If Plato had Microsoft Excel

More statistics on Plato's highly un-utopian utopia, a.k.a. Magnesia. What can you be punished for ? All kinds of things. Having too much money is a big no-no, even if you don't do anything immoral to obtain it. Being unmarried past 35, or not having children, or not loving your children, or failing to discipline your children, or inviting too many people to your wedding (>20), they're not good either. And there's a whole bunch of laws about fruit, for some reason. Don't even think about having your own shrine, because that'll see you on the block. Interfering with your neighbour's bees is frowned upon. But mostly, don't disobey the state. No, not even when its laws contradict each other, which happens quite a lot : theft must always be punished with a fine, except for when it's punishable by death, and bribery must always be punished by death, except for when it's punished by a fine; citizens must always get harsher treatment than non-residents, except sometimes it's the opposite because why not. Oh, and it's explicitly possible to file charges for kidnapping in some circumstances, but there's no law describing what the penalty for kidnapping is.

Funny old thing, philosophy.

... though if Plato had access to spreadsheets and any basic text editor with a ctrl+f or equivalent search function, history would have been a lot different.

Weird legal loopholes to avoid going to school

The headline shown here is compatible with Betteridge's Law, but the actual headline within the article ("Is there a problem with unregistered schools?") is definitely not. These are legal loopholes that need to be closed.

When you think of a place that teaches groups of children - all day, every day - the word most people would use is "school". But the law in England is surprisingly vague on what a school actually is. More than 350 sites - suspected of being unregistered schools - have been investigated in England by education watchdog Ofsted since a specialist taskforce was set up two years ago. Ofsted inspectors say they don't have proper powers to inspect or close them. The people running these sites say they are not schools at all.

Some of them are on industrial estates, in church basements and even in pubs. The BBC has obtained pictures showing squalor, appalling food hygiene and dangerous wiring. Some premises have blocked fire escapes and no access to clean drinking water. Many sites do no criminal records checking of staff. But because of the confusing legal situation, most remain open.

Suri's son will never do GCSEs there, as these yeshivas usually don't provide any maths, English or science despite operating full-time. Instead they offer a wholly religious education for boys, focused on scripture, from the age of 13. At their schools, girls are often able to study secular subjects and do exams, but after a Haredi boy's Bar Mitzvah, devotion to religious education is imperative. Those who run yeshivas would argue that they are not schools and therefore don't have to abide by the rules that the state imposes.

And the Department for Education seems to accept that yeshivas are not technically schools. In a statement, the DfE told the BBC that yeshivas "do not meet the definition of a school and cannot therefore be prosecuted for operating as an unregistered school"... legal guidance known to have been cited by the DfE says a site is not technically a school if it doesn't teach general classes of education, such as maths, English or science. Hence any place that only teaches religious education - be it Muslim, Jewish, Christian or any other faith - is arguably not a school.

For the critics, to define the yeshivas as anything other than schools would suggest that the children are getting their main form of education elsewhere. The law demands all children have an efficient full-time education, whether at a school or at home. That's simply not happening, says Izzy Posen, 23, who was at a Stamford Hill yeshiva from the age of 13.

"Children are in a yeshiva from as early as 8am until as late as 9pm - if that isn't a school, I'm not sure what is. They're not taught anything else at home. There's no secular studies but this is the sole education I got - I didn't get any other. I couldn't speak or write English. When I came out of these yeshivas, I had to teach myself English because I was never taught English. I remember at 18 reading an elementary school text book. I had no idea what the maths Pi symbol meant."

Surely, though the legal status of the schools might be questioned, the legal right of the children to education cannot. The Education Act of 1998 (https://www.loc.gov/law/help/constitutional-right-to-an-education/englandandwales.php) :

In addition to the right to education being provided for by the Human Rights Act, the Education Act 1996 places a legal duty on the parent or guardian of a child aged five to sixteen years (known as compulsory school age), to ensure that the child attends and receives full-time education, either in a traditional school or by any other means that is appropriate for their age, ability, and aptitude, taking into account any special needs they may have.[4] The Act makes it a criminal offense for parents or guardians to take their child out of school without authorization from the school, and an offense for parents who are aware that their child is failing to attend school to not take reasonable action to ensure that the child attends. The offense of failing to ensure regular attendance at school is punishable by up to three months’ imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £1,000 (approximately US$1,600).[5] There are a number of statutory defenses to these offenses, such as the student’s illness, absences that are authorized by the school, or home-schooling the student.

More Googling reveals that while full-time education is a legal requirement, there's a bizarre lack of legislature about avoiding state schools :
There are no requirements to inform the authorities when one is home educating, unless the student was previously enrolled in the government school system. At that time, the parent must let the school official know they are withdrawing their student to home educate him. No other requirements for home education exist.
https://hslda.org/hs/international/UnitedKingdom/default.asp

And :

Write to the headteacher if you plan to take your child out of school. They must accept if you’re taking your child out completely. They can refuse if you want to send your child to school some of the time.
But again, nothing on not registering in the first place.
As a parent, you must make sure your child receives a full-time education from the age of 5 but you don’t have to follow the national curriculum.
For all the faults of the education system, that is batshit crazy.
The council can make an ‘informal enquiry’ to check your child is getting a suitable education at home. They can serve a school attendance order if they think your child needs to be taught at school.
And how are they supposed to know about that if your child never attends school in the first place ?
https://www.gov.uk/home-education
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-43170447

Extragalactic science with New Horizons

I don't have time to read this right now, but it looks interesting.

The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New Horizons mission comprises an instrument package that provides imaging capability from UV to near-IR wavelengths with moderate spectral resolution located beyond the orbit of Pluto.

A carefully designed survey with New Horizons can optimize the use of expendable propellant and the limited data telemetry bandwidth to allow several measurements, including a detailed understanding of the cosmic extragalactic background light, studies of the local and extragalactic UV background, measurements of the properties of dust and ice in the outer solar system, searches for moons and other faint structures around exoplanets, determinations of the mass of planets using gravitational microlensing, and rapid follow-up of transient events.

New Horizons is currently in an extended mission designed to survey the Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 that will conclude in 2021. The astrophysics community has a unique, generational opportunity to use this mission for astronomical observation at heliocentric distances beyond 50 AU in the next decade. In this paper, we discuss the potential science cases for such an extended mission, and provide an initial assessment of the most important operational requirements and observation strategies it would require. We conclude that New Horizons is capable of transformative science, and that it would make a valuable and unique asset for astrophysical science that is unlikely to be replicated in the near future.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180209536Z

Old man criticises China

This particular article isn't too bad, but I want an app that detects an abundance of one-sentence paragraphs and automatically emails the author dumb memes full of irritating grammar until they stop.

Allowing Chinese President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely will be seen by historians as a farce, a government critic has told the BBC. In a rare show of public dissent, ex-state newspaper editor Li Datong sent an open letter opposing the proposal. He says in the letter that scrapping term limits for the president and vice-president would sow the seeds of chaos.

China's internet censors have been deleting critical comments across Chinese social media platforms. There had been widespread speculation that Mr Xi would seek to extend his presidency beyond 2023. The party congress last year saw him cement his status as the most powerful leader since the late Mao Zedong.

State media have been defending the amendment and praising the country's leadership. China Daily said lifting the term limit was needed "to perfect the party and the state leadership system". The PLA Daily said the move was "very necessary and timely".

Speaking by phone from his home in Beijing, Mr Li told BBC Chinese he was too old to be afraid of the authorities. "As a Chinese citizen, I have to fulfil my responsibility and tell the delegates my opinion. I don't care what these delegates will do. It's not like the whole country agrees with the amendment, but everyone has been silenced... Even if the amendment is passed, it doesn't matter. History is often like this - we make two steps forward and one step back. But this is against the tide of civilisation and won't stand the test of time. It will be considered a farce in Chinese history in the future."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43212839

Admissions of failure are part of philosophy

Very hard to be taken seriously as a philosopher if you don't admit your mistakes.

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who wrote on every subject he could get his hands on. He is well known for his lone venture into political philosophy; Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In that book, he argues for a minimalist state that never infringes on personal liberties. At one point, he even muses over how an income tax is akin to part-time slavery, as a worker is paid in wages and a part of them are given to the state without the chance to opt out. His ideal state wouldn’t have any taxation.

His adjustments to his earlier stances are subtle but notable. He doesn’t fundamentally change his position but rather admits problems with it. He endorses the idea that the state can ban discrimination against various groups, admits that the realization of personal freedom may require mandated group effort, and yields to the use of taxation or mandated donation to specific charities as a means to assure society continues to function. While in later interviews he assured readers that he had not abandoned libertarianism, he took the edge off a few of the more hard-line views as he aged.

http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/four-philosophers-who-realized-they-were-completely-wrong

The space Tesla isn't going to spread bacteria anywhere

A red Tesla convertible hitched a ride to space with a SpaceX rocket in early February, bringing with it what may be the largest load of earthly bacteria to ever enter space. NASA's Office of Planetary Protection makes sure spacecraft planning to land on other planets are sterile. Much like an invasive species, organisms from Earth could thrive on another planet and wipe out native organisms. After all, it was bacteria that stopped the Martian invasion in H. G. Wells' fictional "War of the Worlds."

"If there is an indigenous Mars biota, it's at risk of being contaminated by terrestrial life," said Jay Melosh, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University. "Would Earth's organisms be better adapted, take over Mars and contaminate it so we don't know what indigenous Mars was like, or would they be not as well adapted as the Martian organisms? We don't know."

But the Office of Planetary Protection doesn't regulate spacecraft that plan to stay in orbit; since the Tesla was never intended to land, it wasn't cleaned before takeoff.

"Even if they radiated the outside, the engine would be dirty," Melosh said. "Cars aren't assembled clean. And even then, there's a big difference between clean and sterile."

The Tesla could potentially land on Mars, although it's unlikely, he said. The car is in an orbit that crosses Earth's and Mars', and it will probably end up striking Earth, but it could be millions of years before that happens. Extreme temperatures, low pressure and unfiltered cosmic radiation make space an inhospitable environment for living organisms. It doesn't always kill them, though – some bacteria go dormant in the vacuum of space and wake up again when conditions are right.

Alina Alexeenko, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue, works in a lab that specializes in freeze-drying bacteria and biologics. The freeze-drying technology is used for long-term preservation of live virus vaccines, bacteria and biopharmaceuticals – a process similar to what live organisms experience in space. "The load of bacteria on the Tesla could be considered a biothreat, or a backup copy of life on Earth," she said."

I wouldn't worry about it. There's already been a paper showing the chance of a collision with Earth or Venus (neither of which matters) is a few percent over the next few million years (https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04718), with the chance of collision with Mars being too small to estimate. And the organic components of the car itself will last of the order of years (https://www.livescience.com/61680-will-spacex-roadster-survive-in-space.html). Could bacteria survive anyway ? Maybe. But it's probably not much more of a significant risk than any other deep space probes which weren't sterilised because they weren't attempting landings.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-tesla-space-bacteria-earth.html

Space catapults are not a thing and never will be

Not sure if this should be in "humour".... after all, that famous documentary Robin Hood : Men In Tights had a stealth catapult.

https://y.yarn.co/c59d8a36-647a-4257-bad8-735aad550e5d_screenshot.jpg

Until recently, few details about SpinLaunch have been available. SpinLaunch’s website is password-protected, and some Sunnyvale, Calif. job listings merely refer to it as a “rapidly growing space launch startup.” But last month, a bill was proposed in the Hawaii state senate to issue $25 million in bonds to assist SpinLaunch with “constructing a portion of its electrical small satellite launch system.” Hawaii hopes to gain construction contracts and jobs, and meet government goals for expanding space accessibility, by helping SpinLaunch.

SpinLaunch replaces rocket boosters with a kinetic launch system using principles “similar to those explored by several ground-based mass accelerators that date back to the 1960s. Modern adaptations include electromagnetic rail and coil guns, electrothermal-chemical guns, light gas guns, ram accelerators and blast wave accelerators.”

“SpinLaunch employs a rotational acceleration method, harnessing angular momentum to gradually accelerate the vehicle to hypersonic speeds. This approach employs a dramatically lower cost architecture with much lower power.” SpinLaunch is targeting a per launch price of less than $500,000, while Yaney says “all existing rocket-based companies cost between $5 million and $100 million per launch.”

... and always twirling, twirling! TWIRLING toward freedom !

SpinLaunch plans to use a centrifuge spinning at an incredible rate. All that momentum is then harnessed to catapult a payload into space at speeds one source said could be around 3,000 miles per hour. With enough momentum, objects could be flung into space on their own. Alternatively, the catapult could provide some of the power needed with cargo being equipped with supplemental rockets necessary to leave earth’s atmosphere.

3,000 mph is 1.3 km/s, nowhere near the ~8 km/s for low earth orbit.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/spinlaunch/

Not all observations are eventually published : here's why

Everyone bangs on about "publish or perish", but here's a look at the opposite case : astronomy surveys which never produce a publication. Specifically, surveys using European Southern Observatory facilities, about half of which don't produce a publication in the timeframe specified. However, about 36% of those (so about 18% overall) were still working on the data at the time the survey was conducted, and this turns out to be compatible with the average time between collecting data and producing a publication. And 10% had simply been misidentified, and had published a paper after all. Hence through lack of time I won't attempt to correct for this in the rest of this little summary.

There's sometimes talk of null/negative results not getting enough publication. This turns out to be a significant factor in the remaining cases, but not at all the dominant one. There isn't really a single dominant factor, it's a combination of things. That said, some reasons are essentially negligible : the authors just lost interest, they published a non-refereed paper instead, they had inadequate tools to process the data.

More significant are that the observers just didn't get as much or as good quality data that they required, they lacked the resources (e.g. manpower) to complete the analysis to get a meaningful result, or a variety of other reasons. That "other reasons" category sounds quite interesting :
...the most frequent being that the person leading the project left the field. Other recurrent explanations included: lack of ancillary data from other facilities, results not meeting expectations, lowered priority of the project because of more pressing activities, quicker results obtained by other teams and/or with better suited instruments, nondetections, etc.
Which sounds to me like the "results aren't interesting enough" slice of the pie could probably be increased a bit. We keep hearing about the importance of replication, but there's a motivational pressure against doing things people have done before - even if they might not have done it very well.
http://doi.eso.org/10.18727/0722-6691/5055

Storing energy using weights

This is either one of those ideas so breathtakingly simple it's mental than no-one has done it already, or it's got some 'orrible fundamental flaw.

Essentially, the Gravitricity system is a huge ‘clock weight’. A cylindrical weight of up to 3000 tonnes is suspended in a deep shaft by a number of synthetic ropes each of which is engaged with a winch capable of lifting its share of the weight. Electrical power is then absorbed or generated by raising or lowering the weight. The weight is guided by a system of tensioned guide wires (patents applied for) to prevent it from swinging and damaging the shaft. The winch system can be accurately controlled through the electrical drives to keep the weight stable in the hole.

The key requirement is a deep hole in the ground; it can be a disused mineshaft brought back into use, or a purpose-sunk shaft. Shaft depths can be from 150m for new shafts down to 1500m for existing mines. The biggest single cost is the hole, and initially we will prove the technology using existing mine shafts. As our technology costs decrease, the costs of drilling will reduce significantly, opening the opportunity for purpose-built shafts.

Sounds like a much better use of the Boring Company's resources than hyperloops or flamethrowers.

Over the 12 months from January 2018 we will be undertaking sub-system design and deploying a 250kW concept demonstrator. We aim to trial our first full-scale prototype in 2019 or 2020 at a disused mine in the UK.

https://www.gravitricity.com/

Attempting to deradicalise people using Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger has been used to try to deradicalise extremists in a pilot project funded entirely by the company. People posting extreme far-right and Islamist content in the UK were identified and contacted in an attempt to challenge their views. Of the 569 people contacted, 76 had a conversation of five or more messages and eight showed signs it had a positive impact, researchers claim.

That's a pretty dire "success" rate. And how many people showed signs of a negative impact ? Without that, this is meaningless.

This pilot was led by the counter-extremism organisation Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which says it was trying to mimic extremists' own recruitment methods. It told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme and BBC World Service's World Hacks it used software to scan several far-right and Islamist pages on Facebook for targets. It then manually looked at their profiles looking for instances of violent, dehumanising and hateful language.

It employed 11 "intervention providers" - either former extremists, survivors of terrorism or trained counsellors, who were paid £25 per hour for eight hours' work a week.

One was Colin Bidwell, who was caught up in the Tunisia terror attack in 2015. Under a fake profile, he spoke to people who appeared to support Islamist extremism, including some who may support the Tunisia gunman, and was tasked with challenging their views with chatty conversation and questions. "I think I'm entitled to ask those questions after what I've been through," he explained. "If there's the smallest chance that I could make some form of difference or awareness, for me I'm in."

Many did not respond, but some entered into long conversations. Mr Bidwell would talk a little about religion, about the effect the attack has had on his wife and how he worries for the future of his children in "such a violent world". "One of the things I would say is, 'You can have your extreme beliefs, but when it gets to the extreme violence - that's the bit I don't understand'," he said.

The aim was to "walk them back from the edge, potentially, of violence", said Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the ISD. "There's quite a lot of work being done to counter general propaganda with counter-speech and the removal of content, but we know that extremists are very effective in direct messaging," she explained.

Privacy campaigners are concerned about the project, especially that Facebook funded something that broke its own rules by creating fake profiles. Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor at the Privacy International charity, said: "If there's stuff that they're identifying that shouldn't be there, Facebook should be taking it down. Even if the organisation [ISD] itself may have been involved in doing research over many years, that does not mean that they're qualified to carry out this sort of... surveillance role."

During conversations, the intervention providers did not volunteer the fact that they were working for the ISD, unless asked directly. This happened seven times during the project, and on those occasions the conversation ended, sometimes after a row.

Looks to me like the fraction showing a negative result could easily be as great as that showing a positive impact. This would be far more interesting with a much larger sample. Then one could start to compare if there was any correspondence between the methods different "intervention providers" use and their positive or negative results, whether this depends on the particular demographics of the extremists contacted, etc. Without that, I don't think there's much to be learned here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43170837

Turning electric cars into a power plant

Frederiksberg Forsyning has replaced ten of its vehicles with Nissan all-electric vans and has installed ten special “bi-directional” charging points. Its engineers unhook their vehicles in the morning, go off to their jobs around the city and return the vehicles to the charging point in the afternoon. After that the batteries are at the disposal of the grid.

Nuvve’s software, which was developed in the University of Delaware in the US, connects to the grid and constantly monitors its energy requirements. If there is a fluctuation in power it can call on the multiple batteries on its system, to smooth it out within seconds.

“We call this a virtual power plant” says Marc Trahand, chief operations officer for Nuvve in Europe. “All these small batteries put together .. become one big power plant that you can then activate onto the grid."

I don't quite get it. Why put the batteries on vehicles, where they won't always be available to the grid ? Surely it's better to have dedicated energy storage facilities rather than using cars that may or may not happen to be available ?

More interesting, I thought :

Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at Greentech Media thinks other storage ideas are worth exploring: “Compressed air is an interesting technology,” he says. “It can be a form of bulk storage.”

One company that has investigated compressed cold air is Alacaes in Switzerland – it’s drilled a hole in the side of a mountain to store air that can be used to drive a turbine. “The downside is it has to rely on specific geological formations… It needs underground caverns which in itself is a limitation”, says Mr Manghani, of this technology.

But Highview Power Storage, founded in the UK in 2005, is convinced by the potential of cold air and is developing a technology that it says is a world first. Using refrigeration, the company cools air until it is liquid at minus 196 degrees Celsius, and stores it at a low pressure. Liquefaction is a tried and tested technology, but Highview has moved it on to a further level.

At the Pilsworth energy storage facility in Bury, near Manchester, the firm has built a prototype plant that uses heat generated by burning waste gas from landfill, to re-expand liquid nitrogen. It’s pushed through an expansion turbine which drives a generator and puts electricity back on to the grid. The plant is due to be connected to the UK grid in the next couple of months.

I seem to recall that both compressed air and liquid nitrogen being touted as alternative fuels some years back, but they never really went anywhere. We'll see.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/disruptors_smart_power

Plato's semi-ideal state has some distinct oddities

Because I'm feeling very, very nerdy, I made a pie chart (work in progress, but it'll take ages to finish so here we are). Here are all the different punishments for various crimes in Plato's fictional state of Magnesia. 115 laws, about 300 separate punishable offences described.

Summary : lots of death. You can be executed for being an atheist, robbing temples, or bribing anyone. You're required by law to love your adopted children. Lots of reliance on publically shaming people for various offences (my favourite is law 57G(d) : " If a man who is not in the grip of insanity dares to strike his father or mother, or their father or mother... Everyone of citizen birth who passes by, whether man, woman or child, must shout ‘you wicked monster’ at the attacker, and repel him." - that'll teach him ). Animals and objects can be tried and sent into exile for causing loss of life. Lunatics are forbidden from appearing in public, you can be fined for not being married by age 35, and anyone who wants to is free to beat up public officials who fail to turn up for communal meals.

Lovely.

Results in prestigious journals are exciting but not especially reliable

This is a nice, detailed, statistically careful piece.

Two main conclusions can be drawn: (1) experiments reported in high-ranking journals are no more methodologically sound than those published in other journals; and (2) experiments reported in high-ranking journals are often less methodologically sound than those published in other journals.

The prestige, which allows high ranking journals to select from a large pool of submitted manuscripts, does not provide these journals with an advantage in terms of reliability. If anything, it may sometimes become a liability for them, as in the studies where a negative correlation was found. This insight entails that even under the most conservative interpretation of the data, the most prestigious journals, i.e., those who command the largest audience and attention, at best excel at presenting results that appear groundbreaking on the surface. Which of those results will end up actually becoming groundbreaking or transformative, rather than flukes or frauds, is a question largely orthogonal to the journal hierarchy.

Well, a prestigious journal will only accept exciting claims, by definition. And exciting claims are much more common at low reliability levels. This isn't really news, but it's nice to have statistical confirmation of a hitherto largely anecdotal claim.

It is up to the scientific community to decide if the signal-to-noise ratio in these journals is high enough to justify the cost of serial scandals and, in the case of medical journals, loss of life, due to unreliable research.

See also http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2017/03/this-is-not-crisis-youre-looking-for.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16427990
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full

Agenda-driven science

Agenda-drive science is not a problem when the agenda driving science is a scientific agenda... Agenda-driven science is a problem, however, when the agenda driving science is not a scientific agenda, but a social, political, and cultural agenda. 

The most momentous problem of agenda-driven science, as I see it, is that agenda-driven science is a half truth, and the other half of a half truth is a half lie – a lie of omission rather than commission. Agenda-driven science can be rigorous, it can be – as we often say – the best science of its day, and yet by exclusively pursuing a particular line of research and passing over other lines of research in silence, this rigor and scientific excellence is brought to bear only on half truths, which leaves the society that produces agenda-driven science awash in half lies.

Moreover, agenda-driven science, by allowing much of human knowledge to remain in non-scientific forms, condemns all that lies outside the charmed circle defined by the agenda to the status of “anecdotal ‘evidence,” and we all know today that “anecdotal evidence” has become the scientific equivalent of an insult, intended to deprive the anecdotal of any legitimacy. In a society in which all legitimate knowledge is scientific knowledge, and scientific knowledge is the result of agenda-driven science, people can experience things every day and know them to be true, even while these things remain merely anecdotal because they are excluded from the agenda of agenda-driven science.

http://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/171197214777/the-problem-of-agenda-driven-science

Space whales

Found on the internet.

"Cap'n, there be whales here ! Och... well, one whale. Ach, okay, one wee whale's head. Why didne we spring for the Falcon Heavy ? Crivens !"

Sorry, degenerated from Scotty into Nac McFeegle there...

Virgin now have all the things

"People were thinking of using nano-satellites for Earth imagery but nobody had thought of using them for voice or text communications," says Israeli former fighter pilot Meir Moalem, the chief executive of Sky and Space Global (SAS). "We were the first."

His firm is aiming to offer customers mobile phone connections via a constellation of 200 shoebox-sized satellites weighing just 10kg (22lb) each. The fleet is set to be operational by 2020 and will provide text, voice and data transfer services to the Earth's equatorial regions - including much of Latin America and Africa - to a market of up to three billion people.

"Our total constellation costs just $150m (£108m). That's less than the cost of a single standard communications satellite. This is what we mean when we talk of a disruptive technology."

SAS is using a non-traditional method of getting its satellites into orbit. They will be air-launched in batches of 24 by Virgin Orbit, part of Richard Branson's Virgin group. Virgin's modified Boeing 747-400 will fly up to 35,000ft (10,000m), then LauncherOne, a two-stage liquid oxygen-powered expendable rocket, will blast the payload into orbit. It's one of a number of air-launch-to-orbit systems under development.

So there's Virgin Trains, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Orbit (which I'd never before heard of), and Virgin Galactic. But aren't we skipping a few ? Where's Virgin Moon, Virgin Asteroid, Virgin Inner Rocky Planets, Virgin Gas Giants, and Virgin Kuiper Belt ? What about Virgin Oort Cloud and Virgin Interstellar ? Virgin Giant Molecular Clouds, anyone ? Virgin X-Ray Binaries, perhaps ? Maybe Virgin Emission Nebulae and Virgin Supernovae Remnants ? Virgin Globular Clusters... okay, I'll stop now.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43090226

Two-faced kitty

This kitty was obviously born on the planet Cheron.

Recently, professional animal photographer Jean-Michel Labat shot Narnia, an adorable British Shorthair cat in its home in France, and the pictures are making headlines all over the internet.

Labat has purrfectly captured the unique looks of the feline which probably occurred early in its mother’s womb. Narnia was born on the 28th of March, 2017, and his breeder Stephanie Jimenez instantly fell in love with her blue-eyed sweetie. While the exact cause of this particular pet’s striking appearance is unknown, other cats with this mysterious look are known as chimeras. A feline chimera is a cat whose cells contain two types of DNA, caused when two embryos fuse together.
https://www.boredpanda.com/two-faced-cat-british-short-hair-france-jean-michel-labat/

Arecibo is under new management again

Yay. [I say this with sarcasm thanks to insider information, though I do genuinely wish the new management well.]

A consortium led by the University of Central Florida will start formal transition activities to take on the management of the National Science Foundation’s Observatory. NSF is negotiating the operations and management award with UCF.

With its partners, Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan and Yang Enterprises, Inc. in Oviedo, the team plans to expand the capabilities of the telescope, which has made significant contributions to science.

“UCF’s oversight of this crucial resource further solidifies our university as a leader in space-related research,” said UCF President John C. Hitt. “The observatory will provide a valuable new dimension to space science at UCF while creating more academic opportunities for students and faculty at UCF, in Puerto Rico and beyond. Our lead role with the observatory deepens Central Florida’s strong ties with our fellow citizens on the island. This agreement, made possible through partnerships, also ensures that the observatory will continue to make significant contributions to space science and mankind.”

http://today.ucf.edu/ucf-led-consortium-manage-arecibo-observatory-puerto-rico/

Singapore : nudge theory in action

The man who took on this gargantuan task was the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. He recognised that Singapore had to change in order to thrive. "We knew that if we were just like our neighbours, we would die. Because we've got nothing to offer against what they have to offer. So we had to produce something which is different and better than what they have. It's incorrupt. It's efficient. It's meritocratic. It works,” he told the New York Times.

In 1986, Lee Kuan Yew said “I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today… we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right."

A very Platonic approach, using laws to regulate private lives to ensure citizens are well-behaved in public. One day I'll find time to blog that one up...

But while Singapore still loves a public campaign, it has moved toward a more nuanced approach of influencing the behaviours of its inhabitants. One such strategy has been to collaborate with the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team, nicknamed the “Nudge Unit”, which uses the Nobel Prize-winning concept of “nudge theory”. This is based around the idea that people can make better choices through simple discreet policies while still retaining their freedom of choice. Nudge theory is certainly de rigeur among policy makers across the world at the moment but Singapore has actually been using similar strategies long before it became fashionable.

In Singapore some of the nudges you come across are remarkably simple. Rubbish bins are placed away from bus stops to separate smokers from other bus users. Utility bills display how your energy consumption compares to your neighbours. Outdoor gyms have been built near the entrances and exits of HDB estates so they are easy to use, available and prominent enough to consistently remind you. Train stations have green and red arrows on the platform indicating where you should stand so as to speed up the alighting process. If you opt to travel at off-peak times (before 0700), your fare is reduced.

The National Steps Challenge, which encourages participants to get exercising using free step counters in exchange for cash and prizes, has been so successful that the programme name has been trademarked. This form of gamifying is one of the more successful ways of engaging users in achieving objectives. Massive queues to collect the free fitness tracker demonstrated the programme’s popularity.

A potential correlation also has been drawn between support for nudges and the level of trust in government. Hungary, which had one of the lowest levels of support for nudges, also has a low level of trust in its government – only 28% according to the OECD. China, on the other hand, had overwhelmingly positive attitudes to nudges and also a high level in trust in the government.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180220-the-nation-that-thrived-by-nudging-its-population

These aren't the galaxies you're looking for

Looks like I need to add this one to my reading list.

The three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy suspects, DES1, Eridanus III, and Tucana V, located in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, were studied using a wide array of classification techniques. For each, fundamental properties including age, mass, luminosity, metallicity (ratio of heavier elements) and distance were determined. Based upon these parameters, the objects have instead been classified as star clusters.

Classification of these faint objects as star clusters implies that they are not dominated by dark matter, as dwarf galaxies typically are, “and so we are still trying to define ultra-faint dwarf galaxies. Where are these smallest galaxies, what are their properties and how many are there? Answering these questions will help complete the census of Milky Way satellites and let us understand the history of our galaxy.”, says Conn.

Conn and his team are looking into the “Missing Satellites” problem which was originally identified almost two decades ago. Based on what is called the hierarchical formation scenario, many astronomers expected a large number of dwarf satellite galaxies, each containing a high fraction of dark matter, surrounding larger galaxies like our Milky Way. However, too few such satellites have been found to account for the expected amounts of dark matter. Thus, classifying these ultra-faint objects is crucial to our understanding of dark matter in the Universe.

I'm instantly nervous about classifying the dynamical nature of objects based on their other properties, but I'll give the paper a read in due course.

https://www.gemini.edu/node/21044

D'awwww

Found on the internet.

Implicit assumptions : new ideas are not always fully understood

More recent strata lie on top of older strata, except when they lie beneath them. Radiometric dates obtained by different methods always agree, except when they differ. And the planets in their courses obey Newton's laws of gravity and motion, except when they depart from them.

There is nothing that distinguishes so clearly between the scientific and the dogmatic mindset as the response to anomalies. For the dogmatist, the anomaly is a "gotcha", proof that the theory under consideration is, quite simply, wrong. For the scientist, it is an opportunity. If an idea is generally useful, but occasionally breaks down, something unusual is going on and it's worth finding out what. The dogmatist wants to see questions closed, where the scientist wants to keep them open.

All well and good.

This is perhaps why the creationist denial of science can often be found among those professions that seek decision and closure, such as law and theology.

Umm, what ? Is there an anti-science agenda in the law courts that no-one's told me about ? And throwing theology in there is just asking for trouble... but we may dismiss this careless throwaway comment, because the rest of the article is very nice.

No theory exists on its own, as the philosopher-scientist Duhem pointed out over a century ago, and when a theory fails an observational test there are two kinds of possible explanation. The fault may lie with the theory itself, or with the assumptions we make while testing it. More specifically, as Lakatos pointed out in 1970, every application of a theory involves ancillary hypotheses, which can range from the grandiose (the laws of nature are unchanging) to the trivial (the telescope was functioning correctly). When a theoretical prediction fails, we do not know if the fault is in one of these, rather than the core theory itself. Much of the time, we are not even aware of our ancillary hypotheses, which is one reason why we need philosophers of science.

I don't like the term "ancillary hypothesis". I'd have gone with something like "underlying / hidden / implicit assumption." But I digress.

No scientific theory is rejected simply on the basis of its anomalies. It is rejected only when a superior theory is put forward, and the new theory is superior if it explains as much as the old theory, and more besides. Thus we should not even see theories as existing in isolation, but as part of a sequence or research programme. You are bound to be wrong, but don't let that worry you unduly, because error is opportunity, and the way science progresses is by being less wrong about more things. I find this viewpoint liberating.

... The anomaly in the orbit of Mercury, however, could not be resolved in this way, and remained unexplained until the formulation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In the case of Uranus, the anomaly was associated with the ancillary hypothesis that we had a complete list of planets, and it was this ancillary hypothesis that was overthrown. In the case of Mercury, however, the shortcoming was in the theory itself.

... From the perspective of this essay, Rayleigh's initial thinking included the ancillary hypothesis that all the components of air had been identified. This was not true, and (as readers with our knowledge of chemistry will be aware) the additional component was to play a vital role in explaining chemical bonding.

Well, this explains a lot about why ongoing research is so messy. It's because when a researcher formulates an idea, they only consider a limited number of parameters that have drawn their attention to something interesting. They want to suggest some mechanism to explain the data. During that process, it's the mechanism itself that they're interested in - not in the implicit assumptions it requires. Those may well be interesting in themselves, maybe more so than the theory. But not at that particular moment. The point is that for a complex problem, the researcher will not even be immediately aware of the assumptions they're making. Figuring out what those are takes time - usually, years. And this is why it can often look as though scientists are flogging a dead horse, adding yet more and more adjustments to an "obviously" broken idea; adding more crystal spheres and epicycles. They're not. What they're actually doing is figuring out (and testing) the assumptions behind the idea that they already made years ago, but were unaware of at the time.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/02/in-praise-of-fallibility-why-science-needs-philosophy-.html

Technological warfare

“Bows and arrows can only do so much damage, so I managed to get hold of a rifle and some bullets, and decided to kill their most fearsome warrior, Taviwei. I knew that would bring an end to the conflict,” he said. “I crept down the valley and placed myself in some bushes near the frontier, before popping a bullet into the chamber and taking aim. Taviwei spotted me, grabbed a machete and sprinted towards my position. I pulled the trigger, looked up and saw blood all over Taviwe's torso. The bullet had hit him directly in the throat, and killed him shortly afterwards.”

The hills I lived in have seen countless battles over the last few thousand years. For my tribe, war gave meaning to its men, and conquest provided an opportunity to mingle genetically and avoid incest. With weapons made of stone and wood, victory relied on skill, but didn't always result in the death of the enemy. Assault rifles will change everything.

While missionaries in Papua New Guinea appear to have gone out of their way to demolish indigenous culture, the introduction of sophisticated firearms ensures the destruction not just of that culture and tradition, but perhaps of entire peoples. I left my tribe in a state of war against another, both sides increasingly arming themselves with AK-47s and M16s.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exmq7e/papua-new-guinea-tribe-war-475

Fighting for the centre

Launching the new centrist party in London, Mr Clarke said: "Some of the anti-Brexit pressure groups and movements are very, very much focused on asking people to pressure their local MP to have a second thought on Brexit.

"What we are is almost the more military arm of that movement, whereas we are actually standing candidates in seats to threaten those MPs that are not changing their minds, or are not standing up for the views of their constituents."

Ms Khadhouri said "extremes are prevailing" in the wake of the referendum vote.

"Millions in this country feel politically homeless right now and abandoned. Brexiteers and Remainers, old and young, north and south. Many are disappointed with the false promise of Brexit. It is leaving us poorer, damaging us in many ways, and distracting us from addressing real problems of inequality and division. Existing parties are failing to protect people's interests due to personal ambition and tribal loyalties. Extremes are prevailing."

Very much the language of Blair in describing people as feeling politically homeless. If there was an election tomorrow* I'd probably vote for 'em. Fed up of the current crop across the board pussy footing around the single major political issue of the day. No, I don't want another bloody referendum. I want Brexit permanently over so we can get on with actual political issues rather than jingoistic fantasising about the Empire.

* Next week, next month, or next year, who knows ? I'd have time to research them by then. But tomorrow, I'll be feeling reckless. Not Mark Reckless though.


[One year on and the Renew party are practically invisible. At the time of writing the Independent Group have just become a thing but got off to a turbulent start.]

http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/renew-anti-brexit-party-1-5400505

Using games to inoculate people against fake news

"A biological vaccine administers a small dose of the disease to build immunity. Similarly, inoculation theory suggests that exposure to a weak or demystified version of an argument makes it easier to refute when confronted with more persuasive claims," says Dr. Sander van der Linden, Director of Cambridge University's Social Decision-Making Lab.

"If you know what it is like to walk in the shoes of someone who is actively trying to deceive you, it should increase your ability to spot and resist the techniques of deceit. We want to help grow 'mental antibodies' that can provide some immunity against the rapid spread of misinformation. We aren't trying to drastically change behavior, but instead trigger a simple thought process to help foster critical and informed news consumption."

I've played the game (https://www.getbadnews.com/#intro) and it's not bad (although the primary colour scheme is a bit blaaargh my eyes the goggles they do nothing on a large monitor). It's fairly obvious that this is intended as a teaching tool, so I wonder if one intended more as an actual game would be more effective. Something like NewsThump's card game, for instance (http://game.newsthump.com/). People tend to like games a lot more than they like people telling them what to think. Also, methinks the kind of people who deliberately set out to play a fake news-spotting game are probably going to be reasonably effective at it anyway : I don't see this as having much potential to reach the masses in its current form.

Perverse and not entirely serious idea : encode it as a game on social media. Have the network deliberately inject fake news into the feed and every so often present a multiple choice where users try and identify the known fakes from the known genuines. Give 'em meaningless badges the more they get right. Make people compete to win more badges, because meaningless badges, like followers, are the shizzle.

Obligatory cautionary quote from Plato on teaching people critical thinking :

I don’t suppose that it has escaped your notice that, when young people get their first taste of arguments, they misuse it by treating it as a kind of game of contradiction. They imitate those who’ve refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments. Then, when they’ve refuted many and been refuted by them in turn, they forcefully and quickly fall into disbelieving what they believed before.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-fake-news-vaccine-online-game.html

Spotting fake news requires clearing mental clutter

I could quote parts of the article, but it's easier to summarise thusly :

It's harder to change the mind of a stupid person, but the old adage that repeating a lie makes it more believable is backed by data.

More interestingly :

One possible explanation for this finding is based on the theory that a person’s cognitive ability reflects how well they can regulate the contents of working memory—their “mental workspace” for processing information. First proposed by the cognitive psychologists Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, this theory holds that some people are more prone to “mental clutter” than other people. In other words, some people are less able to discard (or “inhibit”) information from their working memory that is no longer relevant to the task at hand—or, as in the case of Nathalie, information that has been discredited. Research on cognitive aging indicates that, in adulthood, this ability declines considerably with advancing age, suggesting that older adults may also be especially vulnerable to fake news. Another reason why cognitive ability may predict vulnerability to fake news is that it correlates highly with education. Through education, people may develop meta-cognitive skills—strategies for monitoring and regulating one’s own thinking—that can be used to combat the effects of misinformation.

What would be really interesting - and I'm sure there's research on it but I don't have time to Google it right now - is to see if education really makes a difference. Does deliberately trying to teach rational analysis and critical thinking actually work, or does it just give people the weapons needed for rationalising their own beliefs instead ? Are there any education strategies which produce a positive effect or is it mainly or wholly down to nature ?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cognitive-ability-and-vulnerability-to-fake-news/

Space funding is motivated by jobs, not exploration

“Totally new ideas are needed and Europe must now prove it still possesses that traditional strength to surpass itself and break out beyond existing borders,” wrote Jan Wörner, director general of the European Space Agency, on his official blog. He expressed dismay that rockets now being built by Europe’s space company, Arianespace, won’t be reusable, which puts them at a deep cost disadvantage to SpaceX. He called for a re-thinking of Europe’s rocket program.

This attitude didn’t last long. A few days later, Wörner wrote an apologetic sequel to his post, emphasizing that Arianespace’s current rocket plan was correct and would be completed as intended. He was merely exercising his prerogative as head of the continent’s space agency for “turning our minds to systems still far off in the future,” he said.

Reading between the lines, the abrupt about-face can be attributed to the stakeholders of contractors and government policymakers, who weren’t pleased with Wörner’s public fretting. This speaks to space exploration’s tendency to become industrial policy, more about jobs than science, which is a key reason why 1970s space visions of lunar bases and enormous space stations aren’t a reality.

https://qz.com/1209330/spacexs-falcon-heavy-rocket-is-the-envy-of-china-and-europe-why-isnt-nasa-on-board/

The world's first animation

A reconstruction of a spinning disk from about 14,000 to 21,000 years ago in Western Europe shows an animal in different positions on each side. As the disk is twirled on a string, the creature appears to move.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-toys-kids-archaeological-record

The amazing technical achievements of deep sea mining... and its massive environmental cost

I'm fine with clickbaity headlines when the article turns out to be more interesting than suggested.

The real target of the crew on board this giant ship was a lost Soviet submarine. Six years earlier, the K-129 had sunk 1,500 miles north-west of Hawaii while carrying ballistic nuclear missiles. The Russians failed to find their sub despite a massive search, but an American network of underwater listening posts had detected the noise of an explosion that eventually led US teams to the wreck.

So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the submarine. That would have been hard enough. But there was another challenge as well - it had to be done without the Russians knowing. The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be exploring the possibility of deep sea mining. A PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules. These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of the deep ocean.

Amazingly, the giant steel claws successfully seized the sub. But then disaster struck. At some point on the way up, the immense strain became too much, part of a claw snapped off and most of the sub slipped back to the seabed... This might have derailed the very notion of deep sea mining for good. But in fact it proved that with clever engineering and a lavish budget it was possible – just - to operate in the otherworldly depths. “It’s really difficult but we showed it could be done,” says Sharp.

...

Run by a Canadian firm, Nautilus Minerals, the project will be managed from a ship in the tropical waters of the Bismarck Sea off Papua New Guinea. Three of the vast machines will be lowered to the slopes of an undersea volcano. There they will encounter a stretch of seabed covered in hydrothermal vents. These strange twisting chimneys are formed by boiling water blasting up from the rock.

As with most fields of vents, this one is astonishingly rich in valuable metals. The site is named Solwara 1 - “salt water” in the local language.But the hydrothermal vents host thriving communities of marine life - snails, worms and shrimp that have evolved to cope with very specific conditions. In some cases these creatures are extremely rare, which is why the prospect of deep sea mining is highly controversial. The plan is for Kewa to guide the steel teeth of the mining machines so they methodically demolish the vents, pulverising them into fragments.

The UN’s International Seabed Authority has drawn up maps dividing the ocean into blocks. There are 29 exploration areas, licensed for mineral prospecting for 15 years. In total they stretch over an astonishing 500,000 square miles (1.3m sq km) of seabed in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Ventures from 19 different countries have paid for the rights to investigate them. China has four of them. Russia and South Korea each have three. France and Germany have two. And so does the UK, via a company called UK Seabed Resources. The company’s owner, Lockheed Martin, has an interesting connection. It was one of the contractors secretly hired by the CIA to retrieve the Soviet submarine – and it has remained genuinely interested in manganese nodules ever since.

...

No deep sea mine can start operating until the ecology of each zone has been assessed. And the rush to mine has generated something unexpected - a wealth of new information about life in some of the least explored parts of the world. Among those are thousands of new species ranging from sponges to crustaceans.

Pedro Martinez, who works at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, told a conference at London’s Natural History Museum how hundreds of creatures spotted in the depths are completely new to science. “We don’t even have names for these species...there are no books to identify them. The abyssal plains,” he asserted, “may have the highest biodiversity in the oceans, maybe the highest biodiversity on the planet.”

So what impact will mining have on marine life? Huge excavators will rumble over the seabed. Either they will tear up hydrothermal vents or they will vacuum up nodules. It will be highly destructive. Michael Lodge admits that but also argues that the areas affected will be tiny compared with the vastness of the oceans – “much less than half a per cent” – and that big areas have been earmarked as reserves to be left untouched.

The geologist Bram Murton has warned of “an ill-informed knee-jerk reaction” to ocean mining which, he says, offers the potential to support a low-carbon future.But Glover says that ultimately it’s about whether it’s right for humans to go into an area and destroy species we know nothing about.

All this raises an awkward set of questions. Where should we get our minerals from? Should phones and wind turbines and electric cars carry a label explaining the origins of their raw materials? Time is running out to come up with answers. More than 40 years since the CIA faked a deep sea mining operation, the first genuine ones may start work far sooner than most people realise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining#sa-link_location=container-top-stories-3&intlink_from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews&intlink_ts=1519056661276&story_slot=1-sa

Inside a hedge

Cross section of a hedge, found on the internet.

Scandal in the world of... curling

"It is a piece of shocking news. Curling is not a sport you associate with doping. People shouldn't assume curling isn't a physical sport, especially mixed curling. They train hard in the gym just like every athlete - but it's also a sport of concentration."

But I would have expected that being able to aim well is more important than being able to run fast. Next up, lawn boules ?
http://www.bbc.com/sport/winter-olympics/43109290

Marvel's greatest superhero

Clearly Marvel's greatest and most underrated hero. Make this movie god dammit.

Y Ddraig Goch possesses superhuman strength (lifting 50 tons). He can shift between dragon and human form by will though his transformation into his dragon form drains energy from others within an area of roughly 50 square miles, rendering them unconscious. He can breathe fire in both forms. As dragon he has large, leathery wings for flight.

Ddraig Goch fought the invaders' White Dragon so hard cattle lost their milk and women miscarried. King Ludd eventually trapped the fighting dragons in a pit full of mead in Dinas Emrys in Snowdonia.

...the men of Dolgellau pleaded with Ddraig Goch to help them against the Vikings and delivered women to him as payment (one half before the job, one half after the job was done)... The women of Dolgellau were brave and accepted their fate. The dragon consumed one half of them as was the deal.

When Ddraig Goch flew towards Odin, Thor and Hermod again Thor threw Mjolnir at the dragon, who kept it between his teeth and used Mjolnir's enchantement to always return to Thor, as a way to come down at Thor even faster... Ddraig Goch devoured Rhodri, who tasted even better than the women of Dolgellau.

Ddraig Goch fought at the battle of Rorke's Drift, aiding 150 British soldiers in defending a supply station from 4000 Zulu warriors.

Haunted by the endless killings Ddraig Goch began drinking heavily at pubs and gradually forgot his true identity. As Dave Griffin he violently took control over Cardiff's underworld including drug trafficking, prostitution and protection rackets. He became addicted to his own drugs and killed mercilessly.
http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix7/welsh_dragon_goch.htm

Black Panther predicts a glorious future for Wales, or possible a glorious past

The more I learn, the more I want to see.

When Wakanda's King T'Challa presents at the United Nations, he stands on stage alongside a Welsh flag. It's left viewers wondering whether Wales is independent in this Marvel universe. Wales is of course part of the United Kingdom, and at the UN is represented by the Union Jack flag. But a scene that comes after the film's credits has got many eagle-eyed Welsh viewers excited, as the Baner Cymru (or Y Ddraig Goch) is on proud display on stage.

Welshman Leigh Jones, who works for a record label in London, said the flag's inclusion made him proud.

(Yes, he's ever such an obvious chap to contact, but never mind)

"When the Welsh language and independence movements began gaining momentum in the 1960s, they saw themselves as part of a global struggle for civil rights at the time, which was being led by black Americans. Whether this is acknowledgment of that fellowship, or somebody working on SFX trying to suck up to the general manager of Lucasfilm (a Welsh person), doesn't really matter," he says. "It's just brilliant to have recognition of Wales as a separate nation on a global scale when we even struggle to get that recognition within the UK."

Other theories posted by fans include the flag's cameo being a nod to little-known Marvel hero Y Ddraig Goch - which literally translates to The Red Dragon. He appears in comic book Earth-616 and is described as the protector of Wales, as well as a former crime lord.

PLEASE make that movie. Let him be a hardened alcoholic from the mean streets of Cardiff, where he rises to heroic status by winning a drinking contest. It'd be hilarious. God only knows what a protector of Wales would get up to, other than drinking heavily and bothering sheep.

Polls suggest that when presented with different options for how Wales should be governed, an average of 6% of the Welsh population would choose independence.

Think of us as a less daft version of Scotland, if it helps.
http://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-43085864

Google is being an arse

Google has made it more difficult for people to save pictures from its image search product, as part of a "peace deal" with photo library Getty Images. In 2017, Getty Images complained to the European Commission, accusing Google of anti-competitive practices. Google said it had removed some features from image search, including the "view image" button. Getty Images said it was a "significant milestone" but critics said the move was "a step backwards".

That's just hugely irritating, much like Getty Images in general.

[There are Chrome extensions available which are generally pretty successful at bypassing this insane piece of corporate control.]

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43085053

"Give everyone money", report says

The government should give £10,000 to every citizen under 55, a report suggests. The Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) said it could pave the way to everyone getting a basic state wage. The idea sees two payments of £5,000 paid over two years, but certain state benefits and tax reliefs would be removed at the same time.

The RSA said it would compensate workers for the way jobs are changing. The money would help to steer UK citizens through the 2020s, "as automation replaces many jobs, climate change hits and more people face balancing employment with social care", the report said.

The fund would be built from public debt, levies on untaxed corporate assets and investments in long term infrastructure projects, and be similar to Norway's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. As the dividends would replace payments such as Child Benefit, Tax Credits and Jobseeker's Allowance, the savings for the government could also be ploughed into the fund.

I don't know, I can see why you'd get rid of jobseeker's allowance, but I would think if you have children you're still going to need extra benefit in addition to £10,000 per year.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43078920

Was Jeremy Corbyn a Communist spy or just stupidly naive ?

That moment when you don't know whether to laugh or cry or wet your pants.

A disturbing new report in The Sun reveals that Corbyn was much more than just a left-wing activist in the 1980s—he was spying on his own country for the Warsaw Pact. Although The Sun is a tabloid and not always meticulous with details, this report is based on the files of Communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security, known as the StB. 

The files in question appear entirely legitimate, and for Corbyn they are damning. They reveal that in 1986, when he was a Labour Member of Parliament, Corbyn was approached by an StB officer masquerading as a diplomat in London by the name of Jan Dymic. Based on Dymic’s report, the meeting went well. He assessed Corbyn, who was known as a sharp critic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Britain’s close ties with the Americans, as “negative towards the USA, as well as the current politics of the Conservative government.”

The files reveal two more meetings with Corbyn in 1987, on July 3 and October 25. At the former encounter, Dymic brought along a member of the central committee of his country’s Communist Party. 

 Corbyn reportedly warned Dymic about increased British security measures, and he claimed to be “very well informed” of people in contact with “anti-Communist agencies.” In other words, COB was willing to pass British counterintelligence secrets to the StB.

http://observer.com/2018/02/new-report-reveals-jeremy-corbyn-was-a-communist-spy-in-1980s/

The great white shark is hugely misunderstood

In real life, the great white shark - the fish can weigh up to two tonnes, grow to lengths of 20ft (6m), reach speeds of 40mph in water and live reasonably long - prefers seals, sea lions, tuna, salmon and small toothed whales as prey. "They are inquisitive, sharp and sentient beings," Dr Aich says. "Sometimes I go down in the water after baits have been thrown, and the shark doesn't come to the boat. Or she will come for a few seconds and go away. The shark's will to encounter humans is pivotal."

The great white shark, according to shark specialist Craig Ferreira, is also "capable of explosive violence, but is absolutely not a blood thirsty and aggressive animal, and its behaviour is centred on not becoming involved in conflict and combat, with combat being the last resort."

Watching the great white, according to a 60-year-old Canadian man, was a "moving experience, and there was no fear at all".

"People say all scary things about sharks, and as a child you are moulded into certain beliefs. But I felt totally at peace with those animals," he said. "It's a completely different experience for me than that I've seen on TV," a honeymooning American couple told the researchers, "It seems they are much more docile".
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42956475

Wikileaks thinks Clinton is somehow worse than Trump

How many leaks would a wikileak leak if a wikileak could leak leaks ?

Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing site founded by Julian Assange, wanted a Republican to become US president, according to a leaked conversation. Files obtained by The Intercept show the Wikileaks Twitter account revealing its preference to a group of supporters, via private chat. "We believe it would be much better for GOP [US Republican party] to win," the transcript read. The account also described Hillary Clinton as a "sadistic sociopath". It is thought that the Wikileaks Twitter account is controlled by Julian Assange, although it is not clear who wrote the comments in the leaked transcript.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43072261

Charlie Brooker is unwittingly aiding the Chinese government

The Chinese government have watched Black Mirror, season 3 episode 1 ("Nosedive" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive) and thought, "yep, that sounds a thoroughly good idea". The resemblance is infinitely closer to reality, and infinitely more disturbing, than the silly incident with the pig.

Known by the anodyne name “social credit,” this system is designed to reach into every corner of existence both online and off. It monitors each individual’s consumer behavior, conduct on social networks, and real-world infractions like speeding tickets or quarrels with neighbors. Then it integrates them into a single, algorithmically determined “sincerity” score. Every Chinese citizen receives a literal, numeric index of their trustworthiness and virtue, and this index unlocks, well, everything. In principle, anyway, this one number will determine the opportunities citizens are offered, the freedoms they enjoy, and the privileges they are granted.

The social-credit system was based explicitly on a familiar, Western model: the credit score. As a de facto reputation index, your credit score strongly conditions where you can rent, what kind of jobs or educational opportunities you’ll be eligible for, even what mode of travel you use to get around. This one number—formulated by obscure means, by largely unaccountable organizations, then used as a gating mechanism by a profusion of third parties, mostly in secret—has become what it was never meant to be: a general proxy for trustworthiness.

Citizens with higher social-credit scores enjoy discounts or upgrades on products and services, like hotel rooms or internet connectivity. Those who wear virtue on their sleeves further—perhaps by taking public transit consistently instead of driving to work, taking out the recycling regularly, or even denouncing a misbehaving neighbor—might enjoy new benefits, like being able to rent a flat with no deposit, or earning the right to send their children to exclusive schools. This hardly sounds like authoritarianism run amok... [Umm, WHAT?!?!? I'm a lefty and even I think that's ridonculous]

Attend a “subversive” political meeting or religious service, for example, or frequent known haunts of vice, or do under-the-table business with an unregistered, informal enterprise, and the idea is that the network will know about it and respond by curtailing one’s privileges. The state wants its citizens to believe that there’s little point in trying to evade detection of such acts, especially when they are strongly correlated with suspicious sites, either by mobile-phone location data or by China’s extensive national network of facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras. Once detected, the system promises to pass judgment on the things a citizen is and is not permitted to do, buy, or access. And with no recourse in real time, no ability to appeal, and nowhere to turn for help... Private, commercial transactions—renting a car, reserving a hotel room, buying a plane ticket—become venues for state-directed punishment for nonconformity.

The implementation of social credit has been piecemeal so far: partial, local, and experimental. And there have been some encouraging signs of popular resistance to imposed “sincerity.” In the coastal province of Zhejiang, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Page and Eva Dou report that locals have rejected a digital tool intended to let them inform on neighbors, on the grounds that it reminds them of the Cultural Revolution–style denunciations that remain within the living memory of elders.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/chinas-dangerous-dream-of-urban-control/553097/?utm_source=feed

Rescue ants

Matabele ants, native to sub-Saharan Africa, lay siege to the termite colonies they eat by the hundreds, braving the potentially life-threatening bites of large soldier termites that defend them. But what really piqued myrmecologist Erik T. Frank’s interest about these ants was that they carry their wounded home after a raid—a discovery Frank made in 2017.

It turns out their battlefield rescues are just part of the story. Back in the nest, ants take turns caring for their injured comrades, gently holding the hurt limb in place with their mandibles and front legs while intensely “licking” the wound for up to four minutes at a time. This discovery marks the first time non-human animals have been observed systematically nursing their wounded back to health.

This behaviour proved vital: 80 percent of experimentally injured ants died within 24 hours if kept by themselves. But if cared for by their nest-mates for even an hour, only a tenth died. Interestingly, 80 percent survived without treatment if placed in a sterile environment, so Frank believes infections are the main cause of death and this “licking” behavior may help prevent them.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/matabele-ants-rescue-heal-injured-soldiers/

SETI would like to use GPUs but everyone is using them for bloody Bitcoins

Bizarre.

Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) wants to expand operations at two observatories. However, it has found that key computer chips are in short supply. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em. That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?" said Dan Werthimer.

Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining. Mining a currency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum involves connecting computers to a global network and using them to solve complex mathematical puzzles. This forms part of the process of validating transactions made by people who use the currency. As a reward for this work, the miners receive a small crypto-currency payment, making it potentially profitable.

Other radio-astronomers have been affected. Prof Parsons' radio telescope, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera), is an American, British and South African project located in South Africa's western plains. It has been designed to listen to low frequency radio waves emitted by the reionising hydrogen gas that permeated the universe before the first stars and galaxies formed.GPUs are needed in order to bring together data from Hera's many small radio telescopes - this synthesises a much larger array, offering an especially wide field of view peering out into the universe.

"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget." added Prof Parsons. "We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra." He also said he was concerned that future work could even be stopped in its tracks, should the GPU shortage worsen.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43056744

SpaceX's Telsa will probably not collide with anything for millions of years

In most realizations, the Tesla does not collide with any object over the timescales we considered. Although there were several close encounters with Mars in our simulations, none of them resulted in a physical collision. We find that there is a ≈ 6% chance that the Tesla will collide with Earth and a ≈ 2.5% chance that it will collide with Venus within the next 1 Myr. The collision rate goes down slightly with time. After 3 Myr the probability of a collision with Earth is ≈ 11%. We observed only one collision with the Sun within 3 Myr.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04718

Unconventional and seriously impressive security hacks

The field of cybersecurity is obsessed with preventing and detecting breaches, finding every possible strategy to keep hackers from infiltrating your digital inner sanctum. But Mordechai Guri has spent the last four years fixated instead on exfiltration: How spies pull information out once they've gotten in. Specifically, he focuses on stealing secrets sensitive enough to be stored on an air-gapped computer, one that's disconnected from all networks and sometimes even shielded from radio waves. Which makes Guri something like an information escape artist.

More, perhaps, than any single researcher outside of a three-letter agency, Guri has uniquely fixated his career on defeating air gaps by using so-called "covert channels," stealthy methods of transmitting data in ways that most security models don't account for. As the director of the Cybersecurity Research Center at Israel's Ben Gurion University, 38-year-old Guri's team has invented one devious hack after another that takes advantage of the accidental and little-noticed emissions of a computer's components—everything from light to sound to heat.

Guri and his fellow Ben-Gurion researchers have shown, for instance, that it's possible to trick a fully offline computer into leaking data to another nearby device via the noise its internal fan generates, by changing air temperatures in patterns that the receiving computer can detect with thermal sensors, or even by blinking out a stream of information from a computer hard drive LED to the camera on a quadcopter drone hovering outside a nearby window. In new research published today, the Ben-Gurion team has even shown that they can pull data off a computer protected by not only an air gap, but also a Faraday cage designed to block all radio signals.
https://www.wired.com/story/air-gap-researcher-mordechai-guri/

Skiing robots

Hypothesis : there's no sport that can't be made more interesting by replacing humans with robots. Discuss.

"The world's first robot ski tournament was held in Hoengseong (South Korea) on the sidelines of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. 8 teams from local universities and tech companies took part in the inaugural event. Each team prepared a self-driving humanoid robot which is engineered to ski down the slopes on its own. Amid the freezing cold and wind, some robots crashed or failed not navigate themselves through the flagpoles. Others successfully completed the run."

"We programmed the robot to imitate human movement by maneuvering 21 motors. It has cameras and sensors that can recognize the red and blue colors of the flag gates. Therefore, it is able to avoid the flagpoles as it skis down the slope."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQxbLkOsv5Q

Farewell, social justice goose

How can you not love Social Justice Goose ? Answer : you can't.

A blind bisexual goose named Thomas has died in New Zealand at the age of 40. He spent six years in a love triangle with two swans and helped raise their dozens of babies.

Years ago, Thomas segregated himself from other geese and instead chose a black male swan named Henry as his life-long mate for 24 years. When Henry fell in love with another swan, Henrietta, Thomas stayed with the pair and helped raise their cygnets up until Henry died in 2009. Thomas finally retired to the Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust (WRBT) sanctuary in 2013 and he eventually went blind.

https://www.indy100.com/article/blind-bisexual-polyamorous-goose-thomas-new-zealand-henry-black-swan-wellington-bird-rehabilitation-8202691

Machine learning to detect and block extremist material

Sharing without comment, except to note that there's an interesting Blade Runner-esque soundtrack for the first video.

The UK government has unveiled a tool it says can accurately detect jihadist content and block it from being viewed. Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the BBC she would not rule out forcing technology companies to use it by law. Ms Rudd is visiting the US to meet tech companies to discuss the idea, as well as other efforts to tackle extremism. Thousands of hours of content posted by the Islamic State group was run past the tool, in order to "train" it to automatically spot extremist material.

The government provided £600,000 of public funds towards the creation of the tool by an artificial intelligence company based in London. ASI Data Science said the software can be configured to detect 94% of IS video uploads. Anything the software identifies as potential IS material would be flagged up for a human decision to be taken.

The company said it typically flagged 0.005% of non-IS video uploads. On a site with five million daily uploads, it would flag 250 non-IS videos for review. It is intended to lighten the moderation burden faced by small companies that may not have the resources to effectively tackle extremist material being posted on their sites.

In Silicon Valley, the home secretary told the BBC the tool was made as a way to demonstrate that the government's demand for a clampdown on extremist activity was not unreasonable. "It's a very convincing example of the fact that you can have the information you need to make sure this material doesn't go online in the first place," she said. "The technology is there. There are tools out there that can do exactly what we're asking for. For smaller companies, this could be ideal."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43037899