The problem of tech monopolies

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.

He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.

Webb telescope hit by tiny meteoroid but should still function well

A tiny meteoroid has hit one of the 18 mirrors of the Webb telescope. But engineers had taken this possibility into account since there are so many tiny particles flying around in space.

The damage inflicted by the dust-sized micrometeoroid is producing a noticeable effect in the observatory’s data but is not expected to limit the mission’s overall performance.

James Webb was launched in December to succeed the revolutionary – but now ageing – Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers are due to release its first views of the cosmos on 12 July.

The US space agency Nasa said these images would be no less stunning because of what’s just happened.
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The speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant.
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The possibility of micrometeoroid hits was anticipated and contingencies like this were incorporated into the choice of materials, the construction of components and the different modes of operating the telescope.
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Engineers will adjust the positioning of the affected mirror segment to cancel out a portion of the introduced distortion, but they can’t remove it all.

July 12 will be a big day in astronomy.

The masks conundrum: Masks yes, mask mandates no?

In my trip to Boston recently, I distinctly got the impression that many people have decided that the pandemic is effectively, if not officially, over. While there was sporadic wearing of masks, most people were not doing so, nor did they seem to be making any effort to sit away from others on the airplanes, in the airport waiting areas, or the museums and other indoor venues I attended. While I usually wore my mask and tried to stay away from people, even I occasionally forgot. A friend of mine who just returned from a trip to Hungary and Poland said that masks were nowhere to be seen and people acted as if they were living in pre-pandemic times.

So is it over? Should we continue to wear masks? David Leonhardt discusses the issue.
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What foods are good and bad for you?

In developed countries where many people have an abundance of food and the luxury of choice, there also tends to be some level of anxiety about eating ‘correctly’, with people being bombarded with conflicting advice about what is good and what is bad for you. For those who do like to be better informed about this, this article explores some of the myths and summarizes the research on various foods that have been either praised or demonized: coffee, alternative milks, red wine, red meat, and carbohydrates. The article goes into some detail on the research on each but I will excerpt just some of the stuff on coffee, one of the demonized items.

“I’m surprised that people still think coffee is bad for them,” says Dr Astrid Nehlig, research director of the French medical research institute, Inserm, and one of the world’s leading researchers into coffee, health and brain function.
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Tackling the problem of renewable energy storage

The cost of producing renewable energy using solar and wind has been dropping sharply over the years so that it is now comparable and often even cheaper that energy produced using fossil fuels. So why hasn’t it taken over the energy sector completely? The reason is that when it comes to renewable energy, there is an extra cost that fossil-fuel based power plants do not have and that is the cost of storing the energy and this has to be factored in as well.

It is energy in the form of electric current that drives all our devices but the problem with current is that it cannot be stored as current because as it flows in wires, it dissipates its energy as heat. (Superconductors don’t have any resistance and thus do not lose any heat but the commercial applications of that are far off in the future.) The production of current has to exactly match the use of current at every moment. The energy grid is is a true marvel of engineering technology that achieves precisely this. We have various power plants feeding electricity into the grid and this is the sent all over the area covered by the grid to wherever it is needed at that moment. So in the US during the summer months, for example, energy is sent to the hot southern parts of the country to meet the increased demands of air conditioning.
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Environmental racism

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver discusses how historic racial discrimination practices have resulted in poor and minority communities ending up living in highly polluted areas, where the life expectancy can be ten years below nearby communities that are not similarly polluted. He describes one community where the lead levels are hundreds of times above acceptable limit, so that signs are posted on yards telling children not to play on the grass or in the dirt! That is like asking children not to breathe the air.
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The problems with self-driving cars

Self-driving cars, like the AI technology they are based on, seem always to be just tantalizingly beyond our reach at any given time. I have been hoping that self-driving cars become a reality because I am getting on in years and there is bound to come a time when it will not be safe for me to operate a vehicle, even though I have been accident and ticket-free my entire driving career, except for one fender-bender and one minor infraction, both of which took place over three decades ago when I was young, wild, and foolish. (No, not really. Both were rather boring events.)

The loss of driving privileges can result in a deep drop in a person’s independence, especially in the US which has pretty bad public transportation services. Having a self-driving car would provide older people or those with any issue that prevents them from driving, from being housebound. Of course, these cars are initially likely to be expensive but over time the prices should come down. The catch is that even though these cars have improved tremendously, they still seem to be not ready for prime time.
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Webb telescope instrument alignment completed

The last major step in the development of the Webb space telescope, checking the alignment of all the instruments, has been successfully completed and all the instruments seem to be at the correct operating temperature. NASA has released images taken of the Large Magellanic Cloud to show the clarity obtained.

The image shows snapshots from each of Webb’s three imaging instruments, plus its spectrograph and guidance sensor. The images show a field of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galaxy near the Milky Way about 158,000 light-years away. If it orbits our galaxy, it would be, by far, the largest satellite galaxy. But there’s a chance it’s just passing through or slowly merging with our galaxy.
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Now that the imaging instruments are properly aligned, NASA and its partners will begin commissioning several science instruments. These are components within the imaging instruments that can do things like filter certain kinds of light, adjust the cameras to specific customizations, or apply a particular lens. That could take a few months, as could a few calibrations to confirm that the telescope is temperature-stable when it moves between targets. During that time, mission control will also monitor mirror alignment to make sure it stays in place.

NASA has also released a video of the event.

In a few months we should start receiving images of parts of the universe we have never seen before.

The idiocy reaches new heights

Samantha Bee talks about the latest obsession of right wingers and Republicans, that men are becoming less manly and more effeminate and that something needs to be done quickly to reverse the trend or the human race will die out. Or something like that. And one suggestion that they are advocating is a real doozy. She is all in favor of them going ahead and doing it.

I think that it would be far more productive for these men to stop worrying about their sperm counts and whether their genitals are getting enough red light and instead investigate why they are so insecure about their masculinity.