Justin Vanessus 02

Supreme Court Validates Texas Anti-Porn Law

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:10:00 +0000

On Friday, June 27, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. The Free Speech Coalition is an organization representing the interests of the online pornography industry, and Kenneth Paxton is the controversial attorney general of Texas,whose duty it is to enforce a 2023 law which "requires pornography websites to verify the age of users before they can access explicit material," according to a report by National Review. The Court upheld the Texas law, finding that the law was a constitutional exercise of a state's responsibility to prevent children from "accessing sexually explicit content."

This ruling has implications beyond Texas, as 22 other states have adopted similar laws, and the decision of the court means that those states are probably safe from federal lawsuits as well.

This is a matter of interest to engineering ethicists because, whether we like it or not, pornography has played a large role in electronic media at least since the development of consumer video-cassette recorders in the 1970s. As each new medium has appeared, the pornographers have been among its earliest adopters. Around 1980, as I was considering a career change in the electronic communications industry, one of the jobs I was offered was as engineer for a satellite cable-TV company. One of the factors that made me turn it down was that a good bit of their programming back then was of the Playboy Channel ilk. I ended up working for a supplier of cable TV equipment, which wasn't much better, perhaps, but that job lasted only a couple of years before I went back to school and remained in academia thereafter.

The idea behind the Texas law is that children exposed to pornography suffer objective harm. The American College of Pediatricians has a statement on their website attesting to the problems caused by pornography to children: depression, anxiety, violent behavior, and "a distorted view of relationships between men and women." And it's not a rare problem. The ubiquity of mobile phones means that even children who do not have their own phone are exposed to porn by their peers, and so even parents who do not allow their children to have a mobile phone are currently pretty defenseless against the onslaught of online pornography.

Requiring porn websites to verify a user's age is a small but necessary step in reducing the exposure of young people to the social pathology of pornography. In an article in the online journal The Dispatch, Charles Fain Lehman proposes that we dust off obscenity laws to prosecute pornographers regardless of the age of their clientele. The prevalence of porn in the emotional lives of young people has ironically led to a dearth of sexual activity in Gen Z, who have lived with its presence all their lives. In a review of several books that ask why people in their late teens and 20s today are having less sex than previous generations, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino cites the statistic that nearly half of adults in this age category regard porn as harmful, but only 37% of older millennials do. And fifteen percent of young Americans have encountered porn by the age of 10.

There are plenty of science-based reasons to keep children and young teenagers from viewing pornography. For those who believe in God, I would like to add a few more. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that they must "become like children" to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he warns that "whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin [the Greek word means "to stumble"], it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matt. 18:6). People who propagate pornography that ten-year-olds can watch on their phones seem to fill the bill for those who cause children to stumble.

The innocence of children can be overrated, as anyone who has dealt with a furious two-year-old can attest. But it is really a kind of mental virginity that children have: the absence of cruel and exploitative sexual images in their minds helps keep them away from certain kinds of sin, even before they could understand what was involved. Until a few decades ago, most well-regulated societies protected children from the viewing, reading, or hearing of pornography, and those who wished to access it had to go to considerable efforts to seek out a bookstore or porn theater.

But that is no longer the case, and as Carter Sherman, the author of a book quoted in the New Yorker says, the internet is a "mass social experiment with no antecedent and whose results we are just now beginning to see." Among those results are a debauching of the ways men and women interact sexually, to the extent that one recent college-campus survey showed that nearly two-thirds of women said they'd been choked during sex.

This is not the appropriate location to explore the ideals of how human sexuality should be expressed. But suffice it to say that the competitive and addictive nature of online pornography invariably degrades its users toward a model of sexual attitudes that are selfish, exploitative, and unlikely to lead to positive outcomes.

The victory of Texas's age-verification law at the Supreme Court is a step in the right direction toward the regulation of the porn industry, and gives hope to those who would like to see further legal challenges to its very existence. Perhaps we are at the early stages of a trend comparable to what happened with the tobacco industry, which denied the objective health hazards of smoking until the evidence became overwhelming. It's not too early for pornographers to start looking for millstones as a better alternative to their current occupation.

Sources: The article "Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law" appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-upholds-texas-age-verification-porn-law/, and the article "It's Time to Prosecute Pornhub" appeared at https://thedispatch.com/article/pornhub-supreme-court-violence-obscenity-rape/. I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton" and the New Yorker article "Sex Bomb" by Jia Tolentino on pp. 58-61 of the June 30, 2025 issue.

Should Chatbots Replace Government-Worker Phone Banks?

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:03:00 +0000

The recent slashes in federal-government staffing and funding have drawn the attention of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and two of the Institute's members warn of impending disaster if the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) carries through its stated intention to replace hordes of government workers with AI chatbots. In the July/August issue of Scientific American, DAIR founder Timnit Gebru, joined by staffer Asmelash Teka Hadgu, decry the current method of applying general-purpose large-language-model AI to the specific task of speech recognition, which would be necessary if one wants to replace the human-staffed phone banks that are at the other end of the telephone numbers for Social Security and the IRS with machines.

The DAIR people give vivid examples of the kinds of things that can go wrong. They focused on Whisper, which is a speech-recognition feature of OpenAI, and the results of studies by four universities of how well Whisper converted audio files of a person talking into transcribed text.

The process of machine transcription has come a long way since the very early days of computers in the 1970s, when I heard Bell Labs' former head of research John R. Pierce say that he doubted speech recognition would ever be computerized. But anyone who phones a large organization today is likely to deal with some form of automated speech recognition, as well as anyone who has a Siri or other voice-controlled device in the home. Just last week I was on vacation, and the TV in the room had to be controlled with voice commands. Simple operations like asking for music or a TV channel are fairly well performed by these systems, but that's not what the DAIR people are worried about.

With more complex language, Whisper was shown not only to misunderstand things, but to make up stuff as well that was not in the original audio file at all. For example, the phrase "two other girls and one lady" in the audio file became after Whisper transcribed it, "two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black."

This is an example of what is charitably called "hallucinating" by AI proponents. If a human being did something like this, we'd just call it lying, but to lie requires a will and an intellect that chooses a lie rather than the truth. Not many AI experts want to attribute will and intellect to AI systems, so they default to calling untruths hallucinations.

This problem arises, the authors claim, when companies try to develop AI systems that can do everything and train them on huge unedited swaths of the Internet, rather than tailoring the design and training to a specific task, which of course costs more in terms of human input and guidance. They paint a picture of a dystopian future in which somebody who calls Social Security can't ever talk to a human being, but just gets shunted around among chatbots which misinterpret, misinform, and simply lie about what the speaker said.

Both government-staffed interfaces with the public and speech-recognition systems vary greatly in quality. Most people have encountered at least one or two government workers who are memorable for their surliness and aggressively unhelpful demeanor. But there are also many such people who go out of their way to pay personal attention to the needs of their clients, and these are the kinds of employees we would miss if they got replaced by chatbots.

Elon Musk's brief tenure as head of DOGE is profiled in the June 23 issue of The New Yorker magazine, and the picture that emerges is that of a techie dude roaming around in organizations he and his tech bros didn't understand, causing havoc and basically throwing monkey wrenches into finely-adjusted clock mechanisms. The only thing that is likely to happen in such cases is that the clock will stop working. Improvements are not in the picture, not even cost savings in many cases. As an IRS staffer pointed out, many IRS employees end up bringing in many times their salary's worth of added tax revenue by catching tax evaders. Firing those people may look like an immediate short-term economy, but in the long term it will cost billions.

Now that Musk has left DOGE, the threat of massive-scale replacement of federal customer-service people by chatbots is less than it was. But we would be remiss in ignoring DAIR's warning that AI systems can be misused or abused by large organizations in a mistaken attempt to save money.

In the private sector, there are limits to what harm can be done. If a business depends on answering phone calls accurately and helpfully, and they install a chatbot that offends every caller, pretty soon that business will not have any more business and will go out of business. But in the U. S. there's only one Social Security Administration and one Internal Revenue Service, and competition isn't part of that picture.

The Trump administration does seem to want to do some revolutionary things to the way government operates. But at some level, they are also aware that if they do anything that adversely affects millions of citizens, they will be blamed for it.

So I'm not too concerned that all the local Social Security offices scattered around the country will be shuttered, and one's only alternative will be to call a chatbot which hallucinates by concluding the caller is dead and cuts off his Social Security check. Along with almost every other politician in the country, Trump recognizes Social Security is a third rail that he touches at his peril.

But that still leaves plenty of room for future abuse of AI by trying to make it do things that people really still do better, and maybe even more economically than computers. While the immediate threat may have passed from the scene with Musk's departure from DOGE, the tendency is still there. Let's hope that sensible mid-level managers will prevail against the lightning strikes of DOGE and its ilk, and the needed work of government will go on.

Sources: The article "A Chatbot Dystopian Nightmare" by Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Timnit Gebru appeared in the July/August 2025 Scientific American on pp. 89-90. I also referred to the article "Move Fast and Break Things" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on pp. 24-35 of the June 23, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.

Why Did Air India Flight 171 Crash?

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:40:00 +0000

That is the question that investigators will be asking in the coming days, weeks and months to come. On Thursday June 12, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner took off from Ahmedabad in northwest India, bound for London. On board were 242 passengers and crew. It was a hot, clear day. Videos taken from the ground show that after rolling down the runway, the plane "rotated" into the air (orienting flight surfaces to make the plane take off), and assumed a nose-up attitude. But after rising for about fifteen seconds, it began to sink back toward the ground and plowed into a building housing students of a medical college. All but one person on the plane were killed, and at least 38 people on the ground died as well.

This is the first fatal crash of a 787 since it was introduced in 2011. The data recorder was recovered over the weekend, so experts have abundant information to comb through in determining what went wrong. The formal investigation will take many weeks, but understandably, friends and relatives of the victims of the crash would like answers earlier than that.

Air India, the plane's operator, became a private entity only in 2022 after spending 69 years under the control of the Indian government. An AP news report mentions that fatal crashes killing hundreds of people involved Air India equipment in 1978 and 2010. The quality of training is always a question in accidents of this kind, and that issue will be addressed along with many others.

An article in the Seattle Times describes the opinions of numerous aviation experts as to what might have led to a plane crashing shortly after takeoff in this way. While they all emphasized that everything they say is speculative at this point, they had some specific suggestions as well.

One noted that the appearance of dust in a video of the takeoff just before the plane becomes airborne might indicate that the pilot used up the entire runway in taking off. This is not the usual procedure at major airports, and might have indicated issues with available engine power.

Several experts mentioned that the flaps may not have been in the correct position for takeoff. Flaps are parts of the wing that can be extended downward during takeoff and landing to provide extra lift, and are routinely extended for the first few minutes of any flight. The problem with this theory, as one expert mentioned, is that modern aircraft have alarms to alert a negligent pilot that the flaps haven't been extended, and unless there was a problem with hydraulic pressure that overwhelmed other alarms, the pilots would have noticed the issue immediately.

Another possibility involves an attempt to take off too soon, before the plane had enough airspeed to leave the ground safely. Rotation, as the actions to make the plane leave the ground are called, cannot come too early, or else the plane is likely to either stall or lose altitude after an initial rise. Stalling is an aerodynamic effect that happens when an airfoil has an excessive angle of attack to the incoming air, which no longer flows in a controlled way over the upper surface but separates from it. The result is that lift decreases dramatically. An airplane entering a sudden stall can appear to pitch upward and then simply drop out of the air. While such a stall was not obvious in the videos of the flight obtained so far, something obviously caused a lack of sufficient lift that led to the crash.

Other more remote possibilities include engine problems that would limit the amount of thrust available below that needed for a safe takeoff. It is possible that some systemic control issue may have limited available thrust, but there was no obvious mechanical failure of the engines before the crash, so this possibility is not a leading one.

In sum, initial signs are that some type of pilot error may have at least contributed to the crash: too-early rotation, misapplication of flaps, or other more subtle mistakes. A wide-body aircraft cannot be stopped on a dime, and once it has begun a rollout to takeoff there are not a lot of options left to the pilot should a sudden emergency occur. A decision to abort takeoff beyond a certain point will result in overrunning the runway. And depending on how much extra space there is at the end of the runway, an overrun can easily lead to a crash, as recently happened when Jeju Air Flight 2216 in Thailand overshot the runway and crashed into the concrete foundation of some antennas in December 2024.

The alternative of taking off and trying to stay in the air may not be successful either, unless sufficient thrust can be applied to gain sufficient altitude. Although no expert mentioned the following possibility and there may be good reasons for that, perhaps there was an issue with brakes not being fully released on the landing-gear wheels. This would slow down the plane considerably, and the unusual nature of the problem might not give the pilots time enough to figure out what was happening.

Modern jetliners are exceedingly complicated machines, and the more parts there are in a system, the more combinations of things can happen to cause difficulties. The fact that there have so far been no calls to ground the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners indicates that the consensus of experts is that a fundamental issue with the plane itself is probably not at fault.

Once the flight-recorder data has been studied, we will know a great deal more about things such as flap and engine settings, precise timing of control actions, and other matters that are now a subject of speculation. It is entirely possible that the accident happened due to a combination of minor mechanical problems and poor training or execution by the flight crew. Many major tragedies in technology occur because a number of problems, each of which could be overcome by itself, combine to cause a system failure.

Our sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in the air or on the ground. And I hope that whatever lessons we learn from this catastrophe will improve training and design efforts to make these the last fatalities involving a 787 in a long time.

Sources: I referred to AP articles at https://apnews.com/article/air-india-survivor-crash-boeing-e88b0ba404100049ee730d5714de4c67 and https://apnews.com/article/india-plane-crash-what-to-know-4e99be1a0ed106d2f57b92f4cc398a6c, a Seattle Times article at https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/what-will-investigators-be-looking-for-in-air-india-crash-data/, and the Wikipedia articles on Air India and Air India Flight 171.

Science Vs. Luck: DNA Sequencing of Embryos

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:36:00 +0000

"Science Vs. Luck" was the title of a sketch by Mark Twain about a lawyer who got his clients off from a charge of gambling by recruiting professional gamblers, who convinced the jury that the game was more science than luck—by playing it with the jury and cleaning them out! Of course, there was more going on than met the eye, as professional gamblers back then had some tricks up their sleeves that the innocents on the jury wouldn't have caught. So while the verdict of science looked legitimate to the innocents, there was more going on than they suspected, and the spirit of the law against gambling was violated even though the letter seemed to be obeyed.

That sketch came to mind when I read an article by Abigail Anthony, who wrote on the National Review website about a service offered by the New York City firm Nucleus Genomics: whole-genome sequencing of in-vitro-fertilized embryos. For only $5,999, Nucleus will take the genetic data provided by the IVF company of your choice and give you information on over 900 different possible conditions and characteristics the prospective baby might have, ranging from Alzheimer's to the likelihood that the child will be left-handed.

There are other companies offering services similar to this, so I'm not calling out Nucleus in particular. What is peculiarly horrifying about this sales pitch is the implication that having a baby is no different in principle than buying a car. If you go in a car dealership and order a new car, you get to choose the model, the color, a range of optional features, and if you don't like that brand you can go to a different dealer and get even more choices.

The difference between choosing a car and choosing a baby is this: the cars you don't pick will be sold to somebody else. The babies you don't pick will die.

We are far down the road foreseen by C. S. Lewis in his prescient 1943 essay "The Abolition of Man." Lewis realized that what was conventionally called man's conquest of nature was really the exertion of power by some men over other men. And the selection of IVF embryos by means of sophisticated genomic tests such as the ones offered by Nucleus are a fine example of such power. In the midst of World War II when the fate of Western civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Lewis wrote, " . . . if any one age attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power."

Eugenics was a highly popular and respectable subject from the late 19th century up to right after World War II, when its association with the horrors of the Holocaust committed by the Nazi regime gave it a much-deserved bad name. The methods used by eugenicists back then were crude ones: sterilization of the "unfit," where the people deciding who was unfit always had more power than the unfit ones; encouraging the better classes to have children and the undesirable classes (such as negroes and other minorities) to have fewer ones; providing birth control and abortion services especially to those undesirable classes (a policy which is honored by Planned Parenthood to this day); and in the case of Hitler's Germany, the wholesale extermination of whoever was deemed by his regime to be undesirable: Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and so on.

But just as abortion hides behind a clean, hygienic medical facade to mask the fact that it is the intentional killing of a baby, the videos on Nucleus's website conceal the fact that in order to get that ideal baby with a minimum of whatever the parents consider to be undesirable traits, an untold number of fertilized eggs—all exactly the same kind of human being that you were when you were that age—have to be "sacrificed" on the altar of perfection.

If technology hands us a power that seems attractive, that enables us to avoid pain or suffering even on the part of another, does that mean we should always avail ourselves of it? The answer depends on what actions are involved in using that power.

If the Nucleus test enabled the prospective parents to avert potential harms and diseases in the embryo analyzed without killing it, there would not be any problem. But we don't know how to do that yet, and by the very nature of reproduction we may never be able to. The choice being offered is made by producing multiple embryos, and disposing of the ones that don't come up to snuff.

Now, at $6,000 a pop, it's not likely that anyone with less spare change than Elon Musk is going to keep trying until they get exactly what they want. But the clear implication of advertising such genomic testing as a choice is that, you don't have to take what Nature (or God) gives you. If you don't like it, you can put it away and try something else.

And that's really the issue: whether we acknowledge our finiteness before God and take the throw of the genetic dice that comes with having a child, the way it's been done since the beginning; or cheat by taking extra turns and drawing cards until we get what we want.

The range of human capacity is so large and varied that even the 900 traits analyzed by Nucleus do not even scratch the surface of what a given baby may become. This lesson is brought home in a story attributed to an author named J. John. In a lecture on medical ethics, the professor confronts his students with a case study. "The father of the family had syphilis and the mother tuberculosis. They already had four children. The first child is blind, the second died, the third is deaf and dumb, and the fourth has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant with her fifth child. She is willing to have an abortion, so should she?"

After the medical students vote overwhelmingly in favor of the abortion, the professor says, "Congratulations, you have just murdered the famous composer Ludwig von Beethoven!"

Sources: Abigail Anthony's article "Mail-order Eugenics" appeared on the National Review website on June 5, 2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mail-order-eugenics/. My source for the Beethoven anecdote is https://bothlivesmatter.org/blog/both-lives-mattered.

AI-Induced False Memories in Criminal Justice: Fiction or Reality?

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:16:00 +0000

A filmmaker in Germany named Hashem Al-Ghaili has come up with an idea to solve our prison problems: overcrowding, high recidivism rates, and all the rest. Instead of locking up your rapist, robber, or arsonist for five to twenty years, you offer him a choice: conventional prison and all that entails, or a "treatment" taking only a few minutes, after which he could return to society a free . . . I was going to say, "man," but once you find out what the treatment is, you may understand why I hesitated.

Al-Ghaili works with an artificial-intelligence firm called Cognify, and his treatment would do the following. After a detailed scan of the criminal's brain, false memories would be inserted into his brain, the nature of which would be chosen to make sure the criminal doesn't commit that crime again. Was he a rapist? Insert memories of what the victim felt like and experienced. Was he a thief? Give him a whole history of realizing the loss he caused to others, repentance on his part, and rejection of his criminal ways. And by the bye, the same brain scans could be used to create a useful database of criminal minds to figure out how to prevent these people from committing crimes in the first place.

Al-Ghaili admits that his idea is pretty far beyond current technological capabilities, but at the rate AI and brain research is progressing, he thinks now is the time to consider what we should do with these technologies once they're available.

Lest you think these notions are just a pipe dream, a sober study from the MIT Media Lab experimented with implanting false memories simply by sending some of a study group of 200 people to have a conversation with a chatbot about a crime video they all watched. The members of the study did not know that the chatbots were designed to mislead them with questions that would confuse their memories of what they saw. The researchers also tried the same trick with a simple set of survey questions, and left a fourth division of the group alone as a control.

What the MIT researchers found was that the generative type of chatbot induced its subjects to have more than three times the false memories of the control group, who were not exposed to any memory-clouding techniques, and more than those who took the survey experienced. What this study tells us is that using chatbots to interrogate suspects or witnesses in a criminal setting could easily be misused to distort the already less-than-100%-reliable recollections that we base legal decisions on.

Once again, we are looking down a road where we see some novel technologies in the future beckoning us to use them, and we face a decision: should we go there or not? Or if we do go there, what rules should we follow?

Let's take the Cognify prison alternative first. As ethicist Charles Camosy pointed out in a broadcast discussion of the idea, messing with a person's memories by direct physical intervention and bypassing their conscious mind altogether is a gross violation of the integrity of the human person. Our memories form an essential part of our being, as the sad case of Alzheimer's sufferers attests. To implant a whole set of false memories into a person's brain, and therefore mind as well, is as violent an intrusion as cutting off a leg and replacing it with a cybernetic prosthesis. Even if the person consents to such an action, the act itself is intrinsically wrong and should not be done.

We laugh at such things when we see them in comedies such as Men in Black, when Tommy Lee Jones whips out a little flash device that makes everyone in sight forget what they've seen for the last half hour or so. But each person has a right to experience the whole of life as it happens, and wiping out even a few minutes is wrong, let alone replacing them with a cobbled-together script designed to remake a person morally.

Yes, it would save money compared to years of imprisonment, but if you really want to save money, just chop off the head of every offender, even for minor infractions. That idea is too physically violent for today's cultural sensibilities, but in a culture inured to the death of many thousands of unborn children every year, we can apparently get used to almost any variety of violence as long as it is implemented in a non-messy and clinical-looking way.

C. S. Lewis saw this type of thing coming as long ago as 1949, when he criticized the trend of substituting therapeutic treatment of criminals as suffering from a disease, for retributive fixed-term punishment as the delivery of a just penalty to one who deserved it. He wrote "My contention is that this doctrine [of therapy rather than punishment], merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being."

No matter what either C. S. Lewis or I say, there are some people who will see nothing wrong with this idea, because they have a defective model of what a human being is. One can show entirely from philosophical, not religious, presuppositions that the human intellect is immaterial. Any system of thought which neglects that essential fact is capable of serious and violent errors, such as the Cognify notion of criminal memory-replacement would be.

As for allowing AI to implant false memories simply by persuasion, as the MIT Media Lab study appeared to do, we are already well down that road. What do you think is going on any time a person "randomly" trolls the Internet looking at whatever the fantastically sophisticated algorithms show him or her? AI-powered persuasion, of course. And the crisis in teenage mental health and many other social-media ills can be largely attributed to such persuasion.

I'm glad that Hashem Al-Ghaili's prison of the future is likely to stay in the pipe-dream category at least for the next few years. But now is the time to realize what a pernicious thing it would be, and to agree as a culture that we need to move away from treating criminals as laboratory animals and restore to them the dignity that every human being deserves.

Sources: Charles Camosy was interviewed on the Catholic network Relevant Radio on a recent edition of the Drew Mariani Show, where I heard about Cognify's "prison of the future" proposal. The quote from C. S. Lewis comes from his essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," which appears in his God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970). I also referred to an article on Cognify at https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/62983/1/inside-the-prison-of-the-future-where-ai-rewires-your-brain-hashem-al-ghaili and the MIT Media Lab abstract at https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ai-false-memories/overview/.

NSF and Women in STEM: Removing Barriers or Chartering Jets?

Mon, 26 May 2025 11:20:00 +0000

Anyone even remotely connected with the academic world knows that the Trump administration has recently been playing Attila the Hun to the Italy of the government-funded research establishment, slashing billions in already-granted money, firing staff, and generally raising Hades. A recent article by Andrew Follett in National Review highlights the shakeup at what many academics consider to be the crown jewel of such funding, the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Follett points out that the long-established woke-diversity-equity-inclusion slant at the agency may be repressed for the moment, but making permanent changes will require Congressional action.

Follett may well be right regarding the correct political strategy, but what I would like to focus on is one particular goal which the NSF holds dear to its bureaucratic heart: expanding participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for women.

It is not quite the case, as Follett says it is, that NSF is abandoning this goal completely. Rather, according to some updated guidelines on the NSF website, investigators may pursue it, but only "as part of broad engagement activities" that are open to all Americans, regardless of sex, race, or other "protected characteristics." Even if Congress gets involved, I suspect NSF will keep doing what it wants to do while staying within the letter of the law, because I've seen up close how they do it in the case of a specific grant aimed at increasing the participation of women in engineering.

I state categorically that women should not be barred from pursuing degrees or jobs in engineering, either de jure or de facto. As recently as 1970, women were not admitted to many all-male engineering-intensive schools, and many engineering programs at coed universities refused to take women. Accordingly, the U. S. Dept. of Labor reports that only 3% of engineers were women that year. Second-wave feminism, equal-employment laws, and other societal changes knocked down virtually all the legal and cultural barriers that kept women from being engineers by around 1990, and the percentage of engineers in the U. S. who were women rose to around 16%, where it has hovered to this day.

But since 1990, NSF has expended probably a total of billions of dollars trying to raise that percentage above 16%, with the presumed goal being "equity": that is, a percentage of women in engineering equal to their percentage in the general population. We can say several things about these efforts.

The most obvious thing is, they have failed. If NSF had poured billions of dollars into a pure-science project—just to take one at random, say, the nature of ball lightning—and gotten precisely zip results by now, one would hope that common sense would prevail and they would turn their attention to other matters. But that is not how these things work. This is not to say that all the money was wasted. In a grant I was familiar with at my own university, special scholarships and academic support networks were set up in a way that mainly attracted women, although when I asked the principal investigator whether a male student could apply, she said technically yes, although they weren't getting any to speak of. And scholarships are good for students, other things being equal.

But in terms of NSF's original goals of funding science research that otherwise would not get done, paying for scholarships that are legally for everybody but (wink-wink) are really focused on women is a classic example of politics corrupting science.

I use the word "corrupting" deliberately, in the sense that betrayal of an agency's stated purpose for political reasons—any political reasons, right, left, or slantwise—is a step down a long road that led to distinctions such as "Aryan science" in Germany before World War II.

As a wise junior-high civics teacher once told me, politics is just the conduct of public affairs, and of course it's not possible to keep any human institution, let alone a governmental one, completely free of political considerations.

But as in so many other ethical situations, the intent is the key. If Congress manipulates an agency's budget to favor certain regions, there's not much the agency's director can do about it other than jawbone. But that is vastly different from setting up entire divisions directed not at the discovery of new knowledge, but at the changing of certain demographic statistics such as the percentage of women in engineering.

It is entirely possible, but in the nature of things it cannot be proved, that about as many women as want to go into engineering today presently do so. As we said, most legal barriers that kept women out of engineering were gone by 1990, and since then the two professions that are even more prestigious than engineering—law and medicine—have become thoroughly feminized. And the stereotypical engineering image has changed radically from the 1940s, when a clipart drawing of an engineer would depict a rugged guy wearing work boots and toting a transit tripod on one shoulder and a big hammer in his hand. Nowadays, your typical engineer does exactly what I'm doing now—sits at a computer, something that women and men can do equally well.

I agree with Follett that the NSF, along with other federal agencies, will require extensive Congressional action and supervision in order for it to reorient its intentions and priorities. Old habits die hard, and old bureaucrats die harder. But some such sea change may be necessary if we are to avoid a wholesale turn away from government support of science research, which from the 1940s up to at least the 1990s enjoyed the benign support of most citizens. In a democracy, if most people no longer want a thing done by the government, it shouldn't be done, generally speaking. And if the science establishment has betrayed its origins and allowed itself to be corrupted by political winds that inevitably go out of fashion, the day of reckoning we are currently seeing the dawn of may go on longer than we think.

I'm glad there are women in engineering. I miss them when I don't have any in my undergraduate class, which happened last semester. But I think it's time NSF quit trying to move political needles and go back to funding science.

Sources: Andrew Follett's article "How Republicans Can Actually Defund Woke Science" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/how-republicans-can-actually-defund-woke-science/. I also referred to the Dept. of Labor site at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations-stem for women-in-engineering statistics, and the NSF website https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities for their updated priorities.

Parents and Children: Breaking Down the Technoference Barrier

Mon, 19 May 2025 10:49:00 +0000

No, I never read the word "technoference" before today, either. But according to some sociologists, technoference is what happens when a parent pays more attention to a mobile phone than to their children. And the results are not good.

An article by Clare Morell on the news website The Dispatch points out that even if children don't have mobile phones or screens themselves, their lives are significantly affected when their parents do. A study that compared rates of parental mobile phone use with how well their children do when starting school found that kids whose parents used their phones a lot had deficits in language and interpersonal skills.

Another problem comes when children try to learn new life skills. It turns out that parental "scaffolding"—basic support and encouragement—is vital for children to control their emotions when dealing with new situations. If Mommy is off in cyberspace when Junior is trying to color within the lines for the first time, she can't provide the reassurance and guidance which, however trivial-seeming for the parent, can make an earthshattering difference for the child.

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I rode a bike without training wheels. And it was when my father held the bike for me to get on, and then gave it enough of a shove that it would stay upright no matter what I did. Suddenly I could make it go on my own. This was about three decades before the advent of mobile phones, and while my upbringing was not without problems, mobile-phone technoference wasn't one of them.

Full disclosure: I have never been a parent, so I can't speak about childraising from personal experience. But there is one childraising principle I have observed in action over many years, which the article terms "over-imitating." I prefer to state it as follows: "Whatever Daddy (or Mommy) does is OK." This is a deep and profound, even subconscious, tendency in children to accept, embrace, and imitate whatever they see their parents doing. It plays out in everything from such minor habits as habitual finger-tapping to major malfeasances such as adultery. And I'm sure it applies to mobile-phone use as well.

One interesting study found that even babies are affected by a parent using a mobile phone within the child's field of view, even if the baby doesn't need anything in particular at the time. If you observe the expressions of people while they are looking at their phones, it's a kind of passive, zoned-out look that showed up a lot when a sociologist decided to install a camera on a TV and take pictures of people as they watched television. The researchers call this a "still face." It turns out that showing a still face to an infant isn't good, because it gives the infant no positive feedback or assurance that the mother or father is paying attention to the child. This passive look often inspires the infant to cry or otherwise try to attract attention. If Mommy stays glued to her phone, Junior escalates provocations until he gets some kind of reaction, which by this time will probably be a negative one.

Yet another study showed a correlation between a four-times-greater incidence of depression in teenagers and high rates of mobile phone use among parents.

Now, as we should constantly remind ourselves when reading about research like this, correlation isn't necessarily causation. The crisis in reproducibility of scientific studies means that statistical methods are often misapplied in an illogical way. That is a topic for another blog. But even if we disregard all the statistics and simply ask, "Can a parent's mobile-phone use get in the way of their attempts to be a good parent?" I think the answer is obvious. Of course it can, but what can we do about it?

Morell has a number of recommendations, some of which are easier to do than others. She suggests having a "phone box" to put phones in at the end of the day, so parents and children are both freed up to interact without distractions. How one would define the day's end is up to the individual, but it sounds like a good idea. I have a phone you can actually turn off, and I set it in my study and leave it there overnight.

She suggests putting away your phone whenever you are with your children. For some people, especially single moms, that is a big ask. But at least consciously setting aside a no-phone interval each day might be a good idea. The only time these days I am around parents with a lot of children is when I go to church, and except for the stray ringtone during the sermon, you might otherwise think that my church is a phone-free zone. That's an unusual situation, though, and I have no idea what these parents do with regard to mobile phones when they are home with their kids. A good many of them homeschool, however, and you can bet the phone is put away during those times.

Morell says she uses something called a Wisephone. A visit to that firm's website shows that their product has "no social media, no explicit content, no web browser" but can do basic stuff like maps, calling for rides, playing music, dealing with money, and checking the weather. That's two or three more things than I use my phone for, so I'm ahead of her already in that regard.

I'm also in sync with her recommendations to go analog (or at least not use your phone for everything): get a separate alarm clock (check), use a paper calendar (check), use a real camera instead of your phone camera (check), and use a notepad and pen (check). I claim no particular virtue for doing these things: I just never quit doing them when I got a mobile phone. Others may have more of a problem transitioning.

So even if kids don't have mobile phones themselves, their parents' phones can cause problems. Parenting is a huge responsibility, and my metaphorical hat is off to anyone who attempts it. Just be aware that your smartphone may get in the way of being the best parent you want to be.

Sources: Clare Morell's article "Parents, Put Down the Phones" is on the (paywall-protected, unfortunately) website The Dispatch, which some may be able to access at https://thedispatch.com/article/parenting-phones-screen-time-kids-development-imitation/. I also referred to the Wisephone website at https://wisephone.com/.

Did Renewables Contribute to Spain's Blackout?

Mon, 12 May 2025 10:50:00 +0000

That's the question that still has not been definitively answered as of today (May 11), almost two weeks after the April 28 power outage that plunged much of Spain and Portugal into darkness for almost 24 hours. Why could renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power have contributed to the blackout? The answer isn't simple, but as more and more countries derive more of their energy from renewables, it's a question that deserves examination.

What we do know about the blackout is this. The Iberian Peninsula is a little like Texas in that its power grid is nearly autonomous, with only small interties to the rest of the European continent. A little after noon, some "oscillations" appeared in the grid and were "detected and mitigated." Operating a large power grid is a delicate balancing act in which the fluctuating demand must be met by appropriate generating capacity at all times. And across the entire grid, all the generating plants must produce power in synchronism at a rate of 50 Hz (in Europe—60 Hz in the U. S.).

A prime indicator of the health of the grid is how close the grid's frequency is to its nominal frequency. The grid is like a symphony orchestra in which all the instruments are tuned to the same pitch. The entire system is designed for optimum efficiency at 50 Hz, and as little as only 1 Hz deviation above or below that can lead to serious problems and ultimately damage or destroy millions of dollars' worth of transformers and other gear. So grid operators have both automatic and manually backed-up systems to keep the grid frequency near its nominal value, and to vary the amount of power being generated as demand varies.

For reasons that are not yet clear, at 12:33 PM three generators tripped off the grid. This meant that the system lost 2.2 GW of capacity instantly. In response, the grid frequency began to fall from 50 Hz, and when it reached 48 Hz, automatic protection circuitry began to disconnect more generators from the grid, leading to a cascade that shut the entire system down in a matter of seconds.

Once a thing like this happens, it takes hours to communicate among the now-isolated generating plants and organize an effort to re-synchronize and reconnect parts of the grid in a way that will not lead to further problems. In the meantime, most communications and transportation systems in Spain and Portugal were severely crippled, thousands of people had to be evacuated from electric trains, and seven people died as a result of the blackout.

At the time of the grid failure, over half of the grid's power was being produced by solar, wind, or hydroelectric plants. Assuming most of this was wind or solar, the grid was therefore missing something that power grids used to have an abundance of: "spinning reserve." And spinning reserve is an important way that grids can stabilize themselves.

Simply put, spinning reserve is the energy stored in the mechanical momentum of the turbines and generators used to produce power at nuclear, fossil-fueled, and hydropower plants. A generator-turbine shaft, armature, and blades weighing many tons cannot be stopped on a dime, and the fact that it's spinning, typically at thousands of revolutions per minute, means that there's a lot of energy stored in it.

When a sudden increase or decrease in load occurs on such a generator, the spinning reserve means that its speed (which directly determines its frequency) does not change instantly. If the load increases (as it would if generators elsewhere suddenly tripped off the line), the spinning reserve automatically keeps the frequency from dropping instantly. This factor can be used in designing stability into the grid, and historically spinning reserve has been an asset in making grids stable.

When renewable sources began to be connected to power grids, the approach taken by designers was that the renewables would always be a small fraction of the total power generated. So when they designed the devices to interface solar or wind power to the grid (called "inverters") they simply designed them to follow whatever frequency the grid was producing at the time. Electronics has no mechanical momentum, so renewable sources can adjust their frequency instantaneously. As long as they represent a small fraction of the total power generated, like a few monkeys riding on the back of an elephant, the fact that renewables do not contribute spinning reserve was not important. The monkeys go where the elephant goes, and they're just along for the ride.

But reports say that at the time of the blackout, the fraction of power being made by renewables was on the order of 58%. So the monkeys outweighed the elephant in this case. Engineers have studied and modeled these situations, and presumably know what they're doing, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion that under some circumstances, having too large a fraction of renewables on a power grid that is isolated, like the Iberian Peninsula's is, can lead to trouble. The question is, was last month's blackout an example of the kind of trouble renewables can cause? We will have to wait on the results of the investigation to find out.

There is a way to make renewable power sources act like they have spinning reserve, but it's not cheap. That energy has to come from somewhere, and either the renewable source has to hold its maximum capacity in reserve (which is wasteful), or you have to add capacity in the form of batteries. But with suitable inverter design, a wind or solar source with batteries can be made to act like it has a certain amount of spinning reserve.

If we find that the blackout was in fact worsened by inverter-based renewables, something like the battery-spinning-reserve idea may need to be implemented as a safety precaution. There are other good reasons to put battery storage on grids with a lot of renewable energy. A windless night produces no wind or solar power, and it's handy in such cases to have energy stored up somewhere that you can use in such situations.

Batteries are improving steadily and may come in very handy to avert the next blackout. If it turns out that renewables contributed to the problem, we have a solution, but it's not going to be cheap.

Sources: I referred to an article in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/what-caused-the-european-power-outage-spain-blackout/, an article on batteries supplying spinning reserve at https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/battery/spinning-reserve-displacement-using-batteries-for-a-more-efficient-and-cleaner-way-to-back-up-power/, and the Wikipedia article "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout."

She Did Not Turn Left

Mon, 05 May 2025 11:43:00 +0000

Those are the last words of a New York Times story on the helicopter-airline crash that killed 67 people last Jan. 29 in Washington, DC. While there is no official word yet from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the crash, the in-depth Times report has material from interviews with numerous experts, and pieces together the final minutes leading up to the crash. As with so many avertable tragedies, this one combined multiple factors, each one of which might have not been fatal by itself. But the combination proved deadly, and as is often the case in modern aviation accidents, human error played a large role.

The basics of what happened are well known. American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's National Airport was on its final approach to land when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying a training mission collided with it short of the runway. All 64 people on the commercial flight died in the crash, as did the helicopter pilot, Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach; the instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, and the third member of the crew, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara.

When I blogged on this crash shortly after it happened, we knew that the helicopter was flying higher than FAA regulations allowed. At the location of the crash, it was supposed to be lower than 200 feet, but the crash occurred at an altitude of about 300 feet. Also, the helicopter was equipped with an improved navigational aid called ADS-B, which updates air traffic controllers every second on the aircraft's location, but the device was not turned on at the time.

The Times article adds important information about the interaction among the air traffic controller, Capt. Lobach, and Warrant Officer Eaves. The main purpose of the flight was to practice evacuating important members of the Federal government in time of emergency. As a part of that practice, it was customary not to operate easily-detected navigational equipment such as the ADS-B. The helicopter had a standard radar transponder on board which was operational, but it provides updated location information only about every five to twelve seconds, according to the report.

Such a time gap between updates could have been critical. For one thing, the runway that Flight 5342 landed on that night was seldom used, and it's possible that Capt. Lobach had never been in a situation where she had to avoid a plane landing on that runway. For another thing, it seems that critical information the controller tried to tell the helicopter crew may have been "stepped on" when the crew pressed their push-to-talk button to transmit words to the controller.

A third factor is that a few minutes before the crash, after being alerted that there was a commercial flight nearby, the helicopter pilots requested "visual separation" from the controller. This meant basically, "We want to be responsible for avoiding a crash by looking around us and getting out of the way of anything we see in our path."

This relieves the controller from essentially micro-managing the flight's actions, but puts a heavy burden on the pilot to know exactly what is going on and what to do to avoid a collision. At night, with night-vision goggles on, it is quite possible that Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves had difficulty seeing the approaching Flight 5342, or at least gaining enough information about its path to avoid the collision.

At about 40 seconds before the crash, when the two aircraft were about a mile apart, the controller asked the helicopter pilots if they had the CRJ passenger jet in sight. He received no response, and then transmitted an order to them to pass behind the jet. Analysis of the recordings indicates that the helicopter crew might have been transmitting at the time and didn't hear this order. The last exchange between Warrant Officer Eaves and the controller came a few seconds later, and affirmed that the helicopter crew had "the aircraft" in sight and wanted to be okayed for visual separation, which was again approved.

Then, the instructor Eaves told the pilot Lobach to turn left, which would have brought the helicopter farther away from the jet's flight path and might have averted the accident. But she kept flying straight, and the collision happened a few seconds later.

No one knows what was going on in the minds of Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves in those last few seconds. But some aspects of this tragedy remind me of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam in 1997. Analysis of the voice recorders in that crash revealed that the captain of the flight evidently became confused about the plane's location. But when the junior-ranked copilot tried to correct him, his suggestions were ignored.

In a training flight, the protocol should be that the student, even if she is a five-star general, for the moment is under the authority of the instructor, even if he is just a warrant officer. It's possible that cultural factors prevented Warrant Officer Eaves from being as forceful as he should have been in telling Capt. Lobach to turn left. And we do not know how deferential Capt. Lobach was feeling at the time, and whether she was alert and cognizant of her surroundings, frozen with fear, or somewhere in between.

But it is already clear that communications broke down in significant ways in the last few critical seconds before the crash. The technology exists to enable pilots to both hear and talk to the controller at the same time. I say that, not knowing the details of what would have to change about the old-fashioned AM VHF cockpit radio system still in use, but I suspect there would be some grumbling on the part of those affected and then they would go along with the change.

Beyond technology, there is the vital issue of prompt and relevant communication among those who can do something to avoid a crash. That didn't happen in this case, and I hope the lessons learned here are applied in every situation where they could help avoid the next accident.

Sources: The New York Times carried the story entitled "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash" by Kate Kelly and Mark Walker appeared in the Apr. 27, 2025 edition. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision and Korean Air Flight 801.

Waymo Comes to Austin

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas. Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project. It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure. Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown. Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street: four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic.

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other. There were no passengers and of course, no driver. They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat. A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is. The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system. Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each. So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens.

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade. But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them.

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it. This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here. Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was. It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me. I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas. But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing. Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle. You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known. Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles. I have blogged about them probably dozens of times. But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance.

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos. I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger.

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines. Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far. According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash. Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it. The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month.

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis. For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides.

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away. The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been.

Waymo isn't going to do that. All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation. At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

Sources: The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5. I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/.

The Dire Wolf Dilemma

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 10:59:00 +0000

Many readers will have learned by now that a company called Colossal Bioscience has bio-engineered a creature that resembles the extinct dire wolf. The last true dire wolf died more than 10,000 years ago. Fossils recovered from Los Angeles's La Brea tar pits show that they had a more powerful bite than modern wolves, and they probably subsisted on wild horses and other large quadrupeds of their time.

Exactly how much the cute white-haired puppies in Colossal Bioscience's publicity photos resemble the extinct species is a matter of some controversy. The more technical statements from Colossal Bioscience admit that the creatures' DNA is closer to being inspired by ancient samples of DNA of true dire wolves obtained from museums around the world, than it is a direct copy. That is rather like a movie that is "inspired by" true events—you can trust that the idea wasn't original, but don't look for exact correspondence in every detail either.

If this was just an expensive exercise in dog-breeding, why bother? That and many other questions are investigated in an article by D. T. Max in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Max interviewed the company's founder, a Dallas billionaire named Ben Lamm; George Church, a professor of genetics whose dream of resurrecting extinct species caught Lamm's fancy; and Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA who was hired away from her U. C. Santa Cruz lab to become Colossal Bioscience's chief science officer.

The 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park and the movie franchise that followed imagined what would happen if we were able to recreate million-year-old dinosaurs. Shapiro admits that is impossible, because DNA deteriorates with time and we're lucky even to have enough DNA from dire wolves to make an educated guess at the complete genome of a species that went extinct less than 100,000 years ago. The firm's most publicized goal is to re-engineer (probably the best term) the woolly mammoth. One reason for that is that its DNA is abundant, as entire frozen carcasses have been discovered in Siberia and North America. But even a billionaire's resources are limited, so why has Lamm spent a large fraction of his fortune so far on efforts that have gained him nothing more than publicity?

Among the reasons Lamm gives are altruistic motives, such as the restoration of ecologies that would be improved by the return of woolly mammoths. It seems that they suppressed the proliferation of small shrubs, which would be stamped into oblivion by herds of mammoths. It may be too late for the extinct dodo bird, but there are also species of endangered birds that could be assisted by genetic technology that Colossal develops.

But bird species can't pay for such services, so is this nothing more than a rich man's hobby? After all, the puppies receiving Kardashian-level publicity have DNA that started out from a living species, the gray wolf, and was modified with CRISPR technology to have traits that resemble what the scientists think the dire wolf had: fluffy white hair, for instance. And some genes from ancient dire-wolf DNA were inserted. But no one has claimed that their DNA is identical to that of the dire wolf, because it isn't.

Even the piece's author Max can't come up with answers to questions such as whether these stunts will definitely lead to any sustained ecological changes. There are no plans to breed the imitation dire-wolf puppies, for instance, and the longer-term goal of "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth is still in the future by a good bit. The word "resurrect" appears in Colossal's PR material, but isn't used much by Shapiro, who is still trying to act like a scientist, although her company forbids her from publicizing intellectual property which in an open university lab would be the subject of many scientific publications.

And that may really be the main issue ethically with what Colossal Bioscience is doing. Ever since the era of big-science projects began after World War II, and especially after biological science turned out to be massively profitable for drug companies, much research in the area has taken place under proprietary conditions. This means that discoveries potentially beneficial to humanity are controlled by private organizations, and general knowledge of them is either delayed (in the case of trade secrets) or available only under license (in the case of patents).

Making money from a thing is a good way for the thing to become generally available, so this situation is not necessarily unethical. It looks like Lamm is counting on his hundred or more scientists to develop methods and techniques that will turn out to be profitable, and that probably means human medical applications. Letting one's imagination go leads to the so-far-forbidden area of human cloning, or the cloning of deceased individuals, which has rightly been banned outright in many countries, and highly regulated in others.

But cloning is only part of what Colossal is doing—the ancient-DNA techniques they are developing are irrelevant to cloning recently deceased individuals. Perhaps Lamm really means what he says, and he simply wants to bring back extinct species as a way of atoning for the massive species destruction that humanity has been visiting on the rest of the biosphere since we developed minds that could plan attacks on other creatures, or simply plan new suburbs that wipe out whole ecologies.

The efforts to re-create extinct species are still in their early stages, and we will just have to wait to see what Lamm and his stable of scientists come up with next. Maybe they will be able to take intact DNA samples from mammoths and do total-DNA cloning as they originally hoped. But if Lamm is expecting to recoup his investments by selling live woolly mammoths to zoos, he's got another think coming. Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby, even if it benefits the ecosphere as a byproduct.

Sources: The article "Life After Death" by D. T. Max appeared in the Apr. 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 30-41. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on human cloning, the dire wolf, and the woolly mammoth.

The JetSet Roof Collapse: Causes Yet Unknown

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 10:58:12 +0000

Many prominent people were in the exclusive but crowded venue of the JetSet nightclub on Avenue Independencia in the Dominican Republic's capital city of Santo Domingo late Monday night, April 7. These included a provincial governor named Nelsy Cruz, ex-Major-League baseball players Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and famed merengue musician Rubby Pérez, whose singing was the main attraction. An estimated five hundred people were jammed into the building, which occupied a corner block behind some trees and a canopied entryway.

Around a quarter to one A. M., someone pointed to the ceiling, saying that they had seen something fall. Seconds later, a video showed Pérez himself on the stage as he glanced at the ceiling. Thirty seconds after the first warning sign, the roof over the entire main room of the club collapsed, crushing people under the weight of concrete slabs.

By Friday, the death toll stood at 225, with almost as many injuries. Pérez, Dotel, Cruz, and Blanco were killed, along with 17 U. S. citizens and numerous residents of other countries.

Any time a crowded building collapses with loss of life, especially in the absence of natural causes such as hurricanes or tornadoes, questions are sure to arise about the cause. While evidence to support a conclusion in which we can put confidence is lacking at this time, the little we know about the circumstances so far can guide cautious speculation.

According to news reports, the building was erected in the mid-1970s as a movie theater. Theaters, coliseums, and other locations for public performances require long unobstructed sight lines, which means that the roof has to be supported only at the edges, with trusses spanning the distance from wall to wall. Firefighters saw large blocks of concrete among the fallen rubble, and at least one remarked that he saw no "rebar" (reinforcing steel bars) in them.

In the U. S., most spaces at least fifty feet (15 meters) wide or more will have primarily steel trusses supporting the roof, which may have a thin layer of concrete above them for waterproofing. But the main supporting strength is in the steel trusses.

It's possible to span such distances with a roof made primarily of concrete, but there has to be reinforcing means such as rebar or pre-tensioning cables and thicker concrete beams to support the rest of the roof. The state of the construction industry in the Dominican Republic in 1975 is unknown to me, but it's possible that the builders of the original structure made the roof just strong enough to support itself.

If, as the fireman who saw the concrete slabs speculated, extra weight was added to the roof over the years, such as air-conditioning units or even solar panels, the weight might exceed the carrying capacity of the roof.

Concrete is not like steel, which is homogeneous enough to fail almost as soon as it's overloaded. Depending on how the concrete was mixed, a piece of concrete that is fundamentally overstressed may hang together for a relatively long time as cracks slowly propagate and stresses reorder themselves to go through the remaining connected pieces of the mix. Concrete is more likely to fail with a crumble than a bang, although when the most stressed part fails, it usually takes the rest with it pretty fast.

This catastrophe recalls the collapse of the Surfside Condominium in a Miami suburb in June of 2021. Repeated inspections of that structure pointed out serious deterioration in some supporting columns, exacerbated by recent building modifications. Renovations had been scheduled before the collapse, but the building fell down, taking 98 people to their deaths with it, before they could be done.

It is not known at this point (at least by me) whether Santo Domingo required regular building inspections of places where people gather in large crowds. Even if such inspections were required, it is not easy to inspect a concrete slab underneath layers of roofing material, although there are ways of doing so. And even if inspections were required, they might not have been done on schedule. And if they had been done, adverse findings might have been ignored. The owners of the nightclub are reportedly one of the wealthiest families in the Dominican Republic, so they presumably could have afforded repairs if they were needed. Now they're going to find out if they can afford the legal nightmares of liability for the two-hundred-plus deaths the collapse of the building caused.

If anything good can come out of this tragedy, it may take the form of improvements in building codes and inspections. Every industrialized nation has followed a long road from basically free-for-all construction methods to increasingly strict regulation of building codes, materials used in construction, design methods, and inspections before, during, and after a building is erected. While there is an argument to be made that we have now passed the point of diminishing returns in parts of the U. S. and building codes now serve to restrict the housing market more than improve safety, there is a lot more room on the other end of the road where inadequate codes and inspections allow conditions to happen such as the circumstances that led to the JetSet tragedy last week.

Perhaps this horrible accident will stimulate a conversation in the Dominican Republic about building codes, inspections, and where on the tradeoff curves the country wants to reside. There is always the possibility that some extremely rare and unlikely cause will be found—sabotage, perhaps, or a freakish set of circumstances that can't be predicted. But currently, the little we know indicates that carelessness and perhaps incremental loading of the roof without an engineer's inspection and approval may be the cause. If that's the case, then there is something the citizens of the Dominican Republic can do about it: demand safer buildings, and whatever regulation and enforcement is required to get them.

Sources: I referred to a CNN article at https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/10/americas/what-happened-dominican-republic-collapse-latam-intl/index.html and the Wikipedia article "JetSet nightclub roof collapse."

P. S. A month or so ago, editor Michael Cook of the website mercatornet.com notified me that his website would soon cease operations. For over a dozen years, Michael did me the compliment of reprinting many of my blogs, always with my permission, and often with the result that they reached a much wider readership than they otherwise would have. Originally one of the few conservative family-values-oriented news outlets in Australia, Michael's site recently experienced increased pressure from competition from similar sites and a lack of readership numbers that finally made it uneconomical to continue. I wish Michael the best in his future endeavors and remind him that all the good things his website did have still been done, and will have unimaginable effects in the future—mostly good ones, I expect.---KDS

Ten Pounds of Plutonium

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:40:00 +0000

Plutonium was a major ingredient in the first nuclear bomb to be detonated successfully, the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, New Mexico. The bomb contained thirteen pounds (5.9 kg) of plutonium, but subsequent measurements of the blast showed that only about three pounds (1.4 kg) of plutonium was consumed by the chain reaction. This means that the remaining ten pounds (4.5 kg) spread from the blast site over the New Mexico counties of Guadalupe, Lincoln, San Miguel, Socorro, and Torrance, as well as other counties and states to the east. As plutonium-239, the isotope used in the bomb, has a half-life of 24,000 years, virtually all that plutonium is still out there somewhere, with large amounts scattered among the ranches and villages of southeastern New Mexico. However, later investigations showed that some plutonium from the bomb reached 46 of the 48 continental United States as well as Canada and Mexico.

When breathed or ingested, the high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei) that plutonium emits cause havoc in any living system they enter. In a documentary I saw last week entitled "First We Bombed New Mexico," a woman recalled the summer day in 1945 during her childhood when white particles looking something like snow began to fall. She and her brothers tried to form it into snowballs, but it wouldn't stick together. It turned out to be fallout from the Trinity test.

Far from being an uninhabited area, the part of New Mexico selected for the world's first nuclear explosion harbored ranchers, cowboys, and others trying to extract a hardscrabble existence from the dry soil. Most of them were poor, most of them were Hispanic, and virtually none of them knew anything about fallout, nuclear explosions, or radiation. But as rates of cancer, thyroid disease, and infant mortality began to rise in 1945 and 1946, people started to wonder what was going on.

It is impossible to "prove" that a particular case of cancer in one person was caused by radiation from the Trinity test. But statistics cited in the movie persuaded me that a great injustice has been wrought on the residents of the region heavily contaminated by fallout, an injustice that continues to this day as plutonium gets concentrated by rainfall in streambeds and aquifers in ways that no one has had the resources to quantify, except in rare cases.

Residents of Nevada near the subsequent thermonuclear-bomb test sites used in the 1950s, some residents of Utah, and some uranium miners were in principle compensated for their losses by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which was proposed in 1979 but not signed into Federal law until 1990. Ironically, it excluded the first victims of nuclear fallout: the New Mexico residents who were the nation's first guinea pigs in the uncontrolled experiment of seeing what ten pounds of plutonium spread over the landscape would do.

An activist (and cancer survivor) named Tina Cordova has devoted most of her adult life to getting New Mexico included in an extension of RECA, which was set to expire in 2022 but was extended to 2024 by President Biden's administration. Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group of cancer survivors, uranium miners, and relatives of deceased victims of cancer who are trying to extend the reach of RECA to cover their region as well.

As I watched the film, I found myself imagining what would have happened if the Trinity test had been performed outside, say, Albany, New York instead of Socorro, New Mexico. Southeasterly winds would have carried the fallout over Springfield and Boston in Massachusetts and Hartford in Connecticut. If anything close to the level of radiation after Trinity was found in that part of the country, it's likely a bill would have been passed to dig up every square inch of soil in New England to a depth of six inches and get rid of it somewhere—maybe New Mexico? They need topsoil there, don't they?

There was very little in the way of technical information in the film. Most of the time, the director, Lois Lipman, followed Tina Cordova around as she spoke at rallies, visited community events, and participated in memorial ceremonies in which paper bags with candles in them, one for each cancer survivor, were blown out one by one.

The Catholic faith is a constant undercurrent in the region of New Mexico contaminated by plutonium, and many victims and relatives gave God credit for getting them through the tribulations of cancer treatments, the sadness of watching one relative after another die of cancer at an early age, and the frustration of seeing the RECA bill amendments turned down year after year. At this moment, the U. S. Senate has passed a version of the bill, but Speaker Mike Johnson is preventing it from coming to a vote in the House. God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but I'm sure He is interested in the outcome of this particular political tussle.

The nation was at war in 1945, and at least in the early stages of the nuclear bomb's development, we did not know how far Nazi Germany was in developing something similar. This situation initially justified a habit of secrecy which continued well after the end of the war, when the USSR became the chief nuclear threat instead. This air of secrecy perhaps explains, but does not justify, why virtually nobody in the path of the fallout was evacuated or even warned of the danger after the July 1945 test.

But now that we know and have records of the injuries and premature cancer deaths that ten pounds of plutonium have wrought upon thousands of mainly poor people in New Mexico, it is a simple matter of justice to compensate them in some way roughly equivalent to what the other people covered by the RECA law have received. That is the message of "First We Bombed New Mexico," and that is the message I hope our elected representatives get when Tina Cordova and others plead once again for its amendment and renewal.

Sources: The award-winning film "First We Bombed New Mexico" was shown at a community center in San Marcos and accompanied by the director, Lois Lipman. It is not generally available, but Lipman is trying to get it aired publicly in time for the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is coming up in July of 2025. I also referred to a news article on Tina Cordova at https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2024/03/05/activist-who-has-fought-for-reca-expansion-chosen-as-lujans-guest-for-the-state-of-the-union-address/ and the Wikipedia articles on plutonium and the Trinity test. I also included some information provided to me by Lois Lipman concerning the extent of the fallout.

Forged in the Heat of Battle: Drones in the Ukrainian War

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 10:36:00 +0000

Last December, near the Russia-Ukraine border, a group of about 100 Ukrainian soldiers from the drone-specialist Khartiia Brigade launched a massive all-drone attack on an entrenched Russian position. No Ukrainians did anything except operate and monitor the drones and communications systems. But ground-based drones, kamikaze drones, and even a drone with a rifle on it assaulted the Russians from multiple directions, causing chaos and leading the enemy fighters to abandon their position.

The Ukrainians were expecting to lose as many as half of their drones before they reached their targets, but the operation proved to be successful beyond their hopes. This is only one of a number of stories coming out of Ukraine that shows how drone technology is changing the face of warfare as I write.

The Russians have drones too, but they have relied primarily on their large advantage in the number of conventional forces and weapons they can bring to bear on Ukraine. Both sides have advanced drone technology for military uses tremendously beyond what it was just a few years ago, but as reporter Tim Mak points out in a recent article in The Dispatch, Ukraine has three reasons why they are currently the world's leader in this field.

First, desperation leads to innovation. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own territory, towns, and loved ones. Second, three years of war has provided them with a real-world testing ground that no amount of laboratory drills could give, and allowed them to respond to problems in real time and try new ideas to see which ones work in the battlefield. And third, the decentralized nature of the Ukrainian military has kept bureaucratic delays and interference to a minimum, allowing different groups to try different approaches and share their successes.

The best drone in the world is not much good if you can't control it, and so many innovations have come in the field of communications technology and electronic warfare (EW). EW is the suite of techniques that are used to disrupt an enemy's electronic communications and radar. Mak turns up the surprising fact that the first country ever to use electronic warfare was Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), when Russian ships attempted to interfere with Japanese radio messages to the Japanese Navy. Russia developed "jamming" (the broadcast of interfering signals) to a fine art, and I recall as a short-wave listener in the 1960s hearing the buzz-saw sounds of USSR jamming stations scattered across the airwaves to prevent Voice of America and BBC broadcasts from reaching the USSR.

But Ukrainian innovators such as "Mathematician" (a member of the Khartiia Brigade who goes by that pseudonym) have come up with clever and almost unbelievable ways of flouting Russian EW measures. For example, one type of drone carries with it a 20-km-long reel of fiber-optic cable connected to its operator's control box. As it flies, it simply unreels the cable over the landscape, and as long as the link remains unbroken, the operator has a completely secure and un-jammable way to communicate with the drone.

Mak points out the ethical implications of a situation in which one operator might be in charge of several drones. It is now entirely possible to program a drone to recognize the optical earmarks of, say, a Russian tank. But Mak poses this question: What if a Russian soldier in the tank decides to get out and surrender? And what if the autonomous drone single-mindedly ignores him and blows up the tank anyway, killing the soldier? Who is responsible for this incident, which could be considered as a war crime?

Mak posed the question to a colleague of Mathematician, who said, "I think the end user will be to blame . . . . if you teach him badly, he will do badly." Clearly, international agreements about what constitutes war crimes are lagging behind the technology currently in place, and such questions will arise more and more frequently in automated battlefields.

Reading Mak's report reminded me of how the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 provided a testing ground for many war techniques that later found application in World War II. Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy provided air support for Franco's Nationalists, and when their bombers mounted an attack on the Spanish town of Guernica on Apr. 26, 1937, over 1,600 civilian casualties resulted. This is considered by historians to be the first time that the Luftwaffe fielded its doctrine of "terror bombing" to demoralize civilian populations.

Of course, both sides in World War II adopted this doctrine, although its first use was shocking enough to inspire Picasso's famous painting Guernica, which is an attempt to portray the horrors of modern war as it was taking shape in the 1930s. I am unaware of any great art out there which includes images of drones, but it might happen yet.

More importantly, anyone preparing for a ground war now has to take into account the drone factor, and right now the world experts in that military technology are in the hundred or so companies that have sprung up in Ukraine to supply the much-needed hardware and software that is keeping the Russians at bay. It is a sad but obvious fact that wars tend to advance technology, and not just military technology, at a greater speed than occurs in peacetime. Mak hopes that once the Ukraine war winds down, these technological drone advances will be turned to peaceful purposes: evacuation of wounded people from natural disasters, the shipment of essential supplies, and the demining of mine fields, for example.

And some of that may happen. But first, the Ukrainian war has to end, and while President Trump and others have been trying to broker a deal to bring peace, nothing substantive has resulted yet. When the war is over, perhaps we can enjoy the fruits of Ukrainian drone innovations, and they can take the lead in a business that is currently dominated by China. They certainly deserve to profit from their innovations, which have been made at a huge cost in lives as well as money.

Sources: Tim Mak's article "War Machines or Instruments of Peace?" appeared on Mar. 27, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-automation-lethality-ethics/. I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War.

Heathrow Power Failure: A Lesson in Infrastructure

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:48:00 +0000

Around midnight Thursday evening, Mar. 20, a transformer at the North Hyde substation in west London caught fire and failed, interrupting power to some 67,000 customers. Power outages are not that unusual, and this one would not have made the news except for the fact that one of those customers was Heathrow Airport. Although airport authorities claim that the backup emergency-power systems worked as expected, they decided to close the airport, which is the fifth busiest in the world.

It took seven hours for firefighters to quench the blaze, and another twelve or so before power could be fully restored. Consequently, all flights into and out of Heathrow were diverted or canceled until around 6 PM Friday. The knock-on effects from this major disruption will be felt for several more days as stranded travelers find alternate routes and the transportation system strives to return to normal.

One engineering expert interviewed about the incident expressed surprise that there were not alternative supply paths for such an important load as the airport. Apparently one terminal did not lose power, but the expert said that the grid in that area of London is "highly constrained" and has recently been stressed by increased development in the region.

Admittedly, the failure of a substation transformer is an unusual event. Such transformers can be the size of a small bus and cost on the order of a million dollars. Utility companies normally monitor their condition remotely and perform routine maintenance on them such as cleaning or replacing the cooling oil that bathes the tons of steel and copper inside the sealed container that is visible to the eye. Dropping the ball on any of these precautions can lead to a dangerous situation. Impurities such as water can get into the oil, weakening insulation and leading to a sudden arcover and failure.

We will have to wait for investigation results to discover exactly why the transformer caught fire. But another question is: why did Heathrow not have sufficient backup power to continue normal operations?

The best guess is simple economics. A modern airport uses a great amount of power for moving sidewalks, elevators, security equipment, and lighting. Maintaining enough backup generators to provide the entire normal load would be expensive, probably complex because of the load's distributed nature, and would show up as a dead loss on the books of the private company, Heathrow Airport Holdings, which runs the airport. So the bottom line is probably that the firm decided the temporary fallout from a short-term shutdown would be less expensive than paying for a large number of emergency generators that might be used only once every few decades.

No one died or was even injured in the Heathrow shutdown, and in retrospect the decision to limit emergency backup resources was probably a wise one. Nevertheless, this incident brings up an interesting issue with regard to how seriously we should take preparing for unlikely infrastructure failures.

In cases where a power failure could be deadly or extremely costly, institutions and organizations usually buy enough backup power to keep things running almost without interruption. For example, most hospitals have enough backup power to keep operating rooms running normally, although the lights may go out in hallways and patient rooms if the main power fails. You don't want a power failure in the middle of your brain surgery, and so most responsible hospitals make sure this can't happen.

Huge semiconductor plants also typically have enough backup power to keep their essential processes running without a hitch, although the emergency power system forms a costly and seldom-used aspect of the installation. A former student of mine is heading the electrical installations at a major semiconductor plant, and showed me a photo of the ranks of large backup generators that are being installed. If power were to go out in an operating semiconductor fab facility, the entire inventory all along the process lines would have to be scrapped, and this multimillion-dollar potential loss justifies spending extraordinary amounts to ensure that the machines keep running.

On the other hand, while Heathrow is a vital part of Europe's transportation infrastructure, closing it for less than a day has not had many permanent ill effects. The systems that communicate with airliners were unaffected and flights were successfully diverted, so other than a lot of travelers whose plans were disrupted and deliveries delayed, the incident will have few lasting consequences.

Once the cause of the fire has been determined, we may learn something about ways of preventing such fires in the future. If the oil was dirty and led to deterioration in insulation, better maintenance is called for. If the substation was overloaded due to new construction, maybe another substation is needed, or the North Hyde facility needs to be expanded with a second transformer. And if there was some sort of transient or network disturbance that led to a stress failure, new smart-grid technologies can be brought into the picture to alleviate such incidents in the future.

A transformer fire is one of the worst things that can happen to a power grid, but it does seem like some fairly minor changes in the distribution infrastructure could keep this from happening again. A friend of mine who used to work in an aerospace job uses a phrase that would apply to this situation: "single-point failure." If a system has one component whose failure brings down the whole system, that single point is a vulnerability that should be addressed. And maybe last week's shutdown of Heathrow will motivate changes that will keep it from happening again.

Sources: I referred to an Associated Press article on the incident at https://apnews.com/article/britain-london-fire-heathrow-airport-6d63b2f6615e8ff39f2647641bfbc160, a website called Open Conversation at https://theconversation.com/heathrow-closure-what-caused-the-fire-and-why-did-it-bring-down-the-whole-airport-expert-panel-252834, and the Wikipedia article "Heathrow Airport Holdings."

If You Build a Better Internet, Will They Come?

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

It's been quite a while since most thinking people agreed that there is something wrong with the way the Internet affects public and private life. In the April issue of National Review, policy analyst Luke Hogg takes a hard look at one reason for these problems: the effects of centralization.

He begins by harking back to the early hobbyist-style years of the Internet in the 1990s. It was a time of relative freedom in the sense that users could control who they associated with and how much and what kind of information they shared. Many online users were seeking the ideal proclaimed by an early statement of that era which Hogg quotes from the operators of YouTube: "anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world."

A lot of bits have passed through the Internet since then, and users' current trust in social media isn't much greater than their trust in legacy media: less than one out of five people recently polled say they trust social media to provide accurate information. One big perceived problem is censorship, and while many states have passed laws prohibiting social-media platforms from viewpoint censoring, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are likely to be unconstitutional, as they restrict a private entity's freedom of speech, or freedom to refrain from speech.

And this is not just a U. S. problem. Hogg cites the case of how Facebook inadvertently helped the military in Myanmar to incite violence against that country's Rohinga minority group. It turned out that the Facebook monitors simply couldn't understand what was going on among the specific cultural groups involved.

Hogg sees these and other problems rooted in one factor: centralization. And he sees two solutions, both technological: to give users greater control over their experiences on a given platform, and also to enable them to communicate as they wish across multiple platforms.

Right now, such customization is nearly impossible. If you get tired of what's going on in your Facebook feed, you can up and quit, as millions of people have done from time to time. But just quitting a platform deprives you of all the good your social network might have been doing, as well as allowing you to avoid the idiots who made you want to quit in the first place.

Hogg talks about "middleware," which is a name for software that works as a kind of concierge or secretary between the centralized mega-platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and the individual user. With the proper protocols in place, such middleware could defend children against pornography and stalking no matter which platform it came from, for instance.

There have been experiments in this direction, but they have either been new built-from-the-ground-up platforms, or specialized software that interfaces between the user and existing platforms. So far, they haven't made much of a dent in the problem, but they show that the technology is out there, waiting to be used.

Hogg says that some existing regulations would have to be changed in order for decentralization to progress meaningfully. In particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have had unexpected side effects that allow current platforms to suppress both competing content they don't like, and also stifle the kind of middleware that would allow decentralization. These laws could be amended to fix these problems. And Hogg also calls on the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to encourage decentralization with a stick as well as a carrot. Obviously, if things are going to change in a big way, the regulatory environment will have to change too.

My heart is with Hogg's ideas, but my head and my wallet see a big problem that Hogg seems to avoid: how platforms will make money from a decentralized Internet.

Allow me to be nerdy for a moment by quoting something called Metcalfe's Law, which, according to Wikipedia, "states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system." So if a given network goes from 50 users to 1000, it's not twenty times as valuable, but twenty-squared, or four hundred times as valuable. While I may be taking this law a little beyond its original purview, it's the main reason that businesses whose essential function is to connect people and profit from their connections have a huge incentive to grow and take over absorb smaller networks. It happened with Western Union, it happened with Ma Bell, and it happened with Facebook and YouTube.

Much of what Hogg proposes to do to decentralize the Internet would directly threaten the network dominance of prominent social-media platforms. If Facebook can't guarantee control over what their users see and do, including ads, then they won't be able to sell ads as easily, and their whole economic model is threatened. If users are the product, they can't be allowed to just interconnect promiscuously and wander around and select exactly what experiences they want.

In the face of this problem, I see one tiny little light that might be at the end of the tunnel. Many of you may be familiar with a social-media platform called Nextdoor. It runs Neighborhood Network, which Wikipedia calls a "hyperlocal" social networking service. Compared to Meta, the $164-billion-revenue elephant that runs Facebook, Nextdoor is a $200-million mouse. But speaking for myself, I have fallen into at least reading Nextdoor posts and occasionally finding useful information on them, mainly because they are literally from people next door, or at least in my immediate geographic area. And I have nothing voluntarily to do with Facebook. Yes, there are idiots on Nextdoor too, but there are also people I stand a good chance of actually seeing in the grocery store and getting to know better. That virtually never happens on Facebook or the other centralized platforms.

Maybe some giant revolt will happen, and everybody will boycott the big boys in preference to decentralized social-media operations such as Nextdoor. I agree with Hogg that decentralization would be great if we could get it to happen. But the only way I can see it happening is if users insist on it, and keep insisting till it does.

Sources: Luke Hogg's article "Building a Better Internet" appeared on pp. 24-26 of the April 2025 edition of National Review. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Metcalfe's Law, Nextdoor, and Meta.

Moving Fast and Breaking Starships

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:06:00 +0000

Not being retired, I can't drop everything I'm doing and run down to Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas and wait till Elon Musk's SpaceX organization decides to launch a Super Heavy booster with a Starship on top of it. But I'd like to, as it's a shorter trip than the drive to Florida to watch launches at the Cape.

But it turns out that if I was looking for a spectacular aeronautical display, Florida would have been the better place to watch last Thursday's launch from, which took place after sundown that evening. The Super Heavy booster did its job, successfully separating from the Starship second stage, and even returned safely to the launch pad as designed. But an "energetic event," as the controllers termed it, happened inside the Starship shortly thereafter, shutting down several of its engines, destabilizing it into a spin, and causing it to explode. Numerous posts to social media from Florida and the Caribbean show a constellation of flaming objects streaking across the night sky. According to Reuters, a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands was slightly damaged by a piece of the rocket that fell out of the sky. But not to worry—SpaceX says there were no toxic materials in the debris. Nevertheless, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped flight takeoffs from several Florida airports briefly because of "space launch debris," and launched its own investigation into the failure.

According to a Wikipedia article on the Starship, there have been eight flight tests so far of the integrated Super Heavy booster and Starship orbital vehicle, beginning in 2022. Three (the fourth, fifth, and sixth) were entirely successful in the sense that both rockets took off and landed intact under control. The first three and the last two, including last week's test, ended with at least the Starship blowing up, although the booster seems to be working more reliably.

Characteristically, Musk termed the latest test a "minor setback." Maybe it's minor to one of the world's richest men, but to people in Florida and the Caribbean, a small but non-zero chance of having a piece of rocket come down on your head is perhaps something more than minor.

Comparisons between SpaceX's exploits and the NASA manned spaceflights of the 1960s are inevitable, at least to someone like me who lived through them both. The Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was the first significant rocket to be introduced by SpaceX, was first launched in 2010, and it was not until ten years later that the company risked putting people on it. By then it had proved to be one of the most reliable orbital workhorses ever designed, so the risks were reasonably well known.

Although the U. S. space program started off with an embarrassing failure—the December 1957 attempt to orbit a satellite after the Soviet Union beat us into space—it quickly recovered and to my knowledge, there were no major rocket explosions, certainly none with people aboard, until the famous Apollo 13 lunar-orbit service-module failure, which almost left the astronauts stranded.

So we can regard the last two Starship failures as growing pains, perhaps, and look forward to many more before the track record improves to the extent that anyone smart enough to train as an astronaut will be willing to step aboard for a ride. The question now is whether we should put up with falling space debris indefinitely while SpaceX works the bugs out of its rockets.

So far, no one seems to have raised any show-stopping objections. SpaceX and Musk are formally at the mercy of the FAA, which has to approve each launch and has the power to shut down the entire operation if they decide that the hazards to the public are too great. Fortunately for Musk, Floridians are used to having rockets around, and there are enough former space-business employees and military personnel in Florida that having a few fireworks fly over now and then doesn't seem to bother them in any major way. If SpaceX had chosen an orbital path over New York or California, on the other hand, we would probably have heard a lot louder protests and a call to cease and desist.

As long as Musk doesn't run out of money, SpaceX will keep trying with the Starship, and once the bugs are worked out the rocket's built-in advantages will come into play. The goal is to get the cost of each launch down to $10 million or less, which is a factor of ten less than it currently costs. But there are a lot of fundamentals in place already.

Take fuel, for instance. Instead of using exotic and hazardous fuels such as hydrazine, the engines burn liquid oxygen and liquefied methane, which is the same stuff that people with natural-gas hookups burn in their stoves. Both the fuel and the oxidizer are relatively cheap and common industrial products.

The rockets themselves are reusable, and ideally will return to the launchpad like all the old sci-fi stories said they should. What isn't commonly appreciated these days is the spectacular recent advances in automated control systems that both make autonomous drones possible, and amazing feats like rockets landing themselves on launch pads without human intervention. Such tricks simply weren't safely possible in the 1960s or 1970s, but we have the technology to do it now and SpaceX is using it.

I hope that the SpaceX engineers figure out exactly what's making the Starship blow up, and remedy things so that we can have a row of ten or more flawless takeoffs, orbital trips, and landings. I suspect something on the order of that kind of track record will be required before any humans are allowed on board. By then, maybe I'll be retired and have the time to go down to Brownsville and hang out for a few days, waiting to see the next successful launch of a Starship. And if I want to see any fireworks, I'll just buy them myself.

Sources: I referred to the Reuters report on the latest Starship launch and failure at https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/, and the Wikipedia article "SpaceX Starship."

A Psychologist Advises Parents About Smartphones

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:09:00 +0000

Jacqueline Nesi is a professor of psychology at Brown University whose specialty is how technology use affects children, and how parents can deal with this issue. She has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers and writes a Substack blog on technology, and appears to be one of the best-qualified social scientists to advise a parent when children should be allowed to use smartphones. In this month's Scientific American, she had the opportunity to summarize the best of her findings in a page or so, and I'm here to tell you that according to her . . . it all depends.

As one would expect, her command of the literature is superb. She starts out by describing the present situation: at what ages do kids these days get smartphones? You might be surprised by the results of one study she quotes from an outfit called Common Sense Media. Over four out of ten ten-year-olds have their own smartphone. Or at least they say they do. (Nothing is said about how reliable a ten-year-old's survey response might be.) 71 percent of 12-year-olds have one, and by age 14, 91 percent do.

She then makes the entirely reasonable statement that while these stats show what parents are allowing their kids to do, it doesn't say anything about whether it's good or bad. Dr. Nesi's goal is to muster research responses to let parents make the right decision "for your child and to help you feel more confident in your decision-making."

There's lots more statistics about phones and teens, and she describes some of the flaws in realistic surveys, and then winds up saying a gradual approach might be the best: first a family-shared iPad, then a dumb flip phone, and then if the teen has proved to be responsible, maybe a smartphone at last.

Leaving aside the expense of this graduated approach, this might not be a bad idea, although I've never personally heard of anybody using it. But beyond all the statistics and data, there is an underlying philosophical flaw in Dr. Nesi's approach which she never addresses.

The word "best" implies a scale of values. If there is a best, there are good and bad solutions, and presumably even a worst one. But what Dr. Nesi leaves almost completely alone is the question that motivates this whole issue: Good and bad according to what scale of values? Producing 21-year-old fodder for the economic machine? Leading your teen to Christ? Or just keeping him or her out of jail until they're on their own?

The closest Dr. Nesi comes to addressing any issues of moral values is when she says ". . . smartphones offer an in-your-pocket portal to everything on the Internet—some of which we'd rather they not see."

Now in a one-page essay, it's unreasonable to expect a social scientist to delve into the depths of moral philosophy and come up with gems of wisdom, or indeed anything at all. The elephant in the room here is that "science" (which is to say, scientists speaking as scientists) cannot tell us what is right or wrong. That's not what science is for, at least not as presently practiced. The science of psychology tries to describe what goes on in peoples' minds, but strictly speaking, it has nothing to say about the morality of thoughts, words, or actions—including giving your ten-year-old a smartphone, which four out of ten parents apparently do.

To be fair, Dr. Nesi respected the boundaries of science in writing this mostly helpful and insightful piece. She refrains from laying down absolute prescriptions, and says that each case is different. A very mature and self-controlled ten-year-old (a thing I cannot recall having encountered) might be able to handle a fully-functional smartphone without anything bad happening, but it would be unusual. And there are fully-grown adults walking around with smartphones that I wish someone would take away from them.

But fundamentally, Dr. Nesi cannot go very far with the parents who are agonizing about what is right to do with regard to smartphones and children. She can only say, "Well, here's the data. Best of luck in figuring out what is right for your kids." And while she's wearing her scientist hat, that's all she has a right to do.

There's a reason that as of this writing, 13 states have laws or policies enacted that limit K-12 classroom or school cellphone use. While relatively few experts have called for a universal ban on underage cellphone use, as it would intrude into the privacy of the parent-child relationship, there are some who argue even in favor of that. Why do you suppose these movements are happening?

One can think of the problem as an iceberg with the tip showing and a whole lot more we don't know much about underneath. The tip of the iceberg are the cases of smartphone-enabled bullying that lead to suicides, and other smartphone-enabled deaths of teens and children. Just underneath those cases are the vastly greater number of depressed, anxious, and sleepless children and teenagers whose lives revolve around how they look to others on social media. And farther out of sight, but perhaps most important of all, lies the issue of how smartphone-mediated pornography, social media, and even news and educational material coming through smartphones molds the character and abilities of an entire generation. Science can maybe help us a little here, but we need a moral compass to navigate these iceberg-fraught waters, to overload a metaphor. And you can't find moral compasses in the social-science stockroom.

I will close with an anecdote, which has no scientific value as a single data point but spoke volumes to me about the state of smartphone-saturated society at the time. When we were test-driving what became our new car in 2020, my wife and I exchanged random conversation with the twenty-something salesman who was hoping we would buy the car. Somehow we got onto the topic of how life was when we were his age, and he spontaneously offered the following, which is the most accurately I can remember what he said from five years ago: "Sometimes I wish I'd been born back then, and you know why?" He pulled out his smartphone and said, "These weren't around."

Sources: Dr. Jacqueline Nesi's article "Kids and Smartphones" appeared on pp. 83-84 of the March 2025 Scientific American. The statistic about states with smartphone bans in schools is from https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools.

Close Call for Flight 4819 to Toronto

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:05:00 +0000

A saying among pilots reportedly goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." By that criterion, the landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, was a good landing, at least for most of those on board who did in fact walk away under their own power. But those who watched the plane land and saw what it looked like afterwards might disagree.

Although the Toronto area had recently received as much as 20 inches of snow, airport officials report that the runway was clear when Flight 4819 began its approach to the Toronto airport, which is in the suburb of Mississauga. The main weather problem was wind, according to a report by CNN, which was gusting from 26 to 38 MPH at a 40-degree angle to the runway. Landing with even a steady crosswind is a tricky proposition, because the pilot relies on the wind and adjusts his (or her!) controls to keep the plane lined up with the direction of travel. But if the wind suddenly changes, or drops to nothing, as could conceivably happen, the pilot's carefully calculated orientation and velocity can change just as abruptly. And something like this evidently happened to the Bombardier CRJ900, which was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members at the time.

Normally, just before landing the pilot will "flare" the aircraft, tilting the nose up and slowing the descent until the landing gear contact the runway, ideally without the passengers even noticing they're now on the ground. That wasn't what happened in this case. Both reports of passengers on the plane and a video clip taken from a nearby plane show that the jetliner never flared, but hit the ground so hard that the rear (main) landing gear collapsed. Almost immediately the right wing hit the ground, sheared off, and a fire began where the missing wing exposed fuel.

Then a curious thing happened. The plane was still going so fast that the remaining left wing was producing plenty of lift. While sliding along the runway in flames, the plane executed a half barrel roll, turning completely upside-down, until the left wing hit the runway, ending this unique maneuver. As the fuselage finally slowed down and stopped, the fire did too, leaving 80 passengers and crew members "upside-down hanging like bats," according to one passenger.

Not everyone on board was a trained athlete, so getting down off the floor (now the roof) posed problems for several people and resulted in some 21 injuries. But by week's end, everyone was out of the hospital and in receipt of an offer of $30,000 from Delta for enduring what has to be one of the weirdest landings in aviation history.

Most news reports covering this story inevitably mention the previous air accidents that have happened since the New Year, and just to be perverse, I won't (you can find the other two big ones in my previous blogs). While this one had a happy ending for all concerned, it does make you wonder if something systematic is going on with regard to air safety.

Even with the accidents we've had already, though, flying is per mile one of the safest modes of travel, much safer than driving the same distance in your car. But psychology is not statistics, and my wife has already asked me with concern in her voice whether I'm going to drive or fly on a business trip I have scheduled later this month. The logical and more safe thing is to fly, but I understand her concern.

Officially, the investigation into this crash has just begun. I'm sure the pilots will be grilled thoroughly, and the black-box recordings pored over. We can imagine that there are two extremes of responsibility. On one extreme, the pilot simply messed up the landing, and the same thing might have happened even if it was a bright sunny day. On the other extreme, even the best pilot in the world couldn't have dealt successfully with the bizarre and unique wind turbulence that was encountered, and despite all the piloting skills available, the plane failed to flare, hit the runway too hard, and flipped over.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Weather remains a not-completely-predictable factor in aviation, despite technical advances such as CAT (clear-air turbulence) detection, wind-shear sensors around airports, and other instrumentation that can help pilots make safe landings, or decide to delay a landing if things are just too dicey.

That may have been the case here, but figuring out that the world's best pilot couldn't have landed in those particular conditions is not something we can presently do. You can imagine peppering every runway with tiny anemometers that would give some artificial-intelligence system second-by-second updates on the wind conditions, but most of the time it would just be wasted effort, and it might give bad advice anyway, telling the pilot it's okay to land when it wasn't and vice-versa. And circumstances can change so fast that the warning might come too late for the pilot to do anything about it.

I will keep my eyes on this investigation and when results are announced, I will try to do an update on what has to be one of the closest near-miss crashes on record, in terms of fatalities. The investigation should go pretty quickly as all the passengers and crew are around to tell us what they saw, the pilots survived, the black boxes survived, and we have a video of almost the whole thing. What may be missing are fine-grained data on wind conditions, but even that data may be recoverable from video cameras on site if some cleverness is exercised in that direction.

We can all be grateful that every person on that plane survived, even though the landing was more than anyone bargained for. I'm not sure whether I would take such a ride myself even if I knew there was $30,000 waiting for me on the other side. The payments to passengers are chicken feed compared to the loss to the airline represented by a functioning airliner that is now turned into scrap metal. But those payments bought the airline more than what they cost in good will.

Sources: I referred to an AP report carried by WHEC-TV in Rochester, NY at https://www.whec.com/national-world/plane-that-flipped-over-in-canada-highlights-some-of-the-dangers-of-holding-kids-on-your-lap/, a CNN report at https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/us/what-we-know-delta-plane-crash-canada/index.html,

and the Wikipedia article "Delta Connection Flight 4819."

The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation. If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements. But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants." According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust. Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power. He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell." And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters. He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points. Energy conservation is a good thing. In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022. This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones. Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more. And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes: that energy would cost less.

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021: rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather. The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores: gas-fired turbine plants. Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure. While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them. The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas.

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants. If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down. It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos. While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power. An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights.

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid. As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available. That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW. And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps. So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again.

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt. But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation. As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors. They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business. And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says. Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one: the transmission lines themselves. But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid. All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

Sources: The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states.

The Potomac Mid-Air Collision: The Role of ADS-B

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:22:00 +0000

That headline is supposed to make you wonder what ADS-B is, as I did the first time I read about it. The mid-air collision, of course, is the tragedy that happened last January 29 when American Airlines flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was coming in for its final approach to runway 33 of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. About half a mile from the end of the runway, the plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac, killing all 64 on board the airliner and the three crew members on the helicopter. It was the worst U. S. air disaster in terms of fatalities in over twenty years, and the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is continuing its investigation following a briefing held Feb. 6 for members of Congress.

As reported in a piece from CNN, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at the briefing that it was not clear whether a system called ADS-B in the helicopter was working at the time of the crash. The critical nature of this question becomes clear when we realize that the height of the helicopter at the time of the crash is something that hasn't yet been explained.

Airliners coming in for a landing have to follow a definite glide path in order to reach the runway, and so there are strict restrictions on where other aircraft can go near airports as busy as the Reagan National. The Black Hawk helicopter was flying something called Route 4, and was practicing what are called "government continuity operations." In other words, if the President and other key government figures have to get out of town in a hurry, they are going to travel by Black Hawk helicopter, and the people flying the helicopters have to keep in practice.

Presumably, the routes flown by these helicopters are height-restricted so planes approaching the airport will pass above the helicopters. Whether the Black Hawk involved in the mid-air collision was too high is a critical question, which is where ADS-B comes in.

That acronym stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast, and it is a souped-up version of the transponders that commercial aircraft have had for years which tells air-traffic controllers what height a plane is flying. And that system was a step up from the old follow-the-blips technology that traffic controllers had to use in the early days of radar-assisted air traffic. Knowing how high an aircraft is helps a controller decide whether two converging blips just mean a harmless intersection of two flight paths at different altitudes, a scary near-miss, or a disaster like the one that happened last month.

When fully operational, an ADS-B unit in the Black Hawk would have updated air traffic controllers every second with a GPS-determined three-dimensional location data burst. This is vastly superior to what the controllers' radar can tell them on its own. And knowing that the helicopter was high enough to collide with the American Airlines plane would have at least allowed the controllers to alert the pilots to the problem.

That is exactly what happened only a day before, when an air traffic controller warned an Embraer ERJ 175 to abort a landing at a different runway at Reagan National because a nearby helicopter was flying at 300 feet. Although there appeared to be enough altitude difference between the two aircraft, the controller alerted the passenger plane's pilot anyway, who flew around and landed successfully later. Whether the helicopter in this incident was a Black Hawk or something else is not clear from published reports. But near-misses like this can provide warning flags for safety-conscious operators, who can apply lessons learned and prevent major disasters such as the one that happened January 29.

Late last week, crews successfully recovered all the major pieces of both aircraft involved in the accident, and the hope is that among the rubble is information about whether the helicopter's ADS-B system was working, malfunctioning, or turned off. The signal that ADS-B transmits is readable by anybody, so in an actual emergency flight carrying the President to parts unknown, it's likely that the system might be turned off for security reasons. In peacetime it's fine to announce your exact location to all and sundry, but in a combat situation it's the last thing you want to do.

The bottom line on this accident remains to be discovered, as we still don't have critical questions answered such as the one about the ADS-B system. Speaking statistically, if one decided to stage a mid-air collision, one would have quite a challenge, because the volume of air occupied by a Black Hawk is not that large, and exquisite timing and aiming would be required. Unfortunately, the statistics were not favorable on that deadly evening.

According to a Wikipedia article on the ADS-B, the U. S. somewhat lags behind other countries in requiring adoption of the system by most aircraft. I suspect it is a fairly costly piece of avionics, involving data links to a plane's GPS system and a 1-GHz-range microwave transceiver and antenna. Both aircraft were definitely equipped with ADS-B, but as mentioned above, it has not been determined whether the Black Hawk's unit was operational at the time of the crash.

More generally, this incident provides a good reason to speed up the adoption of ADS-B, which provides faster and more accurate data to air traffic controllers, who need all the help they can get. Another issue unearthed at this early point in the investigation is that the control office in charge of the airspace was understaffed at the time, and one controller was handling situations normally dealt with by two individuals. Whether this understaffing contributed materially to the collision remains to be seen, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees air traffic control operations, is not exactly a poster child for governmental efficiency. Other countries such as Canada have transformed their FAA equivalents into private non-profit organizations, paying for them by user fees, and sometimes this makes things run better and cheaper. But that is an argument for another day.

We will keep an eye on the investigation of Flight 5342's crash, and hope that lessons learned will be applied to keep anything like this from happening again.

Sources: I referred to an ABC News article on the ADS-B question at https://6abc.com/post/washington-dc-plane-crash-major-pieces-helicopter-deadly-midair-collision-recovered-ntsb-says/15882589/, an NBC news article on the helicopter's route at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-hawk-helicopter-investigation-pilots-flight-path-dc-plane-crash-rcna190031, and a CNN article on the day before's near-miss at https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/us/dca-plane-helicopter-crash-invs/index.html, besides the Wikipedia articles on "2025 Potomac River mid-air collision" and "Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast."

P. S. This blog lost one of its most faithful and long-standing readers with the passing of David Jenkins, K4COG, on Feb. 1. I met David in 1980 at a lecture I gave at the Bible translation organization Wycliffe Bible Translators, and being fellow amateur-radio operators, we hit it off and kept in touch for the following 45 years. He will be sorely missed by his family and many friends. To Dave, I say "God bless and 73."

The Pros and Cons of Cancer Blood Tests

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:22:00 +0000

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made the news the other day without ever touching a football. He came out in favor of federal legislation that would require Medicare to pay for a blood test that can detect 20 different types of cancer. Prescott's mother died of cancer, as did the mother of Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who is sponsoring the legislation.

A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman describes how two million people a year are diagnosed with cancer, but often too late to do anything about it. Prescott believes in the test so much that he had the Cowboys' entire staff screened at his expense, which was considerable as the tests range between $2000 and $3000 a person. Cowboys staffer Tad Carper is glad he did, though, because it caught his case of cancer of the tonsils. Presumably, he had his tonsils removed and that took care of the problem.

This particular test has not yet been approved by the Federal Drug Administration, but if the proposed legislation passes it would automatically be paid for once approval is given. It's not hard to figure that this would add several billion dollars to the annual cost of Medicare, which is already one of the primary budget-busters in the federal budget. But who cares if it saves lives?

We all care, or should. From an engineering point of view, this is a classic tradeoff, in the sense that we face a decision which will favor one good at the expense of a different good. On the one hand, more cancer screening will help us find, and hopefully treat or cure, more cancers, leading to longer lives. On the other hand, more money spent by the federal government that it doesn't have will lead to less money somewhere else, or inflation, or some other less well-defined but nevertheless negative fiscal consequence sooner or later. And there's always the possibility that the tests may turn out to be, if not a total boondoggle, at least a lot less effective than we hoped.

Paralysis in Congress (legislative, not literal) being what it is, the chances of this bill getting approved are iffy at best, as it has come up several times in the last few years and never made it into law. But let's take this idea to the limit.

Suppose we found some genetic test that would not only predict cancers, but would outline our entire medical history, to the extent possible. Obviously, it couldn't predict things like a person taking poison at the age of 43, but there are many diseases, the main killers of heart disease and cancer among them, which have a strong genetic component. This pipe dream is already somewhat realistic today and will only become more so in the future. Wouldn't it be a great idea to profile every baby at birth and lay out his or her entire medical life history at the get-go?

On the one hand (here we go again), you could take steps to forestall diseases that a person might be especially prone to. My wife had breast cancer, which was treated, and now she is cancer-free. But some women carry genes that make them especially susceptible to breast cancer. And some of those, on discovering this fact about themselves, decide to undergo pre-emptive double mastectomies.

But what if you find out you'll die of lung cancer at the age of 43, say? At this time, most lung cancer is basically untreatable except in a palliative sense. Or what if you're going to get Alzheimer's when your 72 and die at 85? There's no treatment for that either.

I once read a short story whose author or title I can't recall (what if your memory starts to fade when you're 71?), but the gist of it was a dinner party at which a magician told the fortune of everyone at the table, and they believed him. He laid out exactly what was going to happen to them from that day forward. I forget the rest of the story, but the point was that knowing the future is a two-edged sword. Yes, you can forestall some things that would be good to know about in advance. But other things are truly inevitable, and knowing them would cast a pall over one's entire future and possibly lead even to depression and suicide.

Pancreatic cancer rates are increasing for unknown reasons, and it is one of the most insidious and deadly types of cancer, often being asymptomatic until it's far too late to treat. And even if caught in the early stages, it spreads so fast that surgery usually doesn't help. The most famous recent victim, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was accidentally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as a result of an examination for something else, and following her surgery for it she survived for an extraordinary eleven years, far above the norm for such a situation. So having a blood test for pancreatic cancer under the present conditions of treatment protocols would in most cases just let you know earlier that you were going to die of it. Sometimes ignorance truly is comparative bliss.

This brings to mind what the 18th-century wit Samuel Johnson said when he heard that a former acquaintance was going to be executed soon. "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Perhaps it would be a good thing to have a populace with minds concentrated by the knowledge that they are going to die at a future date certain. But we all know we're going to die sometime anyway, and there's all the difference in the world between knowing that, and knowing when and how.

It's up to Congress to decide whether a blood test for many types of cancer should be made available for everyone on Medicare. But if that does come to pass, you can depend on it to have unintended consequences, some of which we may regret.

Sources: The article by Nicole Villalpando, "Dak Prescott: Medicare should cover cancer test" appeared on p. 1 of the Saturday Feb. 1, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.

Attention Must Be Paid—But To Whom?

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:21:00 +0000

In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person." If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones.

Some academics see the crisis as real. Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts college, as saying ". . . in the past five years, it's as though someone flipped a switch . . . . Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding." On the other hand, media that use modes other than just text are getting longer. Immerwahr notes that one of the most award-winning films of 2024, "The Brutalist," runs well over three hours. And a highly popular video game called "Baldur's Gate 3" takes a dedicated player about seventy-five hours to play.

As Immerwahr points out, every new medium from the printed novel to radio and television gave rise to similar concerns that people will no longer be able to pay adequate attention to things they should attend to. Interactive media such as TikTok, Facebook, and the like have added a new factor: the carefully-honed algorithms that profile user preferences and give them more of what they like. That is how you can pick up your smartphone to check the weather forecast, finally shake yourself forty-five minutes later and ask, "What have I been doing?" and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Overall, though, Immerwahr concludes that if attention spans are in trouble—a concept he says even psychologists can't satisfactorily define—we are still able to devote long unbroken spans of time to things that we are interested in, or things that attract us. At the end of his essay, he concludes that the real problem is not so much that we can't pay attention, but that what we pay attention to is often overhyped, inflammatory, divisive, or false.

Rod Dreher couldn't agree more. In his new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher calls for a recognition that modern societies have adopted a set of undebated underlying assumptions about the world that derive from the fact that we are, in a pungent phrase, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—conveniently abbreviated WEIRD. This combination of background factors is highly unusual in world history, and has led us into a materialistic, scientistic worldview that excludes the supernatural from practical consideration. That, Dreher points out, is a real problem, because the world simply isn't that way.

Attention is a kind of love. One cannot love something, or someone, to whom one pays no attention. Dreher makes no secret of the fact that he is a capital-O Orthodox Christian. The Orthodox family of churches sat out the Reformation, and preserve an unbroken tradition of acknowledging the supernatural in worship and theology that goes back all the way to the time of Christ. His book is full of stories of dreams, visions, apparently coincidental meetings, and similar phenomena that support his contention of God, and demons too, being all around us.

His chapter most relevant to our topic is "Aliens and the Sacred Machine." In search of meaning, we will pay attention to all sorts of things that don't necessarily fit into the materialist worldview. With the advent of artificial-intelligence companions (AI girlfriends, for example), some men find that they are more comfortable talking to a machine, or even doing other things with it, than with going through the effort to meet and get to know a real woman.

But that isn't all. According to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, many influential people think that AI reveals "nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time." In other words, the "I" that software like ChatGPT uses isn't just a function of the program—there's a non-material personality at work in there somewhere. And according to Dreher, if it's not God, it's from the other place—in other words, demonic.

Reading this section of Dreher's book reminded me powerfully of C. S. Lewis's 1945 science-fiction dystopia That Hideous Strength. In that book—which has a sketchy outline of what is recognizably the Internet, 45 years before its advent—scientists manage to revive the decapitated head of an evil genius so it serves as a medium of communication between them and certain forces which turn out to be demonic. Their regard for what they call the Head can only be described as worship, and when people cease to believe in God, they will end up worshiping either themselves or something outside themselves that eventually enslaves them.

When the first caveman painted the first cave painting, he was probably tempted to sit and admire his work instead of paying attention to his fellow cave-dwellers, so in a sense, the problem of distracted attention has always been with us. But not until recently has it been super-powered by AI algorithms that insidiously lead us away from God and the human beings who deserve our attention, and into the rabbit-holes and dungeons of distraction that wastes the only thing all of us have the same amount of every day—time.

Dreher relates how he was rescued from a near-suicidal focus on his own misery by the ancient practice of reciting the Jesus Prayer, five hundred times a day. This forced his attention away from himself and his distractions, and while he still has plenty of problems, he was able to get moving again and write a remarkable book.

Those of us who grew up in a less distraction-prone age—the 1960s, say—have no idea what younger people struggle against in trying to pay attention to those objects and people which they know deserve it. If you believe in such things, say a prayer for them as we face the assaults of AI-powered social media, and be aware that, as Dreher begins his book, "The world is not what we think it is."

Sources: The article, "Check This Out" by Daniel Immerwahr appears on pp. 64-69 of the Jan. 27, 2025 issue of The New Yorker. Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder was published in 2024 by Zondervan. C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is available in numerous editions. And a description and explanation of the Jesus Prayer is at https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/the-jesus-prayer.

Did IBM Help with the Holocaust?

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:46:00 +0000

Edwin Black certainly thinks it did. In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables." The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II. But if you frame the issue in terms of a legal case, the book is more like an extensive set of notes for the prosecution, rather than the prosecution itself.

To say anything meaningful about the book in the space of one column is presumptuous, but I'll try anyway. Black provides useful context by briefly describing the corporate history of IBM, which formally begins in 1911 with the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. One of the founders was the German-American inventor Herman Hollerith, whose concept of storing information in the form of little holes in thin stiff cards gave rise to what we would now call the first data-processing machines. Salesman Thomas J. Watson, who eventually rose to head the company, expanded IBM's customer base beyond the U. S. government, which used "Hollerith cards" as long ago as the 1890 census, and by 1930 Watson was in firm control of what was now known as International Business Machines, or IBM. Almost in parallel, a German subsidiary whose full name was Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH (abbreviated "Dehomag") was established and provided punch-card equipment to Germany and other European customers. Dehomag was owned 90% by IBM USA, which wasn't a problem until Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the U. S. public perception of what became the Nazi regime turned sour.

Author Black accumulated tens of thousands of documents showing exactly how Watson and IBM USA kept Dehomag going throughout World War II, despite its being taken over by Nazi-appointed trustees once the war began. Profits, which were substantial, built up in frozen accounts which were accessed after the war, and Black shows how IBM-designed and provided punch cards and processing systems allowed the Nazis to count, locate, and round up Jews and other disparaged types when the time came for the concentration camps to ramp up their killings.

From the earliest IBM-facilitated census in 1933 to the last gasp of the Nazi regime in 1945, punch-card systems helped Germany keep track of trains, coordinate production, and account for every death in every concentration camp. A secret government agency founded in 1937 and called the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (Office of Automated Reporting) kept track of punch-card equipment and supplies, and served as a central clearinghouse for all punch-card technology and operations, which consumed many millions of cards during the war. And as Black shows, the U. S. minders at IBM kept tabs on Dehomag and other European subsidiaries all the way through the war, sometimes even with the assistance of U. S. diplomatic personnel.

That sounds bad enough. But what is missing in Black's otherwise unimpeachable thoroughness of documentation is any consideration of alternatives, and a kind of moral summing up of exactly what IBM's culpability was. His book is a classic case of not being able to see, or at least talk about, the forest because of all the trees in the way. In the introduction, Black admonishes the reader to read the book all the way through, or not at all. I did what he told me to, but this meant slogging through page after page of minutiae such as examples of bills of sale and machine serial numbers.

Perhaps Black thought his job was simply to report the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. But facts never do—historians have to say something about what they mean. And what I kept wishing for was an examination of what Watson (who in a real sense was IBM at the time) could have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference.

For example, suppose Watson had simply sold Dehomag at a huge discount to whatever buyers in Germany were around in 1939, say, and walked away from the subsidiary, cutting off all communication with it. One could argue that this would have been a dereliction of responsibility to IBM's shareholders, as Dehomag was using IBM's technology and patents. But perhaps it would have been worth it for the war effort. As it turns out, Dehomag probably had enough expertise to keep going without the parent company's help, but perhaps with less effectiveness. The Nazis were not about to let go of the informational power that punch-card systems gave them, and the Maschinelles Berichtwesen would have kept the machines running somehow.

As it happened, Watson tried to walk a fine line between not appearing to favor the Nazi regime on the one hand, and not abandoning Dehomag altogether on the other hand. In 1937 Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, but in June of 1940, Watson publicly returned the medal, and nearly lost Dehomag in the process. But intense diplomatic and other efforts kept Dehomag in IBM's orbit, however tenuously.

If punch cards had never been invented, Hitler would probably have killed a lot of Jews in World War II anyway, but maybe not as efficiently and thoroughly. One frustrating aspect of Black's book is that he clearly has only a layman's understanding of exactly how IBM's 1930s punch-card technology operated. He shows how the Nazis valued and used the technology and how much faster it allowed them to find Jews and track railroad cars, but comparisons between operations carried out with punched cards and modern-day computing are lacking.

Nevertheless, Black has shown that IBM's machines were an essential part of the Nazi war machine, and that Watson and his underlings did nothing to slow down their use—in fact, they assisted to the extent possible, always refraining from asking exactly what the Nazis were doing with their cards.

The IBM of today is a vastly different entity than it was in the 1930s, but the sordid record of its collusion with Nazi Germany is a moral lesson in the responsibilities of corporations in wartime. Black has given us plenty of material from which to draw that lesson, but the job of learning it is up to us.

Sources: Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Allliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation was published by Crown (a division of Random House) in 2001.

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 11:57:00 +0000

. . . all that smart, that is.

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise! You're not in the car. ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own. It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

What's not to like? Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is. And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you. How cool is that?

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times. Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)." No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date.

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles. The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways. This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means. If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible. But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open? I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible. It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents. And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology. There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short.

How much regulation is too much? It depends on who you ask: the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths. The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price.

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there. In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today.

There are two extremes to think about. The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year. Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business? I doubt it. There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations. This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable. Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them. Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions. Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones.

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features. Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it. But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either. The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on.

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells. I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out. Not everybody else will, though.

Sources: An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d. I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI.

Here's Why Your Girlfriend Will Eventually Get Bored During Sex

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:26:52 +0000

Don't shoot the messenger here

7 Ways to Make Your Girlfriend Feel Less Self-Conscious In Bed

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:00:08 +0000

If you give her what she needs, trust us— she'll return the favor

Calvin Klein's Latest Sweater ... Is Different. We Can't Put Our Nipples on It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:47:57 +0000

It's not exactly office appropriate

Could Tattoos Actually Give You Cancer? Honestly, Science Doesn't Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:35:51 +0000

Research suggests that there might be a correlation between tattoo ink and cancer— but don't freak out just yet

Can Watching Too Much Porn Give You Erectile Dysfunction?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:29:45 +0000

We spoke to two experts about the scary possibility

Daily Deal: Cook the Juiciest Steak of Your Life With This Sous Vide

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:13:28 +0000

Way cheaper than tuition at Le Cordon Bleu

Actor Frank Vincent Passes Away Due to Open Heart Surgery Complications

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:00:04 +0000

The critically-acclaimed mob drama star was 80 years old

Light Up Your Arms, Chest, and Abs With This TRX Exercise

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:23:38 +0000

The pushup to pike is ideal for multitaskers

No, Wonder Woman Is Not Based on a Threesome

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:08:57 +0000

A new movie suggests that the superhero was inspired by a steamy three-way— but the truth is a lot more complicated than that

This Victoria's Secret Model's Muay Thai Workout Will Leave You Drenched

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 18:41:24 +0000

You'll work your abs in ways you never have before

There's Actually a Way to Reverse Diabetes—Here's How You Can Do It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:46:58 +0000

The condition doesn't have to be permanent for everyone, research suggests

Danica Patrick's 33-Minute Living Room Workout Looks Exhausting as Hell

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:34:08 +0000

The NASCAR star shows off her fitness in a living room workout she posted on Instagram

'I Tried Eating An Avocado Every Day For A Week—Here's What Happened'

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:25:33 +0000

It was harder than it sounds

Meet the Man Who Tattooed His Penis and 90 Percent of His Body to Help Fight His Chronic Pain

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:59:36 +0000

"Tattboy" has spent over $80,000 on his ink

The Cadillac CT6 Plug-In Hybrid is Green Luxury

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:48:55 +0000

What you should know about Cadillac's new hybrid

Could a Sex Robot Actually Kill You?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:33:47 +0000

A viral news story claims hackers could train fembots to kill us in our sleep— but don't believe the hype

The 16 Coolest Leather Backpacks for Fall

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:16:03 +0000

Perfect for a daily commute or a weekend adventure—and everything in between

5 Celebrity Chefs Reveal the Key to Perfectly Fluffy Scrambled Eggs

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:05:23 +0000

Just don't over-whisk them

Here's Why WWE's "Big Show" May Finally Have to Call It Quits

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:39:29 +0000

Due to a lingering injury, the seven-time champion isn't sure what the future holds

What Every Germaphobe Should Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:34:10 +0000

Your quest to avoid pathogens might take you down the wrong path

Selena Gomez Reveals She Underwent a Secret Kidney Transplant Due to Lupus

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:55:46 +0000

The singer's battle with the autoimmune disease continues to impact her life

Watch This Giant Cyst Pop Like It Was Shot Out of a Cannon

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:50:44 +0000

You can thank Michael Lewis, M.D., for this clip

More Men Are Seeking Help for Eating Disorders Than Ever Before

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:09:04 +0000

The number of guys seeking treatment has risen 70 percent between 2010 and 2016

Conor McGregor Says a "Wealth Belly" Is the New Six-Pack—Here's Why We Aren't Buying It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:15:01 +0000

Don't expect the MMA champ to start fighting as a heavyweight anytime soon, either

Male Birth Control Might Be Right Around the Corner, And It Sounds Pretty Damn Cool

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:52:58 +0000

Researchers have been talking about male contraception for years, but it actually might be on the horizon