toucana

As of May 1945, the USA had enough fissile material available to manufacture just 3 atomic bombs. One of these nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ was a ballistic gun-type device that worked by firing a slug of Uranium 235 along a barrel into another sub-critical mass of U235 to cause a chain reaction with a 15 Kiloton explosive yield. This was never tested because the engineers were certain it would work at the first time of asking - so they simply assembled and dropped it on Hiroshima - but there was no other Uranium 235 available. The scientists had used up their entire stock of weapons grade Uranium 235 refined over a 3 year period in building this single weapon. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/fatman-littleboy-losalamosnatllab.pdf The other two devices both relied on an HE implosion lens to compress a hollow sphere of Plutonium 239 into a critical mass with an explosive yield of around 21 Kilotons. This novel Plutonium implosion mechanism was a highly complex engineering challenge to perfect, and absolutely had to be tested by proof firing one of the devices nicknamed ‘The Gadget’ at Los Alamos to ensure it worked. After the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, the USA now had just 2 atomic bombs left available for use - One Uranium device, and one Plutonium device nicknamed ‘Fat Man’. American military planners believed they would need to drop at least two bombs to convince the Japanese to surrender, and they reasoned it was better to actually run out of ammunition, rather than *look* as though they were running out of ammunition. It was a gamble that worked, because after the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th, the Japanese concluded that America had an entire production line running, and that a third weapon would shortly be dropped on Tokyo if they did not offer their unconditional surrender immediately. In reality the USA had no other nuclear weapons that could have been deployed against Japan at that time. It is said that they could have cobbled together another Plutonium 239 device by a cannibalising a laboratory test-rig nicknamed the ‘Demon Core’ - which is another entire story - and would have taken months.

I would suggest that you read The Fall Of Japan by William Craig (1968) which provides a good readable account of the Pacific war, and which covers the following points in some detail: i. The USA leadership did not know it had a viable atom bomb until the Trinity test took place in the New Mexico desert on Monday July 16th 1945. Even the top US military commanders i.e. General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz who were leading the war against the Japanese in the Pacific knew nothing about the Manhattan project until they were subsequently shown films of the test firing at Los Alamos. ii. All of the US planning for the military defeat of Japan had been finalised at the Honolulu conference a year earlier in July 1944, and was predicated on a massive amphibious assault using conventional forces that might well cause over 1 million American casualties according to American planners who had recently witnessed US casualties of over 40,000 suffered when capturing the tiny garrison island of Okinawa in May 1945. iii. The Japanese knew perfectly well that the allies would need to carry out a two-stage occupation of the Japanese archipelago, starting with the capture of the island of Kyushu. Their defensive plan Ketsu-Go developed by the Japanese army aimed to break the morale of the invading forces by inflicting massive casualties on the only two suitable landing beaches available on Kyushu as they came ashore. iv. When the Japanese did surrender, and turned over the details of their battle plans, American strategists found that Japan’s Ketsu-Go planners had anticipated almost every single detail of the Allied invasion plan. One of the few details in the US order of battle that had eluded Japanese military intelligence was the real purpose of the 509th Composite Bombing group, which was the unit that actually dropped the atomic bombs. v. The Japanese government had absolutely no intention of surrendering to the US under any circumstances, Their premier Suzuki had rejected an ultimatum issued to Japan by the allies following the Potsdam conference on 2nd August using the Japanese phrase mokusatsu 黙殺 which means “with silent contempt”. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed on August 6 and August 9 respectively, high ranking Japanese military officers staged a bloody coup in a failed attempt to prevent the recording of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech from being broadcast on Japanese radio the next day. vi. It was the US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson who first suggested using the new atom bomb to end the war at a cabinet meeting shortly after the Trinity test. It was said that Stimson himself personally removed Kyoto from the list of possible targets, because he and his wife had spent their honeymoon in that beautuful ancient city some years earlier. President Truman later confided to a biographer that one compelling reason why he authorised the atom bombing of Japan was because he believed that he would have been impeached for incompetence by Congress in his role as Commander-in-Chief if he had refused to use the bomb, and had proceeded with a conventional amphibious assault that cost a million allied casualties instead. (Archive photo taken at the Honolulu conference in July 1944. Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz knew of the existence of the Manhattan project).

Researchers in the Graduate school of Engineering at Chiba University Japan have discovered that adding caffeine to specific platinum electrodes can enhance the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells. https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=62709#:~:text=Despite%20their%20promise%2C%20fuel%20cells,platinum%20electrodes%20by%2011%20times. Their study which was published in Communications Chemistry on February 3rd, 2024 claims that Professor Nagahiro Hoshi, along with colleagues Masashi Nakamura, Ryuta Kubo, and Rui Suzuki conducted their experiments by submerging platinum electrodes of varying types in a caffeine-containing electrolyte. They discovered that caffeine increases the ORR (oxygen reduction reaction) activity by up to 11 times with Pt(111), and by 2.5 times, with Pt(110) at a molar concentration of 1 × 10^−6 . This can potentially increase fuel cell efficiency, and decrease the need for extra platinum catalysts. The really intriguing question is however, what prompted this line of research ? Did someone accidentally drop an extra strong cup of コーヒー or kawa in the electrolyte one morning ?

A new YT video by the well-known ‘Mentour Pilot’ channel goes into more detail about the overlap between the Inmarsat ACARS satellite tracking data of the MH370 flight, and that of the WSPR (weak signal propagation reporter) dataset mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk It provides a highly lucid account of the flight operations procedures from a pilot’s POV, based on research by two French pilots Capt Blelly and Jean Luc-Marchand, along with links to the latest WSPR research sites including a very recent paper from 15 February 2024 by Dr Hannes Coetzee and Prof. Simon Maskell - ‘How Does WSPR Detect Aircraft over Long Distances - 15FEB2024’ https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vzftcvfx01lhbt3xfgyu5/How-Does-WSPR-Detect-Aircraft-over-Long-Distances-15FEB2024.pdf?rlkey=p8dcu8q3ww741joa922bdikng&dl=0 This offers some worked examples of how WSPR data can be used to track large aeroplanes in flight.

A Chilean LATAM Airlines LA800 flight from Sydney to Auckland NZ suffered a ‘Technical Event’ on Monday that sent the 787 Dreamliner jet plunging 500 feet in an instant, injuring some 50 passengers, 12 of whom needed hospital treatment on arrival in Auckland. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/latam-flight-from-sydney-to-auckland-nose-dives-passengers-and-crew-thrown-into-ceiling/MBE4BNFIFJD73DDZJ3USYZYL5M/ Passengers subsequently told reporters that the pilot had apologised to them after the incident, and said that he had lost control of the plane after “All the gauges went blank”. The nature of this technical event appears to be related to an AD (Airworthiness Directive) originally issued by the FAA in 2015. https://www.aviationtoday.com/2015/05/05/boeing-787-power-issue-to-receive-software-fix/ The issue identified is a glitch with the GCU processors which control the AC generators used to power the aircraft’s electrical systems. The problem can arise if the aircraft’s avionics systems are left continuously powered up for 248 days or longer. An internal system counter in the controller chip overflows and forces a fail-safe system reset. This previously unknown issue was apparently only detected during extended laboratory bench-testing over an 8 month period. This was a potentially catastrophic failure in a fly-by-wire passenger jet. It was mitigated only by the fact that the the airliner was flying at a cruise altitude of 35,000 feet. During the emergency the plane was briefly descending at 4000 feet/minute (according to FR24) before the the event was fully brought under control. If this had happened at a lower altitude during the final landing approach, it could easily have led to the total loss of the airplane along with all the passengers and crew.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, the BBC have broadcast a new documentary about the mystery called ‘Why Planes Vanish:The Hunt for MH370’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001x0yh/why-planes-vanish-the-hunt-for-mh370 This documentary (currently available in UK on iPlayer) provides a concise history of the disappearance of the Boeing 777 flight with 239 souls aboard on March 8th 2014, and updates the story of the ongoing international search to find it. One of the most intriguing leads comes from new research by a retired Aviation engineer Richard Godfrey who has studied the possibility of using the WSPR network dataset to track the exact position of MH370 on the night of its disappearance. WSPR (weak signal propagation reporter) is an amateur radio protocol system set up in 2008 which is based on small MF and HF transmitters around the world that broadcast low power test signals to evaluate the conditions of their propagation paths through the earth’s atmosphere. The transmission and reception data is automatically logged in a large database. Richard Godfrey who likens WSPR to a global network of tripwires has suggested that close study of the WSPR data can disclose signal-to-noise and frequency drift anomalies caused by the passage of MH370 on its final flight into the southern Indian Ocean. It’s a suggestion that raised eyebrows and was met with much scepticism at first, but the idea of using WSPR as a form of OTH (over the horizon) radar happens to be testable. A number of proof of concept studies have been undertaken recently, including one led by Professor Simon Maskell at Liverpool University, and the results are said to be sufficiently encouraging that deep-sea search specialists Ocean Infinity are now negotiating with Australian and Malaysian authorities to resume their search for MH370. Richard Godfrey believes the WSPR data indicates that MH370 will be found within a 30Km sector just beyond those on the 7th Arc previously searched by Ocean Infinity. The hypothesis is that the pilot extended MH370’s flnal flight path by gliding the unpowered plane for another 20m or so after its engines flamed out from fuel depletion. (photo below)

The fanbase recently started a GoFundMe campaign to cover his costs after the latest Judge Engoron ruling. The GoFundMe allegedly raised around $84,000 in the first 24 hours - which equates to around 0.01% of the billion or so that TFG will need to cover all his legal costs, fines and interest payments. That's a "long row to hoe" as they say.

Roberta Kaplan the counsel for E. Jean Carroll recently recounted the experience of meeting Donald Trump at Mar a Lago to take a deposition, and of him telling her “See you next Tuesday” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/02/robert-kaplan-trump-c-word-e-jean-carroll-lawyer “What are you saying ?” she replied , “We are not due in court until next Wednesday ?”. It was only when she was being driven away from Mar a Lago that her staff explained to her what TFG had really meant. Meanwhile Trump who famously congratulated “The great state of Kansas” back in 2020 when the Kansas City Chiefs won Superbowl LIV (they play in Kansas City Missouri) is having another meltdown about the same team winning Superbowl LVIII at the w/e. https://www.marca.com/en/nfl/kansas-city-chiefs/2024/02/12/65ca04b746163fa5638b457e.html Apparently it’s all a ‘Deep State’ psy-op involving Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift to prevent him from winning the 2024 election.

Donald Trump apparently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi 4 times in a single sentence while addressing a rally in Concord NH on Friday. TFG was trying to run one of his habitual lies about the Jan 6 insurrection by claiming that the Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the lack of security around the Capitol that day. Unfortunately Trump’s cognitive failures are now so frequent (and so severe), that he thinks Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley are one and the same person, and that the latter was Speaker of the House in the last months of his presidency. He also referred to George Conway (not Concord) as the capital of New Hampshire in the same speech. This is unlikely to end well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGTJy1Ij4Qk

An integral part of Mexican cuisine ?

The SCOTUS will need to consider this interesting ruling which was penned by none other than Neil Gorsuch back in 2012 when he was a circuit judge on the appellate bench of the Tenth District. This was cited by the Colorado Supreme Court in their ruling this week. https://www.newsweek.com/neil-gorsuch-could-strike-death-knell-donald-trump-1853993

Donald Trump has just been kicked off the GOP primary ballot in Colorado by the Colorado Supreme Court. https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/colorado-trump-14th-amendment-12-19-23/index.html This reverses a finding by a Colorado District Court just a couple of weeks ago, where the judge reached the baffling conclusion that Donald Trump *had* engaged in insurrection, but should *not* be disqualified under section III of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, because even though he was the POTUS at the time, he wasn’t technically deemed to be an ‘Officer of the United States Government” in the sense referred to by the 14th Amendment. The Colorado Supreme Court made it clear in a 217 page ruling that they regarded this finding by the lower District Court to be a clear and reversible legal error. They also made it clear that the earlier finding that Trump had engaged in an insurrection was correct and factually based on evidence of record, and that Trump’s inflammatory speech which provoked the riot and breach of the Capitol was not protected political speech under the First Amendment. This latest ruling will undoubtedly be appealed immediately to the SCOTUS by Trump and his lawyers. In reality the Colorado decision by itself will make little difference to the calculus of the electoral college in the 2024 Presidential election, because Trump probably wouldn’t have have won any EC votes in Colorado to start with - but the new ruling does set a very interesting legal precedent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1PySqGo4L0

I think Burns Night is on the 25th of January ?

The title of my OP in this thread was a ‘HAL 9000’ joke about who was actually running OpenAI. But it’s a topic that has also been receiving some more serious attention recently e.g. https://www.reworked.co/digital-workplace/reduce-uncertainty-to-drive-ai-adoption/#:~:text=In%20a%20now%20famous%20quote,and%20should%20be%20held%20accountable. The article by Benjamin Granger from August 2023 cites a famous comment originally made by IBM in 1979.

From the original article by by Bruce Schneier in Slate Dec 4th 2023: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/ai-mass-spying-internet-surveillance.html From the follow-up article by Benji Edwards in Ars Technica the following day Dec 5th 2023: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/due-to-ai-we-are-about-to-enter-the-era-of-mass-spying-says-bruce-schneier/?comments=1&comments-page=1

A recent article by Bruce Schneier (first published by Slate) highlights the risk of how a new era of mass spying may be triggered by advanced AI systems that enable a shift from observing actions to interpreting intentions, en masse. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/due-to-ai-we-are-about-to-enter-the-era-of-mass-spying-says-bruce-schneier/ In the context of OpenAi’s recently reported AI breakthrough Q*, this passage makes particularly worrying reading:

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/