österreich entscheidet

Polls close in Austria mid-afternoon local time today and the some six million eligible voters in a country of nine million seem posed to elevate foreign minister and ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei, the Austrian People’s Party) chair Kylo Ren Sebastian Kurz to chancellor and head the coalition of conservative, anti-immigration and anti-EU factions to form a government, dispensing with the need for seeking cooperation and compromise with minority liberal voices in the Bundesversammlung. This snap-election is the conclusion of a series of inconclusive votes that occurred last year and were revisited over the summer but failed to break a statuary threshold needed to validate the outcome. The thirty-one year old Kurz has pledged that his party’s platform reflect his personal crusade and frightening coincides with Vienna taking the helm of the rotating European Union presidency—and just as Brexit arrangement are finalised, associates of a single opinion that Brussels meddles far too much in national affairs and that the UK is better off outside of the customs bloc.

sopwith camel

The municipal airport serving Sonoma county was renamed in 2000 in honour of cartoonist and long-time Santa Rosa resident Charles M Schultz (Sebastopol to be specific whom Schultz created a contemporary of Charlie Brown and Linus van Pelt called Five for short but whose full name was 555 plus the postal code of the town, 95472, which is one of the few restrictions, numbers, on naming children in American) we discover thanks to Just a Car Guy, adorned with the logo of Snoopy outfitted in flying ace attire and piloting his dog house.
The former army airfield is not only a tribute to the creator of Peanuts and his cast of characters but also the chief staging area for California’s forestry protection against and where the firefighting aircraft battling the wildfires ravaging the state deploy from.  Sadly, we learn the Schultz’ homestead was also consumed by the fires along with untold thousands of others.

heat sink

A group of clever researchers have managed to create a pump and containment system out of ceramics—a material capable of withstanding very high temperatures but usually too brittle to take such stresses—that can handle a volume of white hot molten tin and this breakthrough is potentially revolutionary in the arena of renewable energy by allowing solar cells and wind farms the opportunity to off-load its surplus power in times of excess for when its needed.
Storing energy for later use—as sunshine and blustery days are often at cross-purposes and rarer yet correspond to our peak electrical demands—has attracted a raft of creative and novel means for saving power from batteries, to expanding the electrical grid with idle cars as active members, to the potential energy of gravity. All of these are brilliant schemes but a lot is lost in terms of efficiency—which is where the liquid tin (or metal of one’s choice comes in—tin is especially a good candidate because its liquid state lasts over a range of several hundred degrees kelvin before it boils away) because in the exchange of excess energy to keep the metal hot and later withdrawing on that deposit, because of the laws of thermodynamics, very little (relatively) is lost and higher storage temperatures yield higher storage capacity.

charge-parity symmetry

Though the search for non-baryonic “dark matter” that accounts for around thirty percent of the composition of the Cosmos (compared to the around five percent of the familiar luminous matter—all else is radiant or dark energy, astronomers believe) continues unabated, researchers can claim a significant victory in having found the remaining, heretofore undetected “normal” matter of the Universe. Of that conjectured five percent of the total, only an astonishingly small ten percent could be definitively pointed to by star-gazers. That missing matter (or at least a good chuck of it), however, seems to have been found through two independent studies that suggest it is diffusely spread out over immense distances in a network of intergalactic filaments of hot gas. The nature of these strands that link the cosmic web opens yet another mystery to investigate.

sic transit gloria mundi

Humanity may indeed be caught aware by the Singularity—assuming that it’s not already occurred—and not wanting to spread the bombast of street preachers but this inevitable development, as Wired! magazine reports, of learning software writing its own, improved (in novel and unexpected ways) learning software makes me think that we are lurching ever closer to that reality.
Presently the machine is learning to build neural networks that optimise search results and targeted marketing across one relatively knowable, shared plane of existence, but should human programmers by side-lined into a sine cure, directorial role will greatly accelerate the pace of transformation—which with too much human intervention could really turn into an experience fraught with the tantalisingly tremolo-fulfilling and the unchallenging. What do you think? Not only will the way we interact online change in exponential ways, fully-automated and autonomous, self-generating learning software will also spread into the real world much faster and take helm not only in transit but also in legal, financial and health services and be accorded a role in civil and corporate governance, making it not only more difficult to justify wealth disparity but also calling into question our economic models and priorities to begin with.

hsinbyushin

Presenting a particularly woke feature for Public Domain Review, English professor Ross Bullen shows us how carnival barkers of the past too could conjure up a rather indirect but in no way allegorical nor subtle forum for airing racial tensions and expounding on ideas of white supremacy—pointedly in late nineteenth century America just two decades after its civil war.
Circus impresario PT Barnum’s latest acquisition was about to go on display and the public was abuzz with excitement, only that what was billed as a sacred white elephant (which Barnum’s agents had procured at a high price from the Burmese monarch and Barnum himself tried to curb the audience’s expectations) didn’t prove to be white enough with one critic even calling the creature more like a “mulatto.” A figurative meaning was already attached to owning a white elephant as both a blessing and a curse as the prestige of it was also burdensome and impractical but the stock usage of white elephant swaps, the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure or as a commentary on costly to maintain projects (but unable to dispense with) and under-utilised infrastructure really became cemented in common-parlance after this episode. Despite Barnum’s reputation as one to pass along hoaxes and the fraudulent as authentic, this genuine curiosity couldn’t keep his spectators enthralled and precipitated a broadening culture war with elephant bleaching and racist soap advertising campaigns, and those who did come to behold the sacred white elephant were met with the reflection of their perhaps unformulated, unarticulated ideas about identity and the other turned back on them.

igneous

As an update to a project first covered last summer, we learn that an international consortium of engineers and alchemists have brought the first negative-emissions power plant on-line in Iceland.
The scientists and their backers were understandably muted about their works and successes—hoping that industry would do a better job of policing itself and leave direct-air capture—having filters sequester atmospheric carbon-dioxide by transforming it into stone—as an absolute last-resort. Additionally, despite the fact that we’ve probably passed that pivot point and considering what’s at stake, the scientists were also not wanting to seem too pie-in-the-sky considering the prohibitively high costs associated with constructing the facilities—but desperate times call for a symmetrical response and right now with many places battered by climate-change driven natural disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, no price can be too dear. This first prototype plant paired with the geothermal generating station in Hellisheiði (to make it truly carbon-negative) is so far able to reabsorb the annual emissions of an average family home, but a May demonstration project in Geneva captured the equivalent of twenty households with costs coming down.