The GOP war on democratic institutions

It is quite extraordinary how the Republican party seems determined to tear down institutions that have long been seen as fundamental to the smooth functioning of democratic societies.

The most recent and extreme has been the attack on the entire judiciary system in the US in the wake of the many charges that have been leveled against serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT). He has lost defamation suits brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, business fraud suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the falsifying business records to further his election campaign brought by Manhattan district Attorney Alvin Bragg. He further faces charges of election interference in Georgia brought by Fulton Country district attorney Fani Willis, and two sets of charges involving the possession of classified documents brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith.
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How did the dog find the camp site?

A man who was driving in Oregon with his four dogs, crashed his pickup truck through a guard rail and fell into a ravine. One of his dogs ran four miles back to the campsite where the family was and this alerted them to the problem and they managed to find them.

The case unfolded as Brandon Garrett was driving with his four dogs north on US Forest Service Road 39 in Baker county, near where his family was camping.

During the trip, Garrett failed to navigate a curve in the road and crashed over an embankment, according to a statement from the Baker county sheriff’s office.

Garrett survived the crash, but the accident left him stranded and forced him to wait – and hope – for help.

Thankfully for him, one of his dogs ran back to the campsite, and the animal’s appearance led the Garrett’s family to realize something had gone wrong. The dog ended up running nearly four miles through the wilderness before tracking down the other campers on 3 June at 9.30am.

What amazes me is that the dog was able to get back to the campsite at all. There have been many stories about the amazing ability of dogs to travel long distances to find their way back home. The article mentions the well known ability of dogs to use their sense of small. But it also mentions them having an inner compass that detects magnetic fields as aids. I had heard of birds using magnetism to navigate but had not heard of that applying to dogs.

Dogs do have an incredibly strong sense of smell that enables them to pick up the minutest traces of scents to track and navigate. But this dog was not going home. The group was camping so this was unfamiliar territory and, since the dog had been traveling by truck, there would have been no scent to follow back to camp. How did the dog know where to go?

What happens to our bodies in excessive heat

It is astonishing that with record heat waves year after year, there are still those who refuse to acknowledge that we are experiencing dangerous levels of global warming, who not only ignore the warnings but even threaten journalists who write about it.

Almost four out of every 10 journalists covering the climate crisis and environment issues have been threatened as a result of their work, with 11% subjected to physical violence, according to groundbreaking new research.

A global survey of more than 740 reporters and editors from 102 countries found that 39% of those threatened “sometimes” or “frequently” were targeted by people engaged in illegal activities such as logging and mining. Some 30%, meanwhile, were threatened with legal action – reflecting a growing trend towards corporations and governments deploying the judicial system to muzzle free speech.

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A better AI system?

Via Kevin Drum, I learned that the Wall Street Journal had tested five AI engines and the winner was one that I had not heard of before called Perplexity, where the basic version is free.

As readers may recall, back in December I tried out ChatGPT and Bard with the prompt “What can you tell me about Mano Singham?” and got back some accurate information mixed in with false ones. I read that turning out some false information was common in these AI systems, making them of highly dubious value.

I tried the prompt “Who is Mano Singham” on Perplexity and got results that were fairly extensive and correct and did not have any false information. I used a prompt asking about myself not because of vanity (at least not entirely) but because that way I can know what is true and false immediately without having to do any further research.
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Wear the damn seat belt!

Turbulence in the air is one of the biggest causes in injury on airplanes and yesterday saw a dramatic example of that, when a plane dropped 6,000 feet in just three minutes.

A British passenger has died and seven people have been critically injured after a flight from London to Singapore was hit by turbulence.

Passengers onboard the Singapore Airlines plane told of a “dramatic drop” that launched those not wearing a seatbelt into the cabin ceiling.
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How fountains worked in the days before electricity

When watching films that are set in a time before there was electricity, I would sometimes see public fountains and would idly wonder how they worked. I knew that they had to be driven by gravity, with the water coming from a source like a tower that was higher than the. fountain, the way that many of us still get water nowadays, from city water towers. But how did they fill the water towers in those days?

This article explains.

Ancient Rome received all of its water (according to Encarta, about 38 million gallons a day) through a system of aqueducts. All water flowed to the city by gravity, but because it was arriving from surrounding hills, it could be stored in large cisterns very similar in concept to today’s water towers (the main difference is that cisterns are filled from the top).

Water flowed from the cisterns either through pipes to individual houses or to public distribution points. Fountains served both decorative and functional purposes, since people could bring their buckets to the fountain to collect water. The cisterns provided the height needed to generate water pressure for the fountains to spray. As discussed in How Water Towers Work, a foot of height generates 0.43 pounds per square inch (psi) of water pressure, so a cistern does not have to be that tall to develop enough pressure to give a fountain a reasonable display.

The question that the article does not address is what happens to the water after it comes out of the fountain. It cannot be pumped back up without electricity or having people and animals haul it back up to a height. Did they just let it soak into the ground?

While those old fountains must have been nice to look at, they do seem to be a wasteful use of precious water that had come a long way using aqueducts, themselves a magnificent engineering feat.

Approaches to the end of life

Dhruv Khullar writes about the differing opinions about how to approach the so-called “‘marginal decade’ at the end of our lives, when medicine keeps us alive but our independence and capacities bleed away.” He points out that in 1900, the life expectancy at birth was 47 years. But at that time, one in five children died before the age of 10. Now life expectancy at birth is close to 77. Much of this improvement came about rapidly due to improved sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines that have reduced infant and child mortality considerably.

But in the last six decades, increases in longevity have slowed, to only about seven years, and are more due to extending the lives of of old people, many of whom are in ill health. In other words, Khullar says, “we are prolonging the time it takes to die.” The goal of compressing mortality, i.e., shortening the gap between the end of a healthy life and death, may be slipping away.

If anything, longer lives now appear to include more difficult years. The “compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality,” two demographers, Eileen Crimmins and Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez, wrote in 2010. According to the World Health Organization, the average American can expect just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. (Health spans are greater in countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Panama, Turkey, and Sri Lanka.)

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The amazing Voyager space probes

Way back in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 probe into space to do close up studies of Jupiter and Saturn. The mission was to be for five years but Voyager kept going and going, leaving the solar system and in August 2012 became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, continuing to send back data for nearly half a century.

But in December scientists said that a problem with the onboard computers resulted in the probe sending back gibberish. But rather than give up on the plucky little probe, engineers did a remote fix, even though it was 15 billion miles away.
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The ridiculous Tesla cybertruck

You may have seen photographs of the Tesla cybertruck. It is a hideous vehicle that looks like something in a futuristic dystopia.

It is the brainchild of Elon Musk and has had to be recalled because of a dangerous problem.

Tesla recalled all Cybertrucks Friday after federal safety regulators contacted the company over malfunctions with the vehicle’s accelerator pedal. New Cybertruck orders have been reportedly cancelled or stalled. The news follows numerous reports of embarrassing Cybertruck failures.
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Cybertruck owners reported that their vehicles were at risk of getting stuck driving at full speed due to a loose accelerator pedal. Video showed the pedal itself falling off and the piece beneath wedging itself into the car’s interior, which would force the vehicle into maximum acceleration. One driver was able to save himself from a crash by holding down the brake pedal.
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The Cybertruck, which has long been a pet project for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, began deliveries in late 2023 after years of delay due to production problems and battery-supply constraints. Since then, numerous failures in the vehicle’s design and function have ranged from embarrassing to outright dangerous.

The trucks – which Musk once claimed would be the “best off-road vehicle” – have been shown getting stuck in sand, snow and dirt, with one towed away by a Ford truck. Some owners have reported their new Cybertrucks have simply stopped running completely. Many have complained the truck’s stainless steel exterior rusts easily, and one owner said the windshield broke quickly in a hail storm. Musk himself claimed the car was bulletproof at its unveiling before cracking its window with a steel ball thrown by hand.

It looks like the cybertruck will not meet the EU’s safety and quality standards and so will not be sold there. Lucky Europeans! We in the US will have to deal with this monstrosity on the roads.

Here is a brutally funny review of the cybertruck, explaining why only Musk fanboys who have bought into his shtick are likely to buy this piece of trash. Astonishingly, apparently two million people have paid deposits to buy one, that will take between eight and thirteen years to be delivered to them.

Arizona GOP digs an even deeper hole on abortion

The ruling by the Arizona supreme court that an 1864 law that purportedly bans all abortions even in the case of rape and incest has created shock wave in GOP politics. The only exception is to save the life of the woman but, as has been pointed out, this is not as clear cut as it appears to be. It is not always evident at which point the woman’s life is in danger and doctors fearing prosecution may wait until they think death is imminent, which could well result in death or serious complications.

Even serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and the GOP nominee for governor Kari Lake have said that they oppose the law although embarrassingly for Lake, just two years ago she enthusiastically supported the very same law, even referring to it as section 13-3603, its specific legislative number, showing that she knew exactly what she was supporting.
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