Seeking hackers, AI robots, and farmers

I just finished reading the Widow, a best selling crime novel where a lawyer hires some criminal hackers to find who poisoned his client.

 The irony is that there are supposed to be a lot of privacy laws that would stop a legal search for such things: But hey Comey and Biden and Obama and Hillary all managed to get around these legal barriers to spy on Trumpieboy's campaign to get information on what he was planning to do (similar to the Watergate burglers, but on steroids). And of course we know that these people will never be prosecuted. 

 Well anyway it's not just campaign stuff: The coverup of a Trump assassin's presence on line is being found and that is what this is

 about: 

I had to laugh at the part where they say Trumpieboy didn't seem upset about it. I doubt that, but maybe he's too busy saving the world. Sort of like the same reason he's ignoring the psy op on Epstein files.

As for Trump's latest: Making pals with the Saudis etc will help make peace in Gaza, but the speech by Musk scares me:

 

 I doubt his robots will replace the farmers. We are only partly mechanized, but if you watch Clarkson's farm you can see the complications of being a farmer.

And all it would take is a solar flare or a minor problem with the internet or electrical grid to make the world fall apart.

Sort of like how Cloudflare crashed X and a lot of other sites yesterday.

Speaking of farmers: One of our farmér's daughters just died of bone cancer. A sad case.

Striped Cows?

 

Japan wins 19th Ig Nobel Prize for painting stripes on a cow

A Japanese research team's experiment involving disguising a cow as a zebra to fend off bloodthirsty insects received the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize's biology category on Sept. 18, making this the 19th consecutive year a team from Japan has won.

The results indicated that painting cows and other livestock to look like zebras is an actual viable alternative to insecticides, representing a potential new method of pest control beneficial to both the environment and human health.

Of course the problem is how to make cow painting cost effective

for later watching

 posting links so I can listen to these lectures on my tablet.

I thought this interview of Musk with Joe Rogan was about politics,' so I avoided it but today was running it in the background while I surfed the net:

 but at 1:50 he starts discussing the technical issues of the heat shields both on the Space Shuttle and on his rockets. 

My impression: He is a good teacher of scientific problems.

.....

and sorry ArtBell fans: no there are no UFO secrets out there or he'd know about them.

.....

and Dr Campbell reviews a new article about covid and corporate censorship

in medicine: Uh, Dr Marcia Angells of the NEJM was pointing this out 30 years ago, and back then ethicist Dr Pelligrino from Georgetown was pointing out the danger of making medicine into a profit making corporation at a time before the HMO's ate all of your medical care (One reason that I joined the IHS to practice medicine).

he also mentions the silence of the media on the massacres of Alawites and Christians by the new ISIS leaders of Syria. Indeed, the EU sent them money last week.

But Duterte, who prevented the Philippines from descending into  a narco state? The ICC in the Hague is prosecuting him, blaming him for oodles of murders that were not by hit squads but often pay back murders by people who could not get justice because of the court system's slowness, or because they were afraid if they complained they would be killed by drug gangs.

Priorities I guess. Durterte won over the CIA chosen candidate and tried to make nice with China, and these are his main sins against the NWO.

They plan to gaslight you

 The LATimes had an article explaining why we need gain of function research especially at a time when we are facing a bird flu epidemic.

Since the article blithely pretends that the lab leak theory of Covid is wrong, I take anything the author writes with a grain of salt.

I posted my criticism of parts of the article and quotes from other articles on my medical blog... it is too wordy to post here, but if you want to read related stuff check it out.

Key naive assumption stated in the article:

 Regulations  mean mistakes won't happen.

reality: Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Second assumption: Bird flu will kill us all.

well, no evidence of that from the Cattle infected humans.

Bird flu so far is not a problem: only a few cases reported from dairy cow workers and most of them were not very sick... , and given the fast mutation rate of influenza viruses there are many  experts that suggest gain of function research might not help to make a vaccine.

but it 'might be only a matter of time until Bird Flu mutates into another 1918 epidemic...

or would it? That epidemic was exacerbated by malnutrition from World War I, crowding in barracks, and may have hit the young because those over 45 years had immunity from a similar influenza strain that hit years earlier.

=====================

Update:

Piltdown man and the politics behind science

Historian Tom Holland (no, not the Spiderman guy) discusses the Piltdown man hoax in this video.

This was a famous hoax of the early 20th century, where a skull of a primitive man was discovered in England and celebrated by scientists as the missing link between man and apes. 

Alas, years later it was found to be a fake. A guy looking to be famous and who went around making fake fossils found the skull and presented it to the scientific world. Why? He wanted  Fame.

but the back story is more disturbing than simple forgery: This was the time of scientists embracing fundamentalist ideas of Darwinism, that the strongest/smartest/best survive, and that inferior types of organisms die off. And some embraced this idea, which  spawned  the Eugenics movement that took Darwin's ideas and applied them to humanity.

So if humans evolved in Britain, then the Piltdown man proved the popular theory that the British race was superior to those dirty Irish/African/Italian/Jews who were filling up the slums of London.

Sound familiar? 

A few people objected to the eugenics idea, and some scientists were bold enough to question the validity of the skull, but they were ignored because SCIENCE!

, but what is more disturbing is that some scientists who went along with the hoax knew it was a fake never revealed the truth.

 Indeed, one scientist who was involved in the dig (and found one of the teeth used in the hoax) hinted in his letters that he knew about it, and said nothing.

Yes I am talking about Teilhard de Chardin S.J., beloved by modernist Catholics (PBUH..../s), and someone whose ideas made him the Patron Saint of Transhumanism 

 

So why did he keep quiet? 

Because he was guilty of a joke gone wrong? (the most common opinion). Or was he silent because admitting it was a hoax would lose him friends in the scientific establishment and taint his reputation as a scientist? Or maybe because he "found" a tooth that was an important part of the find, and maybe some might suspect he was involved in the hoax.

So he remained silent about this "discovery" that not just supported evolution, but was used to support racial superiority in Europe with all of the eugenic implications that were being discussed in those days. 

But ideas have consequences. 

He lied, people died. 

Hitler was a big fan of these ideas, and unlike the scientists, actually acted on their ideas.

If the idea of scientists promoting a political agenda as science, lying about it, and ostracizing those who question it sounds familiar, it is because it resembles the coverup of where the covid virus originated. and the complicity of the Medical establishment and major medical journals in pushing this hoax and destroying the careers of those who said no. 

But Teilhard's ideas causing mischief didn't stop there: He went on to write philosophical books on evolution and a deity behind it who was helping humans evolve into a superior type of person.

Drawing upon his devout Christianity, the author argues for a morally idealistic understanding of human nature through which social advancement under the watchful eye of God will eventually lead to a total reconciliation of all things and a final state of absolute collective consciousness, which Chardin titled the "Omega Point".

 if some of this sounds familiar, it is because it's utopian vision overlaps some of what is now being discussed as the Singularity, where man (and machines) become a unity and evolve to a higher power.

The Omega Point is the final step before “Singularity” takes place. Once we achieve (or cross into) Singularity, which will be the first and truly major evolutionary step in mankind, we cease to be humans...

In the near future, computers will surpass our collective intellect, and our only way to maintain our place in the universe will be to merge with them. When transhumanists speak about the Omega Point, they refer to the point when our use of science and technology will improve our human state, making conditions such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and even death a thing of the past. 

Given the genocides and misery spawned by the utopian ideas of the 20th century, why am I not optimistic when I read such things? 

Sarah Connor, call your office. Cordwainer Smith wants to talk to you.

=========================

My unedited notes and reference on all of this, including a discussion of the covid scandal in Lancet were posted to my medical blog.

the good news that didn't get reported

 lots of conspiracy theories about solar storms and the Carrington event.

Lots of hysteria.

So the latest solar flare gave us lots of lights in the sky, but no disaster. WTF? We were told it would kill us all.

But it didn't happen: because:

From Behindtheblack, a space blog:

What this most recent storm has shown us all, however, is that the engineers and managers who run those systems did their proper due diligence in the ensuing decades. By 2024 they were prepared for such a big storm, and when one arrived on May 11, 2024 they made sure that infrastructure continued to function throughout. And it did.

freedom of speech

Tucker continues to cause problems.

Everyone pointing to his interview with Putin as if it was treason, not a routine interview similar to what used to be done on the BBC, but his interview here is also causing problems.

 

real clear politics discusses here.

"From their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War Two would collapse."

reality check: There are other ways to inform people (the use of cassettes with religious sermons was how the Ayatolla got rid of the Shah, who had jailed all the leftists and censored their complaints in the news). 

But allowing freedom of speech and freedom of religious opinions is the basis of the US Bill of Rights, and is needed for a free society.

This is not a one sided attempt of censorship (see previous post about boogiewoogiegate). 

So this is a normal geopolitic tactic.

What is new is how this censorship program was extended to not allow ordinary medical discussions about covid policies and treatments.

when I worked in Africa, we knew the Soviet Union spread anti vax propaganda and lies (including anti vax stuff that got doctor giving out vaccines killed). So there is a reason for the CIA etc. to push the US point of view and help grass roots medical institutions in their public health work.

But when the national security state pushes the idea that the Covid virus didn't come out of a Chinese lab leak, gets a major medical journal to post an article signed by "experts" saying this, and later censors experimental cheap medicines (e.g. Ivermectin) while pushing other experimental cheap medicines and vaccines, I suggest that such things are outside their area of expertise.

Headsup Dr. Malone. who posts the transcript.

a lot of this is geopolitical censorship. Heck, what else is new.

but what is new is the covid censorship media project

There's over 60 universities now who get federal government grants to do the censorship work ...They did this, for example, with COVID. They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these protected VIPs and individuals whose reputations had to be protected online.

And they created these code books, they broke things down into narratives. The Atlanta Council, for example, was a part of this government funded consortium, something called the Virality Project, which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents we're talking about around covid, everything from COVID origins to vaccine efficacy.

And then they broke down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about covid. And whenever something started trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. 

it is bad enough to use such things (dirty politics is not new: Caesar was killed because the propaganda persuaded folk he wanted to be king). But when a government uses their power to censor their opponents, and works with the social media to do such censorship, then democracy is in danger.

And of course, the bias in covid coverage, even in medical journals, has resulted in people just not trusting these institutions.

Sigh. 

History lesson of the day: Boffin power

Wikipedia:

Boffin is a British slang term for a scientist, engineer, or other person engaged in technical or scientific research and development. A "boffin" was viewed by some in the regular military or government services as odd, quirky or peculiar, though quite bright and essential to helping in the war effort through having and developing the key ideas leading to transformative military capabilities....

So if you are reading this, it might be because a boffin worked for years developing a blue LED.

Why are blue LEDs important? after all, red LEDs had been around for years.

This video explains why making a blue LED was so difficult, and why this is important. And it also tells the story of the stubborn boffin who found the solution by  doing hands on work, and the two other university scientists whose work contributed to the discovery...

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Shuji Nakamura won The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014

shared with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano

The Nobel committee explains:

Lighting plays a major role in our quality of life. The development of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has made more efficient light sources possible. Creating white light that can be used for lighting requires a combination of red, green, and blue light. Blue LEDs proved to be much more difficult to create than red and green diodes. During the 1980s and 1990s Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura successfully used the difficult-to-handle semiconductor gallium nitride to create effecient blue LEDs.

headsup from Kuya. 

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

 Some of us are old enough to remember the old Timex commercials.

The Timex was essentially a cheap watch that ordinary people could afford, and one of it's selling points was that it was rugged and wouldn't break easily:

it's slogan was It takes a licking and keeps on ticking...

So one might say cynically, well that's nice but they don't make them like they used to.

But maybe you are wrong:

This is a triumph of modern engineering and quality control by Chinese manufacturing.

And although one usually thinks that iPhones are made in China, they are really made with componants from all over the world: 

While it’s tempting to take the Made in China text on an iPhone at face value, not everything that goes into making an Apple product comes from one place. The iPhone’s display, for example, is made by either Samsung or LG in South Korea. The flash memory and DRAM, on the other hand, likely come from Kioxia’s factories in Japan. And the Gorilla Glass that protects the screen could make its way from a Corning factory in the USA, Taiwan, or Japan. Apple’s A-series SoC, meanwhile, is custom silicon designed in California but manufactured by Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC. And we’ve barely even scratched the surface with this list so far.

an example of the interrelatedness of today's world and a warning that the modern world relies on a supply chain,  

But anyway, in today's world where emphasis on equity means that more time is spent shaming employee into agreement instead of evil science, it's nice to know that some things still work.

The sour fruit of Teilhard's evolutionary ideas

 

 a recent article in the New Yorker discussing the Pope who in Mongolia revealed he love Teilhard's philosophy, and that this might be the tipping point for the coming synod

As it turns out, Teilhard’s theology of cosmic spiritual progress is a useful way to understand the challenges that Francis is currently facing

what is left out of that is Jesus.

...His written work, a sustained effort to reconcile Christian theology with the theory of evolution, placed him in the vanguard of twentieth-century theology...

which only shows the problem of theologians who no longer believe all that stuff about Jesus. 

Teilhard’s notion that the earth would someday be surrounded by a complex information system powered by human consciousness has been seen as anticipating the Internet...

 and don't forget his ideas of evolving intelligence is similar to transhumanist ideas, of ubermensch who live forever via genetic engineering or via being linked to computers. 

But Teilhard’s most memorable concept is the notion that “tout ce qui monte, converge,” or “everything that rises must converge”that the various forces of natural evolution and human civilization are all ascending in a pattern of spiritual progress and will converge in a “Point Omega” at the end of time.

But he posited spontaneous evolution, not evolution via labs and CRISPR and computer implants that merge your brain with a computer.

And behind all of this shiny brave new world are the lessons of history.

one of the backstories of war and conquest going back to the ancient world is the logic of conquerers: that they are superior in some way and you peons are inferior, so obey us or die.

 the idea that some people are justified in conquering inferior races can be seen not just in European colonialism and in Rome's history, but in Chinese history, Japanese conquering Korea, the Mongul invasion of India, Genghis Khan, or Shaka Zulu among others.

So the fruits of Teilhard's evolution leads to what? A universe of love, or history repeating itself as the egotitical use his theory to insist science gave them the right to take over the world? and this time, the argument will be it's science so shut up.

(sound familiar?)

Then you have the ideas that Teilhard's ideas rconcile science and evolution with the faith: something was behind evolution and man will evolve to an omega point and voila paradise.

Theologically that has a lot of holes in it that no one wants to talk about.

 uh, Jesus?

Because at a time when Rome was proud to have conquered the world and imposed order and peace on it's minions (just ignore the slaves and massacres of course), God pulled one of his tricks and came to earth as a little baby born in a working class family in a remote area of the empire, and brought another idea: that the creator of the universe loves and cares for those who are least important in the eyes of the world.
that all men are created equal in God's eyes and that we serve him in caring for others....

which brings me back to the Pope and his fake synodality meeting that are prescripted so that everyone approves of his "reforms", which stress global warming, ecology, and sexual liberation for all, and the idea that the church should be an NGO cooperating with the global effort toward peace and a sustainable world, not a church dedicated to preaching Jesus.

This has geopolitical implications...

But the US press which hates conservatives prefers to frame the story in good liberals vs bad conservatives (who are of course white racists)...And I can only shake my head over their racist assumption that only white European and American opinions matter...(Just ignore all these African bishops, who actually believe in Jesus. As the Anglican church can tell you, they aren't exactly going to go along with the modern heresies).

which brings us to another problem with Teilhard: a willingness to tolrate scientific fraud in the Piltdown hoax to support his belief in evolution,  and his ability to ignore the racist assumptions behind the Piltdown hoax... 

Teilhard was involved in the Piltdown man hoax: maybe not behind it but very close, and he never opened his mouth to question it.

And the Piltdown man was pushed by British establishment that loved eugenics and evolution and used the Piltdown man to prove the Brits were the first true humans (i.e. inferior races evolved later and were inferior. see argument here).

Osborn studied the intelligence and physical attributes of modern humans to reveal their distinct racial and evolutionary journeys. He judged the black race to be the oldest and, by implication, the least evolved;

italics mine 

the white race had made the greatest advances. As with Dawn Man, environment did the heavy lifting in shaping the evolution of the races.....

Proof of inherent biological and evolutionary difference between Europeans, Africans, and Asians was of acute importance to Osborn because he believed strongly in keeping these group separate. ...

He co-founded the Galton Society in 1918 and American Eugenics Society in 1922, both dedicated to the advancement of the white race through eugenics. These groups sponsored “Fitter Family” contests, anti-miscegenation laws, and sterilization drives for unfit groups and “inferior” races.

Buck vs Bell, anyone? 

and other ideas morphed from this small seed: and alas every conservative site echoes this type of racism against immigration:

Osborn was also very politically active, passionately lobbying for the Immigration Act of 1924 that drastically limited immigration from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe.

ah, but what about now, when we can make designer babies? Back then, "Nature had shaped each human race into an evolutionary form suited to its specific environment" was the idea, but in today's world we actually can do it ourselves.

CRISPR an;yone? 

A recent book about Teilhard work with the Peking man (not discovered by him) seems to say it was this discovery that gave him the idea of evolution of man. But his involvement with the Piltdown hoax suggests he already had that idea and merely wanted evidence to support his preconceived idea. Fast forward to Peking man.

A spectacular example of erectus was discovered in 1929 by Chardin and the David crew in China’s Zhoukoudian caves. There they unearthed the fossil dubbed Peking Man—“as typical a link between man and the apes as one could wish for,” the priest wrote exultantly. (This vital find, along with many other fossils, vanished in 1941 during the Japanese occupation of China.)

how convenient.

Smithsonian magazine discusses the PIltdown hoax

and this article notes discusses Teilhard's part in the hoax.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit paleontologist, priest, and philosopher. In the figures published in articles in 1943 and 1951, he attempted to draw a "plausible schematic reconstruction of the natural connections between fossil men" and a "phyletic composition of the human group".

 

I draw attention to Teilhard's reference to Eoanthropus ("Piltdown Man") in small print in his figure that was first printed in 1943. Most suspiciously, there is no reference to this (supposedly important) genus in the associated text, nor is there any reference whatsoever to "Piltdown Man" in the article published in 1951.

 

Even as early as January 1913, Teilhard may have been aware that "Piltdown Man" was a hoax or joke, artificially associating a human cranium with a modified orangutan mandible. A new suspect is Edgar Willett (rather than Charles Dawson). Teilhard may have been an advisory accomplice in a joke that went seriously wrong.

so it was a joke? so it's okay?

Science magazine has more about Teilhard's involement and continues to say it was a joke, because of course, one can not be forgiven to be involved in lying in science, but hey, a joke can be forgiven.

Dawson's calculated chicanery underscores why studying Piltdown Man is still important to modern science, De Groote says. Although such a brazen hoax is unlikely to occur again in physical anthropology because of the sophistication of modern analytical techniques, she says, there's still a danger of being too quick to accept interpretations that adhere to what scientists expect to find.. ...

sound familiar?  

"Piltdown Man sets a good example of the need for us to take a step back and look at the evidence for what it is," she says, "and not for whether it conforms to our preconceived ideas."

So the debate about Teilhard and the Piltdown hoax also could be discussed in the distortions about covid (or global warming) where scientists who go against the shaky science are silenced, not just by their collegues but in scientific journals... 

and like the Piltdown man hoax, this is not about science per se but about censoring ideas 

Raman spectroscopy

 I pointed out in an earlier blogpost about Spaghettification, i.e. pulling a object into spaghetti type strings when it enters a black hole.

so in today's SciDaily news I read a story about scientists learning how to use Ramen spectroscopy to analyze proteins without cooking them accidentally when they do so.

Uh, Ramen Spectroscopy? As in Ramen noodles?

Nope.

it got it's name from C.V. Ramen, the Indian scientist who developed the technique back in the 1920s.

Fusion? True or hype?

 

this speech is a couple years old, from the UK and discusses the problems of actually using fusion, and discusses what fusion will lead to.

translation: if it works, then maybe you will have electricity for your electric batteries and cars.

As predicted here: 

Noodles (and sphaghetti) in Space

 AnnAlthouse has a link to an article about scientists discovering gravity waves, which is apparantly a big thing.

But what caught my attention is this part of the WaPost article (behind paywall) that ends with this comment:

[T]he newly announced waves are not one-shot wonders, and theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion....

italics mine.

Noodling?

In Oklahoma, that word means the practice of digging into the mud with your bare hands to catch a catfish.

or does it refer to noodles? 

Or is it because the word noodle resembles the word google (the oo sound is similar in both words) and googling meaning to search on the internet for something

So I did google the word

That apparantly is a new word, because the Cambridge dictionary defines it as: 

to do or think about something without giving it full or serious attention:

wordnik adds these definitions:

Noun: The practice and sport of noodling (fishing for catfish using the bare hands).

 

Noun:Musical improvisation.

 This isn't the first time I ran into a food word used as a scientific description: In an earlier blogpost I did note the use of the word Spaghettification, which means a stretching an object into long noodles as it gets sucked into a black hole.

well, anyway, here is a video explaining why discovering gravity waves is so important. 

and one irony about this is that it was found partly thanks to the now destroyed Arecibo radiotelescope. 

Why destroyed? It collapsed in 2020 Because no one apparently was doing proper inspections of the supporting cables

The UKGuardian noted:

a socket holding the auxiliary cable that snapped failed in what experts believe could be a manufacturing error.

italics mine. Bought from the lowest bidder?

or was maintanance the problem? Steel corrosion is a problem in a damp environment where hurricanes happen all the time. 

The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory that is managed by the University of Central Florida, said crews who evaluated the structure after the first incident determined that the remaining cables could handle the additional weight. But on 6 November another cable broke.

and after two of them snapped, they took their time to fix it, so the whole thing collapsed. DUH.

a Nature article from 2015 notes that the lack of funding was a major problem for the telescope even then. 

The article ends with a quote about seeking outside funding from private donations (instead of the NSF) and in view of what happened is ironic: 

Efforts to find an outside donor have been ongoing for some time, to no avail, Nolan says. Users can be expected to pay for telescope time, but “someone has to pay for the base operations — keeping the grass cut, keeping the big steel structure from falling out of the sky,” he says. “And that’s the part everyone’s finding too expensive.”

italics mine. 

or as the saying goes 

 For want of a nail socket the shoe cable was lost. For want of a shoe cable the horse telescope was lost. 

and the loss of an expensive telescope points to a larger problem:

Regular cable inspiection is an important  issue for bridges that are not being inspected and repaired.

According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, there are 171.5 million crossings per day on over 45,000 structurally deficient U.S. bridges—a significant number of which have bridge cable corrosion issues.

italics mine.....some back story here and here.

 

Behold the power of beer

....

 from Phys.org

It was a "bartender thing" in the city to take a few peanuts and pop them into beers, Pereira said."

Because the peanuts are denser than the beer, they first sink down to the bottom of the glass.

Then each peanut becomes what is called a "nucleation site". Hundreds of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form on their surface, acting as buoys to drag them upwards.

When the bubbles reach the surface, they burst.. The peanuts then dive down before being propelled up again by freshly formed bubbles,

more technical details at the link. 

the scientists now plan to study how this varies with peanuts of different shapes and with different beers.

By the way, this is not the first time Scientific discoveries were made by observing beer bubbles:

Don Glaser ...won the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber at Berkeley Lab. He discusses how, inspired by bubbles in a glass of beer, he invented the bubble chamber and detected cosmic-ray muons.

Tonga volcano caused your GPS system to wobble and other science stories

it is not just solar flares that can knock out satellites etc.

 Science alert story about the eruption of the Tonga volcano in Jan 2022.

The volcanic eruption in Tonga in January 2022 was so large, it created waves in the upper atmosphere that constituted their own form of space weather. It was one of the largest explosions in modern history and impacted GPS across Australia and Southeast Asia. As we describe in our new study in the journal Space Weather, the eruption caused a super "plasma bubble" over northern Australia that lasted for hours.

the article has the technical details of superbubbles, that compare this to the designs you see when you add cold cream to your coffe.

More in this video...

No reports if the huge explosion would affect the weather (Mt Pinatubo lowered the world temperature for a year or two if I remember correctly).

Luckily the eruption only killed three people according to this report.

But there is another volcano that might cause a major disaster:...The UKGuardian has lots of photos:
...a lot depends if it just has local lava flows, or local pyroclastic flows... and of course, the dust and sulfur can cause asthma and the dust when it rains can collapse houses.

Sigh.

the problem about evacuation is that, if they evacuate and nothing happens, then the next warning will mean people will ignore the warning and stay put. Often most of the family will leave but leave one person to guard their possessions against looting, and of course the dust can kill farm animals and crops.

In the meanwhile, here in the Philippines, we are watching the typhoon that just devestated Guam that might be heading our way.

It is; very large which means the areas affected by wind and rain are larger. 

UPI says it could affect not just the Philippines but Taiwan, China, and Japan.

And it is traveling slowly, which means that the rains will last longer than if it travels quickly, and of course flooding is a major problem. It will probably only hit north of here but we are downstream from the mountains of northern Luzon so floods are a worry.

right now, we are having heavy thunderstorms every evening (the yearly monsoon rains) which is good because it means less of a need to pay for irrigation pumps to flood the fields to prepare them for rice.

But it also means the soil is saturated, so even if we only are hit by the edge of this typhoon, flooding as water runs downstream from the nothern mountains added to the monsoon rains, is a bigger danger.

Gain of function experiments? Evil Trump stopped them

 At least that is what this LATimes article says.

Uh, actually these experiments were stopped by President Obama and then given an ok to restart a week or two before Trump took over (and in the chaos I guess they figured this would be overlooked).

But now the LATIMES Business page  (not the science page?) insists:

Column: How Trump’s anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research...

yup. he stopped EcoHealth from funding gain of function research, something that a lot of scientists think developed the covid strain that killed a couple million people.

I discussed all of that in the past LINK but one does wonder at this part of the article:

Trump’s action magnified what already had become a targeted attack on EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak. Republicans and advocates of the theory that the COVID virus leaked from a Chinese lab have tried to depict them as villains of the pandemic.

hmm... Peter Daszak? Wasn't he the guy who in January 2020 got a lot of scientists together to write an article in Lancet saying covid was not from a lab leak?

The problem? He funded the Wuhan lab, so should not have been allowed to do this. 

Indeed: he has now been thrown off the Lancet panel still investigating the origin of covid.

Yahoo news :Jerry Dunleavy June 22, 2021· 

 Peter Daszak Zoologist, disease ecologist Peter Daszak, a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology who steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding to the Chinese lab, has been recused from a COVID-19 origins investigation run by a commission organized under the auspices of the Lancet medical journal.

 italics mine. Recuse means removed because of a conflict of interest. 

 But hey, don't mention that in your article LATIMEs writer. If you do maybe your propaganda that Trumpieboy hated science might not be believed.

So the lies and coverup continue, but hey, what do you know peasants?

As I said in my earlier post: One arguement that covid originated in the wet market was believable because it was a mile or two away from the lab, and at least two strains of the virus were found there. 

Then Mosher's article in the NYTpost connected the dots by pointing out that some personnel were stealing and selling lab animals, and that explains the missing link of how the wuhan lab animals went to the wet market and spread the virus.

Conspiracy theory? Uh not if you are familiar with a culture of corruption. In the Philippines, double dead meat is a problem. so is stealing /diverting stuff by underpaid staff.

So why wouldn't scientists figure this out?  

Because they are scientists, not cops. 

Scientists ask a question and figure you are telling the truth so believe you. 

Cops however might dig a bit and find things being covered up. 

MIT technology Review shows how scientists examine the lab leak vs market theory: 

Drawing on myriad sources, including peer-reviewed papers, insights from epidemiologists who had access to first-hand information, and media reports, he tried to determine whether bias crept in when clinicians in Wuhan were trying to understand the viral outbreak.

What he found—not only that there was no obvious bias, but also that many of the first diagnosed cases of covid were either people who worked at the market or lived nearby—has settled his mind that the virus is unlikely to have emerged from a lab leak and that the market was the site of a spillover from animals.

A virologist would assume these people were truthful.

But what if they lied, or didn't want to tell about rumors about their friends on the staff diverting animals to be sold, or maybe just they were snobs who didn't notice the lower paid staff exist: You know, the ones who might be the ones most likely to divert sick animals because they are underpaid.

Corruption is behind counterfeit drugs that kill people, much of which comes from China or India.  UKGuardian article is from 2019 but is probably still valid.

as for Mosher: He was the one who spilled the beans on China's forced abortion policy, back in the 1980s when few westerners living with the elite in the big cities didn't notice this was going on.

Westerners simply do not understand that such things happen. 

The Tabloid the UK Mail discusses the problem of wild animals being sold in wet markets in China.

A study from researchers in China, the UK and Canada that went unpublished for more than a year has been posted online

It finds that more than 38 species of wild live animals were sold for food and as pets from the markets in Wuhan

Many of the animals were sold infected with diseases, including coronaviruses that originate in birds and in fowl

The findings may offer a clue in the origins of COVID-19 and whether it jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a lab

Researchers sent the study to a journal in February 2020 and was rejected, was rejected twice more and than sat in a WHO inbox for more than year

Italics mine.

So the problem was known: What was not known is where the animals came from.

Sceptics say yes they sell animals but no proof they were the covid ones, However they quote a few Chinese sources about the problem.

Animals 24 7 notes the monkey trade going on. This is not about covid, but gives one an idea on how corruption works.

The reason I posted the Professor Feynman videos in an earlier blog post was that the Space Shuttle investigation was all set to assert it was an accident that could not have been forseen, but Feynman, who was a regular mensch, not a big shot or a bureaucrat, actually went and talked to the lower staff and figured out the problem. And being a non bullshitter, dared to say this out loud.

I was going to say with more scientists like Feynman we wouldn't need to go to conspiracy sites to figure out the problem. 

But of course, one of the scandals of the Covid debacle is the censorship of experts who did not support the official story.

Joe Rogan, call your office. 

-------------------------

Update: Dr C has a short video on big shots questioning stuff (and the video has links to more information). And he does mention about good intentions leading to bad stuff happening.

then we have this report by an evil Republican.(/sarcasm).

debunking experts

 

.....,,,,.....

Science lesson of the day

 

Asteroids, Armadillos and Leprosy

Science headline of the day:

 
Asteroid the size of 33 armadillos to pass Earth Sunday - NASA...

Asteroid 2023 FL2 is 35 meters, which is as much as almost 33 nine-banded armadillos lined up tail-to-snout. However, it won't hit us, and armadillos might even be more dangerous.The asteroid in question has been designated 2023 FL2 and was discovered just this year, according to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Headsup Instapundit

So how big are nine banded armadillos?

  Wikipedia says:

Nine-banded armadillos generally weigh from 2.5–6.5 kg (5.5–14.3 lb), though the largest specimens can scale up to 10 kg (22 lb). They are one of the largest species of armadillos.[7] Head and body length is 38–58 cm (15–23 in), which combines with the 26–53 cm (10–21 in) tail, for a total length of 64–107 cm (25–42 in).

Most people north of Oklahoma or Texas only have seen them dead as road kill, which is the idea behind this  comment on the Instapundit site:

Nine-banded armadillos are Texas truck mines, waiting on the road to perfectly time their defensive behavior jump to enter into the fan housing of your average (older) truck. Such a mess.

their tendency to jump to avoid predators  explains why so many become road kill.

When startled, the nine-banded armadillo can jump straight upward about three to four feet into the air. This reflex may help scare off predators in the wild. Unfortunately, many armadillos are killed when they jump into the underside of moving vehicles.

But please be careful when you touch an armadillo: They are the only non human animal that carries Hansens disease, aka Leprosy.

Smithsonian article discusses this.

This is a minor problem in the USA where only a couple dozen cases a year catch this disease, but as poor people move into the Amazon to farm, they also tend to eat meat from local animals, including the armadillo. 

Nat Geo explains:

The U.S. documents around 200 cases of leprosy each year—only around 25 percent of which are associated with armadillos. But Brazil records around 25,000 cases annually, which may actually be an underestimate according to Spencer’s research.

Note: the research was on a small number of people and most had antibodies, suggesting exposure, but no active disease

And while it’s true that armadillos can serve as a reservoir for leprosy that can sometimes spill back into humans, it’s worth noting that we gave them the disease first. “People brought leprosy from Europe, with the ships that came from the colonizers,” Spencer says.

uh, stop blaming Europe as the source of the disease: it came from Africa via the European slave traders.

actually leprosy, which was common in medieval Europe, sort of disappeared after the black plague killed most of the lepers, while leprosy in west Africa, where the Europeans obtained slaves, is still a health problem.

40 years ago, when I worked in Liberia, I knew the nun who ran the leprosy treatment outreach clinics there.

She was funded by the Knights of Malta, who are one of the NGOs who work with the WHO to are trying to eradicate the disease there.).

  Atlas obscura article about the Knights of Malta,

Also known as the Knights or Hospitallers of Malta, the Order has a global staff of some 42,000—mostly medical personnel, from a range of religions—and almost twice that many volunteers. There are national associations empowered to set their own humanitarian agendas, and no central, governing authority for these programs. The Order’s staff has provided disaster relief after typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, as well as care for people afflicted with ebola or leprosy in West Africa and Southeast Asia, and operates specialized dementia facilities in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Leprosy is easily treated nowadays and with aggressive treatment, can be eliminated from countries. 

This site has up to date statistics and information on how the disease is eradicated. And it seems to be working:

Over the past 20 years, more than 16 million leprosy patients have been treated. The prevalence rate of the disease has dropped by 99%: from 21.1 cases per 10 000 people in 1983 to 0.2 cases per 10 000 people in 2015. A dramatic decrease has been achieved in the global disease burden: from 5.2 million people with leprosy in 1985, to 805 000 people in 1995, 753 000 in 1999, and 176 176 people with leprosy at the end of 2015.

Happy Pi Day

 LINK

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to recite the infinite digits of Pi, talk to their friends about math, and eat pie.