More speed 1

Hyperloop - fast and autonomous - isn't being developed in the U.S., but faster and/or autonomous transportation appeals to just about everybody. Variations are already used in multiple locations all over the world.

Dubai (UAE) on the Arabian Peninsula has an eye-catching system. Autonomous cars move people along a monorail system between major landmarks like Palm Jumeirah.  Here are 44 other monorail locations.

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China had no high-speed rail at the turn of the century, but now has 45,000 network miles, the world's longest HSR. The fastest commercial train in the world runs between Shanghai and its international airport. With peak speed of 268 mph, it makes the 19-mile trip in a little over 7 minutes. It uses "maglev" technology, the magnetic levitation idea connected with the hyperloop concept.

Japan's bullet train was the world's first HSR to operate way back in 1964.

Stealing IP #3

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

While testing some turbines in China, American Super Conductor found that they were running on new code which AMSC had not released yet. They investigated Dejan because he was one of the few who had confidential access, and then found the emails which told the whole story.

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Sinovel, their biggest client, cancelled all its millions of dollars' worth of orders (of course it did). Dejan confessed and spent a year in Austrian prison. AMSC suffered market value loss of over a billion dollars and had to let 600 employees go out of their previous total of 900. It was devastating.

Afterward, cyber attacks kept coming. AMSC hired a computer security firm, which discovered that the attacks were now coming from a Chinese military unit tasked with spying on North American companies. Thousands of American companies have lost "engineering documents, manufacturing processes, chip designs, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, you name it it's been stolen."

from The Great Brain Robbery

Stealing IP #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Imagine this scenario. You have some ideas for a great tech product. You start your company and hire some engineers to develop those ideas. You find clients who really want your product and are happy to purchase it from you. You keep figuring out more ways to help your clients and take care of your employees.

After decades of research and experiment at your company, someone takes your valuable results and gives them away. That's stealing intellectual property. 

That's pretty much how it was for American Super Conductor. They spent years and millions of dollars developing advanced software for the operation of wind turbines. After China in 2005 passed a law calling for wind farms, AMSC contracted with the Chinese company Sinovel to provide the required gadgetry and computer code to them while they would do the physical building of the wind turbines.

An AMSC employee (Dejan) working in their Austria office was seduced by the Chinese. An email showed his demands: "All girls need money. I need girls. Sinovel needs me." Sinovel executives were glad to comply.

from The Great Brain Robbery

(cont'd tomorrow)

Stealing IP

A grand jury just indicted a former Google engineer for stealing intellectual property. Over 500 confidential files of Google's ideas (mind work) were stolen for Chinese companies. 

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He was arrested last week in California for stealing trade secrets relating to AI technology and could receive up to ten years in prison and a fine of $250k for each of the four counts of theft.

Hired in 2019, with access to confidential information, he started uploading hundreds of files into his personal account in 2022. He was soon offered the position of chief technology officer in a new Chinese startup dealing with artificial intelligence. He founded another Chinese startup to train "large AI models powered by supercomputing chips." 

Surveillance camera footage showed somebody else faking his identity at Google's entrance while he was in China. He resigned last December.

from Ars Technica

Paris Olympics 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Tickets are going fast! No, really. "Of the 10 million tickets available for the Olympic Games, just under 8 million have already been taken up."  Better hurry if you don't already have your tix.

What could go wrong? Plenty of things. 

Bed bugs, for one thing. Last fall it was like a plague. About the same time, trash collectors went on strike and piles were left on Paris streets. That in turn probably exacerbated the persistent rat problem.

For another thing, they have millions of visitors coming in the middle of a "housing crisis." In the words of one student, "[M]any of my friends are being evicted from their flats in June so that their landlords can let them out at inflated prices during the Olympics."

Workers are being asked to work from home if possible, so that the already-strained transport system isn't overloaded. Transportation tickets will double in price.

Add more strikes and public protests to the list. Be glad you are not in charge of making this whole thing look good to the world and run smoothly. Because the last thing France wants is to damage its global, glorious reputation. 

from Paris is heading for an Olympic-sized disaster

Paris Olympics 1

With an expected fifteen million visitors coming to town this summer, Paris is making a tremendous effort to give them a good impression and a good time at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

Spectacular scenery will abound as a background for photos. Imagine the opening athletes coming down the Seine River on boats as you watch from the riverside quai, beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower, equestrians on the grounds at Versailles.

artist's image

Huge profits will ensue for businesses and the city. But possible disasters loom as well, so the upfront costs are also huge as they try to eliminate those possibilities.

Three swimming events will be held in the river itself, where swimming has been banned since 1923 because of pollution. Confident that it will be clean, President Macron says he himself will take a swim in the river.

from Paris is Heading for an Olympic-Sized Disaster

(cont'd tomorrow)

Never happened 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said (he's still on Google's board but no longer running it): “We definitely messed up on the image generation . . . it definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

He added: “We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases and that’s not our intention. . . weird things that are out there that definitely feel far left."

Yes, it sure does feel far left. He claims that he doesn't understand why. Maybe he's just blinded by his ideology. Because it's totally clear to the rest of us--Gemini presents left-wing ideas because its creators/engineers are left-wing. 

Racial diversity is a filter built into image generation. When users ask for an image of a historical figure who was actually of the white race, this is less important than the woke preference of the Gemini designers. So, for instance, it presents non-white Nazi soldiers, which we all know never happened.

image

Personal views of those designers take priority over factual, accurate truth. Clearly, truth-telling is not the highest priority. So we wonder, what else that Gemini shows us is not going to be really true? 

That's it. That's why people are upset. 

Never happened 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Sundar Pichai was the CEO of Google, and is now CEO of its parent company, Alphabet. In 2022 he was paid $226 million. Google is said to be worth $1.7 trillion. It employs 150,000 people, including about 30,000 engineers. A giant.

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You're familiar with its search engine, its email (gmail), and of course Youtube. Gemini was supposed to be its splashy entrant into the generative artificial intelligence market, an answer to ChatGPT by this technology giant. 

Instead, Gemini seems to have cost the company billions since its recent launch. Google stopped it from generating images on February 22. As of last Thursday, Alphabet's market cap (number of shares x its share price) had tumbled by $96 billion.

from Yahoo Finance

(cont'd tomorrow)

Never happened 1

Artificial intelligence has advanced greatly since Open AI's ChatGPT, which was itself a breakthrough advance in 2022.

No business wants to be left in the dust, so staff work diligently to find every possible way to use the new technology. More generative large language models (LLM's like ChatGPT) are being developed by tech companies. Gemini by Google is one of them.

Shortly after its launch, Gemini triggered alarm. When asked by users to generate pictures of historical figures, it showed them . . but not as they were. Minority races were substituted for white people and dressed in the style of their century. 

People are learning, if they didn't know it before, that AI does not necessarily report true and factual information. 

Gemini and all other artificial intelligence only follows the instructions (algorithms) of its creators. It does not "think things through" or look for truth. "AI can only learn from what it’s been given" by its developers--who have their own biases.

from "Google Gemini Presents a Pattern That Never Happened"

(cont'd tomorrow)

Sing louder 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Why does the man have these nightmares? Because he and his family and his church actually stood by and watched a few feet away as Jews were hauled to concentration camps. His childhood conscience was shocked, and it burned into his adult conscience.

A pastor of that time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, didn't take the view of this boy's pastor. He claimed that the Christian church has a responsibility to fight evil:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.

Not to speak is to speak.

Not to act is to act.”

Eric Metaxas wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer and sees the passive American church often doing what many German churches did then: ignoring evil in our own time, in our own country. His Letter to the American Church was written to call churches to fight it, not ignore it.

"Can it really be God’s will that His children be silent at a time like this? Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as godly meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle."

Here is a trailer for the film that recently came out. Any church may screen it for free.

Sing louder 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

The man's dream is a memory from his childhood in Germany as a boy.

Week after week, he and his family gathered with their friends in the 1940's on Sunday mornings in their little church. A train always passed behind them during the service. Fellow Germans--neighbors with homes and families--were being hauled in cattle cars.

Inside the church, the pastor's sermon one morning urged Christians to submit meekly to evil, as he said Christ would do. Outside the church that day, a whistle signaled that the train was stopping right next to them. 

At that point, the man's dream becomes nightmarish. Everyone in the church service hears the people in the cattle cars screaming as they pound on their locked doors. The pastor raises his voice over the screams, shouting to his congregation to love their enemies. He nods to the organist and starts them singing a hymn. Loudly.

The congregation is alarmed and disturbed by the screams. But they comply and sing their hymn. The boy walks out by himself and sees the doomed prisoners.

from Sing a Little Louder

(cont'd tomorrow)

Sing louder 1

Recurring nightmares disturb this man. He wakes up in a panic. 

The video below is based on a true story that took place in the middle of the last century. The nightmares come from one of his childhood memories of church services.

It may bear some relevance to church goers today. Take 11 minutes to watch it, time well-spent.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Old & new

When I visited Oxford (UK) and Normandy (France) in 2018, I was struck by the contrast in architecture. We saw buildings in use everywhere that were hundreds of years old - and so beautiful.

By contrast, the library in my town was completely renovated ($11 million) because it was dated and aging at . . 20 years old.

But retaining the old does not always hold sway, I guess. See this example in Germany of replacing the old and beautiful with the dramatically new and modern.

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EV competitor

Do you own a BYD? If you live in the US, you might not even know what it is. This Chinese car maker just surpassed Tesla's production of electric vehicles in the final quarter of 2023. 

Tesla far out-sells all other manufacturers of EV's in the US, and the same held for global sales up until now. But BYD is on track to take the leader position in 2024. Elon Musk has a warning for the auto industry:

“Frankly, if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.” 

Low priced models are part of BYD's soaring success, and they can put out new models in as little as 18 months. Tesla took four years to put out the hyped cybertruck. 

But Tesla has plans for a new "baby Tesla" to compete in the lower price range, expected to cost the consumer under $30,000.

from Yahoo

High speed 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

U.S. High Speed Rail Alliance wants to convince Americans to build high speed trains for our public transportation needs. They say it's the "realistic, easy, and affordable" way forward.

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Certainly it's more relaxing than driving through traffic; it's easy to socialize/eat/read/watch the scenery when you're not at the wheel. Less time is required since the common definition of "high speed rail" is moving at 155 mph or more.

But efficiency and energy benefits may be the biggest appeal to lawmakers who worry about the environment. Per passenger, rail transportation emits less carbon dioxide and uses less energy than either cars or airplanes.

According to Brightline West, that HSR project from LA to Las Vegas (yesterday's post) will mean 700 million fewer vehicle miles traveled per year and 400,000 tons fewer carbon emissions.

from U.S. High Speed Rail  Alliance

High speed 1

It looks like the idea for "hyperloop" transportation is dead or nearly dead in this country. Projects proposed in Colorado and West Virginia have not followed through and the most prominent start-up has folded.

Elon Musk promoted the idea and encouraged others to pursue it, touting it as a better option than California's plan for high speed rail (HSR). But the high speed rail project is going ahead. In fact, billions of dollars are promised to it by the federal government.

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Brightline, which already runs trains between Orlando and southern Florida, will build the HSR between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Federal money in the amount of $3 billion for this project was announced in December. It's supposed to be done in time for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles with an expected one-way ticket of ~$100.

There's another $3 billion for a route between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and $1 billion for a route between Virgina and North Carolina.

from TechCrunch

(cont'd tomorrow)

Roland 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Police in the US do not use lethal force against Blacks more than they do against white people. In fact, they use that force about 23% less than they do against whites. That was the result that Roland's research team discovered. Some of his colleagues advised him against publishing it because it was "so different." But he did publish it.

A previously fired assistant then filed accusations of sexual harassment against him out of revenge (according to her friend). A Harvard investigator found no basis for it. But Harvard University punished him with 2-year suspension and the end of his research lab, essentially "career death." Claudine Gay was on the deciding committee.

Why? Apparently because his work challenged the official narrative that systemic racism causes American police to frequently kill black men, so Roland's research had to be stopped. So much for "veritas" at Harvard.

Dr. Roland Fryer still wants to find strategies that actually help black kids achieve. "Truth helps us. False narratives do not. I find it insulting that people would change the truth because they think they're trying to help us."

Roland 1

Roland started life in a lower-income black neighborhood in Daytona Beach, Florida. Raised by his grandmother, his father was in prison and he didn't meet his mother until he was in his 20's. His extended family sold drugs in Florida.

He stayed away from drugs because he saw what happened to his cousins, and not one of his childhood friends is still alive.  Always feeling like a misfit, he never bought into the idea that it was cool to be poor. 

The first person to ever tell him he was smart was his economics teacher. He fell in love with economics, worked very hard as a student at Harvard, and became a professor. They were all trying to find the truth ("veritas") in their subjects, he naively thought. 

That's what Roland was trying to do. Back in 2015-2016 he looked into the actual police statistics to find the data about policemen killing black men. He did the research and published his conclusion, and then his life changed.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Competitor

NASA launched a lunar lander from Cape Canaveral last month, but the rocket booster was not from the well-known and often-used SpaceX. 

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United Launch Alliance (ULA), owned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, was formed in 2005 to make rockets. They dominated the market for almost a decade, charging NASA over $400 million per launch. NASA contracted with them in 2013 for 28 launches, but SpaceX protested, offering a price of just $90 million using their Falcon 9.

A major restructuring of ULA followed with the goal being to cut its launch pricing in half so that it could compete, but the company was still in danger of bankruptcy by 2015. They asked for $1+ billion from the US Air Force to help them develop a new rocket called the Vulcan. Today that rocket provides 22,000 jobs across the country.

Jumping over the intervening years, last month's launch was delivered by ULA's brand new rocket, the Vulcan Centaur, at a price to NASA of $108 million for its five payloads.

I still have questions about ULA. If I find answers, I'll continue this.

from Wikipedia and Wikipedia

Girls' sports

An official with the NCAA has taken a stand for female student athletes. 

William Bock III resigned from his position on their infractions committee to say it's not fair to make females compete against male bodies.

The NCAA allows it if the transgender athlete meets certain requirements, like a lower current level of testosterone. But Bock made the right point in his resignation letter when he pointed to something we all know:

“There’s a lot of biological development that starts at birth that allows you to maximize testosterone, and those changes that you get through development — they don’t go away . . . you’re never going to bridge the gap between men and women."

Common sense at last. Apparently it took a little courage as well, judging from another of his comments:

“I’ve gotten no response from anybody,” he said. “Which I think probably says a lot about the fear that’s driving silence at academic institutions on this issue.”

from Washington Examiner

The mother lode

Rare earths are essential for the manufacture of modern technology products. They're not common or abundantly found on earth. When you put together those two factors, essential and uncommon, it means that manufacturers will pay a high price to get them.

China is the main source of rare earths. That means China makes a lot of money from supplying them to manufacturers, and it means that they can manipulate this advantage for political goals.

photo

But all of this may change because the "mother lode" of rare earths, the largest deposit ever found, has been discovered--and it's not in China. It's in the US, in the state of Wyoming.

"If wisely exploited, this find—estimated to be the richest in the world—will give the U.S. an unparalleled economic and geopolitical edge against China and Russia for the foreseeable future."

from WSJ, "Wyoming Hits the Rare-Earth Mother Lode"

He gets us . .

Yes, Jesus certainly gets us, as the Super Bowl ad says. He knows us to our core and understands us. But that's not all He does. 

He gets us as we are . . and He doesn't leave us there.  He saves, transforms, cleanses, restores, forgives, heals, delivers, redeems, loves us. In short, #HeChangesUs

EV charging 5

Follow-up to this post

Most EV (electric vehicle) car manufacturers have decided to build Tesla's charging technology (NACS) right into their new cars, starting in 2025. Here's the list so far: Ford, GM, Rivian, Toyota, Volvo, Polestar, Mercedes, Nissan, Fisker, Honda, Acura, Jaguar, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Lexus.

Starting later this year, 2024, owners of these EV's may use some of Tesla's supercharger stations, but they will have to use an adapter that will be available.

Stellantis (Jeep) and Lucid haven't decided yet. You have to wonder what's holding them back. Tesla's charging stations are both more plentiful and more reliable than any other. Researchers at University of California/Berkley found that rival CCS stations were often not functional.

The EV market relies on a charging network that is easy to find and works well. The US government wants EV's to dominate. All car manufacturers are working on it. To Elon Musk and others, it's a moral imperative. But, is it really? For me, the jury is still out.

image

from Business Insider

Aliens & faith

What if we discovered real, actual space aliens, non-human intelligent beings from other planets? Many believe it could happen.

 Some think that would somehow disprove the faith of Christians. Would it? Does Christianity depend on humans being alone in the universe?

What would you say?

Climate fear

Dr. Wielicki was alarmed at the fear which he saw in his university students. They were afraid that the world would be destroyed by climate change, even to the point of deciding not to have children.

So he explained to them that, in his view, the earth is not in that sort of danger.

"The narrative in the main stream media is doing so much damage to mental health. Climate anxiety is probably the number one anxiety issue for the students that I talk to. And the science does not support that fear. I think that fear is irrational."

And then he paid the price for dissenting from the favored narrative. 

Europe's farms 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

(?Kerry's remark is curious, since more CO2 means more green plants to feed people.)

European Union has a plan to severely cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by the year 2040. It includes policies to limit what farmers can do, how they run their business, including both livestock and crops.

Farmers all over Europe have been dramatically protesting to tell them that the plan must change. They have won over various groups. One of them wrote to the EU saying, “The root of the problem is clear: the majority of farmers simply cannot make a living from their work. They are trapped in a system that is killing them.”

photo

Worried that a lot of voters are going to express their anger in the election coming next summer, the president of the EU made some changes to the plan this week:

• a recommendation to citizens to eat less meat was dropped
• a requirement to cut pesticide use by half was dropped
• a requirement to cut nitrogen, methane, and other emissions by a third was dropped

Apparently the farmers made enough noise.

from The Telegraph

Europe's farms 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Last week farmers took their protest to the EU itself: 

"Demonstrators rolled into Brussels in their tractors in the early morning hours before gathering outside the European Parliament where the summit was being held, blaring horns, hurling eggs and sparking fires."

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Rising costs, declining profits, government threats against farms, declining government support for farmers, all contribute to fear for their future. These pressures come from the European Union's passion to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions. Globally,  agriculture produces 12% of CO2 emissions.

As American John Kerry, "presidential envoy for climate," says, "We can't get to net zero, we can't get this job done, unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution . . . You can't continue to warm the planet while also expecting to feed it."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Europe's farms 1

Farmers in Europe are really upset. 

Angry farmers are protesting in Germany, Romania, France, Greece, Bulgaria and other countries. Thousands used tractors, fire, manure to get the attention of their governments because they have the impression that nobody is listening.

photo

Rising taxes and regulations are part of the problem, but there may be an agenda for farms that's bigger than taxes and regulations. Dutch farmers were told that the government plans to seize 2000-3000 farms. In Ireland, the government wants to "eliminate" 200,000 cows. 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Level 4

A Level 5 autonomous, self-driving vehicle would drive safely and reliably anywhere and under any conditions without human intervention. That exciting idea was promised by some researchers (Ford, Tesla), but nobody's gotten there yet and it doesn't look like any car company will attain it any time soon. 

But some companies are focused on Level 4 instead of Level 5. Waymo is having some success with it, describing itself as "The world's first autonomous ride-hailing service," operating now in San Francisco and Phoenix. Like Level 5, their electric vehicle needs no human intervention; but it only operates in defined areas under defined conditions.

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Cruise tried to do the same thing but with perhaps a little less focus on safety. California revoked their permit for autonomous driving vehicles.

Waymo is still losing an estimated billion dollars per year. Eventually they must turn a profit. Neither investors nor employees will be able to keep the company going without it. 

from Mind Matters

U of Austin

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

University of Austin will welcome its first class of students next fall. It is not the University of Texas at Austin, but a new university altogether, designed to allow students and faculty to think and speak freely while pursuing truth. You know, like the university system which thrived for centuries doing that until today's disastrous corruption.

Six hundred professors applied for the initial fifteen faculty positions, six hundred who want to escape the oppressive culture of other universities to join this new one. Maybe they are afraid (of course they are) to speak their opposition to the mono-culture on their current campuses.

In the words of one of the founders, "Independent thinkers are repelled by intolerant and rigid intellectual environments. When universities are obsessed with hunting heretics, they become incapable of real creative achievement and fall behind."

 The founders and faculty (including Peter Boghossian) are optimistic that this can succeed.

from "Why I'm Co-founding a New University Dedicated to Freedo of Thought and Study"