Notices by Minoru Saba (minorusaba@toad.social), page 11

"It is an inherently unstable situation. Hezbollah needs to maintain its credibility as the tip of the spear of Islamic resistance to Israel. Netanyahu needs to keep Israel in a continual state of war to put off... his risk of a fall from office with corruption charges pending in the courts. Both seek to stay on the brink of a wider war..."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/18/israels-double-punch-humiliation-of-hezbollah-is-a-dance-on-the-edge-of-an-abyss
🔸Lots of crazy chickens racing towards Tel Megiddo —only an hour's drive from the border— egged on by lots of bad actors😬
#armageddon

@davidho Tokyo's Suica/Pasmo card seems to be more passenger-friendly:
"If you are caught out and run out of charge on the card when arriving at a station, you can even top-up at special kiosks inside the gates before you exit"
https://en.japantravel.com/guide/how-to-get-a-suica-card/22316

Perhaps it's another example of Japan's Galápagos syndrome🤔
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome

Serious PSA: If you’re taking the RER C from Paris to Versailles, don’t get the t+ ticket (€2.15). You have to buy a ticket for Versailles (€4.15).

There are people waiting to check at the exit and the instant fine is €32. I saw many people caught out by this.

It's an exciting time for the future of space flight and space exploration, and the reusability of the SpaceX system will be revolutionary - once they complete the development phase, which they are making great progress towards.

I can't help but worry about the amount of stuff we are dumping in the atmosphere though. Every launch involves a huge amount of fuel, and every reentry involves burning material (even if whatever is reentering does not burn up on reentry).

@MicheleV_AK
"Should We Call the Threat to Trump an “Assassination Attempt”?
The gunman never had him in his line of sight nor fired a shot. Trump ignored Secret Service warnings about security at his golf course."
"So far, Routh has only been charged with gun crimes, not attempted murder or assassination. Yet Republicans are not only raving about a second assassination attempt but blaming Democrats for it"
- Joan Walsh (The Nation, 17 Sept 2024)
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-assassination-violence/
#USpol #MediaFail

"...a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant"
compared with "the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts"
https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/neuron-computer-chips-could-overcome-power-limitations-digital/
🔸i.e. nature has come up with a more elegant, energy-efficient solution compared to the arrogant, brute-force trend of money-driven technology

"Tech firms and Silicon Valley billionaires...have another incentive to promote [nuclear power]: artificial intelligence"
"“If you were to integrate large language models, GPT-style models into search engines, it’s going to cost 5 times as much environmentally as standard search,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group focused on the social impacts of AI"
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/nuclear-power-oklo-sam-altman-ai-energy-rcna139094
🔸"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad"
#AI #nuclear

Perhaps a tad too dystopian, but have been wondering when "self-destruct" becomes a stealthy standard feature required by control-freak authorities for mobile devices😬
https://journa.host/@w7voa/113155359946366273

"Enormous #floods have once again engulfed much of #SouthSudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced from their homes by huge floods a few years ago and were yet to return before this new threat emerged.

Now, there are concerns that these displaced communities may never be able to return to their lands."

https://www.wired.com/story/south-sudan-floods-the-first-example-of-a-mass-population-permanently-displaced-by-climate-change/

"Floods across 14 central and West African nations have affected at least 4 million people — rendering many of them homeless — killed about 1,000 and are devastating crops"
"Researchers blame this year’s deluge...on global warming, saying that rising temperatures are resulting in the air storing more water vapor"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/africa-floods-affect-4-million-people-deepen-food-crisis/ar-AA1qHv1v
#Africa #floods #FoodCrisis #GlobalWarming

"...catastrophic floods in West and Central Africa, affecting over four million people in 14 countries [Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo]"
"...spike in humanitarian needs comes amid a regional hunger crisis already affecting 55 million people"

https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-ramps-response-flood-hit-west-africa-region-grapples-record-levels-acute-hunger
#Africa #floods #hunger

"Theme One"
Composed by George Martin
Performed by The George Martin Orchestra
https://youtu.be/wZ0UrwusWcM

I remember hearing this as the control room club checked out the sound systems in the school auditorium.
Learnt later that it was the theme tune for BBC's Radio One.
Learnt 30 years later that it had been composed by George Martin.

Next, these images of NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II from Feb 7, 1984, during the STS-41B mission, when he made the first ever untethered free flight using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) and starred in one of the most memorable images of our time, an image that inspires us to this day.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/photos-from-sts-41b/
2/n

"If a vacancy occurs on the Republican side [between the nominating convention & Nov general election], the Republican National Committee can either reconvene the national convention or select a new candidate"
"Neither party... requires that the presidential candidate’s running mate be elevated to the top of the ticket, but that would obviously be the most likely scenario"
🔸Cui bono?🤔
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/12/politics/presidential-candidate-race-drop-what-matters/
#USpol #LineOfSuccession

There’s obviously something unusual about a person willing to spend a decade figuring out how to prevent roofs collapsing in longwall coal mines.

“Why I find it so fascinating is a mystery to everyone I’ve ever met,” said Chris.

“But I do.”

Most people capable of solving such a time-intensive technical problem would grow bored of it before they were done.

“You have to be smart but not too smart to put in the years,” as he put it.

The federal government has long been a natural home for such characters:

people with their noses buried in some particular problem from which they feel no need to look up.

But once Chris had solved his particular technical problem, he had nothing to do but to look up.

“I said, ‘Okay, I solved the pillar problem for longwall mines.

What do I want to do next?

I want to look at whatever has the direst safety implications.’”

He never questioned the path he had put himself on,
but he soon had new thoughts about how to move along it.

“As far as I was concerned, there was only one reason I was there:
worker safety,” he said.

“At the Bureau of Mines you didn’t have to feel that way.

The kinds of things we did research on were usually not the same things that killed people.

It was more about keeping the mine stable and working.

But I started asking: What’s killing people?”

And so he brought his statistical mind to another mother lode of data:
casualty reports,
which had been meticulously collected since they were mandated by law in 1952.

He began to read individual accident reports.

Patterns leaped out from them.

Chris had always imagined that accidents in a coal mine followed the same logic as casualties on a battlefield.

In war, the rule of thumb had always been that for every soldier who died, three or four would be wounded.

He now saw that for every miner who was killed by a falling roof, 100 were injured.

More oddly, the injuries were occurring in mines where the pillars held up.

“When I looked at the data, the support system seemed to be working, but you had all these injuries,” said Chris.

He assembled another database.

It showed that injuries were being caused by smaller pieces of rock falling between the pillars.

As these fragments could be the size of Volkswagen buses,
they occasionally killed,
but mostly they just maimed. “

I realized that death and injuries were two separate problems,” he said.

“On a battlefield the same bullet can kill or wound you.

Here there are two different mechanisms.”

He’d been so focused on the bullets that killed that he hadn’t noticed the bullets that usually just wounded.

This was the problem that roof bolts had been invented to fix.

Right through World War II, miners had used timbers to support the roof directly over their heads.

In the 1940s, a handful of coal companies showed that it was far more effective to bolt the roof,
effectively to itself.

It struck many miners, at first, as completely weird.

They’d drill a hole into the mine roof and then drive a metal bolt between three and six feet long into it.

The bolt pinned the sedimentary layers together the way a toothpick pins a turkey club sandwich.

The success of the bolt
— and the toothpick
— turns on the presence of at least one solid, strong layer.

Roof bolts, in effect, used strong rock to hold weaker rock in place.

“The single most important technological development in the field of ground control in the entire history of mining,” Chris called them.

Roof bolts were adopted more rapidly than any other technology in coal mining.

Someone had the idea, and almost instantly they were being drilled into mine roofs.

They obviously worked and yet … they hadn’t.

At least not for a very long time.

In the accident statistics, Chris stumbled upon a riddle:

The powerful new technology hadn’t reduced deaths and injuries.

“The accepted story was someone invented roof bolts and it was safer right away,” he said.

“I looked into it and saw it just wasn’t true.

By the end of the 1950s, death rates had actually gone up!”

It was a full two decades before roof fall fatality rates began to decline, and dramatically.

That year, 1969, also happened to be the year that the Bureau of Mines was finally given the enforcement power it needed to properly regulate the industry.

He graduated in 1981 without a clear idea of where to go next.

He had a serious interest (mine safety)
but no obvious place to express it.

He worked for a spell with an engineering consulting firm in Chicago
but found it dull and beside the point.

He toyed with going to work as a field engineer for a coal mining company and even spent a summer in mines in Wyoming.

There he was reminded of the realities of a coal miner’s life.

“A guy says, ‘Let’s go to a bar.’

It’s 50 guys and one woman stripper.

He says, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’

It was the exact same scene:
50 guys and one woman stripper.

It made me so depressed
— that’s all I need is to be one of those 50 fucking guys.”

Then Bieniawski called to say that he’d just received new funding for a PhD student.

He wanted Chris to be that student.

All Chris needed was a thesis topic.

The coal mining industry soon supplied it.

On Dec. 19, 1984, a roof collapsed inside the Wilberg Mine,
just outside of Salt Lake City.

The miners at Wilberg had been trying to break the world record for the most coal mined in a single day.

Nine senior officials from the mine’s owner, Utah Power and Light,
had entered the mine to witness history.

Suddenly, a fire broke out in one of the two main tunnels.

Before the executives or 18 working coal miners could escape,
the roof in the second tunnel collapsed and blocked their exit.

All 27 people wound up trapped inside an inferno.

It would take a year to recover their bodies.

And Christopher Mark thought:

If they’d figured out the right formula for their pillars, they’d all still be alive.

🕵️ Still using Chrome?

How do you feel about any site being able to call `document.browsingTopics()`to learn all about you?

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/private-advertising/topics/web/topic-classification

"La Serenissima"
performed by Rondò Veneziano
https://youtu.be/Qjek7AlTvgk

Heard this over 40 years ago when it was released in connection with the campaign to save Venice from sinking beneath the waves.

Call me radical but I’m totally ok with the idea of a 100% tax rate.

Should I or my business profit so much that money becomes trivial, I’d expect the state the step in and make better use of it. In fact, it should be considered a national security risk that those entities hold so much collateral.

And for those that are hard-of-thinking, the majority of that profit ordinarily goes towards paying their executives too much, further exploiting developing countries to increase margins and destroy competition, and lobbying politicians for all kinds of deregulation and to further erode worker’s rights and make more money.

None of which is in your interests.

@Theblueone DADZ

NO MORE POAST YOU GIBS SNAC

I AMZ GUITAR OF DAY