Dr. Phillips at Spaceweather.com has an alarming observation:
GIANT SOLAR PROMINENCE: There’s a loop of plasma on the sun’s eastern limb so large that normal scientific notation doesn’t describe it. “It’s ginormous,” explains Richard N. Schrantz …
The arch is 325,000 km long–almost the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Implication? Implication?? Beyond normal scientific notation??? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!
See the above link for a pic.
Perhaps one of the most potentially explosive situations is China, which has had water issues for decades, and still hasn’t found a solution to them. Interesting Engineering has an article on their latest effort:
Under the new phase of the project, China aims to drain water from the Three Gorges Dam to the Han River, a tributary of the Yangtze River. Water from the Dam will be sent to the Danjiangkou reservoir at the lower reaches of the Han through the Yinjiangbuhan tunnel, a large open canal.
Compared to the Päijänne in Finland, which stretches a little over 74 miles (120 km), the Yinjiangbuhan tunnel is expected to run over 870 miles (1,400 km), with some of its parts running nearly 3,300 feet (1,000 m) underground as compared to the 426 feet (130 m) that the Finnish tunnel goes into the bedrock.
Expected to cost 60 billion yuan (US$8.9 billion), the tunnel could take up to a decade to be built and, when completed, will take the waters of the Three Gorges Dam all the way to Beijing. The world’s largest tunnel construction will also take engineers through some of the most challenging terrain known to humanity. High pressures in deep rocks, active fault lines, and risks of flooding and excessive heat are some of the challenges in the completion of the project.
Possible unintended consequences? I’m too tired to chase them down, but projects of this size always have undesired, as well as unintended, consequences.
And the thing about China is that, at its heart, it’s an autocratic society. Protests may be met with local corrupt suppression, or, as with Tiananmen Square in 1989, the use of the PLA (national army) to suppress those who threaten the hold of the autocrats on the rein of society, no matter how badly they mismanage it.
I don’t yet see how this ends well.
More, and in-depth, commentary from Pakalolo on Daily Kos here.
Daniel Byman notes that the assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri by American remote controlled forces may have have a net operational negative effect:
Yet, al-Zawahiri’s death may actually be good news for al-Qaeda, or, short of a boon to the organization, will likely have little impact given the group’s many existing problems. Al-Zawahiri, in contrast to Bin Laden, was pedantic and had little charisma. Under his watch, the core group had not conducted any spectacular terrorist attacks on the United States and Europe for many years despite a continued rhetorical focus on the United States and Europe. Affiliates tied to the organization, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), did inspire and perhaps orchestrate attacks, such as the military trainee from Saudi Arabia who killed three American sailors at a U.S. naval base in Florida in December 2019, but the core organization has not done a successful attack on the United States or Europe since the 2005 bombings in London. This may reflect operational weakness or simply a more pragmatic shift toward areas where its affiliates are most focused, but either way it is good news for the United States. [Lawfare]
Which rather makes this look like instructional vengeance. And I’ve been wondering if we’ll be seeing a counterstrike on American forces or politicians. But:
Any new leader might seek to take revenge for Zawahiri and has a strong short-term incentive to support high-profile terrorist attacks on the West as a way of gaining attention, attracting money, inspiring recruits, and proving the new leader’s credentials. Fortunately, as the al-Zawahiri strike shows, the United States maintains an impressive counterterrorism apparatus, working closely with allied intelligence services around the world as well as striking deep into terrorist havens. Al-Zawahiri, after all, is only the latest of many al-Qaeda and ISIS leaders killed or captured in hideouts in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Al-Qaeda’s aspirations remain grand and revolutionary, but its capacity is weak, and the organization risks being marginalized if the new leader cannot energize it.
Which is reassuring. However, the American strike legitimizes violence in the minds of many, especially those sympathetic to the al-Qaeda cause. Whether this was a wise decision in the long-term remains to be seen, of course, even while we acknowledge that Zawahiri was certainly a deadly enemy of the United States.
Philippic:
Philippic is discourse (traditionally an oration) that is characterized by fierce condemnation of a subject; a diatribe or rant.
The term philippic (from Greek philippikos) is derived from the virulent denunciations of Philip II of Macedon delivered by Demosthenes of Athens in the fourth century BC. Demosthenes is commonly regarded as the greatest orator of his age. See Examples and Observations, below. [ThoughtCo.]
That’s a new one on me. Noted in “Now we see the wisdom of the high court’s ‘vulgar cheerleader’ ruling,” George Will, WaPo:
His school suspended and then expelled C.G. for a year, citing school district policies forbidding, inter alia, behavior “on or off school property” that is “detrimental to the welfare, safety or morals of other students or school personnel.” This absurdity, occasioned by a bad joke, was unconstitutional, given what the Supreme Court said about the ninth-grader who, when she failed to make the varsity cheerleading team, posted on Snapchat — off campus and after school hours — a picture of her raised middle finger, and a teenager philippic, about half of it consisting of profanity.
Professor Madalyn K. Wasilczuk happens to agree with me about police officers and their emotional development requirements:
Scientists agree that people between ages 18 and 25—sometimes called “emerging adults”—continue to undergo biological and psychological changes that influence the way they behave. Put more simply, they have not fully matured. This lack of maturity manifests in incapacities that make emerging adult officers ill-suited to the job of policing. What’s more, the way policing affects emerging adults may mean that joining the force during this period of their lives will change the way those officers police throughout their careers.
Though police spend a minority of their time dealing with crime, their jobs require a great deal of personal interaction, sometimes in tense situations. These conditions require police to be calm, think on their feet, and have strong emotional self-regulation skills. In emergency situations, where, as the Supreme Court has said, “[p]olice officers are often forced to make split-second judgments,” those judgments should be as well-considered and reasonable as possible. Unfortunately, emerging adults’ developmental capacities make this unlikely. [Lawfare]
Good not to be a lonely voice in the night.
People who like prominences. Maybe.
Tomorrow is the August 2nd primaries, which should answer one or two more questions, mostly in Arizona. Slightly out of date previous amateur analysis is here.
I was a little puzzled by this NewScientist (16 July 2022, paywall) article:
A computer component that uses vibrations rather than electrons could approach the physical lower limit for energy use when processing and sending information.
The minimum amount of energy needed for a computer to perform a computational step is called the “Landauer limit”, named after the 1960s physicists Rolf Landauer. In his calculations, Landauer did not consider any specific computer design, but rather the basic energy cost required to manipulate information, like erasing or re-writing a bit.
Well, OK. So what?
Nanomechanical computers are unlikely to replace the machines in our homes, but they may prove uniquely suited for use on satellites, says [Warwick Bowen at the University of Queensland in Australia]. A nanomechanical computer free of wires and electronics could withstand extreme conditions like solar flares, stopping it from losing information in such an event, he says.
Oh! So that’s cool! At least until the satellite sags into the atmosphere and burns up. But still.
Here’s orange
and yellow.
I like them both. But the yellow caught the light better.
Remember Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), who testified on television to the shameful activities of Trump supporters when he refused to engage in illegal actions at Trump’s behest, but then stated that, yes, he’d vote for Trump again?
Not anymore.
Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) on Sunday said he’ll never vote for former President Trump again, a reversal of earlier claims that he’d back Trump in a match-up against President Biden.
“I’ll never vote for him, but I won’t have to. Because I think America’s tired and there’s some absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible and upright people, and that’s what I want. That’s what I want in my party and that’s what I want to see,” Bowers told moderator Jonathan Karl during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” [The Hill]
I couldn’t help but note this remark:
“It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired, that this is my most basic foundational belief,” Bowers, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told the committee. “And so for me to do that because somebody just asked me to, is foreign to my very being; I will not do it.” [NBC News]
It’s one of those remarks that sounds sophisticated and authentic and all that rot, at least on first thought. But on second thought?
I think I’m just a piece on a cosmic Monopoly game.
I wonder why he can’t give credit to the humans who came up with the Constitution, with the series of compromises, good and bad, of checks and balances, of a document that reflects hope, humility, and awareness of the inevitability of error? What keeps him from acknowledging it’s a best attempt by humans, rather than some oddball Divinity who appears to think we’re all, well, to be honest, thumb puppets?
