The nineteenth-century novel random character generator. The first one I got was "Byronic Peer with Ulterior Motives."
Brujeria as self-care among Hispanic Americans: "the rituals can help better ourselves by removing blockages, tackling grief and pain that maybe we even carried from our ancestors so we have the courage to move forward."
Interesting thread on X about why Evangelical art is boring. In the 17th-century you could be a bad, violent, tormented person (Caravaggio) and still make Catholic art, but it's much harder for such a person to be accepted as an Evangelical; also, great art is about struggle, and the Evangelical art we have is mostly about putting struggle behind you and finding peace. Johnny Cash would be an obvious exception to all of this, and perhaps by his example shows what the writer wants more of.
South Korean drone light show welcomes the Year of the Dragon.
Last week a Ukrainian Bradley IFV knocked out a top-of-the-line Russian T-90 tank with a 25mm autocannon. In an interview, the gunner says he knew where to hit the T-90 from playing War Thunder. (That's the game that keeps ending up in the news because people have posted classified documents to discussion boards to win arguments about its very detailed combat system.)
The USAF announces that their new bomber, the B-21, is entering production, just two months after the first prototype flew. After the very expensive boondoggle of the F-35 program the Air Force radically overhauled its procurement process to get from initial design to serial production much faster, and so far it seems to be working. But the B-21 is pretty similar to the B-2, and is being made by the same company, so that was an easy lift compared to the challenge the more radical NGAD program will present.
Texans did not lose power during this year's deep freeze, mainly because natural gas plants that froze last time have been winterized. Wind and solar facilities mostly kept working, but it took a surge in gas use to meet the high demand. (NY Times)
NY Times: "A new study estimates that reusing or recycling rare earth metals from old cellphones, hard drives, electric motors and turbines could meet as much as 40 percent of the demand for the metals in the United States, China and Europe by 2050." In theory, sure, but so far the cost and energy consumption have been too high for this to work.
Noah Smith on why he is optimistic about the plan to build a new city on farmland halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.
More fraudulent scientific data exposed by amateur sleuths, in this case involving the leaders of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, affiliated with Harvard. (NY Times, Harvard Crimson, For Better Science) Here is a real contribution already made by AI, which can be trained to recognize duplicated or manipulated images.
Ben Pentreath, photographs of Christmas at his Dorset country house, with the village duck race. (Plastic ducks, alas.)
The resurgence of an old crime, train robbery. So much high-value freight flows inland from southern California's ports, much of it on trains more than a mile long with only two crew, that theft is not particularly difficult. (NY Times)
Speaking of train robbery, a crossword puzzle clue got me curious about who Bat Masterson really was, and, wow, he certainly did have a Wild West movie kind of life.
Study finds little difference in the criminal codes of red and blue states. My personal experience is that there is not a lot of difference in the regulatory environments, either.
Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter, is grounded after 72 flights over three years because of a broken rotor blade. Considering that the original plan was for only 5 flights over 30 days, its career has been amazing. Bigger Mars flyers are in the works.
Tom Friedman says the world is witnessing a "titanic geopolitical struggle" between the "Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future" and the "Inclusion Network, trying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past." The leaders of the Resistance are Russia and Iran, with partial support from China and much of the developing world.
The resurgence of an old crime, train robbery. So much high-value freight flows inland from southern California's ports, much of it on trains more than a mile long with only two crew, that theft is not particularly difficult.
ReplyDeleteThe railroad companies actually are pushing to get the crew reduced to one. This on top of having trains that routinely reach multiple miles in length.
They've also slashed the amount of time allowed for safety checks, on top of expecting them to be carried out by a single person rather than two. For example, wheel inspections used to be allotted between five and eight minutes to be completed by the crew - now they're allotted between 30 and 60 seconds.
How a single person can possibly expect a mile long (or more) train in that amount of time, only The Executives and The Shareholders can possibly know. But boy, it sure has increased "efficiency". (Read, "profit margins".)
They could increase "efficiency" even more if they could only get rid of safety inspections altogether - but the inspections are required by pesky laws and regulations, so until the railroad companies can lobby hard enough to get those laws scrapped, they have to at least PRETEND to inspect their trains. That way, when they derail over a mile's length of cars carrying poisonous and explosive chemicals directly into a small town, they can avoid any and all responsibility for the catastrophe by noting they TECHNICALLY performed safety checks as required by law, and thus they cannot be held liable for anything!
Gods, this country. What a laughingstock we are. We can't even manage basic rail freight competently or quickly, because we're too busy throwing ever more money at the 1%.