MrG's Blog & Notes

* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with monthly entries.

[*] NEWS FOR JULY 2020

* While America struggles with COVID-19 and Donald Trump, events roll on towards the November election. Neither the pandemic nor Trump are permanent afflictions; in time, it seems sooner than later, both will be overcome, with the Democrats left with the question of: "What now?" To that end, on 8 July, a joint task force headed by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders issued a 110-page paper titled: "Combating The Climate Crisis & Pursuing Environmental Justice".

The task force recommendations do not include the far-reaching structural changes that Sanders had advocated, such as "Medicare for All", the "Green New Deal", and eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They instead conform more closely to the priorities established by Biden during the primary campaign, Biden during the primary, like expanding the Affordable Care Act through a public option -- but add ambitious time lines for reaching certain environmental benchmarks, such as eliminating carbon pollution from power plants and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for new buildings. The paper also includes a list of criminal justice reforms, including to law enforcement and policing practices, issues that have risen to a high profile since the death of George Floyd in police custody in May.

The idea of joint task forces was born out of Biden and Sanders' pledges to unite the party ahead of the November election, to defuze the infighting that helped Donald Trump in 2016. The former Democratic primary rivals unveiled their unity task forces in May. Each of the six task forces, focusing on climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, education, health care and immigration included members picked by Biden and Sanders, as well as co-chairs selected by each man. Most notably, the joint task force on climate change was co-chaired by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the champion of the Green New Deal.

Biden, commenting on the release of the document, said:

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No surprises there. The Sanders statement was more interesting:

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That shows the exercise was a coup for Joe Biden, and a testimony to his well-tuned political skills. In one smooth movement, he brought the hard Left into the mainstream of Democratic policy, and ensured there would be no serious challenge to him from the Left: they bought in to the program.

Devious? No, obvious. The reality is that there is not a great difference of goals between Moderate Democrats and the hard Left; there is mostly a difference of opinion over tactics. Once Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez sat down and talked with Biden's team, Biden had basically won: the hard Left had to come to agreement, and Biden could offer many concessions without sacrificing anything he didn't want to give away. After all, as the nominee, he had a better hand of cards to play.

The nutjob Right takes a reverse-skewed view of the same issue, claiming the hard Left has taken over the Democratic Party. Nonsense: again, there has never been much difference between the goals of the two arms of the party, and the Left's attacks on the Moderates were typically over-the-top. The Right's take on the matter says much less about the Democrats than it does about the Right, showing how far out of step with America in the 21st century the Republicans really are.

Next up, Biden selects a running mate. There's been a great deal of discussion about who he might select -- but nobody really knows. Wait and see.

* In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic is turning the USA upside-down. It was obvious after the mass carelessness exhibited during the Memorial Day holiday at the end of the May that things were going to get much worse during June; it took until late in that month, but cases began to skyrocket. The carelessness over 4th of July holiday was even greater, there being more travel across the USA this Independence Day than last year. Now the Red States and the rural areas have been infected.

In a significant demonstration of the impact of the pandemic, late in July Herman Cain -- once CEO of Godfather's Pizza, and a prominent black Trump supporter -- died of COVID-19. It seemed likely he had contracted the disease at Trump's rally in Tulsa OK on 20 June. Many deaths could have been avoided had people worn masks, kept washing their hands, and observed social distancing. There would have been some resistance to pandemic-control measures in any case, but the resistance was greatly inflated by Donald Trump's refusal to lead in the crisis -- trying to downplay it, refusing to wear a mask, attempting to shift blame to China and others. His approval numbers have plummeted as a result. He's made attempts to act more responsibly, but he can't stay on message.

The Republican Party is distancing itself from him. The GOP is in a worse position now with Trump than they were in 1932 with Herbert Hoover, and not just because of the pandemic: Hoover hadn't been impeached, nor was he irresponsible, malign, corrupt, and dysfunctional. The Republicans lost the White House in 1932 and didn't get it back for 20 years. [ED: Trump would, unfortunately, make a comeback ... which would prove particularly unfortunate for the GOP.]

Incidentally, although the 2020 election was a "Big Blue Wave" for the Democrats, allowing them to handily retake the House of Representatives, I was a bit disappointed; the Democrats took 41 seats, while in 2010 -- the year of the Republican "counter-revolution" against Barack Obama -- the GOP took 63 seats. However, on recently thinking things over, I figured out that in terms of percentage of votes, the Democrats got an 8.6% plurality of the vote in 2018, while the GOP got a 6.8% plurality of the vote in 2010. The GOP got more seats out of fewer votes because they won in less populous rural districts. It really was a Big Blue Wave. 2020 is likely to be even more lopsided.

In any case, Trump also didn't do himself much good by dispatching Department of Homeland Security men to Portland, Oregon, to deal with ongoing protests and unrest there. The city and state governments said they weren't welcome; the Feds couldn't suppress the demonstrations, they just inflamed them, coming on like stormtroopers in unmarked uniforms. It was a publicity stunt for Trump, trying to impress his hardcore fans. Unfortunately for Trump, it antagonized a lot more people, dragging down his approval ratings even more. It wasn't a demonstration of strength: it was a demonstration of weakness, all the more so because he really wanted to send in the Army. The generals made it clear to him that wasn't going to happen.

No matter what Trump does, he can't escape the pandemic; no stunts he pulls can distract from it, and it won't go away when he ignores it. Late in the month, bolstered by an inept study from the Henry Ford Health System, he started promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19, when all sensible studies performed to date shows it does little or nothing. Trump's reasoning is easy to follow: "The pandemic really isn't a problem [LIE], and to the extent it is, we have a miracle cure [LIE], but the Liberals are conspiring to suppress it [LIE]."

In other words, it's shifting the blame. This only works with the ignorant, who will accept anything Trump tells them. One of the popular memes among them at present is that the pandemic will disappear the day after election day -- as if every government in the world was conspiring to keep Trump from being elected.

* In reality, Trump is failing on his own, no conspiracy against him needed. The Lincoln Project, a collaboration of anti-Trump Republicans, has been hitting him with merciless, well-produced ads -- for example, one displaying "Trump's Wall", a line of upright coffins 66 miles long. The Lincoln Project includes, among others, George Conway, a prominent Trump critic, and Rick Wilson, a media attack dog.

Wilson has a dry, biting sense of humor. Early in the month, the Supreme Court judged that Congress could not subpoena Trump's tax returns, but gave the green light for New York State to proceed on doing so. Wilson wrote an essay for the DAILY BEAST, titled: "Trump's No Billionaire. He's a Bullshit Artist. And Soon, We'll Have the Taxes to Prove It." It read:

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Mary Trump, incidentally, greatly and blessedly upstaged John Bolton's self-serving book on the Trump Administration, hitting the best-seller lists and staying there. Mary Trump looks remarkably like her uncle, incidentally, but comes across as level-headed, intelligent, and articulate -- as her uncle does not.

Anyway, as a parting shot, in mid-month Rick Wilson commented on his Twitter feed:

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These days, if we couldn't laugh, we'd have to cry.

* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Bioluminescence People Find So Attractive Is A Defence Mechanism", 20 June 2019), it is well-known that many marine organisms are bioluminescent, emitting light. What is not so well understood is why they do so.

Ships at sea may leave a lovely glow in their wake, this light being produced by single-celled planktonic creatures known as "dinoflagellates". Dinoflagellates are also known as the agent of "red tides", which are reddish, toxic blooms of the organism that can kill fish and other animals. The toxins can also accumulate in filter-feeding clams and the like, presenting a hazard to those who eat the clams.

Might there be a relationship between these two characteristics of dinoflagellates? Two researchers, biologists Erik Selander and Andrew Prevett -- of Gothenburg University in Sweden -- decided to investigate. They chose as their test subject Lingulodinium polyedra, a common dinoflagellate. They raised, in tanks, several colonies of a strain of L. polyedra that don't produce defensive toxins.

The tanks also contained colonies of other species of plankton, resulting in mixed communities. In some cases, the researchers turned off the ability of the dinoflagellates to glow; in others, they were left to glow as they normally did. Some of the colonies were also dosed with a fat named "copepodamide" -- produced by small crustaceans known as "copepods" that often graze on dinoflagellates, the idea being to tip off the dinoflagellates that copepods might be present. Once all the colonies were established, the researchers unleashed copepods on them, with the results:

• In colonies consisting of toxin-free dinoflagellates that couldn't glow, the copepods readily devoured the dinoflagellates. Although L. polyedra made up only a quarter of the possible prey organisms in these colonies, they constituted three-quarters of the copepods' diets.
  
  
• In colonies where L. polyedra were able to glow normally, the dinoflagellates made up only a quarter of the copepod diet.
  
  
• In colonies where the dinoflagellates had been primed to the presence of copepods by exposure to copepodamide, the dinoflagellates flashed brightly as the copepods approached. The flash discouraged the copepods; in this case, L. polyedra made up only 2% of their diets.

In other words, with L. polyedra, bioluminescence amounts to a defense mechanism. Predators like copepods may have evolved to avoid the toxic dinoflagellates by being tipped off by the flash; or the flash may blind the copepods; or the flashes attract predators that prey on copepods in turn. Possibly it's some combination of those factors. Further research will nail down the mechanisms.

* An article from THEVERGE.com ("The Rise And Fall Of The PlayStation Supercomputers" by Mary Beth Griggs, 3 December 2019) provided a footnote to a quirky story in the history of computing: the era when Sony PlayStation (PS) game consoles were ganged up to be used as supercomputers.

By the beginning of the 21st century, game consoles had acquired sophisticated 3D-graphics capabilities, which were enabled by graphics coprocessors AKA "graphics processor units (GPU)". GPUs supported number-crunching that was clearly useful for scientific applications; they weren't common in personal computers, and nobody was making processor systems with GPUs for scientific applications, at least at reasonable prices. Game consoles were available and relatively cheap.

In 2002, Sony released a Linux-based operating system that allowed a PlayStation 2 to be used as a personal computer. Craig Steffen -- now chief researcher for the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) PS Linus made the PS2 accessible to his purposes: "They built the bridges, so that you could write the code, and it would work."

The NCSA wired together a system of 60 or 70 PS2s to cobble together a home-brew supercomputer. Steffen says: "It worked okay; it didn't work superbly well." It often had to be rebooted. The NCSA researchers quickly abandoned the effort. The idea, however, didn't die out.

In late 2006, Sony introduced the PlayStation 3, with more powerful hardware and a better scheme for booting up with Linux. The PS3 made the idea of assembling a PlayStation supercomputer more attractive. Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna, of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, was interested in investigating black holes, but money was a problem: "Doing pure period simulation work on black holes doesn't really typically attract a lot of funding, it's just because it doesn't have too much relevance to society."

One of the members of Khanna's team was a hard-core gamer, and he suggested that the PS3 might be able to solve the problem. Khanna and his people started out wiring together eight PS3s; having got them to work together, they gradually expanded the system to 176 PS3s. Other research teams had the same idea. A group in North Carolina also built a PS3 supercomputer in 2007, and a few years later, at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New York, computer scientist Mark Barnell began working on a similar project named the "Condor Cluster".

Barnell's team proposed the project in 2009. However, by that time, Sony was backtracking on PS Linux support. The company's new PS3 Slim couldn't run it -- and in fact, after being hacked, Sony issued a firmware update that eliminated PS Linux support from all PS3s. The Air Force managed to obtain PS3s without the new firmware from Sony, with the Condor Cluster going online in 2010. It had more than 1,700 PS3s connected by kilometers of wire; in its prime, it was in the top 50 supercomputers in the world.

That was as far as it went. The PlayStation 4 wasn't flexible enough to be used as a supercomputer element, and neither was any of the competition. Khanna described the PS4 as a "regular old PC", saying: "We weren't really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4." New, much more powerful hardware came out, with startups offering dedicated and cheap supercomputer modules, or researchers home-brewing their own using available tools.

The PS3 supercomputer at Dartmouth is still working, though it has been trimmed back. The Air Force phased out the Condor Cluster about five years ago, with some of the old consoles sold off as excess. One subset ended up on a TV series -- playing a supercomputer.

* From late November 2019 into January 2020, there were tales of platoons of large drones cruising the prairies in Nebraska and northeastern Colorado at night, leading to excited speculation by the inhabitants. The stories died out before the end of January because -- according to an article from, of all things, the AKRON NEWS-REPORTER, dated 30 January 2020) -- there was nothing there.

Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado said things started happening in his area on 30 December: "Residents began calling in reports of drones of unknown origin moving above houses and farms . The numbers would range from four to ten drones in an area at a time. Some were reported to be low and at least six feet long."

Iovinella further detailed that the drones had white and red flashing lights, as he and other deputies made "several attempts" to follow the drones. The drones were moving "very fast at times" but could also "sustain a hover over an area for long periods of time." He added: "It is believed that there could have been up to 30 drones moving around the county, if not more, and appeared to be working in a search pattern across the county."

Reports indicated the drones were operating from about 7 to 10 PM. On 8 January 2020, a medical helicopter reported a near miss with a drone; in response local, state, Federal, and military authorities formed a joint task force to investigate, working from the town of Brush, Colorado, out on the prairie. On 13 January, the Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) issued a statement summarizing the investigation, saying that the CDPS had "confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity."

Of 23 reports investigated between 6 January and 13 January, 13 were found to be "planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones"; six were commercial aircraft; while four remain unconfirmed. Much the same can be said of other reports of drones. Of course, something still might be going on, but there are no leads to suggest what.

The Colorado non-incident adds yet another instance of drone hysteria to the record books -- which has been documented by a white paper published by drone manufacturer DJI, and a study by the Academy of Model Aeronautics which found only 27 out of 764 reports of drone sightings by aircraft pilots were legitimate near misses. Stan Hilkey, CPDS executive director, cautiously told THE DENVER POST: "While I can't conclusively say we have solved the mystery, we have been able to rule out a lot of the activity that was causing concern. We will continue to remain vigilant, and respond as new information comes in." THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.

* In petty adventures, I decided to get all my smartphones -- I have three now -- working with Google Voice. As I mentioned before, I don't have a SIM chip in any of my phones, I don't have a phone subscription; I only can communicate over wi-fi using a Google Voice (GV) VOIP number, or with a TextFree (TF) / Pinger VOIP number I got as a backup.

I decided to make a GV call through one of the phones as a test, thinking it would be easy -- I'd done it before -- but it proved troublesome. I had some difficulties getting my bluetooth phone headset to work, but that didn't take too long to work out, it was just a question of playing with Android Settings until the phone properly recognized the headset.

Trying to get the GV app to work proved trickier. I couldn't make a call at first. It would ask me to verify the phone, by asking me to enter another phone number to send a verification code to. I gave it the TF number, but it wouldn't send a text message with the verification code to TF. GV did also allow me to send a voicemail with the verification code to TF, and that way, I could get the code off of TF -- but it didn't change anything when I punched it into the GV app.

I got to wondering if there was some setting I had wrong. I got into GV settings and found a permissions list; I set all the permissions that made sense to set -- and then got to poking around a bit more, to find that I had to authorize the phone to make calls over wi-fi, the authorization being set to OFF by default. Makes sorta sense, I guess carriers aren't eager to tip off users that they can use their phones over wi-fi.

Anyway, I set the wi-fi authorization to ON, and then I was flying. The GV app still asked to verify the phone, but I simply went to the Contacts list and could call anyone on the list. No more going in circles. I figured out that Paypal support was a good number to call for testing, since I could verbally ask the automated response system for my funds balance, and ensure the headset was working. I then made sure all my phones worked.

After I got that done, I decided that I would leave one of the phones ON at all times, set to STANDBY and plugged into USB, on the basis that I would stick it in my pocket when I went outside. That was primarily for security purposes: it's nice to have a camera phone to get a video record of nuisances, and to call 911 if they get to be big nuisances. Yeah, I don't have a SIM chip, but I can still call 911 if I have to. I didn't realize that calls would ring through if I had the phone on STANDBY, so I was a bit surprised to hear it ring -- "Well, DUH!" I didn't think I could ever directly answer the phone with GV, and it was nice to find out I could. I found out I can still block phone spammers easily enough.

* As a related exercise, Twitter asked me to verify my identity to make sure I wasn't a bot, ending the exercise by sending a verification code to my GV number. Nothing happened, despite repeated tries. Twitter didn't have any problem with my GV number before -- some services won't accept a GV number, it seems on the assumption that free VOIP numbers are easy to scam -- and some exploration online suggested they hadn't any problem with GV to that time.

That made me nervous, since I have use for Twitter, and didn't want to get locked out for good. I tried again the next day, no joy; but the day after that, Twitter let me back in. I suspect there had been some system change that threw things into confusion for a while -- Twitter support said they were swamped on their web page -- and they had no real problem with me.

* In further petty adventures, I got a set of bandanas / masks from Amazon.com. I puzzled a bit on how to put them on, but they turned out to be tubes. They work very nicely, and even when it's hot, they are comfortable. There is the problem that sunglasses tend to fog up when wearing a mask; I pulled on an old sun visor cap out of storage, and it works OK to keep the Sun out of my eyes.

I'd picked up the cap in Kissimmee, Florida, on my 2008 Florida road trip, and it has Mickey Mouse on the front. That's good, because people are expressionless when wearing masks, and it's a friendly communication -- but I think I'll get a plain visor cap next month anyway. Incidentally, it also helps to be more verbally expressive -- laughing when appropriate -- and use hand gestures. I actually don't do that so much normally, but it comes to me well enough when I do.

Overall, though, I don't leave home any more than I have to. I'm a solitary old bachelor, and long been a bit agoraphobic -- but it's more than "a bit" now. It's not so much because of the pandemic itself, but because people are so jumpy. The USA is heading towards a big crunch in the near future, and people are going to get hurt. I don't want to hurt anyone, and I don't want them to hurt me. Best to stay home.

[*] NEWS FOR AUGUST 2020

* The USA continues to be a captive audience to the Donald Trump show, as the president continues his erratic approach to national leadership. Trump has long complained about voting by mail, insisting it is riddled with fraud. In reality, in recent history, voter fraud at no more than 0.001% of the vote, or one vote in 100,000.

Trump was caught short when it was discovered he, and a number of other prominent members of his administration, voted by mail. He then started to make a distinction between "honest" absentee ballots and blanket mail voting, as is performed in states like Colorado. The irony there was that the biggest voter fraud scandal in the 2018 midterm election, in North Carolina, was with absentee ballots -- and the Republicans had to wear it.

Trump then set off a firestorm by flatly saying, on record, that he wanted to defund the US Post Office (USPS) to derail voting by mail. On top of that, the USPS sent out a letter to state governments saying that timely delivery of mail ballots could not be guaranteed. Postmaster General Louis Dejoy ended up being raked over the coals in Congress -- proclaiming there would be no problems with delivery of ballots, with the loud response of: WE DON'T BELIEVE YOU.

In the meantime, Trump suffered a legal setback when, on 20 August, a Federal district judge gave the go-ahead to allow New York state prosecutors to get their hands on Trump's financial records. The US Supreme Court had given the green light to allow the state to proceed on getting the records. There was a perception that Trump would still be able to drag out the legal proceedings indefinitely -- but it appears the courts have had enough, and aren't playing along any more. The issue may well be legally resolved before the elections. [ED: It wasn't, but that was only a stay of execution.]

Two days earlier, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a massive report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, summing up a three-year investigation into the issue. The report concluded that the Russian government did disrupt the election to help Trump win; Russian intelligence services saw members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated; and the Trump campaign welcomed the help. The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was loaded with businessmen ignorant of governance, advisors working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment, and other dubious figures Trump had accumulated over the years.

Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. The report did not conclude the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government, but the report provided plenty of evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisors and people tied to the Kremlin -- notably a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

The report identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer". According to the report, Manafort's willingness to share information with Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services "represented a grave counterintelligence threat." Other Russians in touch with the Trump campaign also had connections to Russian intelligence. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats and is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said:

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The Senate report did criticize the FBI, saying the bureau should have done more to alert higher-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that their servers may have been infiltrated by Russian hackers. It also criticized the bureau's handling of the "Steele dossier", a file of rumors about alleged Trump-Russia links compiled by Christopher Steele, a British former intelligence agent. The bureau used some of Steele's information in applications to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor.

The report portrayed the dossier as shoddy, and criticized the FBI's vetting of Steele as "not sufficiently rigorous or thorough." Nonetheless, there was no reason to think the FBI would have done things differently had the Steele dossier never existed, and the Senate report endorsed the FBI's decision to investigate Page: "Page's previous ties to Russian intelligence officers, coupled with his Russian travel, justified the FBI's initial concerns about Page."

The committee chairman, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, released a skewed assessment of the report's conclusions, saying:

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In short, Rubio shrugged off the Trump campaign's dirty fingers, and inflated the importance of the Steele dossier, inflating as the effective basis for the FBI's investigation. It is unlikely that will be good enough to establish that, as Trump claims, the FBI investigation was a plot by the "Obama deep state" to attack the Trump campaign, that being a crackbrained fantasy. Obviously, the report will amount to nothing as long as Trump is in control -- which may not be for much longer. The report will not disappear.

* The Democrats conducted their national convention on 17 August through 20 August. It was in principle taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- but that was just the coordinating center, with the convention being effectively virtual, something of an innovation. It had an all-star cast, of course, Michelle Obama taking a step out and delivering a speech that was a departure for a first lady, which concluded:

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Her husband Barack Obama, who had long avoided criticizing Trump personally while attacking the Trump Administration, was well more scathing:

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Obama then went on to praise Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, sketching out the agenda for their administration:

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Compared to that, the speeches by Biden and Harris were almost anticlimactic. Not to be outdone, the Republican National Convention was conducted from 24 to 27 August. It was mostly virtual, except for components such as Trump's acceptance speech -- which was given on the White House lawn, a dodgy procedure, all the more so because social distancing and masks were not much in evidence among the spectators there.

There's not much to say about the RNC other than that it was, as popularly described, "sheer bullshit", asserting a mindlessly paranoid vision of a dark grim future if Biden were elected. Puzzlingly, as was pointed out, the dark grim future sounded only too much like the present, under Trump.

Two months to the election now. Things are not looking good for Trump; he keeps playing one trick after another, but his negative poll ratings don't budge. Not a single indicator gives him cause for hope. His blatant efforts to game the election are so ham-fisted that, as alarming as they are, the only thing they accomplish is to put everyone on red alert. Trump still might win, it's just not a good bet. Alas, election day will be like getting to the top of the lift hill on a roller-coaster, with a wild ride to follow.

* Fears of workers being displaced by robots come and go -- but the general conclusion all along is that automation, though it means troublesome changes, doesn't really threaten jobs. As discussed in an essay by Free Exchange -- THE ECONOMIST's rotating business-economics columnist -- titled "The Fear Of Robots Displacing Workers Has Returned" (30 July 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has brought worries about automation back to the front burner.

The pandemic has clearly given a boost to automation. If the workplace isn't safe for human workers, there's an obvious incentive to replace them with machines to the maximum extent possible. COVID-19 has accordingly boosted business automation, and worries about workers losing jobs to robots.

The worries are exaggerated. There were the same worries after the global economic downturn from 2007 -- robocars being a particular concern -- but by the end of the decade, employment had rebounded, and robocars no longer seemed around the corner. Driver aids? Yes. Autonomous cars? Not yet. The concerns have gone high again; many organizations have turned to software to automate paper-processing tasks that can't be done by homebound workers. Those facing a flood of customer enquiries, such as hospitals, are supplementing human assistants with chatbots.

It is, however, ridiculous to suggest that chatbots present a threat to workers. Automation tends to be incremental, and many jobs are hard to automate. In many cases, automation is intended to help human workers, not replace them. Chatbots, for example, are useful, but limited; they simply reduce the burden on human workers, answering routine questions.

Remote work is having a much more visible impact. It had been growing before the pandemic, but COVID-19 put it into high gear. About half of all Americans who were working before the arrival of covid-19 were doing their jobs remotely by May, according to one estimate. Some, maybe much of the shift towards home work will not be reversed after the pandemic ends. With remote work, companies don't need to operate big headquarters facilities, and workers wouldn't have to live in expensive cities.

Remote work may have some job-destroying effects, however. Telemedicine and distance learning might mean that fewer doctors and teachers can serve more patients and students. Their largest impact is likely to be on blue-collar workers, such as clerical and janitorial staff; as centralized facilities shrink, so do the jobs they support. A ripple effect would eliminate small business that support headquarters, such as catering services or cafes.

By holding down wage growth, remote work might well slow down automation by reducing the pressure to automate. COVID-19 might still force more automation if international supply chains break down, leading to reshoring of manufacturing, and strain on labor markets.

In addition, even before the pandemic, years of economic dysfunction have energized campaigns for higher minimum wages and a more generous welfare state. The economic devastation inflicted by the pandemic lends them momentum; like past crises, it could lay the groundwork for a new social contract, growing labor costs, and increasing automation. In an era where populations are graying, that may not be such a problem, automation allowing economic prosperity even as the labor pool shrinks. There's no sure things here.

* As reported by an article from CNN.com ("The Pandemic's Unlikely Pet: Chickens" by Mallory Hughes, 25 July 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has led to substantial changes in American society. One has been a boom in raising urban chickens.

Urban chickens are nothing all that new, but COVID-19 has made raising them much more popular. Gillian Frank -- a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville -- and his wife, Kathryn Jones -- a lawyer -- got to thinking that, given uncertainties in food supply, it would be nice to have a source of fresh eggs. Their 8-year-old daughter Charlotte loved the idea, so it was a go.

They got six chickens, which Charlotte named after women's rights activists, Supreme Court Justices, and her favorite singers: Susan Egg Anthony, Eggena Keggan, Sonia Eggomayor, Ruth Bader Eggsburg, Egger Swift (after Taylor Swift) and Katy Eggry (after Katy Perry). Frank says:

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Traci Torres, CEO of My Pet Chicken, says sales of backyard chicken coops have gone crazy. In March, sales were up 325%. By April, 525%. Torres says: "It started coming back down because we ran out of everything to sell. We just didn't have time to ramp up production of product."

Torres set up the business in 2004, when she got into raising chickens herself, and found there was little support for urban chicken-raising. The company is a full-service operation, Torres saying: "We have the coops, we have the supplies, we also have free information and short little guide books on the website to give you the basics."

Frank's chickens are now busy laying eggs, producing about a half-dozen eggs a day. He says: "It's made us popular with the neighbors, because we have more eggs than we can handle. So everyone on our block that we're friends with is getting farm-fresh eggs." Frank said it's fun to have the eggs and cheap to keep the chickens, so they will maintain their new hobby after the pandemic ends. The hardest part, Frank said, is getting them back in the coop -- thanks to the troublemaker, Susan Egg Anthony, who always puts up a fight.

* In local news about birds, on the last day of July I was attending to my daily morning task of trimming my lawn -- when I turned around and saw a crow watching me from the sidewalk, about arm's length away. I was very surprised. It showed no fear of me at all. I eventually sorted out that somebody had likely been feeding it, and it was begging for a handout. For want of anything better, I gave it some bran shredded wheat squares, knowing that crows are anything but fussy eaters. I hope it comes by again; I understand crows do well on dry cat food, along with a bowl of water for them to dunk it in. The next morning, I picked up a small bag of cheap dry cat food at Walmart, but so far, he hasn't dropped by again.

* I ran across a Twitter feed titled BURMA-GRAM, which was based on the old sequential Burma Shave signs, though with a modern and definitely partisan bent:

   HEADING INTO TOWN?
   HEED LONE RANGER'S PLAN 
   LEAVE PEOPLE ASKING:
   "WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?"  
   - burma-gram

   WE HOLD THIS TRUTH
   TO BE SELF-EVIDENT
   DONALD TRUMP
   SHOULD NOT BE PRESIDENT
   - burma-gram
   
   THERE'S A GUY ON FOX NEWS
   GOES BY THE NAME OF TUCKER
   BUT THANKS TO HIS RACIST RANTS
   MOST CALL HIM ... NOT A NICE GUY
   - burma-gram

   WHERE THERE'S SMOKE
   THERE'S OFTEN A FIRE
   WHERE THERE'S TRUMP
   THERE'S ALWAYS A LIAR
   - burma-gram

   MAKE AMERICA
   EVEN GREATER
   REMOVE & REPLACE
   TRUMP THE TRAITOR
   - burma-gram

   YOUR NAME MIGHT BE TOM
   OR DICK OR HARRY
   BUT WITH NO MASK
   YOU'RE TYPHOID MARY
   - burma-gram

   IT'S LONG PAST TIME
   TO PULL THE PLUG
   THIS NOVEMBER
   VOTE OUT THE THUG
   - burma-gram

* The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in the USA, fueled by the ignorance and pig-headedness of Trump at the top, and his minions at the bottom. Other countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Germany have coped well; Americans, in contrast, seem bent on self-destruction.

The scene doesn't promote a positive outlook on life. I am enduring as well as possible; I keep to myself in normal times, don't have to leave the house much, and so hunkering down isn't such a problem. The tube bandanas I bought work very well as masks, though they are thin, and I double them up when I go to the super or the like. I found one of the popular paper masks as litter on my morning walk; I took it home, sanitized it, and tried it on -- the two-layer bandanas work better. I just ordered another set of them from Amazon.com, these in more garish colors than my custom, just to make sure people see the mask.

I've long been a bit agoraphobic, but it's become more than a bit as of late. I don't like going out, less because of the disease than because of the presence of "maskholes", people who refuse to wear a mask. I was thinking that after the fall of Trump -- which is becoming increasingly certain as he visibly disintegrates -- there would be an uprising of sorts, scattered and uncoordinated acts of violence by malcontents. COVID-19 seems to have moved up the schedule, the malcontents having decided to exploit the pandemic to sow disorder. As the pandemic deepens, so does the rage against them.

I've taken to carrying a kubotan -- which is just a hard plastic cylinder about the size of a cigar, to add emphasis to a punch. It's a minimalist weapon, one I wouldn't dare use unless I had to, and I hope I don't have to. I also bought a combination pen / penlight / kubotan from Amazon along with the bandanas. It has a clip, so I can carry it on my kit bag strap where it's visible, meaning it's not a concealed weapon, and I can get to it quickly. I doubt most people would notice it, and most would not really know what it was. Good, that would sow uncertainty. From the pictures, it certainly looks tactical.

I don't think I'm over-reacting. Early in July, a French bus driver named Philippe Monguillot of Bayonne got into a dispute with three maskholes, who beat him severely; a week later, the doctors pronounced him brain-dead, and the family agreed to shut off life support. The French are up in arms over the killing; from what I've seen of the French, anyone who refuses to mask is going to be treated harshly from now on. No such luck here yet.

As mentioned last month, I also always carry a smartphone, even when I go out in the front yard, much less anywhere else. If somebody starts acting up, I can get them on video -- it seems to intimidate people. I don't have a phone contract, but I can call Emergency 911 if it comes to that. The phone is my first line of defense. In addition, as symbols of resistance against Trump and his Trumpbots, I've been accumulating Joe Biden campaign gear -- a decal on the rear window of my car, a magnetic sticker on the side, a visor cap, a yard sign. I don't go anywhere without the Biden cap. It calls out to friends, and challenges enemies.

It was fortunate that, as mentioned earlier this year, I set up a secondary credit-card account as a "wallet" for routine purchase of groceries, fuel, and so on. The pandemic has discouraged handling cash -- I would say less because of the possibility of passing the virus on with the cash, than because cash implies a close-range hand-to-hand transaction. I have, somewhat to my surprise, now effectively gone cashless. It works because I don't need to balance the wallet account: I just refill it every now and then, and monitor my drafts on it. It actually makes it easier to log my spending, since I don't have to puzzle through sales receipts any more.

As far as the pandemic is going in the USA, July was bad. August will be worse. Things are going to get worse, maybe much worse, before they get better.

* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("India Has A Looming Air Con Headache. Does Antiquity Hold The Solution?" by Amani Al-Aidroos & Tom Page, 6 December 2019), India is a rapidly developing country. It also tends to be hot there, which means more prosperous Indians will buy more air conditioners. The International Energy Agency believes air conditioning could account for 45% of peak electricity demand by 2050.

New Delhi architect and designer Monish Siripurapu, founder of Ant Studio, has looked back on passive cooling schemes long used in India to come up with a more energy-efficient cooling scheme. His "CoolAnt" is a honeycomb-like array of terracotta tubes, with about 700 tubes in a typical array. The array is stood vertically, with water pumped to the top of the array, and dispersed to flow to the bottom. As the water flows over the tubes, it evaporates, cooling the tubes and the air driven through them by a fan.

Siripurapu says that the CoolAnt can take high ambient temperatures and reduce them by about 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit). His demonstrator system, at a factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, is topped up with 200 liters (53 US gallons) of water a week, and used up to four hours a day, six days a week.

[ED: This is not conceptually all that different from an evaporative cooler, where water is pumped through a filter that cools air being driven through it by a fan. The evaporative cooler has two problems: the filter tends to mildew and has to be replaced on a regular basis, and the scheme only works well in dry heat -- in sticky humid heat, it just increases the humidity. It appears this scheme does not have these problems.]

* In less weighty gimmick news, a Kickstarter program has been set up to create the "Building Brick Waffle Maker". It's straightforward, being a waffle iron designed to turn out sets of Lego blocks, rendered as waffle chunks. One can then put together Lego constructions and eat them. How deliberately useless!

[*] NEWS FOR SEPTEMBER 2020

* The COVID-19 pandemic continues on in the USA, as America gets closer to the wire for election day. Trump is still gaslighting on COVID-19, talking the usual trash, and in general weaving all over the road, running down everyone in his way.

The one big news was the death from cancer of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on 18 September. This was followed by an immediate push by the Senate GOP to confirm a new justice. That was exactly what they could be expected to do -- but it rankled, because in 2016, the Senate GOP stalled the nomination of Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's pick, for the better part of a year.

It is likely that the GOP will confirm a conservative replacement justice -- but if the Republicans lose in November, that might have consequences, with the Democrats neutralizing the filibuster and altering the court. Some believe that eliminating the filibuster would be a calamity, but that's arguable. The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster in 1842, and there's never been any real push to restore it. Only 14 US states permit filibusters in their legislatures. Such "supermajority" rules tend to die out in time, once the players start weaponizing them; it doesn't matter who starts it, they're unstable, they're doomed.

For the moment, although the hard Left is enthusiastic about "court-packing", the mainstream Democrats are not, and polls also show no great public enthusiasm for the idea. Moderates seem more inclined to an 18-year term limit for SCOTUS justices, which would eliminate the conservative majority.

Oh yes, another thing happened late in the month: THE NEW YORK TIMES got hold of Trump's tax returns, to find that he barely pays any taxes, and in many years pays none at all. His businesses are not doing well, he's deeply in debt, and big loans are coming due presently. Trump also seems to employ dubious tax dodges, like hiring his family as "consultants" and handing them big consulting fees, then claiming the fees as deductions. Much more remains to be learned, and it's likely to all be bad news for Trump.

[ED: Hindsight from June 2021 shows that the Dems did take back Congress, if narrowly; they haven't killed off the filibuster yet, and there has been no action on court-packing. Court-packing appears to be a nonstarter; but term limits are on the table -- and oh yeah, Trump's tax troubles are starting to become more serious.]

* In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is under attack. As discussed in an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("The World Needs A Better World Health Organisation", 12 September 2020), the WHO's problems are by no means entirely of its own making; it is more sinned against than a sinner.

US President Donald Trump has loudly reviled the WHO and committed the USA to pulling out by July 2021. Trump needs scapegoats for the COVID-19 pandemic, while he has no interest in solutions. In reality, Trump's attacks on the WHO have little justification. Mara Pillinger, a health-policy researcher at Georgetown University in Washington DC, says the WHO has done a "pretty remarkable job" of coping with COVID-19, given the constraints built into the way it works:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The WHO is primarily intended as a health-intelligence system -- to determine the best public-health measures, share that information, and provide support to members that need it. The countries themselves have to implement public-health measures, but the WHO will step in if necessary:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

One of the problems with the WHO is that it tends to work in the background and let countries take credit for WHO successes. If things go wrong, however, the WHO makes a convenient scapegoat, as Trump has realized. It is true that WHO's response to the COVID-19 pandemic left something to be desired, with critics saying the organization dithered too long in declaring a global public-health emergency. Of course, that was very much due to China's reluctance to keep the WHO informed, in violation of the IHR. There have been other complaints:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

However, the WHO's successes in dealing with the pandemic outweigh its failures:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making forum, has put in motion a full independent evaluation of the agency's response to the pandemic, as well as that of individual countries. The report will be published in 2021. Taiwan, it should be noted, was critical of the WHO's conduct early in the pandemic -- but Taiwanese officials clarified that they were not condemning the WHO, just suggesting things might be done better.

Much does need to be improved. Many of the WHO's problems are obvious: it is badly underfunded, overtaxed by demands of member states, and weak by design. It has a yearly budget of $2.5 billion USD, which is nowhere near of what it needs to do the job, while much of the funding is inconsistent, or comes with strings attached. Dr. Tedros has set up the "WHO Foundation" to create a more reliable source of funding, and has tried to persuade member states to give more unconditional funding. The WHO has gone from discussing its work with health ministers to talking to heads of state. In addition:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Should Joe Biden win the US presidency, America will not leave the WHO -- and given Trump's ghastly failure to take the pandemic seriously, it is likely that Biden will win. The USA, almost as a form of penance, will need to absorb the "lessons learned" from the pandemic, and work with the WHO to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated. There will be another pandemic; it will come, sooner or later, and the WHO should be better-positioned to deal with it.

* The humble zipper is an invention that we take for granted. Of course, as discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Zip Fasteners", 18 December 2018), it has a history behind it.

In 2017, the global zipper market was estimated at $11.2 billion USD, and could almost double by 2030. It is not growing because of exciting new uses, just because of more luggage and clothes: a boom in cheap, disposable fashion and developing-world demand for Western-style clothing. Production is centralized: up to 40% of the market, by value, may be controlled by the Japanese company YKK, which makes more zippers every year than there are people on the planet.

The ancestor of the zipper is the button. Buttons go back thousands of years, but they were decorative for the longest time, there being no buttonholes. People snugged up clothing with loops or buckles or pins. Laces began to emerge in the 12th century; buttonholes finally arrived in the 13th. The hook & eye appeared in the 14th century. It led it turn to the first zipper, patented in 1893 by one Whitcomb Judson, an eccentric inventor. He came up with a scheme of using a sliding guide to pull together a line of hooks and a line of eyes on a boot.

Judson's primordial zipper didn't work very well, the hooks and eyes being too easily pulled apart. His Automatic Hook & Eye Company of Chicago didn't go anywhere -- until an immigrant engineer from Sweden named Gideon Sundback rethought Judson's design. Sundback saw that Judson was on to something, but that the hooks and eye connection was clumsy. According to the story, Sundback got his inspiration by tinkering with two interleaved sets of soup spoons, stacked bowl on bowl, locked firmly together. He came up with today's zipper design, more or less: two rows of metal protuberances with a tooth on one side and a socket on the other, forced together and pried apart by a puller. A similar design was patented by a Swiss woman named Katharina Kuhn-Moos around the same time, but it was never manufactured.

The zipper wasn't an overnight success, partly because Judson's gimmick had been a dud. It saw limited use until World War I, when the US Navy began to use them on aviator jackets. In 1918, the US Navy began to put them on its aviator jackets -- then, in 1923, B.F. Goodrich, an American company focused on tires and other rubber goods, put zippers on its rubber boots. It called the new footwear "Zippers", giving the device its name -- it had been previously called the "hookless fastener". The British just called it a "zip".

That was a step forward, but the zipper was still expensive -- and it also had overtones of sexual access, since it made it too easy to take off somebody else's clothes. If that sounds a reach, in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD, the promiscuous inhabitants of his pleasure-seeking future society wore "zippicamiknicks" and "zippyjamas", taking them off instantly. By the 1930s, the zipper was hitting its second wind, becoming fashionable and popular. In 1940 a survey at Princeton University found the trousers of 85% of its students were zipped not buttoned -- while the class of 1894, by then in their 60s, still kept their flies buttoned.

In the postwar era, the zipper took off, thoroughly displacing buttons in roles such as flies, and has now become normalized -- though the sexual suggestiveness still makes an appearance every now and then. It has not led to any further technology revolutions, but there have been improvements: plastic teeth to replace metal ones; the coil zip, using continuous spirals of nylon to form the teeth, making them more flexible and lightweight.

There is, however, a challenge in achieving quality at low production cost -- a general issue with mature technologies. Misalignment as thin as a piece of paper can cause jams. A broken zipper, unlike a lost button, often leads to a garment being discarded.

The improvements have been almost exclusively led by YKK, which guarantees that each of its zips will last for 10,000 uses. Yoshida Tadao, "the zipper king", founded the company in 1934, but had to start again after his Tokyo factory was bombed in the Second World War. Gradually, the company established itself; when Sundback's patents expired in 1960, YKK expanded into the USA. Talon, the descendant of the original Universal Fastener Company, faded away in the face of the competition; YKK could offer as good or better a product at a lower cost, with a cost advantage of even a fraction of a penny meaning everything in a cheap commodity product.

YKK now operates in 73 countries, with much of its production in China. YKK has developed zips that are waterproof, heat-resistant, and that glow in the dark. The company is always looking for improvements -- though again, zippers are a mature technology, and that's a challenge.

Patarapong Intarakumnerd, a professor of innovation in Tokyo, suggests: "If the main function has not changed, it is then about how to apply it in different circumstances and products." Some doctors, for example, like the idea of a zipper that can replace stitches after operations where they may need to access the same part of the patient's body again. Intarakumnerd points out that radical innovation often comes from outside the dominant industry. Smartphones came from computer makers like Apple, not phone companies. Maybe some non-clothing, non-luggage industry will find a reason to rethink the zipper.

The zipper, of course, is not going away, having no real competitors. Velcro is a widely-used technology, but only useful in certain applications, for example snugging up shoes -- and it doesn't cope well with dirt. Zippers aren't really an essential technology, since we could go back to buttons and snaps if we had to; we don't want to. The zipper is like thousands of workaday inventions that evolve from novelty to necessity, without much fanfare, and end up hard to improve on.

[ED: I was surprised when I wrote up the item on the zipper that I couldn't find a reasonable picture of a zipper online. OK, I had to take my own, wearing a rain jacket on a warm dry day. The phone "selfie" capability is handier than I thought.]

* As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("Raytheon Set To Deliver New CUAS Capability To US Army", Raytheon is about to deliver a "counter-unmanned aircraft system (CUAS)" -- intended to detect, identify, and destroy drones -- to the US Army. The system includes the new "Coyote Block 2" interceptor missile, and the "Ku-band Radio Frequency System (KuRFS)" 360-degree detection & intercept radar.

The "Howler CUAS" system is built on the "4x4 Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV)", carrying the KuRFS and four-cell Coyote missile launchers. The Block II Coyote improves on the earlier Block IB by having a bigger blast-fragmentation warhead, for higher lethality against maneuvering drones. The Howler CUAS will operate in conjunction with the Army "Forward Area Air Defense / Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar Command & Control (FAAD/C-RAM C2)" system provided by Northrop Grumman, also based on the JLTV.

The Howler CUAS grew out of a "Joint Urgent Operational Need (JUON)" requirement issued by the US Army in July 2018. The technology has been cleared for export to foreign governments.

* According to an article from CBSNEWS.com ("Alyssa Milano Says She Is Losing Her Hair After Long Battle With COVID-19" by Caitlin O'Kane, 11 August 2020), actress Alyssa Milano, a prominent voice of the anti-Trump "Resistance" on Twitter, ran foul of COVID-19. She's in recovery, but it's a long slog. In a video posted to Twitter, she brushed her hair to show it falling out in clumps: "Thought I'd show you what COVID-19 does to your hair. Please take this seriously. Wear a damn mask."

While hair loss is not a symptom on the CDC's official list, a recent survey found about 26% of people with long-term coronavirus symptoms said they suffered hair loss. The survey was conducted by Survivor Corps, a group that provides resources to coronavirus survivors. The group asked more than 1,500 patients to report what symptoms they had, including those not on the CDC list like weight gain, clogged ears, and hair loss.

The researchers found that "long haulers' COVID-19 symptoms are far more diverse than what is currently listed on the CDC's website." Many people in the Survivor Corps Facebook group have reported hair loss. In July, one woman said that ever since she was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March, her hair had been falling out in "massive clumps!"

Dr. Shilpi Khetarpal, a dermatologist at Cleveland Clinic, said there have been an increased number of reports of hair loss from COVID-19 patients. She says a phenomenon called "telogen effluvium" is to blame. Our hair doesn't grow evenly; some of it stops growing for a time, and is vulnerable to loss. Under telogen effluvium, most of it stops growing. There's generally a two- to three-month lag between a stressful event and the onset of hair loss, which is why, she says, "we're seeing these patients now, several weeks after COVID-19 symptoms resolve."

Milano began feeling coronavirus symptoms sometime in March. By early April, she was in big trouble, saying on Instagram:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Milano said that after first testing negative for coronavirus and antibodies, she continued to have symptoms for four months, such as "vertigo, stomach abnormalities, irregular periods, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, zero short term memory, and general malaise." She took another antibody test; it came back positive, meaning she did in fact have COVID-19.

She told readers:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

* In less appalling news of the pandemic, the local paper reports that here in Loveland, Colorado, the school district plans to check out 13,000 Chromebooks to most of its 15,500 students to allow them to conduct remote learning. One 17-year-old student says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The effort actually preceded the pandemic, with 16 of the 30 schools in the district having a notebook or tablet for every student; the other let out computers to students who don't have access to a useful computer. They are checked out via a drive-through system, being "quarantined" for three days under ultraviolet before being handed out. One difficulty is that not all families have a good internet connection; the school district works with them to help.

Checking around online suggests that, in bulk, schools can get Chromebooks for about $160 USD each -- maybe more, maybe less in practice. Teachers have admin control, through the "Chrome partner ecosystem", over a network of up to 100 Chromebooks, for example specifying what students can install on the machine, so the kids don't spend their time playing games. It would seem the pandemic is an ideal time to push advanced remote learning technologies, such as an AI "teacher" who can recognize a particular student, monitor the student's progress, and keep the student on track. Students might learn to hate it.

Obviously, the younger the student, the harder remote learning is -- the younger the student, the more likely they get tablets. At least so far, Colorado doesn't seem to be having the big problems with "back to school" in the pandemic seen elsewhere in the USA. Thank Bob I live in a Blue state; Colorado is only losing a few people to COVID-19 now. That's not good, but it could be a lot worse. It would be better if the Colorado COVIDiots would straighten up and fly right: "Wear a damn mask!"