Monthly Archives: July 2022

Why, yes, Detective Queen, I am up for a role as Bela Lugosi.

The Mandarin Mystery (1936) is an Ellery Queen story, which means that the fictional Queen and his father, a police inspector, have to figure out how one, then two, murders have been committed – and why.

It’s not bad, but the storytelling is brittle, meaning the suspects are basically from the usual herd of 1930s suspects, and the idea that a postal stamp worth $50,000 in the money of the period would be carried with virtually no safeguards is a plot hole that may have been believable in the thirties, but surely isn’t now.

The Queen character is played with some verve, but in the end this is a minor failure of a story. I couldn’t figure out why I should care, and if I can’t figure it out for myself, I can’t figure it out for you, either.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. has an epiphany about the upcoming midterms:

When it comes to predicting midterm elections, it’s difficult to distinguish between insightful nonconformity and wishful thinking.

The conventional wisdom, well-rooted in history and data, suggests the Democrats should be toast this fall. But beware, say the dissenters, because 2022 is not a normal year, and it will not play out in a normal way.

The dissenters may be onto something, even if the case for a Republican sweep is strong. [WaPo]

So why has it taken Dionne, a professional pundit, this long to realize that there’s something abnormal going on?

It’s not blindness, or conformity.

It’s his status. He’s a professional.

This places multiple constraints on him, and folks in his class. He gets his income from being a pundit. He has a position of some prestige to maintain. He’s part of the standard power structure.

All of these factors, and more, conspire to keep him in a conservative position – not politically, but simply as a predictor of the future – when it comes to the midterms. Historically, the party holding of the Presidency does perform subpar when the economy sucks. He, and all other professional pundits, know these rules of thumb.

And, as their employers expect them to come out with reasonable predictions, this is what comes out.

Don’t confuse reasonable with accurate.

But how about me? I’m an amateur pundit, by which I mean I’m unpaid, I get my income elsewhere, and therefore the time I would otherwise spend researching the political scene instead goes to my employer. I’m under-informed compared to Dionne. Heck, if there was a term further down the ladder from amateur, I’d be that.

But I’m also unconstrained.

So I’ve been predicting for months and months that the Democrats, if they communicate clearly, and their January 6th investigation comes up with good information – which it has – then the Democrats may be looking through the right side of the telescope, despite their blunders with the management of the transgender issue.

Right now, I think in the Senate the Democrats have a good chance of netting two-four seats. If the bowling ball breaks just right, add two more. In the House, which I do not study, I simply note that the Democrats are thought to have more chances to flip seats than the Republicans, who more or less stood pat in most states where redistricting is necessary. I expect Rep Gaetz (R-FL) to lose big time to his challenger, Rebekah Jones (D). Heck, I expect a spirited contest and possible Democratic victory in traditional Republican stronghold CD1 in Nebraska.

I think the independents are finding their local Republicans to be extremists unworthy of positions in Congress. In a way, the election is more under Democratic than Republican control, and while publicly Republican officials and strategists talk an optimistic game, the mutterings from anonymous Republican sources – or even Senator McConnell (R-KY) – are that the extremists have been recognized for what they are by independents and even moderate Republicans, and won’t be getting the votes they think they’ll get.

And I can say this stuff because I don’t depend on a pundit-payer for my income.

But pity the poor reader, because I also don’t have the hours to devote to reading up on each race and talk to local party officials and all that rot. It’d make me ill, anyways. No, I’m an obsolete software engineer who reads way too much and is pushing his impressions of the upcoming election out onto the blog for digestion by a reader who’s not quite sure if I’m spinach or a bad bacteria.

I guess we’ll find out in a few months.

In case you were wondering if Lake Mead is drying up this rapidly due to numbers of people, well, yes, but indirectly. Christopher Ingraham on The Why Axis says the immediate culprit is farming:

Conceptually the west’s water problem is a simple one: humans are draining the Colorado River faster than it can replenish itself via rain and snowpack, a problem compounded by the ongoing drought. But this is fundamentally not a problem of cities being too big, or populations being too high, or families doing too much laundry. Entsminger’s testimony points to the real culprit: desert farms.

“Around 80 percent of Colorado River water is used for agriculture and 80 percent of that 80 percent is used for forage crops like alfalfa,” he said. Stop and sit with that one for a minute. Eight out of every ten gallons that flows down the Colorado gets diverted to farms and ranches. And most of that gets turned into alfalfa for use not by humans, but by cattle.

Western farmers, in other words, are pumping precious water hundreds of miles around the desert in order to grow plants and animals that cannot otherwise survive there — especially during a multi-decade drought. It’s profoundly wasteful, a practice untethered from a reality that has finally caught up with it.

He also seems unduly optimistic about humanity’s wisdom:

The optimistic case for the southwest is that these dire conditions force a rethinking of how agriculture is practiced in the region, leading to water savings that put the river on a more sustainable footing. A couple winters of record snowpacks could go a long way toward replenishing water levels on Lake Mead.

Me? Between overpopulation, chronic narcissism, and general need to make a living, I don’t think we’ll learn a damn thing.

And here’s a nice graph of Ingraham’s.

Photon sphere:

Black holes can have a feature called a photon sphere, where gravity’s pull is so strong that light orbits the black hole. So if you aim a light just outside the photon sphere you could, in theory, see that light come around the other side of the black hole. [“James Webb Space Telescope pictures: Your questions answered,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (23 July 2022)]

From Yahoo! News:

Former President Donald Trump said in a statement Wednesday that he had notified CNN he was intending to file a defamation lawsuit against the news outlet for its refusal to back his discredited claims that election fraud accounted for his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.

“I have notified CNN of my intent to file a lawsuit over their repeated defamatory statements against me,” Trump’s statement said. “I will also be commencing actions against other media outlets who have defamed me and defrauded the public regarding the overwhelming evidence of fraud throughout the 2020 election.”

“You haven’t backed my false claims of electoral fraud so I’m suing!”

Yep, frantic to waste money on lawyers, he is. He’s apparently never heard that part of earning respect is Knowing when to fold ’em.

And speaking of Knowing when to run, when will he be fleeing the United States for the Seychelles? He’s making my prognosticating skills look poor.

Donald J. Trump and the 2020 election. In case you were wondering, he does not have stripes.

This thread has been dormant for quite a while, but it’s worth noting that it’s been nothing but downhill for the reservoir since my last comment in 2015. Indeed, Mead is no longer a harbinger of things to come, but now a dread hunting ground for souvenirs, oddities, and even archaeological artifacts:

When the employee is ten times bigger than the boss, those reviews can be dicey. Here’s the headline from the print version of NewScientist (23 July 2022, paywall), rather than the remanded online version:

Wild bison roam in UK for first time

Four bison were released into an English woodland that they are expected to transform

What happens if the bison fail? Are they fired? I’d hate to be the one delivering the bad news.

Edward Parker and Michael Vermeer want a contest!

NIST [U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology] and others in the cryptography community are carefully analyzing several PQC [post-quantum cryptography] algorithms to try to catch any potential vulnerabilities. But it’s almost impossible to mathematically prove the security of most cryptography algorithms. In practice, the strongest evidence for an algorithm’s security is simply that many experts have tried and failed to break it. The more people try to attack the new PQC algorithms and fail, the more likely it is that they are secure.

One possible option for further crowdsourcing the analysis of NIST’s final candidate PQC algorithms would be a contest in which the general public is invited to try to break them. As hundreds of companies that offer public bug bounties have discovered, crowdsourced penetration testing can be a very useful tool for improving cybersecurity. The U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Defense have also recently experimented with offering bug bounties to anyone who discovers cyber vulnerabilities in the departments’ systems. A public contest certainly can’t replace a mathematical security analysis, but it could be a useful complement that provides additional evidence of the algorithms’ security. [Lawfare]

Parker and Vermeer address and repudiate the usual objections to such a contest, and I tend to agree – let “the public,” a necessarily self-selecting group of mathematicians, both professional and amateurs, have a go at it. Both cash and notoriety will accrue to anyone who actually finds a weakness in any of the algorithms.

And may result in the development of new mathematical techniques and tools. Win-win?

As I, and no doubt everyone else, suspected, the urgencies of winning wars override concerns about killer robots. David Hambling reports in NewScientist (16 July 2022, paywall):

International attempts to regulate the use of autonomous weapons, sometimes called “killer robots”, are faltering and may be derailed if such weapons are used in Ukraine and seen to be effective.

No country is known to have used autonomous weapons yet. Their potential use is controversial because they would select and attack targets without human oversight. Arms control groups are campaigning for the creation of binding international agreements to cover their use, like the ones we have for chemical and biological weapons, before they are deployed. Progress is being stymied by world events, however.

Russia’s need to win in Ukraine, whether it be due to Putin’s egotism, or his alleged devotion to a dead Russian Orthodox mystic, or a realization that the world’s overpopulation suggests food sources, such as Ukraine, a very large food exporter, need to be secured in order to guarantee his legacy is viewed as positive, makes concerns about killer robots secondary.

A United Nations’ Group of Governmental Experts is holding its final meeting on autonomous weapons from 25 to 29 July. The group has been looking at the issue since 2017, and according to insiders, there is still no agreement. Russia opposes international legal controls and is now boycotting the discussions, for reasons relating to its invasion of Ukraine, making unanimous agreement impossible.

So the question becomes Which evolutionary technological path will see the emergence of “killer robots”, aka solely AI directed battlefield weapons? And what special undesirable characteristics will accompany them? At the moment, and I think in line with expectations, drones are a leading candidate. I’ve been hearing about ‘loitering munitions’ for months in reports on Putin’s War, these being drones lurking above for periods of time, utilized only when the operators see, or are informed by spotters, of a target. Everyone worries that the human element could be excluded in favor of an on-board “AI”, or recognition and decision making elements. But that part may be unavoidable:

[Gregory Allen at the Center for Strategic and International Studies] says the extensive use in Ukraine of radio-frequency jamming, which breaks contact between human operators and drones, will increase the interest in autonomous weapons, which don’t need a link to be maintained.

Defensive tactics and technologies are no doubt under development even as we speak, but I haven’t heard much beyond this report.

They just keep dancin’!

• Vice found a recording of Ohio GOP Senate nominee J. D. Vance advocating married couples exhibiting domestic violence stay together, made during a talk at Pacifica Christian High School. This is a test, but not of Vance. It’s a test of his opponent, Rep Tim Ryan (D), and Ryan’s allies, because there’s a lot of nuance going on here. Vance himself grew up in a violent family, and wrote about it in Hillbilly Elegy, so he has first hand knowledge. His response to a request for comment has, I think, some subtly incorrect logic to it – he’s confusing a dependent variable for an independent variable, which alters the character of the article, and the final conclusion. But I do have to respect his first-hand knowledge, although I think the imposition of a one-size-fits-all rule such as his “marriage is sacred and therefore divorce shouldn’t happen” is a basic mistake. But if Ryan or his allies try to make this into a campaign issue, they may end up alienating a significant fraction of the electorate who still believe in the sacredness of the institution of marriage. All it takes is respect for that view, even if you think it has limits. Will the Democrats figure this out? Will Vance have to try to bait them into a trap?
• Wisconsin’s embattled Senator Johnson (R), fighting for his political career, has “signaled” support for same-sex marriage, presumably in a bid for some independent votes this November. Then he voted against a Veteran’s health care bill that he had earlier voted for; it had been returned to the Senate for “technical reasons.” Sounds like he got confused, and, as I’ve mentioned before, the Senator appears to be suffering from dementia.
• Alaska’s Juneau Empire: “Add another unusual poll number to U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s history of them, as a survey published Monday states her net job approval rating has increased by 22% since President Joe Biden took office.” Noted Murkowski-hater Donald J. Trump appears to be headed for disappointment this November.
• In Missouri NBC News may have the reason for Greitens fall in the polls: “A super PAC aimed that’s [sic] been attacking former GOP Gov. Eric Greitens is outspending other groups and candidates ahead of next week’s Senate primary in Missouri, and it appears to be driving down Greitens’ standing in the race.” My question: if the winner isn’t Greitens, will the winner be to the left or the right of Greitens? And will he engage in violence if he loses?
• The latest AJC poll for Georgia shows Senator Warnock (D) leading challenger Herschel Walker (R) by 3 points. Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver has 3% support in the poll, and may split the Republican vote if he persists. A-rated SurveyUSA gives Warnock a commanding 9 point lead in their latest poll. Pundit Erick Erickson still believes in Walker. I remain of the opinion that voting for Walker is a sign of either the ignorance or the political depravity of the Georgia electorate.
• Senator Kelly (D) of Arizona has the formal support of the very small moderate Republican group Republicans for Kelly. Will it be possible to tell if it has any effect on the overall vote? My guess is that the winner of the Republican primary will be so extreme that Kelly will win the general election without too much difficulty, but it’s only a guess.
• Finally, Republican base enthusiasm for a party that seems to be run by a pack of dubious characters, as measured by small dollar donations, may be substantially less than Democratic base enthusiasm for their own candidates. I’ve seen this mentioned in several sources, here’s WaPo. If a good measure, it suggests the Democrats may not be losing control of the House or the Senate in November, errrr, January, oh whatever’s the proper month. I continue to think that seven Republican Senate seats are in danger, Democrats may have one or two in danger. We’ll know more when more primaries are completed and polls conducted after that.

Previous prancing here.

Long-term readers may remember occasional pictures of denizens of a tomato patch climbing the garage. This year, my Arts Editor decided she was tired of all those tomatoes, so most of the patch is dedicated to … sunflowers. They’re not blooming yet, but they’re getting close.

“They’re nincompoops, but they’re malevolent nincompoops,” Former DOJ official @DavidLaufmanLaw says of the Trump allies behind newly revealed emails planning the fake elector scheme. pic.twitter.com/MlvqLhDnPh

— New Day (@NewDay) July 27, 2022

‘Malevolent nincompoops.’ Yep, that’s about right.

Earlier this month Matt Taibbi put out an excellent post on the cost of cryptocurrencies, and what really caught my eye was the juxtaposition of these two paragraphs:

Using digital currencies to help the billions around the world with no access to banking services become participants in a system that has long excluded them is a great thing, in theory. The issue is the structure of these companies. If a stablecoin firm is taking your dollar and trying to make money lending it somewhere, they’re just “unregulated, uninsured, unaudited banks,” as one financial analyst puts it.

And

However, if the transparency goal isn’t maintained in crypto finance, and risk is allowed to exist that digital assets could end up fought over in something like a bankruptcy court, then you’ve just exchanged one brand of “centralized ledger” for another — maybe even a worse version. “There are so many good things about this industry, right? The micropayments, the cheap transactions, the transparency on chain and so on,” says a high-ranking executive for another oft-criticized crypto firm. “But there is also a ton of centralized behavior still.”

For my money >cough<, there’s a contradiction in this dislike for a centralized ledger when it comes to stablecoin trying to make money through lending out assets. Banks have traditionally acted as a centralizer, a concentrator, of wealth, because in order to act as a lender it must do so.

Decentralization may sound great, but negating a necessary pillar of how we’ve done things, and then try to continue to do it, seems like a lovely brick to be installed on that legendary path of good intentions.

Taibbi concludes:

The tragedy of a corrupted crypto universe is exactly the same story, of a “bespoke” financial market grown to fantastic dimensions in a regulatory dead zone, with a cash-fattened congress keeping questions to a minimum, and the same old insiders extracting billions before a crash that will inevitably be paid for by the rabble again. In fifteen or twenty years, maybe, crypto will evolve to revolutionize finance and eliminate insider corruption in the way its adherents hoped, much as the Internet eventually really did change everything from commerce to communication. But we’re still at the stage of clearing out the phonies, the Pets.com and eToys equivalents, and there are a lot still out there.

If ever.

Phlox, balloon flowers, something, Clematis – it was quite a show!

This was found on an island surrounded by the unholy hybridization of flamingos with alligators.

• The Deseret News has Utah incumbent Senator Mike Lee (R) ahead of challenger and Democrat-endorsed Evan McMullin (I) by about 5 points. While that’s hardly overwhelming, it’s still a hill to climb – but it is climbable. And surprisingly close.
• In Ohio, a poll by Innovation Ohio has Rep Tim Ryan (D) leading lawyer and author J. D. Vance (R) for the to-be open Senate seat currently held by the Republicans. The lead is five points. However, FiveThirtyEight has no listing for Innovation Ohio, so keep that grain of salt handy. This would qualify as at least a minor upset, and probably a major upset, since current seat occupant retiring Senator Portman (R) has won by commanding margins in the past.
• I lost track of the Missouri race, and thus missed the poll in late June from Trafalgar that indicates disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens (R) is basically tied with Vicky Hartzler (R) for the GOP nomination for the to-be open seat of retiring Senator Blunt (R), and Eric Schmitt (R) is in hot pursuit, which is quite a change from a month and a half earlier when Greitens had a 6 to 7 point lead. It’s close enough now that an endorsement from any of the three candidates still stuck in single digits might be enough to push the endorsee into the winner’s circle. No mention of the Democrats, they seem a disorganized lot. Trafalgar gets an A- from FiveThirtyEight.
• In the first Illinois poll for the Senate general election that I could find, Illinois incumbent Senator Duckworth (D) has a nearly 10 point lead over challenger Kathy Salvi (R), who proclaimed herself the only Republican who could defeat Duckworth during the primary. The pollster is Victory Research, which has a rating of only B/C from FiveThirtyEight. Salvi’s challenge is big, but not impossible.
• General sentiment continues to run against Republicans, if this report from Global Strategy Group is to be believed: Supporters of the Republican Party are seen as more prone to violence in pushing their agenda than supporters of the Democratic Party, and those who feel the Republican Party is prone to violence cite January 6th, Trump, and the insurrection at the Capitol. The key? The January 6th insurrection.
• In Washington State Senator Murray (D) has won a second poll, a Crosscut.Elway poll, by 20 points. FiveThirtyEight knows of an Elway Research pollster, and gives them an A/B rating. I do not know if there’s a connection between Crosscut.Elway and Elway Research. While there’s a long ways to go, it appears the Washington Republicans have dug themselves a hole and then started using a credit card.
• I don’t put a lot of credence in “generic ballot” polling, because politics is local, local, local, and quite dependent on the particular candidates’ reputation. But the Emerson College Polling result over the weekend is interesting, not only for it showing Republicans and Democrats virtually tied, when Republicans had earlier had a substantial lead, but also to show the importance of the economy to voters to be decaying (down 7 points to being of primary importance to 51% of those polled), while abortion and crime are tied at a distant #2, and then healthcare, immigration, housing, and Covid-19. Other generic ballot polling has varied wildly over time and pollster, so the essential meaning of this poll isn’t entirely clear, but it does suggest that the economy either isn’t as important as the GOP would like to believe – or voters are happier with the Democrats’ performance than the GOP would have its base believe.

Takeaways? The fried chicken. And Senators Duckworth (D) and Murray (D) seem safe enough, barring a black swan event or incompetent campaigning. Ryan is not safe, but promising, Lee has an uncomfortably small lead, relative to expectations, which may in the future be affected by folks’ perceptions of the former President, and Missouri remains a big question mark.

Perhaps most important, though, is the impression that it’s only just beginning to dawn on the Republican strategists that the January 6th insurrection is a big ol’ anchor around Republicans’ necks. I don’t read right-wing pundits much, as just about all of them are disconnected from reality, appear to be paid propagandists, or at best don’t know how to justify their complaints in a compelling manner. Erick Erickson’s my biggest exposure, and, while he does acknowledge the insurrection happened and he condemns it, he remains convinced, or at least is trying to convince his audience, that the economy is far more important than an attempted insurrection by folks carrying Christian Nationalist, Trump, and Confederacy flags, and no one is paying attention to the Dobbs decision.. He’s been busy celebrating the imminent conservative overwhelming victory, while busily ignoring the actual evidence, with only a couple of exceptions.

But maybe he’s more realistic in his subscriber-only posts and/or his radio show. I dunno, I won’t pay for that.

Earlier updates of dubious morality are here.

It feels like deja vu but it’s not – because this is what social media looked like thirty-five years ago:

In April 2021, [Kate Glavan and Emma Roepke]’s followers [on Instagram] encountered an invitation to a new medium: “Join Geneva and meet other Sea Moss Girlies.” Within minutes, fans flooded in.

Geneva allows groups of people to talk in different topic-oriented rooms, similar to chat apps like Slack or Discord. Absent follower counts and likes, members are free to interact without the pressure of public metrics, an algorithmic feed, or company oversight shaping their conversations. Fans of the platform say it offers a more intimate, community-oriented experience than traditional social networks.

In their Geneva community, called a “home,” Glavan and Roepke have an easygoing rapport with members. They exchange music and TV recommendations in long threads, they marked National Eating Disorder Awareness Week by swapping personal stories of their mental health struggles and even met up with members for an IRL picnic. [WaPo]

Even including the terminology room, though not home, this sounds like a close description of various Twin Cities Citadels (original author Jeff Prothero aka Cynbe ru Taren) from maybe 1983 through, oh, 2000. Our numbers were necessarily smaller, as we’re talking single phone line BBSes, but we had a wide age range, 10 to probably 70, from students to engineers to psychologists and a judge and and a scientist or two and … and the get-togethers, weddings, funerals

Perhaps a big difference was that a lot of us were social introverts, while it’s not clear from this article if this holds true, but probably not. Online communication is an accepted manner of social connection these days.

In any case, the tangible metrics of ‘followers’ and clicks and, perhaps, even monetization appears to substantially interfere with satisfying social interactions. While losing those measurements may make it harder to, well, measure the success of the community, the very act of measurement may lessen the satisfaction of members of the community.

And moving to a more egalitarian model of community (go read the article!) also contributes to members’ sense of belonging.

When the same solution is devised for a problem in different scenarios, i.e., convergent evolution, there’s something going on. And this has a bonus: it involves charismatic dinosaurs:

“The neat thing is that we found the body plan [of Meraxes gigas] is surprisingly similar to tyrannosaurs like T. rex,” said [Peter] Makovicky, one of the principal authors of the study and a professor in the University of Minnesota N.H. Winchell School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “But, they’re not particularly closely related to T. rex. They’re from very different branches of the meat-eating dinosaur family tree. So, having this new discovery allowed us to probe the question of, ‘Why do these meat-eating dinosaurs get so big and have these dinky little arms?’”

With the statistical data that Meraxes provided, the researchers found that large, mega-predatory dinosaurs in all three families of therapods grew in similar ways. As they evolved, their skulls grew larger and their arms progressively shortened.

The possible uses of the tiny forelimbs in T. rex and other large carnivorous dinosaurs have been the topic of much speculation and debate.

“What we’re suggesting is that there’s a different take on this,” Makovicky said. “We shouldn’t worry so much about what the arms are being used for, because the arms are actually being reduced as a consequence of the skulls becoming massive. Whatever the arms may or may not have been used for, they’re taking on a secondary function since the skull is being optimized to handle larger prey.” [University of Minnesota News and Events]

Gotta love the painting:

By Carlos Papolio – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link.

At 36 feet long, that’s big enough to scare the hell out of me.

Lovely yellow lily:

Then I turned tail and ran!

Cryptocurrencies are big enough that they are major players in certain markets – insofar as the mining activity goes. What does that mean?

It means power companies are leary of miners because they bring other costs to the table. Consider what’s happening out in Washington State:

Source: Lake Chelan Cams

Though a lot of mining still happens in Chelan, Douglas and Grant counties, thanks to the abundant hydropower that miners prize for their energy-intensive processors, the region’s crypto industry is a shadow of its former Wild West self.

Many of the miners who flocked to the Wenatchee area during the last decade have either gone out of business or moved to other states, like Texas.

And while the three public utility districts still get inquiries from would-be miners looking for juice to run the complicated calculations that underlie cryptocurrencies, it’s nothing like the heyday from about 2014 to 2017. Back then, investors from as far away as China were eyeing about two-thirds of the region’s total hydropower output. Today, crypto mining accounts for maybe 4% of the combined output of the five hydroelectric dams.

“It’s been fairly quiet,” says John Stoll, managing director for customer utilities at Chelan County PUD, which at one point had power requests for more than 200 megawatts of power, or more than the county’s existing residents and businesses were using. The PUD’s current mining load is 8 megawatts, or around 3.5% of local load. [The Seattle Times]

At the levels miners operate, you don’t just plug your computer into the wall and start mining. Both you and your power company have to plan for this energy draw.

It’s only going to get worse. I mean, algorithmically, the plan is for it to get harder and harder to mine. That’s the explicit plan for Bitcoin.

And the current value of a Bitcoin? It appears to be stuck in a range of $20K to $25K per coin, which remains more than 50% off its highs. At these levels, energy has to come cheap to make mining economically lucrative.

And if the supplier is charging you a special, elevated price, then you have a bigger problem. Here’s what I meant by the other costs of cryptocurrencies:

Part of that new quietude is forced. To shield local power grids from crypto’s boom-bust dynamic and short-term investment horizons, the utilities adopted new rates and other policies for their hydropower, which typically goes for around 2.5 cents to 5 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to around 15 cents for U.S. average.

Chelan County, for example, charges miners roughly triple what it charges residents for electricity. Douglas County caps its total crypto mining load at 39 megawatts (it’s currently just under 33 megawatts) and steps up rates for crypto miners 10% every six months. In Grant County, rates for “evolving industry” customers, as crypto miners are known, get bumped a few cents up if miners’ total current and requested power demand exceeds 5% of total county demand, which it has since March.

That dynamic means the power company finds it more difficult to plan for the future, and power companies hate that because power generation, at least until renewables become dominant, is an expensive project. Build too much excess capacity and the power company goes bankrupt – or raises rates.

That makes miners unpopular, mining an eyebrow-raiser, and cryptocurrencies an expensive, unnecessary hobby.

The dude on the left? The cops jailed him for stealing scenes.

The Sphinx (1933) presents a classic murder mystery – when a deaf, mute man is the most likely suspect in a murder, and yet deliberately makes conversation with a nearby janitor, well then just who goldarn did it?

But there’s more going on here. A young woman reporter gets to interview, on an ongoing basis, the murder suspect after he’s found innocent, and is enraptured by his eloquent silence and philanthropic ways. Meanwhile, she’s receiving insistent warnings from the wannabe boyfriend, as well as a cop, that she’s in a dangerous situation.

The lady’s intuition, of course, wins out.

And the bodies are piling up. Who knows what about the financial business, and why does that make them targets of the mad man with the big hands?

For all the nice complexity, the flat acting is a bit of a drag. It made me a little impatient. On the other hand, credit where due: the cops were not a member of the trope common to the era, which is the irritating, farcical nobodies. Authentic or not, these cops were serious characters with believable motivations and actions. A relief for those of us who are not fans of the farce.

It’s not a bad little story. It could have been better.

California Governor Newsom (D) is certainly getting his name on the national scene:

I try to appreciate nifty engineering, and a replacement for a moving parts mechanism with a non-moving parts mechanism always seems to fit the definition of nifty. Oh, here’s one now!

At Stanford University, engineering researcher Nina Vaidya designed an elegant device that can efficiently gather and concentrate light that falls on it, regardless of the angle and frequency of that light. A paper describing the system’s performance, and the theory behind it, is the cover story in the July issue of Microsystems & Nanoengineering, authored by Vaidya and her doctoral advisor Olav Solgaard, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.

“It’s a completely passive system – it doesn’t need energy to track the source or have any moving parts,” said Vaidya, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Southampton, UK. “Without optical focus that moves positions or need for tracking systems, concentrating light becomes much simpler.”

The device, which the researchers are calling AGILE – an acronym for Axially Graded Index Lens – is deceptively straightforward. It looks like an upside-down pyramid with the point lopped off. Light enters the square, tile-able top from any number of angles and is funneled down to create a brighter spot at the output.

In their prototypes, the researchers were able to capture over 90% of the light that hit the surface and create spots at the output that were three times brighter than the incoming light. Installed in a layer on top of solar cells, they could make solar arrays more efficient and capture not only direct sunlight, but also diffuse light that has been scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere, weather, and seasons. [Stanford News]

Importantly, at least to me:

The basic premise behind AGILE is similar to using a magnifying glass to burn spots on leaves on a sunny day. The lens of the magnifying glass focuses the sun’s rays into a smaller, brighter point. But with a magnifying glass, the focal point moves as the sun does. Vaidya and Solgaard found a way to create a lens that takes rays from all angles but always concentrates light at the same output position.

I was concerned that this was going to be a ‘miracle’ device that requires a miracle to manufacture at scale, but this reference to current optical tech as well as 3D printing gives me hope:

After exploring many materials, creating new fabrication techniques, and testing multiple prototypes, the researchers landed on AGILE designs that performed well using commercially available polymers and glasses. AGILE has also been fabricated using 3D printing in the authors’ prior work that created lightweight and design-flexible polymeric lenses with nanometer-scale surface roughness. Vaidya hopes the AGILE designs will be able to be put to use in the solar industry and other areas as well. AGILE has several potential applications in areas like laser coupling, display technologies, and illumination – such as solid-state lighting, which is more energy efficient than older methods of lighting.

Fascinating and potentially impactful and far-reaching.

Carnarium:

The web doesn’t seem to know this word very well, so here’s its usage, by Caitlyn Doughty.

OK, so it’s Latin. I still like it.

The minor controversy, relative to the major controversies already swirling around the former President, of the deleted Secret Service messages of January 6, 2020, suggests a management misstep. If the content of text messages, or other similar material, could be threatening to the status of the generators or their bosses, the existential status of that material should not be under the control of the same personnel. It should be under the control of a neutral third-party who must adhere to anti-corruption regulations and/or statutes.

I hope that was dry enough for you.