Blogspot allows the upload of videos directly into a post (rather than embedding a Youtube). But years ago, when I last tried, the compression used to give terrible looking results. Let's see if it has improved any:
Ross Douthat's latest column, which I will gift link, is an interesting one, entitled "Why you can't predict the future of religion". It starts with this observation, from history:
In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”Yes, I have long been aware of Thomas Jefferson's belief in a de-deified Christ, as I think it is mentioned at his old home Monticello, which I visited around 1989. He went to the effort of making his own de-miracle-ised version of the Gospels:
Less than a year earlier, on “a Sabbath evening in the autumn of 1821” in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that led to a moment when, he wrote later, “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”
This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson’s confident hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and also encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs entirely distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.
That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times.
The 86-page book, now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is bound in red Morocco leather and ornamented with gilt tooling. It was crafted in the fall and winter months of 1819 and 1820 when the 77-year-old Jefferson used a razor to cut passages from six copies of the New Testament—two in Greek and Latin, two in French and two in English—and rearranged and pasted together the selected verses, shorn of any sign of the miraculous or supernatural in order to leave just the life and teachings of Jesus behind. Jefferson, who had suffered great criticism for his religious beliefs, once said that the care he had taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that he was in fact, a “real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”It is a little surprising that the Unitarian movement was well underway even before Darwin, evolution and a radical change in understanding the age and size of the universe would come to shake up things. And a Unitarian of the early 19th century who could foresee those knowledge changes would surely expect that his or her approach to religion was destined to be widespread and successful.
But Unitarianism as a movement is so small now that it is almost like a footnote to mainstream Christianity.
Douthat concludes, in a somewhat surprisingly open fashion, given his own allegiance to traditional Catholicism:
When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected — recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.
If you’re trying to discern what a post-Christian spirituality might become, then what post-Christian seekers are experiencing and what (or whom) they claim to be encountering matters as much as any specific religious label they might claim.
And if you’re imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans — the pastoral strategies, theological debates and long-term trendlines — may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape.
* I saw some of Four Corners this Monday about the very troubling issue of eating disorders, primarily anorexia nervosa, and primarily about how it mainly affects young women. I thought the show was OK, and felt terribly sorry for the people suffering from it (including, or perhaps especially, for the mothers who felt hopeless. I mean, it's not easy for me to imagine myself not enjoying food, but I can imagine a parent feeling helpless in the face of an adult child who is not responding to treatment for a mental illness.) But the way the show was put together also gave me a bit of an uncomfortable feeling that one participant was - how to put this in an inoffensive way - a tad performative in her participation? This may be completely unfair, as it may well be the producers who encouraged this look, but it still gave me the sort of misgivings that most reality TV causes. In any case, it would seem that there is a crying need for the public health system to step up much, much more with the availability of specialised treatment to help deal with it, as people do sometimes recover...
* Speaking of reality TV, I find I can't warm to even the well intentioned versions, such as Love on the Spectrum, or more recently, Better Date Than Never. I mean, these shows (about non average people still going out to try to find love and relationships) are clearly meant to be uplifting and positive, which puts them way, way above trash reality TV. But ever since (God, this is going back a long way) Sylvania Waters, I just can't stop thinking while watching them that "fly on the wall" documentary is intrusive and (to some degree) unavoidably fake. How can people truly ignore being videoed and not have it influence them?
* This column is free at New York Magazine for a limited time - so rush now to read it! It's a fairly long pushback on the argument that American rates of depression and suicide have recently become worse because the world really is getting to be a worse place. Here are parts:
Among online progressives, there is sometimes a tendency to view any acknowledgment of progress as an apology for the status quo. But I think this has more to do with social media’s negativity bias (i.e., negative information tends to be more physiologically stimulating and thus viral) than any objective truth about the political implications of touting positive developments. The fact that Americans enjoy higher incomes than virtually ever before makes our failure to abolish child poverty, invest adequately in social goods like child and elder care, and provide robust mental-health services to our suffering adolescent population all the more damning. At the same time, the fact that we have managed to expand social welfare and reduce myriad forms of social inequity over the past few decades gives us reason to believe in the possibility of progressive change.
Human existence has never been easy. And in some respects, life in 2023 may be more challenging than in the past. Contemporary teens are more likely than their predecessors to lack the existential comfort offered by religious faith or the sense of communal solidarity provided by in-person civic groups. But it simply is not the case that Zoomers’ material prospects are much worse than previous generations’ (or, for that matter, that a human being’s level of depression reliably reflects their objective economic well-being).
In a great many respects, the world has been getting better. But kids have been getting sadder. Even as life has improved in a wide variety of ways since the 1950s, the teen suicide rate has risen substantially since that era. Explaining that requires more than reciting the millennial left’s (generally well founded) complaints about contemporary American society.
By itself, the fact that a Washington Post columnist engaged in hyperbole on Twitter may not warrant comment. But I think Lorenz’s tweets reflect a broader tendency within the discourse to view novel social crises through a lens of ideological self-congratulation rather than intellectual curiosity. Among commentators, there is a strong incentive to abruptly enlist any new sign of social dysfunction into whatever fight you are already waging. I’ve surely done this myself, but it’s an impulse that should be resisted. We owe it to those suffering from any given social calamity to maintain curiosity about its causes. In failing to do so, we risk wielding tragedies as political props and seeing victims as metaphors instead of people.
I found this article via a Noah Smith post, and it is an argument that is very much in line with his views. His substack post on the same theme ("Don't be a Doomer") seems free to read.
Going back to the New York article, I thought this comment interesting and probably right:
The difference between male and female teenager's response to social media as reflected in depression and suicide is, IMHO, fairly obvious.When they feel socially afflicted/marginalized, males on average tend to blame other people, and if they act out to do so against others, while females on average tend to blame themselves and harm themselves.Whether this is learned behavior or not is an open question.But note the overwhelming predominance of males as perpetrators of violent physical aggression.
Update: Oh, I see via a rare, not objectionable, Hot Air post that Matthew Yglesias has also written on the topic, and it seems freely available.
Update 2: well, this is depressing news (for those of us with extremely limited interest in exercising, ha ha): Exercise is even more effective than counselling or medication for depression. But how much do you need?
I don't normally see the Nine Network's breakfast program, but it was on this morning when I got up, and I was interested to see that before a "serious" discussion of the government's modest superannuation change, they handled it in a mocking "this only affects people who can obviously afford it" way by having an outside reporter going around Double Bay and talking to people who were saying silly things like "I will have to sell my third boat to deal with this. It's my daughter's favourite, she'll be upset."
This indicates that breakfast TV is endorsing the change, and knows that it will go over pretty well with the public.
I would add - it does irritate me a bit when even places like the ABC interview someone (be it a rich retiree or a superannuation adviser) who talks only about it being a "tax on superannuation", because such shorthand makes it sound as if their superannuation in total is actually being taxed (and not just the income on their superannuation balance).
...and with a distressingly large email inbox at work....:(
Anyway, Vietnam was great, and I have many thoughts, that I must commit to here before I start forgetting any of them.
But first, have to transfer a large number of photos to the laptop, as that makes for easier posting of them.
Some random thoughts in the meantime:
* happy to see Lidia Thorpe hurt her image further by her "look at me" protest on Saturday night. Could never stand her, and the Greens are far better off without her.
* I saw about 5 minutes of the start of the ABC coverage of the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney, with the few hosts all dressed up in gay glitter outfits and make up for the occasion. Also noticed how Kylie Minogue was the big attraction the night before. Made me think: do younger gay folk think their older cohort is "trying too hard", and have daggy taste? But when I think about it, the non enthusiasts for the event have always puzzled over the hyperbolic commentary and thought it might tone down, eventually. But nah: same old, same old.
* It has seemed to me that hospital systems in many, many countries have really struggled over the last few months, despite the Covid slow down. I've read about problems in France, (I think) Germany, and Britain, although the later can blame itself for making it a less appealing place for Europeans to work in. But I think the cake may be taken by Malaysia, where things are very bad in the public health sector, despite a new government:
Last month, a Twitter account of a group championing the rights of contract doctors that goes by the handle @HKontrak shared a photo of a packed emergency department at Hospital Kuala Lumpur.
The post claimed that patients had to wait for more than 24 hours before being admitted to the hospital. It added that there were also about 100 patients waiting to be seen at the emergency department.
The Star also reported that some emergency departments in other parts of the country were facing overcapacity, with patients having to wait for at least two days to get a hospital bed.
It reported that in a government hospital in Sabah, the wait time could go up to two days or even beyond four to five days.
Most recently, a psychiatric patient became agitated and stabbed an elderly man at Selayang Hospital in Selangor on Tuesday, after being left at the hospital’s accident and emergency department while waiting for a bed to become available.
Yes, getting stabbed by another patient while waiting for a hospital bed is about as bad as it can get.
* I wonder if there will eventually be a Netflix series based on this gruesome, cooked body murder in Hong Kong, involving multiple family members and money?
Ah, it's good to be travelling to somewhere I haven't been to before, even if it's a short visit. Tomorrow I head off to Vietnam, and found an 8 minute video that filled in an enormous gap in knowledge about its history.
I feel I have to justify not formerly having a clue about its history going back any further than the French teaching them how to make nice bread. But honestly, there are too many countries in the world to keep details of their history in your head. I made the decision many years ago to never care about the wild historical mess of what could broadly be called Eastern Europe - all of the countries in colour below, except for Russia:
Anyway, back to Vietnam in eight minutes:
I've wondered about this before - how does someone like this, in the upper echelons of the Canberra public service, manage to keep being appointed by both parties when they are in government?:
Hasn't Bernard Keane complained for years that Pezzullo is bad news? Is his corporate knowledge that invincible? Sounds like completely fresh blood at the top of the department would do wonders.
I will gift this lengthy New York Times feature talking about the Tik Tok tic outbreak, which fortunately, seems to be receding.
It talks about past outbreaks of psychogenic illness, including examples I hadn't heard of before:
Historians looking back thousands of years have come across stories of patients — most often women — with tremors, seizures, paralysis and even blindness that could not be explained. The ancient Greeks called it “hysteria” and blamed a wandering uterus. Sigmund Freud deemed the condition “conversion” and theorized that it was caused by suppressed traumatic experiences.
In more recent decades, scientists have gained a greater understanding of how anxiety, trauma and social stress can spur the brain to produce very real physical symptoms, even if body scans or blood tests show no trace of them. When these illnesses interfere with day-to-day life, they are now called “functional disorders.”
“We all recognize that the mind can make the body do things,” said Dr. Isobel Heyman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, who published the first report on the pandemic tics. Most people, after all, have experienced fear that makes their heart race or anxiety that ties their stomach in knots.
“But when the symptoms are quite bizarre and quite intense — like a seizure, or not being able to walk, or ticlike movements — we think, ‘How on earth can the brain generate symptoms like this?’” Dr. Heyman said. “It just can.”
These sudden symptoms can also spread in clusters, reflecting the shared pressures on a group. In the Middle Ages, a period when many Europeans feared being possessed by the devil, nuns living in a French convent began meowing like cats. In the 2000s, hundreds of children of asylum seekers in Sweden became mute and bedridden for months to years.
It makes repeated reference to how this is something that spread much more commonly amongst females than males; and it also notes how folk claiming to be transgender issues are disproportionately represented in the current outbreak too. (I'm willing to bet there are thousands of indignant transgender activists tweeting as I write, upset at the obvious conclusion many will draw that believing you are transgender can itself be largely due to a social contagion.)
In one key paragraph:
Eighty-seven percent of the patients were female, a sex skew that was also found in previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness. No one knows why girls are more susceptible to this kind of social influence. One theory is that women may seek out belonging more than men do, and may empathize more strongly with others’ suffering. Women also experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and sexual trauma than men.
And as for the connection with transgender issues:
At a conference on tic disorders last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, doctors from several countries shared another observation: A surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary. But without hard data in hand, multiple attendees said, the doctors worried about publicly linking transgender identity and mental illness.
“These kids have a tough enough life already, and we don’t want to inadvertently somehow make things even worse for them,” said Dr. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, whose adult daughter is transgender.
All interesting....
As David Roberts tweeted:
This explanation has been anonymously given to WAPO:
The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday, partly addressing a key question of why so many objects have recently surfaced.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.
“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.
So, the suggestion seems to be that if something was moving slowly, like a balloon, it was filtered out deliberately. Given the number of weather balloons that go up daily, I guess that makes sense.
Was it with the knowledge that countries don't care, so to speak, about balloons that China decided that it was a good way to gather intelligence?
Anyway, this reminds me that I read somewhere, many years ago, perhaps in a UFO book on my shelf, that some guy claimed that the US radar systems ignored objects that were going too fast; and if radar tracks were re-examined to check on objects doing really weird fast things in the atmosphere, there might be actual proof of alien visits already.
This always sounded a bit dubious, given that ICBMs move very fast. But, digging back in my memory, I think the point might also have been that the lines of radar that are the missile warning system are mainly looking outwards from the continental USA, and not over the mainland USA itself so much. (It's too late once they are over Washington.) So a visiting UFO that zooms down and over a 1000 km of mainland USA and back into space might be considered something that could be safely ignored.
I would love to know if there is any truth to that.
But we do at least seem to now know, as I posted last week, that there are surprising gaps in what the USA knows is in its skies....
Update: a valuable thread on Twitter:
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I think David Brooks writes insightfully and with compassion on what it is like to have a friend develop serious depression (which, sadly, ended in suicide), so I will gift link the article.
I don't know that it took to photographing as well as my last meal: but it's pork belly (although a very lean cut of it) done in what is allegedly a Vietnamese way. The sauce is a reduced sticky one, and interestingly, the main flavouring (apart from the obvious soy, vinegar, ginger, sugar) was from the juice and a bit of the rind of an orange, and a 1/3 of a cup of Angostura bitters. The bottle sitting in the drinks cabinet had been there for years. It might only ever be finished if I make this recipe again.
Here's the link to the recipe.
I do get the feeling at times that there is likely to be a backlash in future due to the (shall we say) reputation rehabilitation that has been underway regarding psychedelics for the last decade or so. I mean, I've just always been naturally very, very cautious about anything with psychoactive effects being a good idea to fiddle around with, and it seems such a hard thing to study properly.
This New York Times article (I'll gift link it) gives a list of possible health consequences of various psychedelics, and it's much wider than just those affecting mental health.
I'm not sure if it's free to read already, but I will gift link to the very lengthy and interesting New York Times obituary for Burt Bacharach. A taste (it is a bit high falutin' in its description of his musical oeuvre, but a good read nonetheless):
A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.
Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.
One thing I either didn't know, or had forgotten, was that as a very young man, Bacharach worked as musical director for Marlene Dietrich(!), and he talked about that a bit in this interview.
A long and interesting life...
Of course the Right wing commentariat was always going to leap on the recent Cochrane review that said they their meta analysis indicated that it seemed masking during respiratory pandemics didn't have significant effect, even though it ended on this note:
The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.
There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.
My gut reaction was always that the whole approach of Cochrane was dubious, and would pretty much invite misrepresentation of a complicated issue, and I see now that some people at the Conversation have given a detailed explanation of the problems with the review. I count this as "gut reaction: vindicated".
Ocean acidification as a result of increasing CO2 doesn't get mentioned often lately, although it presumably continues to increase. (There was, no doubt, some sloppily done lab based experimentation on this with fish and other creatures which I think has perhaps harmed its reputation amongst science journalists. But the problem is still real.)
The other big problem in the oceans from global warming is the increase in lack of oxygen as the water warms, and I have mention it from time to time over the years. (You can search "ocean oxygen" in the search bar at the side, if you like.)
There was an article about it in Science recently, and yeah, maybe it will be a race between it and acidification as to which will cause the most serious ecological collapse within the next few decades. Some extracts:
Climate change is leaching oxygen from the ocean by warming surface waters. Two other climate-related threats to the seas—ocean acidification and marine heat waves—get more attention from scientists and the public. But some researchers believe deoxygenation could ultimately pose a more significant threat, making vast swaths of ocean less hospitable to sea life, altering ecosystems, and pushing valuable fisheries into unfamiliar waters. As global warming continues, the problem is sure to get worse, with disturbing forecasts that by 2100 ocean oxygen could decline by as much as 20%. Sharks—fast-moving fish that burn lots of oxygen, sit at the top of food chains and crisscross huge ocean expanses—should be sensitive indicators of the effects....
SCIENTISTS FOR YEARS have documented oxygen-starved dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. There, pollution from nutrients running off the land, such as synthetic fertilizer, sparks algae blooms. Microbes feast on the rotting vegetation, consuming oxygen. A surge of low-oxygen water can flood an area so quickly that crabs, sea stars, and even fish suffocate before they escape. Low-oxygen zones also form naturally along the western edges of the Americas and Africa, where oxygen-depleted water that hasn’t seen daylight for decades wells up.
In the open ocean, currents and storms churn the water, keeping oxygen levels higher. Yet since the 1990s climate models have foretold that a warming climate would deplete oxygen there, too. Surface water warmed by rising air temperatures holds less oxygen, and the growing temperature contrast between surface layers and colder, deeper water slows the mixing that transports oxygen into the depths. At higher latitudes, melting ice can flood surface layers with fresh, low-density meltwater, strengthening the layering and reducing mixing.
In 2008, a paper in Science sounded the alarm. German and U.S. scientists found that the low-oxygen zones off Africa and the Americas were growing deeper and losing still more oxygen. Since the 1960s these areas had expanded by about 4.5 million square kilometers, close to the area of the European Union. In the waters frequented by Sims’s sharks off Africa’s northwest coast, the low-oxygen layer had nearly doubled in thickness over 5 decades, from 370 meters to 690 meters. By 2008 its top had risen to less than 150 meters below the surface. The global trend, the scientists warned, “may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies.”
In 2017, scientists delivered more troubling news in Nature. Overall, the world’s oceans had already lost some 2% of their oxygen since 1960, roughly double what climate models predicted.
For Andreas Oschlies, a biogeochemist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and a leading expert on modeling oxygen in the ocean, the implications were staggering. If the trend continues, it could mean a potential loss of 20% by 2100, he says. That’s equal to going from sea level to more than 2000 meters elevation on land. “I thought ‘Wow!’” Oschlies recalls. “That’s the biggest change and maybe the most worrying change that we see in the ocean. Immediately I thought of (past) major extinction events.” For example, at the end of the Permian period 256 million years ago, rising ocean temperatures and an 80% plunge in oxygen levels helped drive the largest extinction in Earth’s history. Up to 96% of all marine species disappeared.
By comparison, the 2% drop in oxygen levels seen so far might not sound like much. But global averages can be misleading, warns Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has studied the effects of low oxygen on ocean ecosystems for more than 30 years. “There are places in the ocean where there’s been much bigger declines,” Levin says. “These changes are probably very important.”
I didn't watch all of the State of the Union address, but did catch the widely circulated few minutes where he was going back and forth with booing, stupid Republicans. As Axios notes:
President Biden previewed an optimistic re-election platform in his State of the Union speech Tuesday — but veered off script to take on rowdy Republicans in a series of confrontations that captured America's political chasm.
Why it matters: Biden used much of his speech to emphasize what Americans can do when they work together — while also baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security as Congress weighs budget cuts.
Everyone sensible I follow agreed that the "baiting" worked well.
But the thing that struck me most is, once again, how utterly stupid the Right wing commentariat looks for their years of claiming Biden is virtually a demented nursing home candidate, all based on brief video edits of no consequence.
As I have complained many times, anyone who has first hand experience of actual dementia decline in a parent, if they are honest, knows that someone with serious issues cannot handle themselves in public speaking in the manner that Biden does.
But the mainstream media has let the nutjob Right repeat it to itself a million times, and rarely comments how this is pure, offensive, propaganda that, by rights, should remove all credibility on every issue.
To my mind, he's looking like a cool character from a Marvel movie now:
I don't know who the creator is behind the channel this video comes from is, but as far as I can tell, the science content is accurate. Today I watched this one, which starts an explanation of what it means to say that mass is energy (as in the famous Einstein equation):
It gets into the matter of quarks and how they contribute to a proton's mass, and what mass means in a very "meta" sense. It's not simple, of course.
And that aspect - the complexity of what it was explaining - got me thinking that this is a reason that the simulation hypothesis for the universe seems very improbable to me: why would you simulate to such level of tiny complexity?
I mean, when you think about the old particle/wave duality question, the simulation hypothesis has some appeal, because it is easy to imagine the universe as being the equivalent of a computer game which only bothers rendering the part of the game's internal universe you're looking at or interacting with. But when you get to the vastly complicated question of quarks (or other really odd aspects of particle physics - like neutrinos that change as they travel along and zip through matter like it's not there), the whole idea that a simulation would go (or need to go?) to that level of complexity just seems very improbable.
Oh, and speaking of neutrinos, I mention them because I recently re-watched this video, which I don't think I have posted before, about how it seems quite likely that every now and then, a human at night might notice a flash of blue light that is actually a neutrino hitting an atom in your eyeball. Cool:
There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.
It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.
One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:
The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.
“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.
One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.
I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)
But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots. I think I have posted about this incident before: a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up. (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post. I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size. How can they lose track of that over the West coast? Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it! But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)
So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.
