Notices by John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)

If a US president wanted to do everything possible to cede dominance on the world stage
to China, they would

• destroy US trade partnerships and leave trade organizations ✔️
• destroy US military alliances and come out against NATO ✔️
• drastically cut funding to US science ✔️
• make it hard for foreign students to study and work in the US ✔️
• damage US democratic institutions, making it more like a despotic authoritarian regime ✔️

and oh yeah

• push the US into another war in the Middle East ✔️

Balloons carrying radio antennas over Antarctica have detected mysterious radio pulses coming up from the ice! Physicists can't yet explain them.

These balloons detect radio pulses when extraordinarily energetic particles from outer space smash into the Earth's atmosphere and create showers of electrons and positrons. People aren't sure where these particles come from. Most are probably atomic nuclei shot out of supernovae or quasars. That's one reason we've got these balloons over the Antarctic - to learn more. But I'm talking about a different mystery.

Some of these radio pulses come from above. Others come from below! But that's not a mystery: radio waves are reflected by the ice. And we can tell that's what's happening, because when radio waves are reflected, their polarization flips.

But a few pulses coming from below DON'T have their polarization flipped. And nobody knows what makes those! That's the mystery. Enough explanations have been ruled out that people are starting to talk about "new physics".

This "polarization flip" business confuses me, so I read about it. This is what I understand so far:

When a shower of electrons and positrons comes down through the air, they get pushed in opposite directions by the Earth's magnetic field. So you get an electrical current, and this makes radio waves. You can tell from these radio waves which way the shower came from, because the current is always at right angles to both the velocity of the shower and the Earth's magnetic field.

When the radio waves bounce off the ice, they should look different. But we're seeing some radio waves coming from below that don't look like that!

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https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/strange-radio-pulses-detected-coming-ice-antarctica

In the lead-up to the No Kings Day protests tomorrow, I hope you all realize how outrageous the Trump gang's assault on liberty is.

On Thursday, the head of their Department of Homeland Security said this about the National Guard's presence in Los Angeles:

“We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

So yes: she *admitted* their goal is not merely to crush protests, but to seize power from the governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles. Today a judge declared this illegal. They will keep trying.

After she said this, a senator in the room began asking a question. Her henchmen shoved him out of the room, told him to drop to his knees in a hallway, and handcuffed him!

This is fascism.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/noem-says-national-guard-occupation-is-meant-to-liberate-la-from-its-mayor-and-governor

On June 14th the Trump gang will mount an elaborate military parade in the US capital. The tanks are already there. They'll erect 18 miles of fencing and use "multiple drones" to protect this parade from US citizens. And most importantly, Trump said "If there’s any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force".

This will, of course, attract lots of protesters. And that's just what he wants!

Trump knows his popularity is sinking to rock bottom, and only a militarization of the nation can save him now. It started in LA and I predict it will spread. I've been expecting this for a long time.

Be careful, everyone. Even if my prediction is wrong, things are getting close to the boiling point.

Keep your eye on Trump's attempts to use the National Guard to put down the protests in Los Angeles. Yesterday he praised the National Guard for doing this - but the 2,000 troops he ordered to the area haven't even arrived, and it's not clear to me that they're even en route!

Instead, it was Los Angeles Police Department and ICE agents involved in the fighting in the neighborhoods of Compton and Paramount.

I have long thought Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to federalize the National Guard as protests against him grow - thus reducing the power of state governors to stop his actions. Instead, the directive signed by Mr. Trump on Saturday cites another law:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/department-of-defense-security-for-the-protection-of-department-of-homeland-security-functions/

This allows the president to control National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States", and use them "in such numbers as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws.”

From what happened in Hong Kong and elsewhere, I'm not at all optimistic about violent street protests being able to stop an authoritarian regime. Instead, the regime thrives on violence, since that's a sphere where it has the upper hand. The regime will also try to tip nonviolent protests into becoming violent by using excessive force and/or propaganda that claims the protests are more dangerous than they actually are.

Here are 198 methods of nonviolent action compiled by Gene Sharp in his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action:

https://www.aeinstein.org/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action

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I get a lot of email from crackpots - a source of endless amusement and despair. Here's my favorite phrase of the week:

"developed rigorously with the help of large language models"

Do you like large language models so much that you want one hanging around your neck all the time, watching and listening to everything you encounter, sending info to a big company? No I thought not. But these guys are betting 100 million people will.

What could possibly go wrong?

There's a Wall Street journal article on this, which you can read for free here:

https://archive.is/Sm49P

I'll quote a bit:

"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave his staff a preview Wednesday of the devices he is developing to build with former Apple designer Jony Ive, laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

Altman told employees that they had “the chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here,” he said after announcing OpenAI’s plans to purchase Ive’s startup, named io, and give him an expansive creative and design role. He suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

[...]

Altman told OpenAI staff that stealth will be important for their ultimate success to avoid competitors copying the product before it’s ready.

[...]

"Humane, another startup made up of former Apple executives that Altman invested in, sold an “Ai Pin” that failed to catch on with consumers."

I hope this new thing fails badly. Together with the new US "big beautiful bill" banning all regulation of AI for the next 10 years, this is a recipe for disaster. Authoritarian rule with all of us monitored all the time by AI - yes, I can see why that would be popular in some quarters.

To build their new authoritarian society, Republicans want to destroy academia in the US - even if means destroying the machinery of science and engineering that power the US economy. This is hastening the decline of the US.

"Some other countries spy in all this an opportunity to beef up their own scientific capabilities. Several Canadian universities, including the Toronto’s University Health Network and Laval University in Quebec, have announced funding worth tens of millions of dollars explicitly aimed at diverting researchers from America. On May 5th Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, gave a speech in Paris urging scientists to “choose Europe”, highlighting a wodge of new money and the bloc’s social safety-net. The University of Helsinki has been targeting Americans with adverts on social media, promising them “freedom to think”.

"China is likely to be another beneficiary. According to the South China Morning Post, the country is redoubling its efforts to lure Chinese-born scientists from America by offering big salaries. Between 2019 and 2022 the share of non-native artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers who left America for China after their PhD doubled, from 4% to 8%. Springer Nature’s data suggest that in the first quarter of this year applications for jobs in China from scientists based in America were up by 20% compared with the same period last year."

From The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/05/21/america-is-in-danger-of-experiencing-an-academic-brain-drain

"Danger" of a brain drain is understatement - it's happening now.

A free version of the article is here:

https://archive.is/L9Lrn#selection-1355.0-1383.118

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@cjd - It hasn't always been like this. Trump wants to cut science funding in half, kick out grad students and postdocs from outside the US, and even illegally withdraw grants that were already disbursed. The new Republican bill will increase taxes on universities from 1.4% to as much as 21%. And so on.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-grants-trump-cuts.html

Free version:

https://archive.is/rYBJD

One of the things I love about Hong Kong is the use of bamboo rather than metal scaffolding for the construction of buildings. You see elaborate bamboo scaffolds towering into the sky.

Here's a story about this ancient craft, what's happening to it today, and one of the few women who practices it:

https://archive.is/VqeXK

Lots of great pictures!

"The city is one of the last bastions of an art — and later industry — that was first depicted in scroll paintings from the Han dynasty around 2,000 years ago, and it has thrived in bamboo-rich regions in China. But in the past two decades, the rest of China pivoted toward metal amid an overproduction of steel.

Lattices of bamboo poles bound together by intricate knots regularly rise across the city to build and renovate apartment blocks and commercial skyscrapers that can be dozens of stories high.

Advocates of the material, including Ms. Pak, say it is lighter and cheaper than metal to transport and carry in Hong Kong’s tight urban spaces. Builders particularly favor the material when erecting platforms that support workers who patch up building exteriors and replace old pipes and window sills."

@vbuendiar wrote: "The US does a terrible policy and then suddenly everybody is considering what can we do to help them."

I doubt the EU is trying to help the US. I think they've realized they'll be able to hire top scientists for cheap.

For example:

"I start in Ireland at the beginning of June. Overall, I will be earning slightly less than here in the U.S. But the cost of living, aside from housing, is lower in Ireland. The salary reduction is worth it to me. I want to be able to engage in climate research without worrying each day whether or not my position is going to be terminated."

China will probably work harder to get US scientists, but many from the US will find the EU more comfortable, so the EU can pay less.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-looking-to-leave-the-u-s-for-more-welcoming-environments-a-989ca73f-1dc9-4205-8405-1dc901c3623a

No, no, no. These guys - Falcke, Wondrak and van Suijlekom - claim that heavy things emit Hawking radiation even if they're not black holes. Now they're getting more publicity by claiming this means the universe will fizzle out sooner than we expected.

If experts thought this had even a chance of being true, it would be the biggest thing since sliced bread! Everyone working on quantum gravity would be writing papers about it, because if true it would be revolutionary. It would overturn calculations by Hawking, Unruh and many other experts. It would open up a whole new subject!

But in fact, their work has had almost zero effect on physics. There's one short rebuttal, here:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.229001

It explains that these guys used a crude approximation that gives wrong results even in a simpler problem.

But plenty of science journalists don't bother interviewing actual experts anymore: they just believe the press releases. So now, if you ask your favorite large language model, it will say

"Yes, the work of Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom, and Heino Falcke has been accepted by the physics community."

It may cite as evidence the fact that their work got published in decent journals, which means very little. Sigh.

One of many lazy articles:

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-end-of-the-universe-may-not-be-as-far-off-as-once-thought

Finally, here's a really crazy picture by Kevin Gill - a view you could only see if you sailed through the Keeler gap!

Someday I hope humanity does this.

You can see more images by Kevin Gill here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/

(6/n, n = 6)

And here's an excellent image of Daphnis taken by the Cassini spacecraft on one of its ring-grazing passes on January 16, 2017 - the closest to Daphnis it's gotten so far, I believe!

NASA says:

"Material on the inner edge of the gap orbits faster than the moon, so the waves there lead the moon in its orbit. Material on the outer edge moves slower than the moon, so waves there trail the moon. The waves Daphnis causes cast shadows on Saturn during its equinox when the sun is in line with the plane of the rings."

(5/n)

Here's a nice photo of Daphnis in the Keeler gap in real color! It was taken by Cassini on July 5, 2010 - taken in red, green, and blue and then recombined.

https://www.planetary.org/space-images/daphnis-in-keeler-gap

(5/n)

Now here is a really *great* actual photo of Daphnis and the ripples it creates in Saturn's rings!

It was taken by the Cassini probe and released in February 2017. It was taken in visible light using Cassini’s narrow-angle camera. Cassini was 28,000 kilometers away from Daphnis, and the image scale is 168 meters per pixel.

https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESAC/Saturn_s_moon_Daphnis_in_the_Keeler_Gap

What other really good photos can we find?

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There's a larger gap in the A ring called the Encke cap, created by a larger moon called Pan, which you can see clearly here.

To the left you see the smaller Keeler gap. If you look very closely you can see the ripples near the Keeler gap... and if you look *very* closely you can see, or at least imagine, the moon Daphnis.

(3/n)

This 2005 photo, taken by the Cassini probe, was the first time anyone actually saw Saturn's moon Daphnis! It's only 8 kilometers across.

This gap in Saturn's A ring was first discovered by Voyager, and it was named the Keeler Gap. It's 35 kilometers wide. I guess this gap let people guess the existence of a moon, and later the ripples in the A ring let people guess where the moon must be! I don't really know the history here.

(2/n)

Did you see this? It's an artist's conception of how gravity from the tiny moon Daphnis creates ripples in Saturn's rings - created by Kevin Gill of NASA.

This image was pretty popular here, and elsewhere on the web - but people often don't come out and say from the start that it's not a photo. The actual photos are less beautiful but... hey, they're real! And the ripples look different in the photos. Let's take a look.

(1/n)

Hey, this Eno track is more adventurous than a lot of his ambient stuff, and so far I only see it on YouTube and SoundCloud!

About 9 minutes through, after you think you know what's going on, a spooky processed voice reminiscent of his track "Glitch" shows up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq7z9Kv2Rs4