MrG's Blog & Notes

* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.

[MON 02 AUG 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 30

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The significant news of the week was the formal unveiling of the House Select Committee on the Capitol Riot, under the leadership of Bennie Thompson. It kicked off with emotional testimony by Capitol Police, describing the events of 6 January in the Capitol Building.

I knew the Thompson Committee would be a big deal, but it is shaping up to be an even bigger deal than I thought. Initially, the committee will establish the facts through testimony from friendly or cooperative witnesses, and once that is done, then work their way up through Trump enablers -- both inside and outside of Congress. It appears that the Department of Justice will enforce Congressional subpoenas on those outside of Congress; how subpoenas to Members of Congress will work is another question, but it seems likely that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi already knows how that will happen. It will be educational.

I suspect that the agitation of Trump supporters in Congress will become muted once they get hit with subpoenas, in effect asking them to back up their wild charges. It is somewhat more interesting to wonder if Fox News talking heads like Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity will be called as well. Why not? They're traitors, too.

The last person to be called to testify will be Trump himself -- who will be confronted with a mountain of testimony against him, and will fail disastrously. That's why the Thompson Committee is so necessary: Trump has to be taken down in full public view and be discredited, reduced to nothingness. After that's done, it hardly seems important that he be convicted in court -- though he will be, presumably through plea bargaining, a trial being problematic. In any case, the Thompson Committee hearings will be the biggest show in Congress since the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, that brought down Senator Joe McCarthy.

Speaker Pelosi has played her cards well, putting in motion a machine that will take down Trump, and neutralize his supporters. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was carrying on about the Biden Administration's backtracking on COVID-19 measures, in the face of the highly contagious Delta variant now causing a new wave of infections. A reporter asked Pelosi about McCarthy's comments, with the Speaker replying: "He's such a moron!"

That was startling, if not all that inaccurate. It appears that Pelosi has, having neutralized McCarthy, written him off. Trump's influence may be headed for steep decline.

* In the meantime, the emergence of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, said to be as contagious as chickenpox, and the reluctance of many Americans to be vaccinated, has led to a step back in the USA's recovery from the pandemic. The White House is trying everything possible to encourage people to vaccinate, but with limited success. Many people are very hostile to the idea.

... so hostile, in fact, that in Missouri, pharmacists and others administering COVID-19 vaccines report that they are often giving them to people who seem to be attempting to disguise themselves, and plead that no one should be told about the vaccination. It appears that those have come to their senses and decided to get vaccinated are worried about the reactions of family, friends, and colleagues who are opposed to it.

It's very discouraging. I was thinking of taking a road trip from here in Colorado to Seattle in September, but now that's out of the question. I'm going back to masking every time I go shopping again; I don't feel I'm at much risk from the virus myself, but I can be carrying it, and give it to others. Mask mandates are coming back anyway.

Things aren't so bad here in Colorado for the moment, but COVID-19 is clearly on an uptrend. Everything is going bad in Florida, in no small part due to Governor Ron Desantis AKA "DeathSentence", who honestly seems to think that defying pandemic control measures is good for his career. In the meantime, the number of Americans who believe that COVID-19 vaccination should be mandatory is creeping up towards the 2/3rds mark. Blanket mandates are not likely to happen, but smaller mandates are on the increase.

This has its dark humor aspects, of course, as shown on Twitter:

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* Chris Cillizza of CNN commented on a rally Trump performed in Arizona, where Trump said:

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Huh? What? OK, it's an aspect of the ongoing audit of the vote in Maricopa County, Arizona, with those conducting the dubious audit trying to obtain access to internet routers in the state -- in hopes of determining if Maricopa County voting machines were connected to the internet on election day 2020. This links into an elaborate and completely fabricated tale that the vote was manipulated via Italian communications satellites. The ARIZONA REPUBLIC wrote back in May:

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Allowing the auditors to obtain the routers poses several problems:

• The routers would have to be replaced, at a cost of $6 million USD.
  
  
• The routers are in government use for many functions, and replacing them would sow chaos in county government.
  
  
• Anyone who had the routers could use them to get access to, say, the email of those using them.

So ... it won't happen. Trump is just making noise and muddying the waters as usual. The pandemic is bad enough; Trump has become something like a pandemic on top of it. How much longer do we endure? I suspect things will head for a resolution next year. There is the question of how long Trump will remain in business, those who saw videos of him in Arizona saying that he looked unwell. I will say no more about that. [ED: As of 2025, Trump is still in business, and appears even less well.]

* Moog INC of the USA -- no relation to the Moog synthesizer firm, other than the founders of the two firms were cousins -- makes a modular "Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform (RIwP)" turret, now being fielded as the weapons system of the US Army "Initial Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (IM-SHORAD)" combat vehicle, based on the Stryker A1 armored car, intended for battlefield air defense against drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. The RWiP features:

• A launcher for four Stinger light surface-to-air missiles.
  
  
• A Northrop Grumman XM914 30-millimeter Bushmaster Chain Gun.
  
  
• An M240 MAG 7.62 millimeter machine gun.
  
  
• A launcher for two Hellfire anti-armor missiles.

The Hellfire launcher includes a microwave radar guidance link. The weapons are directed by an electro-optic / infrared sighting system, with day-night sighting capability. It is not clear if the sighting system is "smart" and can track targets automatically after they are acquired. It is also not clear why the Hellfire missiles were included: while they can be used against aerial targets, it seems plausible they were added to provide self-defense against adversary ground vehicles.

General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) is leading the effort, with European defense giant Leonardo being a major player. The US Army plans to acquire 144 IM-SHORAD systems.

[MON 09 AUG 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 31

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Thanks to the pressure of the wave of infections due to the COVID-19 Delta variant, the Biden Administration's efforts to get more Americans vaccinated seem to be paying off to an extent. The pace of vaccinations has picked up in particularly laggard Red states like Alabama and Mississippi. It makes a certain amount of sense: hysteria over vaccines, not based in reality, has nowhere to go but down, as it becomes apparent there have been few problems among the tens of millions of Americans vaccinated, while the virus is still killing people. In addition, the fear-mongering of antivaxxers is getting too repetitive and stale, while businesses are increasingly mandating vaccination.

Florida is getting particularly hammered by the Delta variant, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis perversely working to frustrate efforts to control the pandemic. President Biden made his frustration with DeSantis -- as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been just as perverse -- perfectly clear:

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In reply DeSantis told Biden, in effect, to take a hike. It is unclear how anyone could think that COVIDiocy could be a winning political strategy over the longer run. It can only weaken over time -- and in fact DeSantis, who was high in Florida polls at the beginning of the year, is now well underwater. Biden has the bully pulpit, DeSantis does not; Biden can bet on coming out the winner in the contest. The "longer run" appears to be finally arriving. DeSantis is clearly after the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, but that can be judged a delusion. It would be interesting to see a national poll on his prospects.

* For the time being, things remain troublesome. There's been a spate of passengers getting rowdy or even violent on airliners, with a case this last week in which one violent white male had to be taped to his seat until the airliner landed, with police then arresting him. Face mask requirements are often involved in these incidents, as is alcohol. The Feds are looking into what can be done to put more teeth into penalties for such incidents; it appears local police, presumably not keen on dealing with matters that don't seem under local jurisdiction, often let the rowdies go.

Trump is the underlying cause of the current dissension. He remains in the shadows for the moment, investigations against him necessarily taking their own time in doing it. However, they are not going away; Trump is not going to be forgotten.

Rick Wilson of the LINCOLN PROJECT recently recycled an essay, written in his usual style back in February, titled: "Trumpists, Here Are Your Terms of Surrender. Also, Fuck You." The essay started out with:

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Wilson described how, on 2 September 1945, the Japanese Imperial Government signed an Instrument of Surrender on the decks of the battleship USS MISSOURI in Tokyo Bay. The surrender was accompanied by displays of American military might, to rub in the fact that the Japanese had been completely beaten. He suggested that Republican leadership needed to see a lesson in it:

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It wasn't hard for me to see in November 2016 that the election of Trump was a defeat for the GOP: they had obtained the weakest win with the worst leader. We've got so used to political chaos that it almost seems normal, but it cannot be sustained. [ED: The re-election of Trump in 2024 does not change that judgement.]

* In the meantime and for the foreseeable future, I'm finding it an effort to maintain morale; the resurgence of COVID-19, forcing me to start masking again, was a setback. The smell of smoke in the air here lately hasn't helped, either. I've become more reluctant to talk with people, worrying that I might sound too whiny or snappish. Flagging morale does have its uses, since it provides an incentive to rethink things in my life that don't seem satisfactory. Come early next year, I should be firing on all cylinders.

Not having anyplace to go for the time being, my yard is a focus of interest. I figured out that in the heat of summer, it's impossible to keep the lawn from browning to an extent; the trick is to keep the brown areas hand-watered, so the roots don't die. Once the weather gets cooler, the brown areas should grow back to green before winter sets in.

The two catalpa trees I planted in 2017, replacing ashes doomed by the emerald ash borer beetle, honestly seem to love warm weather -- which isn't too surprising, since they're a semi-tropical tree, with oversized leaves and, for a short time each year, spectacular blossoms. The one to the north in my back yard is shooting up to the point where I have to tilt my head back to see the top while watering it.

The one to the south, which is about a year younger, is smaller, and seems to be growing more out than up. I am getting a bit of shade for my bedroom-office window out of it, but not to the extent of any real utility. Come next year, I'll get useful shade out of it; good shade in 2023; that; very good the shade in 2024; all I might want in 2025. In the meantime, I keep them generously watered. The big leaves soak up water like sponges -- well, something like that.

* As discussed in an article from SINGULARITYHUB.com ("The World's Biggest AI Chip Now Comes Stock With 2.6 Trillion Transistors" by Jason Dorrier, 25 April 2021), Cerebras Systems of Sunnyvale, CA, working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has now introduced its "Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) 2" -- the world's most elaborate system on a chip, with 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 processor cores, each core with its own memory, and fast communications links between cores.

This is obviously not a device that will be found in a smartphone; the wafer-scale chip is about the size of a large dinner plate. The first WSE chip, released in 2019, had a staggering 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 processing cores; the new chip more than doubles that number, with its on-chip memory also increased from 18 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes. The rate it transfers data and instructions to and from memory has increased from 9 petabytes per second to 20 petabytes per second. The chip hasn't got physically bigger, however; Taiwan Semiconductor used a 16-nanometer process for the first chip, a 7-nanometer process for the new chip. There were also improvements in design architecture.

Cerebras likes to compare the WSE-2 to the popular NVIDIA A100 AI processor: the A100 has about 54.2 billion transistors, about 2% of those of the WSE-2, and also about 2% of the surface area. Of course, that means 50 A100s more or less equal the WSE-2, and the A100s are a lot cheaper on an individual basis. However, system integration isn't such an issue with the WSE-2, and it's also faster and more efficient than linking hundreds of AI chips together.

The chip comes packaged in a computer system named the "CS-2", which can fit into a standard server rack. Cerebras offers programming and support software for the CS-2. The company is one of the first to offer wafer-scale systems, with customers including GlaxoSmithKline, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Argonne National Lab working with the WSE-1. Not all the applications are in AI, some instead using traditional supercomputer models. Current applications include cancer research and drug discovery, gravity wave detection, and fusion simulation. Cost? "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."

[MON 16 AUG 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 32

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: According to an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Climate Change 'Unequivocal' And 'Unprecedented,' Says New UN Report" by Cathleen O'Grady, 9 August 2021), the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodically releases sets of reports on climate change, the last being in 2013.

The 2021 climate assessment report, the sixth issued to date, paints an alarming picture, but stresses there is still time for swift action to mitigate the worst of the projected impacts of climate change. Current average warming is now estimated at 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial records, the latest estimate adding 0.1C to earlier estimates. Under every emissions scenario considered by the report, average warming of 1.5C -- a major target of the Paris Climate Accord -- will very likely be reached within the next 20 years.

Two more reports will be issued to the end of 2021, each approved by representatives of all 195 member states. The first report outlined the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and projections on expected warming. The other two reports will detail how climate policies can reduce emissions, and what actions need to be taken to adapt to extreme events such as flooding, heat waves, and drought.

Climate science has much improved since the 2013 report, being driven by powerful climate models and bigger data sets. Evidence from ancient climates has offered a way to constrain estimates of what researchers call "climate sensitivity", meaning the anticipated warming caused by concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide double those present in pre-industrial times. The IPCC panel now estimates a global average temperature rise of 2.5C to 4C -- a narrower range than the previously estimated 1.5C to 4.5C.

In a departure from the last comparable IPCC report 8 years ago, this report's range of emissions scenarios includes projections of population growth, urbanization, and other human societal factors. The report sketches out five different "Shared Socioeconomic Pathways", with emissions ranging from very low to very high. In the best-case scenario, with the world reaching net zero emissions by 2050, warming is projected to peak at midcentury with an anticipated 1.6C warming. Even in this scenario, it is likely the Arctic will see at least one late summer free of sea ice by 2050. And in the worst case scenario, warming will very likely reach 2.4C by midcentury, then continue to escalate to 4.4C -- maybe even as high as 5.7C -- by 2100.

Regional assessments show climate change has already led to extremes in heat in nearly every global region, as well as record precipitation and drought. Some changes to the planet are locked in, regardless of how much humanity reduces emissions over the coming decades. Melting of glaciers and ice sheets and thawing of permafrost is now "irreversible" for decades or centuries to come, the report comments -- while the warming, acidification, and de-oxygenation of the world's oceans are set to continue for centuries to millennia. Continued sea level rise, estimated at 3.7 millimeters each year between 2006 and 2018, is also inevitable: over the next 2000 years, oceans will likely rise by 2 to 3 meters if the planet warms by 1.5C, and up to 22 meters with 5C of warming.

* In more positive news, as reported by an article from CNN.com ("Five Things You Didn't Know Were In The Infrastructure Bill" by Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby, 10 August 2021), the Biden Administration, after considerable wrangling, the Senate passed a massive $1.2 trillion USD infrastructure package, and did it with 19 GOP votes -- including Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader. The bill still has to go to a House-Senate conference committee to hammer out differences, but no major obstacles are expected there. Major elements of the bill include:

• $110 billion USD for roads, bridges and major infrastructure projects. Included is $40 billion for bridge repair, replacement, and rehabilitation. Some 20%, or over 275,000 kilometers (170,000 miles), of the nation's highways and major roads are in poor condition, as are 45,000 bridges.
  
  
• $11 billion USD for transportation safety, including a program to help states and localities reduce crashes and fatalities, especially of cyclists and pedestrians.
  
  
• $39 billion USD to modernize public transit. The funds would repair and upgrade existing infrastructure, make stations accessible to all users, bring transit service to new communities and modernize rail and bus fleets -- including replacing thousands of vehicles with zero-emission versions.
  
  
• $66 billion USD for passenger and freight rail. The funds would eliminate Amtrak's maintenance backlog, modernize the Northeast Corridor line and bring rail service to areas outside the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions.
  
  
• $17 billion USD for port infrastructure and $25 billion USD for airports to address repair and maintenance backlogs, reduce congestion and emissions near ports and airports, and promote electrification and other low-carbon technologies.
  
  
• $65 billion USD for rebuilding the electric grid, $55 billion for upgrading water infrastructure, and $50 billion USD for protecting the US infrastructure system from drought, floods and cyberattacks.
  
  
• $21 billion USD to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned gas wells, according to the White House.

Of the many other elements of the plan, five were of particular interest:

• Broadband upgrade: The bill would provide a $65 billion USD investment in improving the nation's broadband infrastructure -- less than the $100 billion Biden originally wanted. The bill will require service providers getting Federal money to offer low-cost affordable plans, and also works to create price transparency and boost competition in areas where existing providers aren't providing adequate service. It would create a permanent Federal program to help more low-income households access the internet.
  
  
• Electric school buses: The bill would help US school districts buy clean, American-made, zero-emission buses, aiming to replace the yellow school bus fleet by providing $5 billion USD for zero-emission and clean buses, and $2.5 billion USD for ferries. The bill would invest $7.5 billion USD to build a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers along highways to enable long-distance travel, as well as within communities where people live, work and shop.
  
  
• Addressing racial discrimination in infrastructure: The bill includes $1 billion USD to reconnect communities, disproportionately Black neighborhoods, that were divided by highways and other infrastructure. It would fund planning, design, demolition and reconstruction of street grids, parks or other infrastructure.
  
  
• New tax regulations on cryptocurrencies: A provision included at the end of the Senate bill would impose new tax reporting requirements on cryptocurrency transactions, which could raise tens of billions in new revenue to help pay for the infrastructure package. The legislation could have sweeping ramifications for cryptocurrency investors and innovators.
  
  
• Delaying a drug rebate rule: To help pay for the infrastructure spending, the bill would delay the implementation of a controversial Trump administration rule that would radically change how drugs are priced and paid for in Medicare and Medicaid. It's expected to save $51 billion USD. The rule, which the Trump administration unveiled last November, would effectively ban drug makers from providing rebates to pharmacy benefit managers and insurers. Instead, drug companies would be encouraged to pass the discounts directly to patients at the pharmacy counter.

The bill is well less ambitious than President Joe Biden had originally introduced. His original $2.25 trillion USD proposal, known as the "American Jobs Plan", included money for caregiving for aging Americans and for workforce training, which Republicans didn't want to vote for. The Democrats are pushing a separate bill, to be passed via reconciliation, to cover those items.

The bipartisan bill also does not include corporate tax hikes, like Biden first proposed to pay for the spending. Instead, lawmakers found other ways to help cover the cost, like imposing new Superfund fees and repurposing some COVID relief funds approved by Congress during the pandemic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office still estimates that the bill would add $256 billion USD to the Federal budget deficit over 10 years. That is a matter to be addressed later.

* Oh yes, on 13 August, Donald Trump was supposed to be restored to the presidency of the USA. The biggest promoter of this idea was Mike Lindell, of the MyPillow company, and Trump's greatest fan.

Lindell, along with alternate Trump stooges Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, is staring down the muzzle of a huge libel suit by Dominion Voting Systems, pressed when the trio said that Dominion voting machines racked up huge numbers of false votes in the 2020 election. They tried to have the suit dismissed, but the court wasn't buying it, writing:

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Bizarrely, Trump fans are gleeful at the suit, insisting that it will actually prove that Dominion voting machines were corrupted after all. This glee was echoed by celebrity lawyer and Trump supporter Alan Dershowitz, who said that the trial would force Dominion to reveal engineering details of its voting machines. I replied to that on Twitter:

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I mean, Dershowitz is supposed to be a big-shot lawyer, and he doesn't realize the defendants have no case? He's gone the way of Rudy Giuliani. I got a reply:

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Along with Trump's failed resurrection, resistance to COVID-19 vaccination is being put under ever greater pressure, as employers impose more vaccination mandates, insurers raise premiums on the uninsured, and any other actions that inconvenience the antivaxxers: "We can't force you to get vaccinated, but we can make life difficult for you until you do."

The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson took a shot at Red State governors like Florida's Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott of Florida who have been interfering with pandemic-control efforts, saying: "The governors of two of the largest states are letting COVID burn because MUH FREEDUMB plays to an audience of a network owned by a crank Aussie billionaire." One Allison Carter, an editor at the INDIANAPOLIS STAR, more dryly commented:

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One poster shot back that it would be better to prime the immune system by getting the disease. To such postings, I'm inclined to post an animated GIF of TV Judge Judy saying: "Either you are playing dumb, or it is not an act." In any case, public patience with the clueless and ignorant has run out. Another animated GIF I like to post is from the SOUTH PARK cartoon: "Everybody is really mad at you." That's all their trolling has done for them.

* I got a summons for jury duty at the county court house in Fort Collins, north up the road from here in Loveland. I wasn't particularly happy with being called up, but I intended to do my duty without complaint. I poked around online, and found out that I should expect to have a three-day trial, and so made plans accordingly. I got my weekly chores done on Sunday and Monday, and uploaded all my daily blog entries for the week.

The summons told me to call in a day ahead of time, so I called in mid-morning on Monday. All I got was instructions for Monday jurors -- "nobody has to come in" -- and so I read the summons again, to find I had to call after 1 PM for Tuesday jurors.

I called in again in the early afternoon, with the message saying jurors with some numbers were called, those with other numbers were released. "Where's my juror number?" I checked the summons, I was #3645, in the released range. The message said to check back in after 5 PM to see if there were any changes; it sounded like they just meant some of the people who were called might not be, but I checked again anyway to be sure. No, I wasn't called.

It appears to be more likely than not that a juror won't be called. I think what happens is that they schedule a trial before getting into pre-trial discussions. The case could then be dismissed, or plea-bargained, meaning no trial. It seems criminal cases are often plea-bargained; if somebody's clearly guilty, they get hit worse in a trial than if they cop a plea.

I'd been summoned before, and been released. I checked my blog, and found out that had been in 2008, just before my Florida road trip that year. They didn't have the tidy voicemail system at that time, I had to show up for selection. I was one of the few prospective jurors wearing a tie, which surprised me: no way would I show up a court of law in work or casual clothes.

The case was a drunk-driving rap, the defendant having refused a breathanalyzer test. Looking back, he was clueless and pigheaded -- there was no real reason to refuse the test if he had been sober, so refusing to do so was an effective admission of guilt. I don't know what happened to him, but I suspect he didn't fare well.

* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com, ("Lithium Battery Costs Have Fallen By 98% In Three Decades", 31 March 2021) the price of batteries remains something of an obstacle for development of electric vehicles -- but, as it turns out, batteries have been becoming ever cheaper, at a rapid clip.

In the early 1990s, the storage capacity needed to power a house for a day would have cost about $75,000 USD. The cells themselves would have weighed 113 kilograms (250 pounds), and the battery pack would have been the size of a beer keg. Today the same capability can be provided at a cost of less than $2,000 USD, from a 40-kilogram (90-pound) package about the size of a small backpack.

The drop in cost of batteries has done much to enable renewable energy, by providing increasingly cost-effective energy storage that can provide power when the Sun is down or the wind isn't blowing. Further reduction in cost will promote electric vehicles (EV); batteries currently account for about a third of the price of an EV, and so reducing their cost is vital for ensuring that EVs become competitive with conventional ones.

Micah Ziegler and Jessika Trancik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a study that concludes the "learning rate" -- the fall in price that accompanies every doubling of cumulative production -- for batteries increased from 20% to 27% in the past few decades. Every time output doubles, as it did five times between 2006 and 2016, battery prices fall by about a quarter. This trend is driven in part by economies of scale: as more batteries are made, producers can spread out the up-front costs of building factories, and use their influence over suppliers to push for lower prices on crucial inputs. There has also been considerable improvement in battery technology, making them more effective, cheaper, and easier to manufacture. Ziegler and Trancik find that a doubling in technological know-how, measured by patent filings, is associated with a 40% drop in price.

The cost reductions are likely to continue. At the moment, the average cost of a lithium-ion battery pack is about $140 USD per kilowatt-hour (kWH), with the drive being towards $100 USD per kWH. At that cost, EVs are expected to become cost-competitive with piston cars, with the industry expecting that will happen in a few years. Battery storage is also booming: the USA installed a record 1.2 gigawatts of storage in 2020, while Australia, Germany, and Saudi Arabia have all planned large grid-scale projects along similar lines. We're not close to diminishing returns yet.

* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Is Lithium-Sulfur The Answer To Electric Aviation's Battery Limits?" by Graham Warwick, 7 August 2019), the push towards electric transportation has been restrained by available battery technologies. While modern lithium-ion batteries are capable, they still leave something to be desired in weight, capacity, safety, and expense.

Options for improved batteries include solid-state batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte in Li-ion with a solid, making the battery safer and improving energy density. Toyota and other car manufacturers are investigating solid-state batteries, with a particular interest in reducing battery size. Another approach is lithium-metal, which replaces the graphite anode in Li-ion with lithium metal to increase energy density.

Still another new battery chemistry, lithium-sulfur (Li-S), is getting attention. Li-S is being promoted by Oxis Energy of Abingdon, England. According to Mark Crittenden, head of battery development there, Oxis now has Li-S cells with an energy density of more than 400 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg), and expects to have 500 Wh/kg soon. That is twice as much as the 250 Wh/kg for the best Li-ion cells currently today.

Batteries are defined by multiple parameters, not just energy density. Other factors include specific power -- that is, the maximum power a battery can supply at any one time, as well as charge-discharge rate, safety, and cycle life. Lithium-sulfur has high energy density, but not high specific power. As far as cycle life goes, the Oxis battery can handle 200 cycles -- which poor, Li-ion easily handling over a thousand cycles. The company is pushing to get Li-S to 500 cycles.

Li-S, along with better energy density, is potentially cheaper than Li-ion, since it doesn't require expensive materials. Li-S is also potentially safer. Dendritic growth of the lithium within a Li-ion cell can cause a short circuit and destructive thermal runaway. That demands safety features that increase the weight and expense of Li-ion batteries. Not a problem with Li-S, according to Crittenden: "We do not get dendritic growth with lithium-sulfur. Any small bumps that form will be eroded in the next cycle as the lithium is used up. Lithium-sulfur does not degrade in a problematic way."

Safety evaluations of prototype Li-S batteries have revealed no show-stoppers. Oxis hopes to have initial production online by 2022, with a capacity of producing millions of units a year.

[MON 23 AUG 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 33

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Of course, the big news this last week was the shockingly abrupt fall of Afghanistan to Taliban insurgents. With other US and Western troops largely gone from the country, the Taliban simply moved into Afghanistan's cities, with the Afghan Army generally giving up without a fight and turning over their weapons. Obviously, the surrender had been well negotiated in advance. The Afghan government fled the country.

The Biden Administration was blindsided by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, having assumed that the Afghans could hold out against the Taliban, at least for a time. As a result, the USA was slow to pull out Americans in Afghanistan, as well as interpreters and other Afghans who were at danger from the Taliban. The consequence was a panic effort to ramp up the evacuation, with transport flights streaming in and out of the Kabul airport.

The Taliban did not see fit to interfere with the evacuation, and indeed has been sounding a conciliatory note, proposing to set up an inclusive government for all Afghans, and allow the education of women. There is widespread skepticism of such claims, in good part because the people making them don't appear to be regarded as anything more than window-dressing by the people who are really in charge. In any case, the US promptly froze Afghan assets to keep the Taliban from getting their hands on them.

The Biden Administration was bitterly attacked for the fiasco. Some of the sniping was for pulling out and letting Afghanistan fall, but there was no substantial public support for staying. The immediate disintegration of the Afghan government underlined the futility of the US involvement in the country: if a patient was on life-support for 20 years and died the instant it was taken away, the patient was a lost cause.

More relevant criticisms focused on the day-late dollar-short handling of the evacuation -- but what's done is done, and no defeat scenario would have looked pretty. There's been much talk of the tremendous damage done to the America's reputation, but that seems overblown. The loudest criticisms are from people who hate Biden anyway, so he loses nothing. A year from now, Afghanistan won't be a real issue; Americans bury and forget their defeats.

Biden had made the right call that nobody before him had really wanted to make, and had to take the heat for it, at least for a while. The evacuation will be completed -- it's supposed to be finished by the end of the month, but it will go on as long as possible. The dust will settle, and things won't seem so bad.

As a footnote to the effort, dozens of Afghan military aircraft and helicopters flew to Uzbekistan; what will happen to them is an interesting question. Vast quantities of other arms fell into Taliban hands, but there are other interesting questions about that matter as well. How much of the more sophisticated gear was left functional? In addition, it is hard to believe that the Afghan Army turned over all of its weapons, it being easier to believe a fair component of it ended up in hidden arms caches.

The Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, but how easy will they find it to rule? It is much easier to blow up bridges than build them. We really don't know what will happen. Expect surprises.

* As per an essay by Stephen Collinson of CNN ("How The 2020 Census Explains Donald Trump", 13 August 2020), the results of America's 2020 census did not come as much of a surprise -- showing the continued evolution of the USA to a less-white, more diverse, less rural, more urban nation. Certainly the far Right has understood that for years, it being an underlying theme on Fox News, and Donald Trump using "white grievance" to win the presidency.

The problem for the Right is that demographic changes are clearly weakening their voter base every election. According to the 2020 census, people of color represented 43% of the US population in 2020, up from 34% in 2010. The non-Hispanic white share of the US population fell to 57% in 2020, down 6 percentage points from the last census in 2010. These changes also pose a challenge to the Democrats: can they appeal to a diverse voter base and still appeal to working-class whites? Tricky.

At a detail level, the census gives insights into regional political battles, such as the current fractious politics of Texas. It shows that Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth are all growing, while the populations of many rural areas are declining. Many of the political shoot-outs in Texas, such as over voting rights and pandemic control, are between Republican Governor Greg Abbott and legislature against Democratic strongholds in the cities. That's why Texas Republicans are attempting to tweak the state's election laws to impede voting in the cities, while boosting it in the rural areas. Similar changes are underway in Arizona, where Phoenix has been growing rapidly -- also shifting the state towards the Democrats, with similar attempts by Republicans to stack the voting system in their favor.

The Democrats are, of course, entirely alert to Republican attempts to step on Democratic voters. Martin Luther King III -- the eldest son of the great civil rights campaigner, and chairman of the Drum Major Institute -- said in a statement: "Some elected officials are afraid that if they embrace a more diverse America, they will lose their power. Those same people are willing to weaponize the new Census data to gerrymander the vote and rig the system against Black and Brown Americans."

There is much concern that efforts to pass a new Voter Rights Act (VRA) to level the playing field are going nowhere, thanks to conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, who have made it clear they won't vote down the Senate filibuster. The fears are overblown; anyone playing close attention to Manchin knows that he makes emphatic proclamations, while leaving himself considerable wiggle room. For all the public complaints about Manchin, there's not a hint of any serious feuding among Democrats in Congress; they're effectively on the same page. Manchin's current voting record is solidly in the Democratic camp -- at last count, 88% the same as that of Bernie Sanders.

What Manchin wants, and it appears that Joe Biden along with other Democratic leadership want as well, is a new VRA that has a Republican stamp of approval, so the Republicans won't work to crush it at the first opportunity. There has to be an exit from the current state of political warfare, and it's definitely a goal worth pursuing. What happens if the GOP decides to obstruct instead? Then the Democrats will do whatever they need to do to pass the new VRA. They can do it on their own if they have to. When push comes to shove, they're not going to let the Republicans step on them.

* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Fly-Eyed Lens Array Captures Dim Objects Missed By Giant Telescopes" by Govert Schilling, 25 March 2021), ever bigger telescopes keep coming online, allowing ever deeper probes of the Universe. However, though they're outstanding at depth, they're not so good at breadth; there's a big need in astronomy for telescopes that are much more focused on breadth than on depth.

Such telescopes, as it turns out, don't need to be all that expensive -- as proven by Dragonfly, a telescope sited in New Mexico that consists of twin fly-eye arrays of commercially-available Canon telephoto lenses, each with 24 lenses. A decade ago, astronomers Roberto Abraham of UT and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University came to the conclusion that an array of dozens of commercial telephoto lenses could gather as much light as a 1-meter telescope while maintaining the lenses' wide fields of view. Canon had just produced a 14-centimeter (5.5-inch) wide lens with a special coating to reduce scattered light. They obtained the lenses, fitted them with camera chips, installed them in the array, and developed a computer system to control them and obtain their data.

By pointing all 48 lenses at the same part of the sky and summing their exposures, Abraham and van Dokkum hoped to find dim diffuse celestial objects. So far, Dragonfly's main claim to fame has been the discovery of numerous ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDG), some of them as large as the Milky Way, but with hardly any stars. In 2016, the researchers found out one that is spinning far faster than it should, given how few stars there are to hold the galaxy together by gravity. That suggested that about 98% of its mass must be in the form of dark matter -- the unseen mass that constitutes some 85% of all gravitating mass in the universe. In 2018, the Dragonfly team discovered the fast-spinning galaxy's opposite: a galaxy rotating so slowly that it must contain hardly any dark matter at all.

The arrays are now to be updated with a total of 120 more such lenses, which will make the Dragonfly one of the most capable wide-area telescopes in the world. The upgrade will cost a modest $3.65 million USD. The new lenses should allow the Dragonfly team to go after a new target: faint clouds of gas surrounding galaxies. These clouds are the dense ends of gaseous filaments that connect far-flung galaxies, thought to have coalesced around regions rich in dark matter. Filters on the new lenses will transmit only the faint red light of glowing hydrogen or the green glow of ionized oxygen to make these wisps of hot, tenuous gas stand out more clearly.

The expansion of the universe stretches light from cosmic objects to longer wavelengths, depending on their distance. To let this "redshifted" light pass through, Dragonfly's filters can be incrementally tilted, to various degrees. Increasing the light's path length through the glass also increases the filters' transmission wavelength?a trick that will extend the reach of the instrument to gas clouds some 100 million light-years away. Team member Deborah Lokhorst of the University of Toronto (UT) says: "Dragonfly is going to provide a completely new view of the Universe." Dragonfly will be particularly well suited to observe the dim glow of vast, tenuous gas clouds that hold clues to the Universe's unseen dark matter.

To map the much fainter filaments of the cosmic web that lie farther from the galaxies, Abraham would like to expand Dragonfly to a 2000-lens array, giving it the same light-gathering power as a 6-meter telescope. He says: "It's not crazy. Dragonfly could well be the first example of a completely new class of optical telescope."

[MON 30 AUG 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 34

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: After a rocky start, the US airlift out of Kabul, Afghanistan, has ramped up, with over 105,000 people evacuated so far. A suicide bomber attacked the crowd at Kabul Airport on 26 August, killing 13 American soldiers and several times that many Afghans. US President Joe Biden announced that the airlift would continue to the cut-off date of 31 August, and that the attackers would be dealt with. The next day, reporter Peter Doocy of Fox News asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki: "When the President says we will hunt you down and make you pay, what does that look like?"

Psaki, who is very used to Doocy's fatuous questions, blandly replied: "I think he made it clear yesterday that he does not want them to live on the Earth anymore." Drone strikes have followed, inflicting casualties on Islamist terrorists. It appears the primary goal is to keep them off balance until the evacuation is complete.

What happens after 31 August? It is unlikely that the US will simply forget about Afghanistan. Biden has made comments about "over the horizon counter-terrorism", which suggests some form of covert action, presumably by the CIA and Special Operations Command. Where that goes over the long run, who knows? It seems unlikely that Afghanistan will return to the status quo of before the US invasion. One knowledgeable Afghan said that at best, Afghanistan would become like Iraq -- with a weak but inclusive and recognized government -- and at worst, like Syria -- divided into warring camps.

Incidentally, during the airlift, a USAF Boeing C-17 "Mighty Moose" cargolifter hauled out a staggering 823 passengers, delivering them to Qatar. 183 were kids, sitting on their parents' laps. The C-17s involved in the operation had the radio callsign REACH, with different number suffixes; an Afghan baby was born on one C-17 rescue flight, with the grateful parents naming the girl "Reach".

* Not quite ignored in all the fuss over Afghanistan, this last week the House Thompson Committee, investigating the 6 January Capitol riot, sent requests for records of Donald Trump's conversations and actions around that time to the National Archives & Records Administration and seven other agencies: the departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and Interior; the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Thompson Committee had been publicly quiet for a number of weeks, but nobody with sense thought the committee had been idle. Obviously, the first thing to do was nail down events on 6 January and then, having done that, start digging. Trump has claimed that he will invoke executive privilege -- which he can do, but the Biden White House can override it. It is very difficult to believe that the Biden Administration would not cooperate with the Thompson Committee, though they may have to invoke some formalities in doing so.

As a demonstration that the Thompson Committee means business, a few days after requesting the information from the White House, the committee requested information relevant to the Capitol riot from 15 social media companies, including 4chan, 8kun (earlier 8chan), Facebook, Gab, Google, Parler, Reddit, Snapchat, Telegram, theDonald.win, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and Zello. The committee seeks "a range of records, including data, reports, analyses, and communications stretching back to spring of 2020."

There is some understandable frustration over how slowly the investigations of Trump are moving along, that frustration being felt personally here. However, it should be noted that, though the authorities were investigating Trump henchman Roger Stone from 2017, they didn't reel him in until 2019. What we are going to see is weeks or a few months of quiet from the investigations, leading to intermittent loud BANGS!

Things are indeed happening. The Thompson Committee is clearly casting a wide net. Trump by himself amounts to little but a low-functioning, reckless loudmouth; he would be nothing without the network of enablers around him, and so the committee is trying to take down both Trump and his network. Things will get interesting.

* In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic is running full bore in the USA, thanks to the new Delta variant. The FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine a week ago; to no surprise, COVIDiots simply found other things to complain about -- but it did lead to a tide of vaccine mandates from schools, government organizations, and companies. The Florida and Texas state governments have tried to push back on vaccine mandates and other measures to deal with the pandemic, but they are unlikely to achieve much, as death tolls in those states pile up. Mandating that schools keep fire extinguishers is one thing; mandating that they can't have them is exactly another.

So far, there hasn't been any rush to vaccinate, but the mandates won't really kick in until next month. For the moment, the news media has been playing up antivaxxers who got COVID-19 and died. It is unseemly to gloat, but it is hard to feel sympathetic. Others haven't been so reluctant to gloat. Phil Mason -- a British chemist and noted skeptic who calls himself "Thunderf00t" online, well-known for his extended YouTube series WHY PEOPLE LAUGH AT CREATIONISTS -- commented on Twitter concerning one such case:

QUOTE:

thunderf00t / @thunderf00t: Darwin Awards got nothing on this guy -- anti-masker protest organizer dies of coronavirus. This is like turkeys buying stocks in gravy AND voting for Christmas!

END_QUOTE

* There's also a growing push to make people show their vaccination status to get admission to events and such. I got to thinking that it might be nice to get a vaccine passport on one of my smartphones so I wouldn't have to remember to carry a vaccination card. Quite a number of such apps were offered on Google Play; instead of trying to guess which one was best, I wondered if there was one recommended by the Colorado state government.

I looked around, and to my pleasant surprise, I found that the state offered a neat ID app, named "MyColorado". I couldn't download it on one of my older phones, but it downloaded okay with my Samsung Galaxy S10. The next day, I got time to configure it. I was thinking it might be tricky, but it was straightforward: I entered my personal information, invented a password, and then scanned the barcode on the back of my driver's license. Voila! I had my driver's license on the smartphone. Incidentally, that smartphone license is supposed to be legally valid.

So what about my vax record? That involved jumping through more validation hoops, including scanning my face, plus having to punch in codes sent to me over email, but it wasn't that much more troublesome. The only thing that threw me was that it sent me two different codes consecutively, but I figured that out quickly enough. That done, I had my vax record on the smartphone, too.

I was very pleased with the app. One of these days, we'll have a system of online ID that will cover all the ID bases, and permit secure transactions without having to shuffle papers. I was thinking that might take some time, but it appears ID apps are a growth market, with more states adopting them. The drive towards vaccination passports seems to be giving it a big push. There's work at the Federal level towards a digital ID system. It sure would be nice to perform all my business transactions online, without having to sign piles of papers.

* In other personal tech news, I wanted to share a confidential file with remote family -- confidential in the sense that I'd be financially destroyed if the information got loose. I'd played with my own encryption program for fun, but it wasn't nearly secure enough, and I was the only one who could decrypt with it.

The baseline for good security is the Advanced Encryption Standard / 256-bit password (AES-256) cipher. I looked around for a freeware encryption tool that handles AES-256, and came across the popular freeware 7-Zip zipfile archiver. I wanted the command-line version, since I was going to use it from a Windows batch file; and after some puzzling, found that all I needed was two files, "7z.exe" and "7z.dll". I put them in my Windows directory so they could be found on my system.

The next thing was to puzzle out the command-line options, which ended up being straightforward. To encrypt, enter:

   7z a -p<password> <encrypted_archive_name> <files_to_be_archived>

For example:

   7z a -pZoMG@PA$$wd safe.7z myfile1.txt myfile2.txt myfile3.txt

-- will create an encrypted archive named "safe.7z" with three text files in it. To decrypt, enter:

   7z e -p<password> <encrypted_archive_name>

For example:

   7z e -pZoMG@PA$$wd safe.7z 

-- will pop out the three text files. I wondered how big a password I needed in practice; it appears one 20 characters long is about right.

Next issue was telling my remote family how to decrypt the file. While I use Windows / Android, they use Mac / iPhone; they could get 7-Zip for the Mac, but I thought they might find the iPhone easier to use. I tracked down a free Android app named "ZArchiver", also available on iPhone, which is functionally equivalent to 7-Zip. I put an encrypted archive on my Android phone and ran ZArchiver; all I had to do was find the archive and select it, with the app asking for a password, then popping out the contents.

"And Bob's your uncle!" Of course, although it was simple in the end, it wasn't simple to figure out what tools I needed and how to get them to work. There are lots of options, and it's hard to sort through them. It was frustrating, but fun and gratifying in the end. Things seem so miserable in the world that it's good to get something right.

* As discussed in an article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("Lab-Made Hexagonal Diamonds Are Stronger Than The Real Thing" by Ben Turner, 2 March 2021), everyone knows that diamonds are formed under pressure deep in the Earth, and are extremely hard. These diamonds have a cubic-type crystal structure; as it turns out, there are very rare diamonds, created under more extreme conditions, that have a hexagonal crystal structure.

Hexagonal or "Lonsdaleite" diamonds are found in meteor impact craters. There was some belief that they are stronger than cubic diamonds -- but the samples obtained from impact craters are highly impure, and so nobody was too sure of the properties of hexagonal diamonds. Now researchers have forged pure hex diamonds, and measured their stiffness.

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Cubic diamonds usually form more than 150 kilometers (90 miles) beneath Earth's surface, under extreme pressures, and temperatures above 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,732 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers generated the hex diamonds by blasting, using gunpowder and compressed air, a dime-sized graphite disk at a wall at 24,100 KPH (15,000 MPH).

To measure the diamonds' strength and stiffness in the instant before the hex diamonds were smashed into bits, the researchers emitted a sound wave, then measured how quickly it traveled through the hexagonal diamonds with a laser. The sound waves cause the diamond density to fluctuate as it moves through, affecting the path length of the laser beam. The stiffer a material is, the faster sound moves through it. The results showed that hex diamonds are indeed stiffer than cubic diamonds.

The researchers would like to created longer-lived hex diamonds -- both to give them a closer investigation, and for commercial purposes. Hex diamonds might make better drill bits, but due to their rarity, might have a distinction in jewelry.