react to form oxygen and a bit of water.

The alkaline electrolyzer needs a membrane between the two electrodes that allows the -OH ions to pass through, but blocks the H2 and O2 -- which could explosively recombine if they mingled. According to Avner Rothschild -- a materials scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology -- the membrane is expensive because it is made up of multiple special layers.

Rothschild and his colleagues thought they could do away with the membrane by "decoupling" the electrolysis, separating the hydrogen and oxygen production in space or time. In 2019, they created a setup in which they charged a nickel-based electrode like a battery during the hydrogen production step, the electrode soaking up -OH ions. They then shifted the electrode to a second chamber to generate oxygen as it discharged. The scheme was efficient, but the requirement of moving the electrode meant it couldn't be continuous. In addition, the electrolyte used in the oxygen generation step had to be hot to speed the reaction, requiring the use of expensive materials, and insulation to prevent heat loss.

The researchers redesigned their decoupled electrolyzer so that hydrogen production didn't charge the anode with -OH ions, but instead chemically altered the liquid electrolyte, bromide ions becoming bromate (BrO3), the reaction it seems being:

   3H20 + Br -> 3H2 + BrO3

The bromate-containing "charged" electrolyte was pumped into a second chamber, which has a catalyst that causes the bromate to decompose back into bromide and oxygen in a room-temperature reaction. The setup produced hydrogen continuously at a high rate. It wasn't as efficient as a typical alkaline electrolyzer, but Rothschild says: "We can keep the hydrogen and oxygen separate without a membrane." -- which should reduce the cost of large-scale hydrogen production.

Mark Symes -- a chemist at the University of Glasgow who helped create some of the first decoupled electrolyzers a decade ago -- says the concept still faces some challenges:

• To prevent bromate from reacting at the anode before it can be pumped to the second chamber, the anode had to be coated with a material that allowed hydrogen to escape but blocked bromate from reaching the anode. The coating was toxic, raising safety concerns.
  
  
• The electrodes in the device use either platinum or ruthenium, which are rare and expensive metals.

Rothschild says his group is working on a next-generation device to address the issues. He believes that the work will prove highly significant in the new green industrial economy.

[MON 04 MAR 24] THE WEEK THAT WAS 9

* SUN 25 FEB: In Ukraine War news, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy admitted that his country has lost 31,000 troops killed in the war with Russia. That is not a good thing, but it is a far smaller number than the Russian troops killed in the conflict. Zelenskyy did not confirm how many wounded there have been -- it is easy to guess that at least as many Ukrainian troops have been crippled and taken permanently out of action. Zelenskyy also said that "tens of thousands" of Ukrainian citizens have been killed, but added that they couldn't really be tallied until the war is over.

In related news, Ukrainian General Kyrylo Budanov, head of the military HUR intelligence service, says that tales of large numbers of Iranian and North Korean long-range missiles in Russian service are not backed up by his intelligence. Although the Iranians have stated they are shipping such missiles to Russia, they lie a lot, and Budanov says that story "does not correspond to reality." As far as North Korean missiles go, he says: "Several North Korean [missiles] were used, but to talk about extensive use ... does not correspond to reality."

At present, Russian President Vladimir Putin is crowing that he has the advantage in the war, but that appears to overstating his case. The Russians just lost another high-value A-50 airborne early warning aircraft, it appears to a long-range missile, with three of them taken out so far. Things are difficult for Ukraine at present, to be sure, but they may be exaggerated to help push through the political logjam on Ukraine War funding in the US Congress.

Incidentally, picking up the Cyrillic alphabet has paid off. Ukrainian military intelligence is generally referred to as the "GUR" in the press, but it's really "HUR". The relevant Cyrillic symbol, which looks like an "L" flipped upside-down, corresponds to "G" in Russian, but to "H" in Ukrainian.

* WED 28 FEB: I was cruising the internet yesterday afternoon, and went to the wrong link from the Microsoft Edge browser -- to get a full-screen pop up window and a robot voice saying things like: YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN LOCKED / WINDOWS SECURITY VIOLATION / DO NOT REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER -- and so on. I was startled but knew it was a scam, thinking: "Don't engage with it!"

I couldn't tab out of the window -- which screamed SCAM! -- so I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot. When Windows asked me if I wanted to reboot, I decided to back to Windows instead, knowing I could try to bail out again if I had to. I didn't need to, when I got back the trap window was gone. Funny, I used to see traps like that a lot, but that was a long time ago. I would think the trap got shut down, but I didn't check to find out.

* Today, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would step down as leader, though he would remain in the Senate. His move was widely interpreted as acknowledging that the GOP was unlikely to regain control of the Senate in the 2024 election.

Mitch is a devious person, so it's impossible to figure out what he's up to ... but I can't help but suspect that he realizes that his political career has been a complete bust. Which is how it will be described in the history books. Sad.

* AND SO ON: Having bailed out of X/Twitter, now I'm working to carve out a space on Spoutible. The big problem with Spoutible is that it's heavily focused on liberal politics and liberal arts -- neither of which I have any real problem with, but they're not my core interests.

I got to thinking: "So why not push the things I'm interested in on Spoutible? Make it the environment I want it to be?" Now I post links about a half-dozen times a day on tech, miltech, the Ukraine War, and science, with a little liberal politics as well. I've only got about 50 followers right now, but there's a vacuum on Spoutible for the stuff I'm pushing, and I've got nowhere to go but up.

At last notice, in June 2023, Spoutable had almost a quarter of a million users -- and Spoutible users are all real users, bots not allowed. Can I get to a hundred followers? Sure. A thousand? Yeah, I think so. Ten thousand? Maybe. A hundred thousand? Not so sure. With only ten thousand, if I promote one of my ebooks, I should get about ten sales -- and even a modest number of sales raises my Amazon rankings. However, I have no idea how long it will take to get there.

* I got an Amazon Fire TV Cube for the TV in my living room a few years back. One of the fun things about it was that I bought a classic videogames package for it for a few bucks. I figured out how to use a game controller with the Cube, and got into the habit of playing ASTEROIDS every day after lunch. I got pretty good at it.

Unfortunately, the makers of the game decided to do an update, one of the things done being to make their version of ASTEROIDS more like the original arcade version. I could not then play it any more. The big problem was that the trackpad or joystick then controlled yaw LEFT or RIGHT -- which was fine -- but also controlled the thruster throttle with UP. Mixing the throttle in with the steering just did not work well.

I have a set of game controllers around the house, but none of them worked very well. I got to thinking my very nice 8BitDo Pro 2 controller would work, because I could reprogram the buttons on it -- for example, use one of the buttons on the bottom for UP / throttle. Since I was using my existing Pro 2 controller with my Windows / Steam game box, I bought a second Pro 2 for the Cube, the new controller being gray and not black like the older one, lest I get them mixed up.

I had tinkered with reprogramming buttons on my old Pro 2, but never did much with it, so I had to dope it out better. The buttons are reprogrammed using an "Ultimate Software" app running on Windows; I ran it, and hooked up the new Pro 2 controller to my PC using USB. The app gave me a list of button mappings that I could change. Having done so, I told the app to "sync to the controller" to download the new settings.

All done? Not quite, I had to press a button on the controller to get it to accept the new key mappings, then exit the app. I couldn't get the mappings to work when I hooked up the controller over bluetooth to the Cube -- until I realized I had to press the button again to select the mappings. I think I can program several sets of mappings, but I didn't need to and didn't worry about it. Anyway, I'm not back up to speed with ASTEROIDS again yet, but advancing steadily. I'm also playing other games in the package that I hadn't paid attention to before, focusing on MEGAPEDES, a CENTIPEDES clone, and getting up to a middling level on it.

Oh yeah, another little comment ... the Pro 2 controller has a 4-position switch to allow the host machine to be set, labeled "SADX" for "Nintendo Switch", "Apple", "Android", and "Xbox / Windows" respectively. Since the Cube is an Android-type device, did I need to set it to "D"? That didn't work well; I set it to "X" and worked from there.

[FRI 01 MAR 24] JOE BIDEN (15)

* JOE BIDEN (15): By the time Jimmy Carter took office, Joe Biden was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Accordingly, when Carter nominated Ted Soerensen -- who had been a speechwriter and presidential aide in the JFK Administration -- as director of the CIA, the Intelligence Committee had to vet him. It started out well enough, but it came out that Soerensen had taken classified documents home when he was working on his best-selling book, KENNEDY. Soerensen, as he commented later in his memoirs, believed that too many government documents were classified without reason, and classification was routinely ignored by government officials, who sometimes leaked important documents to the press.

That and other slights derailed Soerensen's nomination and he withdrew it, to the relief of Carter. Joe praised Soerensen for his integrity, but Soerensen took Joe's opposition personally, writing in his memoirs: "The prize for political hypocrisy in a town noted for political hypocrisy went to Joe Biden." Joe, incidentally, hadn't wanted to be on the Intelligence Committee -- for the ironic reason that membership came with burdensome security requirements. The security was so overbearing as to make it troublesome for its members to even publicly discuss things that were common knowledge, but Mike Mansfield told him, in so many polite words, to man up and do the job.

In early 1977, Joe also became a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. There he said he would oppose the appointment of a black appellate judge, Wade McCree, who had been involved in judicial support of mandates for school busing. Busing of students out of districts to improve racial and educational balance had been promoted since the early days of desegregation. Even though Joe was a strong advocate of civil rights, he dug in his heels on school busing and opposed it in Congress.

Joe regarded busing as a "liberal train wreck", calling it an "asinine concept" in an interview. It was very unpopular with white parents, and not completely popular with black parents either. Joe helped push anti-busing legislation, making him generally out of step with his Democratic colleagues on the issue; he got flak over it, but he didn't care. McCree was confirmed anyway.

Back on the Intelligence Committee, Joe helped push the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)" of 1978 -- intended to provide judicial oversight of government and other surveillance, which had been out of control during the Nixon years. It introduced the "FISA court", a secret court whose judges reviewed requests for surveillance of targets, and issued warrants when they approved. The court almost always issued the warrants, but the fact that investigators had to request and justify the warrants ensured that nothing very untoward was done.

Having proposed to Jill repeatedly over the previous year and being turned down, when he came back from a trip to South Africa, he gave Jill an ultimatum: "I'm not going to ask you again. I have two boys here. I love you, but my responsibility is to them." He said that he would not run for re-election in 1978 if Jill didn't want him to. It was time: she said YES -- but she didn't want him to give up his Senate career.

They were married by a Catholic priest in the United Nations chapel on 17 June 1977, with Beau and Hunt standing at the altar with them. After the service, they went to see the musical ANNIE on Broadway, then had cheeseburgers and went back to the hotel; they all spent the night in the honeymoon suite, the boys in a separate room. Joe's family had been rebuilt and rejuvenated. In the fall, the family went to Nantucket for Thanksgiving weekend, which would become a yearly tradition for the Biden clan. [TO BE CONTINUED]