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?
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?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.
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.
