toucana

A recent article in The Hill highlights some of the problems US pollsters face nowadays when conducting US Presidential election polls. https://thehill.com/homenews/4894892-if-landline-phones-are-dying-out-how-do-political-polls-work-today/ Up until the early 2000’s, pollsters in the USA regarded telephone landline polling as the ‘Gold Standard’ for obtaining responses from voters (some still do). The problem is that nowadays an estimated 183 million Americans (7 out of 10 US adults) do not even have a landline anymore - they rely solely on their cellphones for day-to-day communication - according to US Chamber of Commerce Statistics: https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/landline-phone-statistics Those who do still use landlines in the US tend to be seniors who are more likely to hold conservative views and favour right-wing candidates. This immediately introduces a significant bias into the responses obtained by such old-fashioned polling methods. Pollsters have belatedly begun switching to combinations of phones, text-to-web and online panel discussions to improve their response rates. But they still face the problem of reaching younger voters and ethnic minorities who are often the least likely targets to answer a call, and then sit there for 15 minutes answering a poll. Basically I don’t have a lot of confidence in the US polls right now, as I suspect their sampling methods are fundamentally flawed - a suspicion borne out by the woefully wrong ‘Red Wave’ predictions offered in the last set of mid-term elections.

Sabine Hossenfelder has just posted a YT video about this paper within the last hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErLHm-1c6I4 And yes, it is the group velocity of wave packets, not the phase velocity of individual packet elements that is under discussion here. The conclusion seems to be that no violation of causality is involved here - so you can stand down your time-machine construction projects 😉

Home solar energy systems have now started exploding in parts of Beirut according to the official Lebanese news agency - (video report) https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/lebanons-official-news-agency-claims-home-solar-energy-systems-exploded-in-several-areas-of-beirut-video-surfaces

According to the BBC, Reuters are now reporting (as of 6 minutes ago) that hand-held Walkie-Talkie radio units have begun exploding in south Beirut, the day after the wave of pager explosions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t These hand-held radios were apparently acquired by Hezbollah about 5 months ago, at the same time as the pagers.

My father was an anti-aircraft gunner during WW2 who worked with both 3.7” HAA guns, and the fin-stabilised ‘Z-Rocket’ systems. In general AA fire wasn’t particularly accurate. At the start of the war, Air Ministry estimates were that 6,000 shells were fired for every enemy aircraft brought down. This improved during the war to a ratio of about 1,830 shells per aircraft with the help of better fire-control, new searchlights with radar detection, and the introduction of shells with radio proximity fuzes . https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c9lyr/in_ww2_how_often_did_aa_guns_actually_hit_their/ The real point of AA fire in WW2 was to force enemy bombers to fly higher than they really wanted to, and avoid flying straight-line approaches on their bombing runs. If an enemy plane was flying at 200mph at 20,000 feet, it could take nearly 20 seconds for a shell to reach that height, in which time the plane would have flown another mile. AA crews had predictor machines that could help the gun-layers calculate how far ahead of the target to aim; and the longer the enemy flew in a straight line, the easier it became for the predictor. Hence the necessity for enemy pilots to fly jinking runs which made the job of their bomb aimer much harder.

Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese firm who manufacture these AR-924 pagers say that they licensed the technology and trademark to a Hungarian firm in Budapest called BAC Consulting. The latter deny actually building the pagers, which probably means they sub-contracted the job to another local electronics firm. https://news.sky.com/story/middle-east-latest-eight-dead-in-pager-explosions-include-hezbollah-fighters-militant-group-says-12978800 As noted in iNow’s clip from Axios, various sources suggest that Israel planned to trigger these explosions as the prelude to an all-out attack on Hezbollah, but were forced to activate the plan prematurely because they feared that its secrecy had been compromised - i.e. it was a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario.

New reporting from the NYT says this was a joint Mossad/IDF operation in which explosive material was planted in a batch of new Taiwanese-made pagers recently imported into Lebanon by Hezbollah. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-pagers-explosives.html The explosives were concealed next to the battery, with an embedded detonation switch that could be remotely triggered by a text message.

Thousands of members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon have been injured when handheld pagers they use to communicate with one another suddenly exploded without warning this afternoon. https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/lebanon-pagers-attack-hezbollah/index.html The wave of blasts in Beirut and other areas began around 15.45 local time (1345 GMT), causing mass panic and many hundreds of signficant injuries. The casualties reportedly include Mojtaba Amani, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon. According to Reuters, Hezbollah spokesmen say the incident constitutes the biggest security breach of their communications infrastructure in the history of their conflict with Israel. There is much speculation as to how this was achieved. It would appear that a malware exploit caused the lithium-ion batteries inside the pagers to overheat and explode. Battery fires can burn at up to 590 degrees celsius (1,100F) when a unit is sent into thermal runaway. Earlier this year Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Narallah urged members of his organisation to revert to using pagers for vital communications, reasoning that modern smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13860239/Hundreds-Hezbollah-fighters-wounded-PAGERS-explode.html In reality, pagers often use unencrypted comms channels and outdated software, making them easy targets to attack and plant viruses in.

A third way of making warplanes ‘bullet-proof’ during WW2 was to make them fly so fast that enemy interceptors simply couldn’t catch up with them for long enough to shoot them down. This was done by the allies with a unique plane called the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito which first flew in 1941, and was said to be the fastest operational aircraft in the world at that time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito The Mosquito had an airframe made almost entirely of wood, and was designed as an unarmed fast bomber, pathfinder, and photo-reconnaissance aircraft. From 1942 onwards, Mosquitoes were also used by BOAC as fast transports to carry small high-value cargo from neutral countries through enemy controlled airspace. In particular this meant ferrying consignments of high-grade industrial ball-bearings from Stockholm in Sweden to RAF Leuchars in the UK. Sweden was a neutral country during WW2, but the Germans controlled Norway and Denmark and western Europe, which meant the Luftwaffe could simply shoot down any conventional allied cargo craft over the sea. The RAF Mosquitoes used by BOAC for their blockade running flights to Sweden were stripped of their guns and cameras to reduce weight, and they flew so fast that not even the Luftwaffe Focke-Wulf FW 190 interceptors could catch them. They not only brought back cargoes of ball-bearings that were vital for making aero-engines and instrumentation, they also brought back VIP refugees such as the Danish nuclear physicist Nils Bohr who escaped the Gestapo by fleeing to neutral Sweden, and was flown back to Britain in the bomb-bay of a Mosquito in 1943. This 'high & fast' strategy was subsequently used by the Lockheed U2 and Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy-planes flown by the USA in the 1950s and 1960s respectively.

Short answer - No, it isn’t possible or practical to make airplanes that are completely bullet-proof. But dating back to the days of WW2 several methods were used by the allied forces to try and mitigate the damage done to their warplanes by enemy fire. One was the installation of self-sealing fuel tanks in bombers and fighters to prevent a large loss of fuel, and avert the risk of high octane fuel fires when a gas tank was hit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sealing_fuel_tank These self-sealing tanks made use of a double skin of rubber, one layer of which was vulcanized rubber (hardened with sulphur), and the other was natural rubber. When the tank was perforated by a bullet, leaking fuel would come into contact with the untreated layer which would swell and seal the leak. These tanks could allegedly withstand .50 rounds. Another interesting approach was that of Austrian mathematician Abraham Wald who escaped to the USA and worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG) in New York during WW2. https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d Abraham Wald was asked to analyse the pattern of bullet holes found in heavily damaged US bombers returning from combat sorties over Europe, and to recommend where to place additional armour plating to protect the planes better without adding too much weight to them. Wald made the highly counterintuitive suggestion that the extra armour plating should be added to those areas of the planes that *didn’t* have bullet holes in them ! He did so because he realised that his SRG only got to study those planes which had actually made it back to base because they *hadn’t* been hit in any vital area of their fuselage - e.g. the engines. This is a good example of recognising and avoiding ‘Survivorship Bias’ in engineering analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Apparently a MAGA group called 'Action 4 Liberty' set up a 'Never Walz' stall at Minnesota State Fair to hand out election propaganda and merchandise against Minnesota Governor and newly confirmed VP pick https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/26/never-walz-website-trolls-trump-supporters Unfortunately they neglected to purchase the web domain www.NeverWalz.com as well

An obituary of UK software tycoon Mike Lynch in The Register discloses in passing that his super-yacht was named Bayesian as a nod to his lucrative software company Autonomy that was later sold to Hewlett Packard for $11billion. https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/mike_lynch_death/

There was a geek T-shirt joke about this topic 151.194.25.39 —> is a Public IPv4 address quad. 127.0.0.1 —> is the special ‘Loopback’ address for your own computer on a LAN. 19:08:AF:51:11:08 —> is the MAC or ‘Ethernet’ hardware address of your device in hexadecimal.

A typical home WiFi router makes use of something called DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) to assign LAN (local area network) addresses to all the different devices logged into your home network. These LAN addresses usually take the form of IP quads formatted as 192.168.x.x where the 192.168. prefix is a special index which is only valid as an address on a local network - i.e one that can’t be reached directly from the WAN (wide area network) or the public facing side of the internet. The router’s DHCP protocol assigns these local LAN addresses to your devices on ‘leases’ which are time limited and can expire. This can be one source of confusion - if a lease expires, and/or a new device is added to your local network, and the DHCP process bounces these 192.168.x.x values around, it will unexpectedly assign a new address to a particular device. Your home router has an internal address table of all currently connected devices on your LAN that you can inspect. Home routers also make use of something called NAT (network address translation) which usually works in conjunction with its protective firewall and TCP Port numbers. The latter are used to ensure that incoming data packets from the internet reach the correct device on the local network. You can set up NAT ‘Port Forwarding’ rules in your router to ensure that particular services/message types are routed to one specific device on your local network. The public facing WAN address of your broadband home router is assigned by your ISP (internet service provider) and should in theory be static - i.e unchanging. When I first got home broadband, I was given a static public IPv4 address which didn’t change for the next 17 years. Unfortunately that ISP went out of business last year, and we switched to a new provider whose ‘Static’ public IP addresses turned out to be anything but static - they seem to change every time the router is rebooted, or receives a software/firmware update. My new router has now changed its public IP seven times since being installed last December. The amount of time you are likely to spend fiddling with such networking details depends on quite what you normally do with your home computers. I’m a long-time IRC user and Eggdrop channel protection bot admin - and those ancient things are hell on wheels to configure correctly behind a home router if network IP values start changing under your feet. You wind up getting a crash course in TCP networking theory !

There have been a number of recent reports of Orcas (aka Killer Whales) attacking and even sinking smaller yachts> https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/orcas-have-sunk-3-boats-in-europe-and-appear-to-be-teaching-others-to-do-the-same-but-why Reports of such attacks off the coast of Spain and the straits of Gibralter date back to around May 2020.

On Monday August 19 a luxury yacht called the Bayesian was sunk at anchor at Porticello near Palermo on the NE coast of Sicily by a freak storm that struck without warning at 4am in the morning. Violents winds of around 150 Km/hour and a large waterspout capsized the vessel which sank within 2 minutes according to eyewitnesses. Of the the 22 people onboard, six are still missing, including British tech magnate Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, along with Jonathan Bloomer (the CEO of US investment firm Morgan Stanley International) and his wife. Mike Lynch, a tycoon who was once hyped as the ‘British Bill Gates’ had only recently been acquitted in June on 16 counts of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy in a San Francisco court after a 5 year battle against extradition following the $11 billion sale of his firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The Mediterranean sailing trip aboard the Bayesian had been arranged to celebrate his acquittal, along with members of his family and legal team. By a bizarre coincidence, Steve Chamberlain the former CFO of Autonomy who stood trial alongside Mike Lynch died just 48 hours earlier after being hit by a car while out jogging in Cambridgeshire UK. Ship designers have expressed astonishment that a modern 56 metre long super-yacht could capsize and founder so rapidly in these circumstances - and they point to several factors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0nwe4d7k5o One was the abnormal height of the 76m (246 feet) aluminium mast, said to be the tallest in the world. CCTV seems to show the vessel being blown over onto its starboard side, and there is speculation that even with no sail set, the windage effect was enough to put the boat on its beam-ends, and that the drag of the mast in the water then created a turning moment around the anchor line which fully capsized it. Reports suggest that portholes and hatches had been left open to improve ventilation on a hot summer night which led to a rapid inrush of water into the hull. Only the deck watch and those who had chosen to sleep out on the topside seem to have survived. Yet another factor may well have been elevated sea temperatures in the Mediterranean which are currently at a record high thanks to ongoing anthropogenic climate change. This is causing increasingly violent weather events, and there is speculation that parts of the Mediterranean may soon become too dangerous for pleasure sailing during high summer in the near future.

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities." (Attributed to W. Churchill and others). Sources from inside the Trump campaign say that he is endlessly rewatching the 7 second clip of the July 13 shooting that almost claimed his life, and may be developing symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) as a result . https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/is-donald-trump-suffering-from-ptsd-watching-same-clip-of-getting-shot/articleshow/112549308.cms Meanwhile, Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline led him to tell a Pennsylvania rally audience that they were all in North Carolina the other night. On current form is there a chance that FPOTUS might be remanded in custody to a secure medical facility for psychiatric evaluation when he next appears in front of Judge Juan Merchan for sentencing on September 18 ?

From the early 17th century up until the end of WW2, the term ‘computer’ meant a human being with a talent for doing complex mathematical calculations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) The earliest use of such ‘computers’ was for compiling astronomical almanacs and tables of planetary positions, and the return periods of comets. They were also extensively used to generate critical tables of logarithms and trignometric functions accurate up to 7 decimal places - especially important when slide rules were only accurate up to 2 significant decimal places. From the earlier part of the 20th century onwards, ‘computers’ were increasingly used for statistical work such as calculating actuarial Life Tables, and engineering studies of various types. During WW1 and WW2 large numbers of ‘computers’ - many of them women - were recruited by the military establishment to produce ballistic artillery tables, as well as surveying, map-making and navigational aids for the armed forces. During WW2, the Manhattan Project in particular used many female computers in teams to help calculate the properties of nuclear chain reactions and criticality geometries in the race to develop the first viable atom bombs by 1945. The popular film Hidden Figures (2016) documents the use of female ‘computers’ (many of them black) by NASA and the early post-war US space program to transcribe and convert test flight data into standard engineering units, and to perform orbital calculations to predict re-entry and splash-down points. Interestingly, it was considered menial work at that time.

GARM (Global Alliance for Responsibe Media) a non-profit advertising group that aims to help brands avoid having their adverts appear alongside illegal or harmful content has shut down after being being sued by Elon Musk and X in Texas USA. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/09/tech/elon-musk-garm-advertisers-lawsuit/index.html The group has a hundred or so members including CVS, Unilever, Mars and Danish energy company Øersted. Elon Musk’s lawsuit against them claimed that GARM organised “to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising from Twitter” because the group was concerned that the platform had deviated from brand safety standards after Musk’s acquisition in late 2022. X had previously unsuccessfully sued The Center for Countering Digital Hate - a non-profit for documenting the amount of hate speech on X after accusing them of driving away advertisers. (That lawsuit was tossed by a federal judge in California as an attempt to punish protected speech). X has also sued the progressive watchdog group Media Matters over its analysis of antisemitic and pro-Nazi content on X , in a case set to go to trial next year. Elon Musk who recently told brands that had left the X platform to “go f**ck yourself” may however only succeed in driving even more advertisers away from X according to Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, founders of watchdog group Check My Ads Institute who wrote in an op-ed Thursday. “Everyone can see that advertising on X is a treacherous business relationship for advertisers,” https://checkmyads.org/elon-musk-garm-lawsuit/

About 10 years ago The Guardian did a study of EDL donors which suggested that up to 68% of them live in a local authority where unemployment is above the national median, and 23% live in a region whose jobless rate is among the the worst 10% in England and Wales. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/may/31/english-defence-league-edl-white-extremism But the same study also noted that The most violent younger EDL activists often seem to have been radicalised in online neo-Nazi discussion groups, and they also tend to be part of the football hooligan sub-culture which acts as a gateway to such online echo-chambers, and even more dangerous forms of tribalism. A quick glance at the most recent criminal convictions of rioters shows up perps from deprived areas with high levels of unemployment - such as Hartlepool in the northeast Tyne & Wear area of UK, and Southport near Liverpool which is in the midlands, on the west coast of Lancashire. A rather more unlikely hotspot was Plymouth a naval seaport on the south coast where 3 men were jailed for violent disorder, one of them being a 51 y/o man with a rock in his pocket which he claimed was a ‘healing stone’. https://news.sky.com/story/the-men-who-have-been-jailed-for-rioting-so-far-13193109 Probably the most surprising stats were the ages of some of those newly convicted. A 69 y/o retired welder was jailed in Hartlepool after fighting with 3 policemen at once; and a 54 y/o former postmaster and his partner were jailed for joining in the same riot while returning from an afternoon bingo session. Perhaps the older ones were easier for the police to catch ?

Counter-protesters last night in the Old Market /West St area, protecting the boarded-up Law Centre (bottom right) which EDL supporters had threatened to attack.

The other day members of the EDL (English Defence League) came to our city to try and extend their campaign of racial violence and anti-immigrant slander in the wake of the Southport killings ten days ago. You may have read about this recent wave of violence across the UK, including a riot in Liverpool the other night where thugs burnt down a local community hub and library in Liverpool because some posts on social media had spread a lie that all the books in the childrens section of the library had been replaced by copies of the Koran - (they hadn’t). When they arrived in our city however, the EDL supporters got a surprise. They had intended to attack a Mercure Travel Lodge that was allegedly being used to house asylum seekers, but they found themselves outnumbered 4-1 by a well organised protective cordon of counter-protesters and local community leaders who were also protecting our local mosques and LGBT sites, and who successfully held the racists at bay until the police belatedly arrived to stop the EDL from setting fire to the Travel Lodge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgrrl0zlg5o The following day I met a female friend and lawyer on our local village green who said “Are you coming to the protest tomorrow ?” When I asked for details, she told me that the EDL were now planning to attack the premises and staff of law firms in our city centre who regularly assist asylum seekers (often on a pro bono basis). There is apparently a hit-list of such law firms circulating on far-right Telegram channels. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624r77gnm2o The Playboy of The Western World (1907) was the title of a play by the Irish playwright John Synge which tells the story of a braggart who falsely claims to have murdered his own father. It came to mind as a suitable epithet for Elon Musk - the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) who has recently restored the X accounts of notorious UK hate speech trolls such as Tommy Robinson (EDL co-founder who recently fled the country), Katie Hopkins, and the violent misogynist Andrew Tate. https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-tommy-robinson-prime-minister-southport-spacex-b2590114.html Within the last day or so, Elon Musk has put up incendiary posts on his X platform claiming that “Civil War in UK is now inevitable” and has also attacked our new PM Keir Starmer for disputing the accuracy of these irresponsible claims. According to Sky News, Elon Musk is now also planning to sue major companies for “Conspiring to withhold advertising revenue from X/Twitter” and causing it to miss out on billions of advertising revenue. https://news.sky.com/story/its-war-elon-musks-x-sues-companies-for-not-advertising-on-its-platform-13192318 The reality is that many large corporations stopped advertising on X after finding their adverts were being run in tandem with blatantly neo-Nazi and racist content - which happened as a direct result of Elon Musk gutting the staff at X, and removing most of the content moderation procedures that were formerly in place. The Playboy of The Western World” indeed ! - welcome to the land of consequences Elon.

This particular teaser originally turned up some years ago in one of the DALnet IRC channels where I was an @ - I thought the guy was trolling us at first with an incomplete problem. I put it up here, mainly because I was curious to see if the spoilers button was working at all - in the light of TheVat reporting problems with it - and it is on my Mac. On the subject of using integer values to express a child's age - according to the UK Office of National Statistics - (in the 2021 UK census at least): - https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/questiondevelopment/demographyquestiondevelopmentforcensus2021

A statistician is carrying out a doorstep survey of the ages of children in families. He rings the door-bell of a maths teacher who says --> "Well let's see: I have three children. The product of their ages is 36, and the sum of their ages is the same as the number of this house". The canvasser frowns and says --> "I still need a hint here". The maths teacher says --> "OK, my eldest kid just started piano lessons" "That's all I needed to know" says the canvasser, and walks away filling out the form. Q1. What were the ages of the children ? Q2. What was the number of the house ? -------------------------------------------------