toucana

George Santos has been expelled from the House of Representatives after a vote on the house floor. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/12/01/congress/santos-expelled-00129588 The voting went 311 - 114 in favour of his expulsion, following a damning Ethics Committee report. He becomes only the third politician to be expelled in this way without a federal conviction since the Civil War. The four top GOP leaders in the house (including Speaker Mike Johnson) voted against expelling him.

A report by Reuters on 30 November 2023 which went largely unnoticed, throws more light on what might have provoked the sudden 4 day ouster of Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI: .https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/ The new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems in a way that made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success according to Reuter’s source.

Argentina has just elected a chain-saw wielding far-right ‘libertarian’ fringe candidate called Javier Milei as their new president. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-67470549 Popularly known as ‘El Loco’ (the madman), his economic objectives include replacing the peso with the US dollar and “blowing up” the central bank. On social issues, he wants to loosen gun laws, abolish abortion - which was only legalised in Argentina as recently as 2020 - and allow the sale and purchase of human organs. The victory of Milei who won a decisive run-off by almost 12% against Mr Massa the economy minister of the outgoing left-wing government has been welcomed by Donald Trump and former president Bolsonaro of Brazil who say that he will “Make Argentina great again”. One salient factor that probably influenced many voters was a deep economic crisis that had seen the annual inflation rate rise to 143%, with around 40% of Argentines living below the poverty line.

The ongoing speculation over Sam Altman’s dismissal has provoked a heated discussion of some quite outre theories as to how and why it happened. BBC Technology Editor Zoe Kleinman who says her phone ‘blew up’ on Friday when the news broke, points out that there were only 6 people on the board of OpenAI, so it was just 4 of them led by the Chief Scientific officer who dismissed both the President and the CEO of the company. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67461363 Some have noted that Elon Musk’s company X (formerly Twitter) has recently released a new LLM chatbot called Grok, while others have drawn attention to a blog article published by Sam Altman on the OpenAI website on 24 February of this year titled “Planning For AGI and Beyond” https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond This article discusses his understanding of the nature of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is widely seen as the Holy Grail and next step of AI development, and sets out the possible timeline and challenges involved. The final part of the article includes this paragraph which seems to have a certain resonannce in the light of what has just happened:

New reporting says that Greg Brockman the president and co-founder of OpenAI who had been stripped of his board position on Friday, but was supposed to remain with the company because he was of “vital importance”, has also resigned and left OpenAI. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/openai-president-greg-brockman-quits-as-nervous-employees-hold-all-hands-meeting/ There is a good deal of speculation as to what has prompted the sudden ouster of the founders, with some commentators suggesting that concerns at boardroom level about the prioritisation of profit over safety in the future development goals of OpenAI played a key role. Others have drawn attention to Microsoft’s sudden ban on their own employees from using internal access to OpenAI tools which was implemented without warning on Friday - shortly before the dismissal of Sam Altman was announced. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/microsoft_blocks_chatgpt/?td=keepreading This was said to be due to “data and security concerns”, which lines up with a recent report by UK spy agency GCHQ that sensitive prompts fed into public LLM (large language model) AI systems may allow them to learn confidential information from such inputs, and leak it to other users. https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/15/gchq_warns_against_sensitive_corporate/

Sam Altman the head of ‘OpenAI’ has been ousted by the company’s board in a move that has sent shockwaves through the sector. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67458603 Altman was the co-founder of the non-profit in 2015 which has become best known for its ground-breaking ChatGPT bot. The company which is now backed by Microsoft was recently reported to be in talks to sell shares to investors at a price that would value it at more than $80bn (£64bn). The company said its board members did not have shares in the firm and that their fundamental governance responsibility was to "advance OpenAI's mission and preserve the principles of its Charter". The Chief technology officer Mira Mirauti is set to take over on an interim basis.

One fundamental problem is that many people on the far right-wing of US politics don’t really believe in democratic values anymore, and nor do they wish to live in a constitutional democracy. A good few of them apparently want to live in a Christo-Fascist theocracy based exclusively on evangelical fundamentalist readings of the bible as interpreted by self-appointed ‘ayatollahs’, some of whom want to declare a holy war on unbelievers, and execute non-Christians (and no, that is not a joke or an exaggeration). https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/414450-fbi-investigating-washington-state-rep-for-manifesto-urging-all-males/ Intermingled with these Christian zealots are self-indoctrinated members of the QAnon cult which originally began as an online prank on the 4CHAN image board - a cult which some believe was secretly promoted and encouraged by Russian intelligence operatives as part of a black-ops campaign of psychological warfare against the USA. There is in fact some considerable overlap between the QAnon cult and various wings of the evangelical christian right. There are for example sub-chapters of QAnon that identify strongly with young earth creationists who are also flat-earthers, and follow Bishop Ussher’s chronology which teaches that the (flat) earth was created at 6pm on Tuesday 22 October 4004 BC. Closely associated with both the Christo-Fascist and QAnon cults is yet another bizarre group known as the Sovereign Citizen Movement who back in early 2021 were confidently predicting that Donald Trump would be sworn in as the *19th* president of the USA on 4th March 2021 - Basically this movement believes that every congress since 1871 has been invalid, and that Ulysses Grant the18th president was the last legitimate holder of that office. (For more detail see —> https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qanon-conspiracy-theories-trump-tiktok-1118668/ ). A common thread linking all of these cults is what the French Sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858 - 1916) called ‘Anomie’. a word whose Greek root ἀνομία literally means ‘lawlessness’. Durkheim used this word in several ways, but the one that seems relevant here is a general breakdown of collective moral values caused by a conflict or mismatch between existing belief systems and rapidly changing social realities affecting ordinary people such as mass industrialisation, or the types of de-industrialisation and impoverishment seen in the rust-belt areas of the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie Many ordinary people in the USA feel alienated, betrayed, disempowered and fundamentally ignored both by modern corporate America, and by what by they regard as the self-centered ‘Washington bubble’ of mainstream american politics. This sense of anger and victimhood makes them ready converts to the teachings of conspiracy cults which provide self-referential explanations, convenient scapegoats (e.g. Immigrants, the ‘Deep State; ‘Fake News’, Liberals, Masks etc) and above all they provide a missing sense of community in the form of the companionship of fellow believers - people who will happily stand together on the Grassy Knoll at Dealey Plaza waiting for JFK or JFK jnr. to magically rise from the dead, restore Donald Trump to the presidency, and join him in his fight against the Deep State to purge the world of satanic child-eating cannibals. https://people.com/politics/qanon-believers-gather-dallas-john-f-kennedy-jr-died-1999/

INSURRECTION DAY II - THE SEQUEL (reposted by Donald Trump)

I fail to understand how. An interesting article in the Courier Journal about Daniel Cameron, the defeated GOP candidate in the Kentucky gubernatorial election who was heavily endorsed by Trump makes exactly the opposite point: “Once again Republicans learned the truth about Trump—he’s great in a primary but isn’t nearly as good in a general election, even in a red state like Kentucky. There’s no doubt that Trump’s endorsement of Cameron in the GOP primary sunk his deep-pocketed rival—Kelly Craft—and helped Cameron surge to the nomination. And in October, after falling far behind, Cameron used Trump’s endorsement again to nationalize the race and reel in Beshear, who had built up a large lead. But for as unpopular as President Joe Biden is in Kentucky (and believe me, it’s bad) Trump has his detractors, too. There are moderate, college-educated Republicans and independents in key counties in the Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati metro areas for whom Trump is a deal breaker" https://eu.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2023/11/08/beshear-won-trump-no-help-cameron/71500605007/#

Claims that Donald Trump "has already spoken out against the GOP on this issue" are likely to fare particularly badly in 2024 when videos of him saying the exact opposite start appearing in political ads. Have a look at the videos of Trump in this clip from the Alex Wagner slot on MSNBC slot last night - (from 3.35m elapsed onwards). Those attack adverts have already been cut, and will be on endless loop next year.

The locations cited happen to be ones that have just had elections or ballots within the last couple of days, which means that psephologists can study the actual voting data patterns that really took place, instead of trying to interpret potentially suspect pollster predictions from elsewhere,

Location Location Location……. Andy Beshear won re-election as Governor of Kentucky by +5 clear percentage points - in Kentucky, the home state of Mitch McConnell the Senate Republican minority leader - a deep red state which had previously voted 60/40 in favour of Donald Trump in recent presidential elections. The Ohio constitutional amendment on abortion rights passed by +12 percentage points - in Ohio the home state of ‘Gym’ Jordan, the Republican loudmouth, flamethrower-in-chief, and current chair of the House Judiciary Committee in Congress. In Virginia the Democrats took control of both houses in the General Assembly, and did so in spite of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s high profile involvement in pushing a 15 week abortion ban, and a ’Parents Rights’ agenda in education - thereby frustrating Youngkin’s hopes of a ‘trifecta’, and a possible late presidential run in 2024. They do say that only one poll really matters, and Tuesday night’s election results suggest that MAGA is now largely unelectable. The people have spoken and are saying that they do not wish to live in a Christo-Fascist theocracy governed by a ramshackle coalition of screaming trolls, book burners, and brain-addled Q-Anon Karens waving assault rifles.

You'd probably want to program Alexa to respond to 멈추다 ! (meomchuda) if it's in a Korean factory - but yes :-) The PIR solution would also work. I've used something similar in a stage show where we had big class IV lasers installed as part of a large digital mirror light-show projection onto a giant cyclorama screen. The PIR safety line across the front of the stage was armed before we admitted the public, and it was rigged to cut the power to the lasers instantly if anyone crossed the PIR line onto stage.

I found myself wondering quite what sort of robotic sensor you would use to reliably distinguish between a human being and a box of vegetables ? The best candidate I can think of is a FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red) camera. Hand-held versions of these are quite widely used nowadays in electronics troubleshooting where a short-circuit caused by a faulty component is suspected. Rather than wade through acres of circuit diagrams, or laboriously test many dozens of microscopic components, the quick method used in repair shops is to apply a voltage injection tool to a rail in the vicinity of the suspected problem, and then use a small FLIR camera to monitor the circuit board, and see which area develops a hot-spot. Modern FLIR cameras are astonishingly good and would instantly distinguish between the body heat of a human being, and a cold crate of peppers. The problem is that they need to be calibrated carefully beforehand to obtain optimum results - and that I suspect was the problem here.

A Korean robotics engineer has been crushed to death by a robot at a food packaging plant in South Korea while checking out reports of a malfunctioning sensor system. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-67354709 Acoording to the South Korean news agency Yonhap 연합뉴스, the robot which mistook him for a box of vegetables grabbed him, and then pushed his body against a conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest. The robot which had been newly installed in a pepper sorting plant in the Donggoseong Export Agricultural Complex in South Gyeongsang province was designed to lift boxes of peppers onto pallets. An initial test run scheduled for 6 November had been delayed because of a fault ticket on the sensor system of the robotic arm. Apart from the rather weird Darwin Award nature of this unfortunate engineer’s untimely demise, it does raise the question of how exactly are you supposed to troubleshoot an unreliable sensor system, when it is a safety critical element of a powerful industrial robot ?

Last night the Democrats won the senate and flipped the legislature in the Virginia state elections. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/469164-democrats-flip-virginia-state-senate/ Democratic candidate Andy Beshear was re-elected in the Kentucky race for Governor so decisively that the result was called just 20m after the polls closed. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/07/kentucky-governor-election-results-andy-beshear-democrat-wins Democrats won the Ohio constitutional amendment question on abortion in spite of Governor DeWine’s opposition. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/07/ohio-issue-1-abortion-rights-vote-result Daniel McCaffery won a high-stakes Supreme Court election in Pennsylvania by defeating the Republican candidate Carolyn Carluccio. https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2023/11/pennsylvania-election-results-supreme-court-daniel-mccaffery-carolyn-carluccio/#:~:text=HARRISBURG%20—%20Democrat%20Daniel%20McCaffery%20defeated,tens%20of%20millions%20of%20dollars. A good deal of of this happened because the GOP chose to nail its colours to the suppression of reproductive rights and the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, a highly controversial policy that is strongly opposed by up to 70% of the electorate. Donald Trump is currently facing 91 criminal indictments (and counting), and there is an 85% to 90% chance that he will have been convicted and sent to jail following his trials in late March and April of 2024 - long before the presidential elections are due in November of that year. People say that he will appeal any conviction - and so he probably will. But what these pundits are overlooking is that when you get convicted of serious criminal offences like racketeering, incitement, insurrection and espionage - you *don’t* get released from prison on bail while doing it. Trump will be sitting in a cell while any appeal processes play out. The chances of the GOP choosing to go into the 2024 presidential election with a bankrupt and patently senile front-runner who is already a convicted and incarcerated felon are becoming vanishingly small - which is why prominent Republicans like Kim Reynolds the Governor of Iowa just switched their endorsement to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2024-presidential-race-ron-desantis-kim-reynolds-endorsement-trump/#

For an alternative take on the NYT/Siena poll published on Sunday, you may wish to read this article as well: https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2023/11/poll-watch-thoughts-on-the-new-york-times-siena-colleges-battleground-state-polling.html The article becomes a little technical at times, but the nub of it that the pollsters are accused by critics of having oversampled Republican voters, undersampled opposing groups, and then fiddled with the weightings to reverse engineer a pre-chosen result that has more to do with the current editorial leanings of the NYT than the current political realities in the swing states. Do you recall those pollsters who loudly trumpeted a coming Republican ‘Red Wave’ in the 2022 mid-term elections - which vanished like a mirage when the elections took place and votes were counted ? In the aftermath of that debacle, the NYT published an article called “The Red Wave Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Political Narrative”. Their comments then make rather ironic reading now: “Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past. That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives.”https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html On balance it seem that Sunday’s NYT/Siena poll is about as credible as Trump’s claim at a public rally in Florida just the day before, that he “Won all 50 states in a blowout” https://www.salon.com/2023/11/05/claims-he-won-all-50-states-in-the-2020/

Chinese submarines use turbo-electric transmission systems to drive their propellors. "The Russian, U.S. and British navies rely on direct steam turbine propulsion, while French and Chinese ships use the turbine to generate electricity for propulsion (turbo-electric transmission)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion One reason for using electric motors in the main propulsion system is to lower the acoustic noise profile of the vessel for silent running during operations.

One of the problems faced by China and other Asian nations who wish to design and build submarine fleets of their own, is that critical elements of the key technologies required are embargoed by the USA and other NATO powers. So the Chinese have to do their own R&D, and find their own solutions to the construction challenges involved. The video I cited in my OP went into this in more detail, and it included the technical drawing shown below. Now this is actually a prototype Taiwanese submarine, not a Chinese one, and it's a conventional diesel electric patrol boat, not a nuclear sub - but the key point is the colour of the keys in the graphics. All the items with red colour flags are highly embargoed items of technology (sonar and torpedo systems in particular ). Green flags are items that Taiwan can produce itself, and all the other flags are technologies that have to be sourced from abroad- It rather shows up the scale of the challenge facing them.

Accidents in subs often involve a 'cascade' of adverse events - as happened when the USS Thresher was lost during deep diving tests in April 1963. A high pressure leak in a salt water intake pipe shorted out a major electrical DB, which led to an unwanted reactor SCRAM. Ice crystals then formed in a key air valve system when they tried to blow the ballast tanks, leading to the total loss of the vessel and crew. I suspect that some similar event cascade took place here. I agree that the crew probably tried to use direct generator power initially, the reactor may then have unexpectedly scrammed, forcing them to switch to emergency battery power - or there may have been some unintended feed-back charging loop that overloaded the batteries.

From what I can gather, the submarine was subsequently freed and brought back to the surface again by rescue vessels. It was then taken back to the Qingdao naval base by PLAN salvage tenders - so there was never any issue with a loss of reactor containment, or release of radiation into the sea. This wasn't a deep water incident, it happened in relatively shallow coastal waters near Shantou city on the coast of Guangdong province. It is indeed correct to say that the oxygen system of a nuclear submarine itself would not fail or run out in a matter of just 8 hours or so - which renders it even more likely that some other incident occurred - such as a major battery fire or explosion that released toxic fumes and killed the crew. One detail in the reports that caught my eye was that key items of rescue equipment (such as the large air pump used) had to be flown down from Lianyungang Baitabu air-base which is a long way to the north on the Jiangsu coast, nor far from the main Qingdao naval base. It seems that the Chinese navy simply did not have all the resources needed to handle this incident on hand, which led to some considerable delay. Part of the radio-silence on this incident by China is probably motivated by extreme embarrassment at the ineptitude of the PLAN. Dissident sources say the Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a complete news blackout, and was said to have been furious when details of the accident began circulating on Chinese language social media, and were subsequently leaked to the UK press by British intelligence.

What the article I cited actually says is - "Electricity generated from its nuclear rector is the main source of electrical and propulsion power for the submarine, but a battery, as a source of power, is required during emergency operations" I suspect that what might have happened here is that the submarine used maximum emergency power to try and free itself when the vessel became trapped by an underwater boom, and that they may have overloaded their electrical systems and shorted out or damaged a battery badly creating an H2S hazard.

Nuclear submarines do indeed have very large banks of lead acid batteries weighing over 2000lbs, with an energy storage capacity of up to 2.6MWh. These batteries are often the main propulsive power system in such submarines - the PWR nuclear reactor is used via a heat exchanger to produce steam to run turbo-electrical generators that feed the main battery system which in turn feeds the main electrical propulsion motors. You can find a detailed account here : http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph241/ditiangkin1/ Versions of this story first appeared in the UK Times newspaper on 4 October, although the earlier reports attributed the crew deaths to a failure of the oxygen system, rather than hydrogen sulphide exposure in particular. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/chinese-nuclear-submarine-suffers-catastrophic-failure-what-we-know-4451948# https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-kills-own-sailors-with-trap-set-for-us-and-british-vessels-75wdfkc2p (pay-walled)

From the second article cited in my OP: "In addition, overcharging a lead acid battery can produce hydrogen sulfide gas. This gas is colorless, poisonous, flammable, and has an odor similar to rotten eggs or natural gas. The gas is heavier than air and will accumulate at the bottom of poorly ventilated spaces." https://ehs.umass.edu/sites/default/files/Battery SOP.pdf see also: "Under normal operating conditions, the gasses evolved are hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O). However, under extreme conditions other gasses may be produced such as hydrogen sulphide (H2S). Some strange gasses are also given off in very small quantities such as carbon dioxide (CO2). This document only considers the evolution of hydrogen, oxygen and hydrogen sulphide." https://www.blueboxbatteries.co.uk/blog/industrial-battery-gassing-37 I also came across one news report from USA where people were found dead in a car. It was initially thought they had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, but forensic tests showed they had died from hydrogen sulphide poisoning from a lead acid car battery that had been shorted out by a defective starter motor. And here is an exhaustive academic study commissioned by the US Navy in a 2002 review of SEAL (Submarine Escape Action Levels) for hydrogen sulphide contamination in submarines, which discusses trigger thresholds for emergency action to be taken in response to the detection of levels as low as 10 to 15 PPM of this gas: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10242/chapter/9