Sunday, June 13, 2021

Sunday Reading

Not Welcome At All? — Mark Buchanan in the Washington Post worries about contacting aliens.

In April 2020, the Defense Department released videos recorded by infrared cameras on U.S. Navy aircraft that documented the planes’ encounters with a variety of “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Pilots reported seeing objects flying across the sky at hypersonic speeds and changing direction almost instantaneously, capabilities far beyond that of any known aircraft.

What were the pilots seeing? Bizarre atmospheric phenomena? Alien spacecraft? Something else? Several branches of the government have been investigating the events, motivated in part by concern that adversaries such as Russia or China might have made some spectacular technological advance, and later this month, the government plans to publish a report revealing what they know. Reportedly, the government will say there’s no proof of extraterrestrial activity, but that the incidents remain unexplained.

Chances are, though, that we should all be grateful that we don’t yet have any evidence of contact with alien civilizations. Attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, if they do exist, could be extremely dangerous for us. We need to figure out whether it’s wise — or safe — and how to handle such attempts in an organized manner.

Some scientific circles have already been debating questions around whether to try to contact other civilizations. It’s a topic of profound importance for the entire planet. For 60 years, scientists have been searching with radio telescopes, listening in for possible signals coming from other civilizations on planets orbiting distant stars. These efforts have largely been organized by the SETI institute in California — the acronym stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — and so far, they’ve had no success. Getting impatient, some other scientists are now pushing for a more active program — METI, for Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — that wouldn’t just listen, but actually send out powerful messages toward other stars, seeking to make contact.

The search for aliens has reached a stage of technological sophistication and associated risk that it needs strict regulation at national and international levels. Without oversight, even one person — with access to powerful transmitting technology — could take actions affecting the future of the entire planet.

That’s because any aliens we ultimately encounter will likely be far more technologically advanced than we are, for a simple reason: Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own. Many of these would likely have taken significant steps to begin exploring and possibly colonizing the galaxy.

Hence, it’s a profound mystery — known as the Fermi Paradox, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi — why we haven’t yet seen any such aliens. Many resolutions of the paradox have been proposed, among them the suggestion that all civilizations, once reaching sufficient technological capacity, eventually destroy themselves. Or perhaps aliens are so alien and unlike humans that we simply cannot interact with them.

More alarming is the possibility that alien civilizations are remaining out of contact because they know something: that sending out signals is catastrophically risky. Our history on Earth has given us many examples of what can happen when civilizations with unequal technology meet — generally, the technologically more advanced has destroyed or enslaved the other. A cosmic version of this reality might have convinced many alien civilizations to remain silent. Exposing yourself is an invitation to be preyed upon and devoured.

I’ve written about METI in the past, suggesting such activity takes a huge risk for very little gain. But these concerns don’t convince supporters of trying it, who have some counterarguments. Douglas Vakoch of METI International argues that it’s unrealistic to worry about the danger of an alien invasion. We have, after all, been sending radio and television emissions into space for a century, and a civilization far more advanced than our own will probably have already detected these. If they wanted to invade, they already would have.

He also argues that, in assessing risks, it’s important not only to consider the risk coming from taking an action, but also from not taking that action. Our world faces a number of potentially existential threats, including global warming and destabilization of the environment, and it’s possible that far more advanced civilizations may have already faced these issues and found solutions. If we don’t send out signals, Vakosh writes, we risk “missing guidance that could enhance our own civilization’s sustainability.” It’s also conceivable, he suggests, that we’re making a spectacular misjudgment — and some super-advanced alien civilization may attack us precisely because we haven’t reached out.

For obvious reasons, much of the thinking about these issues has to be rather speculative. The best way forward, perhaps, is to broaden the discussion. If all of humanity is exposed to the possible consequences trying to contact alien civilizations, then more people should be involved in making decisions about what is wise and what isn’t. It shouldn’t be left to a handful of radio astronomers.

One vocal critic of the idea of reaching out to aliens proactively — astronomer John Gertz of SETI — has developed proposals to move toward more inclusive public consideration of these activities. What we need, he suggests, are laws and international treaties to govern more explicit contact attempts. Without prior broad agreement from some globally representative body, Gertz says, contacting extraterrestrials should be considered “as the reckless endangerment of all mankind, and be absolutely proscribed with criminal consequences, presumably as exercised at the national level, or administered through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.”

Currently, no such prohibitions exist. Some informal protocols for interacting with alien civilizations have been adopted by researchers involved in SETI, but these are far from legally binding governmental regulations. That’s mostly because, up to now, talking about meeting or contacting aliens has seemed widely speculative — if not a little deranged — despite the apparent scientific plausibility of such an event.

It’s not easy to weigh the pros and cons of activities around which so much remains unknown. We don’t know if there are any aliens. They might be friendly. They might not be. Given the potential risks involved with trying to make contact, perhaps it would be safer and wiser to just wait — we can always reach out later, and meanwhile, our abilities to do passive listening are rapidly growing more powerful.

In 2015, SETI launched a new 10-year program called Breakthrough Listen, funded by a $100 million donation from Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. As a result, SETI is now recording more signals than ever before, over a frequency range some tenfold larger, and bringing more computational power to bear on analyzing the recorded signals. It’s impossible to know how close or far from making a discovery we may be, but Gertz estimates that our chances are at least 100 times greater than they used to be.

The search is also benefiting from astronomers’ knowledge of exoplanets — planets in orbit around stars other than the sun. Since the first exoplanet was found in 1992, we’ve identified nearly 5,000 more, and the rate of discovery is accelerating. Each one give SETI researchers new promising targets to scrutinize.

Personally, all of this makes me dead-set against any experimentation with attempting to contact other civilizations. Why take cosmic risks when we may have a far safer pathway to discovering them, if they’re out there? Of course, even listening comes with some potentially fraught governance issues also: If and when someone really identifies an alien signal, we’ll need to decide if we should reply — and if so, how. Surely such an act — putting all of humanity at risk — ought to be the result of some collective decision. But there’s no mechanism to encourage that now. Any individual or nation could take the human response into their own hands.

Both paths — listening for aliens or trying to call them — have reached the stage where they require broader public discussion, with an eye to developing sensible regulation. That’s going to take the efforts of leaders from many nations, presumably coordinated through the United Nations or some similar international body. It should happen now. Or soon. Before it’s too late.

I’m fond of the theory that aliens have taken a look and decided we’re not worth contacting. They’re probably telling their friends that Earth is the trailer trash of the galaxy. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Doonesbury — Not getting through.

Monday, May 24, 2021

They’re Out There

From the Washington Post:

In 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid called his colleagues Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye to a specially secured room in the Capitol where highly classified information was discussed.

Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, controlled funding for supersecret Pentagon operations. Reid wanted to put an idea on their radar, one that needed to be kept hush-hush not just for national security but because it was, as Reid’s aides told him, kind of crazy.

He wanted the Pentagon to investigate UFOs.

“Everyone told me this would cause me nothing but trouble,” said Reid, a Democrat who represented Nevada, home of the military’s top-secret Area 51 test site, a central attraction of sorts for UFO hunters. “But I wasn’t afraid of it. And I guess time has proven me right.”

That’s because official Washington is swirling with chatter — among top senators, Pentagon insiders, and even former CIA directors — about UFOs. What was once a ticket to the political loony bin has leaped off Hollywood screens and out of science-fiction novels and into the national conversation. There are even new government acronyms.

For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’

“This used to be a career-ending kind of thing,” said John Podesta, who generally kept his interest in UFOs to himself when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “You didn’t want to get caught talking about it because you’d be accused of walking out of an ‘X-Files’ episode.”

But now there isn’t just talk.

Last summer, the Defense Department issued a news release with the following headline: “Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.” The mission of the UAPTF, an acronym mouthful, “is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” according to the Pentagon.

A few months later, as part of President Donald Trump’s spending and pandemic relief package, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), included a provision calling for the director of national intelligence to help produce an unclassified report on everything government agencies know about UFOs, including scores of unusual sightings reported by military pilots.

That report is due sometime next month.

I have no doubt that there are other forms of life out in the universe who have evolved to sentient beings in some form or another — perhaps humanoid, perhaps not — and that they have also evolved to the point of space travel. The odds are a trillion to one that we are not alone, based solely on the number of stars and galaxies in the universe and the fact that we’re already seeing planets orbiting nearby stars. What’s keeping them from actually contacting us in the manner depicted in science fiction may have to do with the distance — it’s a few light years to the nearest star — or that they have determined we’re not worthy of contacting. In the Star Trek universe, explorers on the Enterprise wouldn’t conduct first contact with a civilization until they had achieved faster-than-light space travel. We’re not there yet because of Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than light.

If somehow these emissaries have achieved faster-than-light capabilities and we are actually contacted by them, it would certainly change things. But if they’ve been listening in on our radio and television transmissions — the only signals we have generated that travel at the speed of light — I’m afraid we’d have a lot of explaining to do about the events of the last 100 years.

Maybe the best thing it could do is convince us to clean up and grow up so as not to appear to be so primitive and tacky to the people next door.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

First Flight

From the New York Times:

A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.

The achievement extends NASA’s long, exceptional record of firsts on Mars.

“We together flew at Mars,” MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said to her team during the celebration. “And we together now have this Wright brothers moment.”

Like the first flight of an airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903, the flight did not go far or last long, but it showed what could be done. Flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars was a particularly tricky technical endeavor, on the edge of impossible because there is almost no air to push against. NASA engineers employed ultralight materials, fast-spinning blades and high-powered computer processing to get Ingenuity off the ground and keep it from veering off and crashing.

Several headlines in the media proclaimed that Ingenuity was the first flight ever on another planet. They should have qualified that as the first known flight, since there are a lot of other planets in the universe and no one really knows who’s doing what somewhere else.

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Random Youtubery

Size matters.

Friday, February 19, 2021

Happy Friday

Best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery for the people of Texas who had to suffer through not only a severe cold snap and snow storm that curtailed power, froze the water pipes, and killed a number of people, but they also have to put up with the bullshit that their elected officials threw at them by blaming wind turbines (less than 7% of their power source) or just plain lit out for the beach at Cancun, only to be shamed into coming back home even though there’s not much a senator can do about it. It’s all in the appearances, and Ted Cruz is a Gorgon as far as that’s concerned.

It has given us a good reason to hope that at last we’re going to have Infrastructure Week.

Meanwhile, NASA is doing what NASA does best.

NASA rover Perseverance landed safely Thursday on Mars to begin an ambitious mission to search for signs of past Martian life and obtain samples of soil and rock that could someday be hauled back to Earth for study in laboratories.

“Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life,” announced Swati Mohan, the guidance and control operations lead for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Cheers, clapping and fist-pumps erupted in the control room, which was half-empty because of the coronavirus pandemic. Someone shouted: “TRN, TRN,” referring to the terrain relative navigation system that allowed Perseverance to land in a rugged area full of natural hazards.

Perseverance, the first multibillion-dollar NASA mission to Mars in nine years, quickly produced two low-resolution images of the landing site — a forlorn landscape pocked with small craters. Dust kicked up by the landing covered the glass shields on the cameras. The pair of photos showed the rover casting a shadow on the Martian landscape.

Charlie Pierce:

Throwing a dart 128 million miles and hitting the bullseye is really worth celebrating. The new Mars rover Perseverance did exactly what it was supposed to do. It landed, softly, in the Jezero Crater, which is probably an ancient river delta and now, for the next two years, it will look for fossilized pond scum, which would be the most important pond scum in the history of pond scum, which goes back to the beginning of time, both here and there.

[…]

It’s hard to explain to people too young to have lived through it what it was like when what was then called The Space Race was going on. It wasn’t just the astronauts, although they certainly commanded the stage. It was all the failed attempts to land anything on the moon, all those Pioneers and Lunas that failed to achieve Earth orbit or flamed out if they did. Finally, on September 12, 1959, the Russian Luna 2 hit the moon, which was all it was supposed to do. It took another five years for the U.S. to match that feat, when this country managed to hit the moon with Ranger 4. In 1966, Surveyor 1 landed and sent data back for two months before going dark.

And there were adventures elsewhere, too. Mariner 2 flew by Venus while, in 1970, the Russians landed a probe there. Mariner 4 flew by Mars and Mariner 10 flew by Mercury. By 1988, the USSR had collapsed, and the U.S. had the cosmos to itself. The Pioneers and Voyagers explored Jupiter and beyond. The machines always took the back seat to men, but the machines were our eyes in so many distant, wonderful places. We often need prompting to lift our eyes to the sky, but we almost never regret it when we do.

I remember when I was in grade school in the early 1960’s they would wheel in a TV on a cart to the gym so we could watch the grainy black-and-white pictures of the launch of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, when going to space was still the stuff of science fiction. We made it to the moon, and then turned our dreams of space travel over to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. But NASA and JPL and the proud nerds who devote their lives to searching for signs of ancient life in the dried-up ponds on our next-door neighbor are continuing the mission we as humans have always had: looking for life, and even if all we find is fossilized microbe poop, it’s evidence that that we’re not just a one-time knock-off; that we’re not alone, even if they can’t answer back.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Sunday Reading

A Lesson on Decency — David Remnick in The New Yorker.

One could be forgiven for thinking that rhetorical dynamism long ago vanished from the hallways and chambers of the United States Congress. It has been a hundred and sixty-four years, for example, since Charles Sumner, the anti-slavery Republican from Massachusetts, rose in the humid air of the Old Senate Chamber to unleash a five-hour, fully memorized onslaught against the idea of Kansas joining the Union as a slave state. Along the way, Sumner paused to lash two of his Senate colleagues, calling Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, a “noisome, squat, and nameless animal,” and accusing Andrew Butler, of South Carolina, of taking up with a “polluted” mistress—“I mean the harlot, Slavery.” You can still hear such acidic flourishes in other legislatures around the globe, but the language of the U.S. Congress is rarely so vivid. Generally, it is as flavorless as day-old gum.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first-term Democrat from New York, provided a rare exception Thursday as she stepped to the microphone in the House chamber to make a hash of Ted Yoho, a veterinarian, Tea Party member, and veteran Republican from Florida.

The story began earlier this week, when Yoho reportedly approached Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps to inform her that she was, among other things, “disgusting” and “out of your freaking mind.” His analysis was directed at her (hardly novel) public statements that poverty and unemployment are root causes of the recent spike in crime rates in New York. On matters of criminal-justice reform, Yoho is of a decidedly conservative bent. Not long ago, he voted against making lynching a federal hate crime, saying that such a law would be a regrettable instance of federal “overreach.”

According to a reporter for The Hill, Yoho did not cease in his expressive disdain for Ocasio-Cortez even as she walked away. Once he believed her to be out of hearing range, Yoho reportedly described his colleague as a “fucking bitch.”

On Wednesday, once the news of the encounter had circulated, Yoho delivered a statement that could best be described as the sort of non-apology apology that begins, “I am sorry if you understood me to be saying. . . .” Yoho began by explaining that he wanted “to apologize for the abrupt manner of the conversation I had with my colleague from New York.”

But his remorse was, at best, confined. “No one was accosted, bullied, or attacked,” he went on. “This was a brief policy discussion, plain and simple, and we have our differences. . . . The fact still remains, I am not going to apologize for something I didn’t say.” With confused logic, Yoho invoked his wife and daughters and said that he objected to Ocasio-Cortez’s views because he had experienced poverty when he was young. “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family, and my country,” he said. It was unclear who had asked him to apologize for his religious faith, his patriotism, or his love of family, but he was ardent all the same.

In all, Yoho’s was at best a deflective, jittery performance that was in no wise enhanced by his spokesman, Brian Kaveney, who e-mailed the Washington Post to say that Yoho “did not call Rep. Ocasio-Cortez what has been reported in the Hill or any name for that matter. . . . Instead, he made a brief comment to himself as he walked away summarizing what he believes her policies to be: bulls—.”

As a first-termer, Ocasio-Cortez has been a star, even if she has had her stumbles, including an initially troubled relationship with the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Ocasio-Cortez has been at the forefront of major issues, including climate change, immigration, campaign-finance reform, and income inequality. Her ability to skewer a balky witness in committee hearings has proved as uncanny as it is entertaining. She came to the House floor Thursday to rebut Yoho, insisting that, after delivering a short retort via Twitter, she might have kept her counsel had he not delivered such a lame non-apology. Her speech, which was then echoed by other colleagues from the Democratic caucus, was not in the Charles Sumner category in either length or style—she favored righteous sincerity where Sumner employed florid invective—but the devastation was of a similar scale. The sporting equivalent might be Billie Jean King’s measured yet unmistakable destruction of Bobby Riggs. The video of Ocasio-Cortez’s speech is available online, of course; it should be studied for its measured cadence, its artful construction, and its refusal of ugliness.

She began with narrative, setting the scene: “I was minding my own business, walking up the steps, and Representative Yoho put his finger in my face. He called me ‘disgusting.’ He called me ‘crazy.’ He called me ‘out of my mind.’ And he called me ‘dangerous.’ ” Then she broadened her scope: “This issue is not about one incident. It is cultural. It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting violence and violent language against women and an entire structure of power that supports that.” Ocasio-Cortez made it clear that she was not going to fall down and faint. She had heard it all before, on the subway and as a bartender. But she wasn’t going to let this pass, not from a fellow-member of Congress: “I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse, and worse, to see that. To see that excuse, and see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of acceptance. I could not allow that to stand.” What’s more, she was not going to allow Yoho, in his clumsy way, to use his family as a “shield” for his barrage.

“Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize,” she said. “I am someone’s daughter, too.”

The politics of our moment are dominated by a bully of miserable character, a President who has failed to contain a pandemic through sheer indifference, who has fabricated a reëlection campaign based on bigotry and the deliberate inflammation of division. His language is abusive, his attitude toward women disdainful. Trump is all about himself: his needs, his ego, his self-preservation. Along the way he has created a Republican Party in his own image. Imitators like Ted Yoho slavishly follow his lead. On the House floor Thursday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exemplified a different sort of character. She defended not only herself; she defended principle and countless women. And all in just a few short minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives.

As Good A Time As Any — Charles P. Pierce on the possibility that we’ve been visited from afar.

OK, 2020, why the hell not?

Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months…Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.” The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence. Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Excuse me?

Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts. “After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Mr. Reid said in an interview.

We are overdue in this weird, disastrous year for some unalloyed Good Weirdness. Let it all out. If there ever was a time in history to learn we’re not alone, this is it.

Doonesbury — Nice work if you can get it.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Random Youtubery

Yeah, but try explaining it to a chicken.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Sunday Reading

John Cassidy in The New Yorker argues that the indictment of Julian Assange is a threat to journalism.

Imagine that, in the summer of 2014, the Justice Department had indicted Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, charging that, in 2010, he engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to “facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defense of the United States so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website.”

How do you think the editorial page of the New York Times would have reacted? (In July, 2010, the Times joined with the Guardian and Der Spiegel to publish tens of thousands of the documents that Manning provided to WikiLeaks.) What about the editorial page of the Washington Post, which published extensive stories about the leaked material? This material included video footage from 2007 of a U.S. Army Apache gunship carrying out an attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqi civilians who were working for Reuters.

We can’t know for sure, but it seems unlikely that the Times would have published an editorial that said, “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.” It also seems unlikely that the Post would have published an editorial that said, “Mr. Assange’s case could conclude as a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.” Both of these statements were contained in editorials that the Times and the Post, respectively, published on Thursday, after Assange was arrested, in London, and Donald Trump’s Justice Department unsealed a federal indictment that federal prosecutors filed in Northern Virginia, last year.

Of course, a great deal has happened since 2014, much of it awful. During the 2016 Presidential election, Assange and WikiLeaks repeatedly published information that was damaging to the Democratic Party and to Hillary Clinton, timing the releases for maximum political damage. Assange denied that the Russian government was the source of this information, but, last summer, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, charged twelve Russian intelligence operatives with hacking D.N.C. servers and the e-mail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager. Mueller’s indictment said that the Russian spies “used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen documents through a website maintained by an organization (‘Organization 1’),” which was WikiLeaks.

Whether he knew it or not, Assange was a key participant in an outrageous Russian effort to sow division inside this country and help Donald Trump. It is understandable that the events of 2016 have heavily colored perceptions of Assange’s arrest and possible extradition to the United States. (“Once in the United States, moreover, he could become a useful source on how Russia orchestrated its attacks on the Clinton campaign,” the Times editorial noted.) But it is important to recognize that the legal charges against him have nothing to do with Russia or the 2016 election. They relate exclusively to his dealings with Manning, in 2010. As numerous media watchdogs and civil-rights groups have already pointed out, they amount to a dangerous attack on the freedom of the press and on efforts by whistle-blowers to alert the public of the actions of powerful institutions, including the U.S. government.

In explaining the charges against Assange, the indictment’s “manners and means of the conspiracy” section describes many actions that are clearly legitimate journalistic practices, such as using encrypted messages, cultivating sources, and encouraging those sources to provide more information. It cites a text exchange in which Manning told Assange, “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left,” and Assange replied, “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” If that’s part of a crime, the authorities might have to start building more jails to hold reporters.

The indictment, and some of the commentary it engendered, also makes much of the fact that Assange offered to try to crack a computer password for Manning. The Department of Justice claims that this action amounted to Assange engaging in a “hacking” conspiracy. Even some independent commentators have suggested that it went beyond the bounds of legitimate journalism—and the protections of the First Amendment.

But did it? On Thursday, my colleague Raffi Khatchadourian, who has written extensively about Assange, pointed out that, as of now, it looks like Assange didn’t do much, if anything, to crack the password once Manning sent the encrypted version. Khatchadourian also pointed out that federal prosecutors have known about this text exchange for many years, and yet the Obama Administration didn’t bring any charges. “As evidence of a conspiracy,” Khatchadourian writes, “the exchange is thin gruel.”

Even if Assange had succeeded in decoding the encryption, it wouldn’t have given Manning access to any classified information she couldn’t have accessed through her own account. “Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers using a username that did not belong to her,” the indictment says. “Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.” So the goal was to protect Manning’s identity, and Assange offered to assist. But who could argue that trying to help a source conceal his or her identity isn’t something investigative journalists do on a routine basis?

Robert Mahoney, the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the indictment as “deeply troubling” because of the precedent it sets. “With this prosecution of Julian Assange, the U.S. government could set out broad legal arguments about journalists soliciting information or interacting with sources that could have chilling consequences for investigative reporting and the publication of information of public interest,” Mahoney warned.

The editorial in the Times did ultimately acknowledge “that the prosecution of Mr. Assange could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistle-blowers.” The Post’s editorial didn’t even go that far. Instead, it ended by saying Assange “is long overdue for personal accountability.” Many people would agree with that statement. But it is important not to view absolutely everything through the prism of 2016.

Putting The Picture Together — Marina Koren in The Atlantic on how the pieces came together to get the picture of the black hole.

The picture of a black hole, captured for the first time, shows a ring as radiant as gold against the darkness of space. At its center, the charcoal shadow of a void so powerful, nothing can escape its pull.

The dreamy photograph represents a tremendous technological achievement, assembled using eight radio telescopes in four continents—two each in Hawaii and Chile, and one each in Arizona, Mexico, Spain, and Antarctica—all synced together to scan the skies for several days in a row.

But the picture would not exist without technology much less sophisticated: computer disk drives.

The telescopes’ data had to go to two astronomy institutions to be processed, MIT’s Haystack Observatory in the United States and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. An email attachment wasn’t going to work. The observatories had collected five petabytes of data. The average iPhone has 64 gigabytes of data storage. One million gigabytes are in one petabyte. It would have taken years for the data to cross the internet.

And so the data were carried on hundreds of hard disk drives, shipped to and from the observatories through plain old FedEx. Which is kind of marvelous, when you think about it. In a world where transferring information from one end of the world to another takes only a click, some things still have to be done the old-fashioned way. Humanity owes its first glimpse of one of the most mysterious objects in the universe not to something flashy and high tech, but a technology that has been around since the late 1950s, and transportation methods far older.

And to find out how it’s done, you have to talk with Don Sousa.

Sousa is a computer-support specialist at the Haystack Observatory. He’s also the shipping guy. He handled virtually every shipment for the Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to photograph a black hole.

Sousa grew up a few towns over from Haystack and has the trademark Boston-area accent to prove it. Over decades at the observatory, he has packaged equipment, put in orders, wrangled foreign customs regulations, and filled out reams of paperwork so that all kinds of hardware, from atomic clocks to disk drives, gets where it is needed. Before disk drives became widely available, he shipped reels of magnetic tape. “It’s amazing the differences from the mid-eighties, when I started, to what we do now,” Sousa says.

For the Event Horizon Telescope, Sousa packaged the disk drives in groups of eight. (“These are off-the-shelf hard drives,” he says. “You could buy them for your own personal computer if you wanted.”) The stacks were placed inside custom cases that allowed data to be recorded on all eight drives at once. Each module—eight disks, plus their custom coating—weighed about 23 pounds. Sousa shipped them in boxes labeled fragile and lined with a two-inch layer of foam, with cutouts in the middle to snuggle the modules, like precious jewelry in an antique box.

Sousa says he uses mostly FedEx and UPS. Some routes were trickier than others. Chile and Mexico had stricter rules about what could cross their borders. Sousa had to obtain a special license from the U.S. Department of Commerce to ship a particular piece of equipment to Mexico.

The toughest destination was the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica. Without a nation to decide customs law, the continent relies on shipping agencies in Christchurch, New Zealand, which dispatch cargo ships and planes to the ice. Sousa had to coordinate with the National Science Foundation, which operates the research station where the telescope is based. Shipments had to meet very detailed specifications; Haystack had to build a wooden crate to carry the modules, because plastic containers weren’t allowed. “If it gets to Christchurch and something’s wrong, your equipment just sits there,” Sousa says.

The journey to the eight observatories was fine. It was the return trip that was worrisome. There were too much data to go through the burden of making extra copies; the disks that flew out of the stations were the only ones they had. “Going out there, they’re just blank,” says Mike Titus, the researcher who operated the supercomputer that helped synthesize all the data into a single, composite image. “Coming back, they’re precious commodities.”

I asked Titus whether the team considered asking a file-sharing service like Dropbox to build them something capable of transferring all those petabytes. “Don’t tell me that Amazon Cloud and Google Cloud, they wouldn’t love to have our data and store it for us,” Titus said, laughing. But even groundbreaking scientific teams don’t have that kind of budget. “Too much data and too much money—that’s why we don’t do it that way. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a 747 filled with hard disks.”

The return of the disks from the South Pole was particularly welcome. The shipment arrived months after all the rest thanks to the Antarctic winter, which had prevented anyone from flying in. The staff at Haystack was jubilant when FedEx arrived with a truck full of cosmic goodies from the bottom of the Earth. “It’s like they thought we were expecting penguins to jump out of the box or something,” says Nancy Wolfe Kotary, the communications officer at Haystack.

Sousa understood the concern, but he wasn’t too worried himself. “I’ve shipped to every continent,” he says, and in his 32 years on the job, he hasn’t lost one package.

Well, there was one, but it wasn’t his fault, or even the fault of any shipping company. The equipment, bound for a new research station in South Africa, cleared customs in Johannesburg and was loaded onto a truck. On the road, the truck was hijacked, and its contents stolen. “To this day, we figure it’s sitting somewhere on a coffee table as a conversation piece,” Sousa says.

Sousa plans to retire in three years and enter a new phase of his life that doesn’t require checking tracking alerts every day. He doesn’t have a background in science; before joining Haystack, he worked as a police officer for the state of Massachusetts. For him, the photo is the culmination of years’ worth of effort by astronomers and shipping experts alike. But the actual shot, he says, is pretty impressive, too.

Doonesbury — That’s Headley.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

That’s Hot

As we’re taught in elementary school science class, when it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s summer in the Southern. So while we’re going through extreme cold in the Midwest, they’re getting extreme heat in Australia.

As a polar vortex hits the U.S. Midwest, the extreme opposite is happening in Australia. The heat wave has parched landscapes, triggered damaging wildfires, pushed demand on the power grid to the brink and toppled significant records, Capital Weather Gang’s Angela Fritz wrote last week.

Temperatures soared to 116 degrees on Thursday in Adelaide, South Australia. That’s the highest temperature for any capital in Australia, according to Fritz. In the southeastern corner of the country, overnight temperatures were as high as 96 degrees — the warmest overnight lows for January anywhere in the world.

[The multiweek heat wave in Australia is blasting through records and threatening wildlife]

Australia’s climate has warmed by about 2 degrees since 1910, leading to more frequent heat waves and severe drought conditions, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Eight of Australia’s top-10 warmest years on record have happened in the past 13 years.

So if the climate-change deniers are having wondering where the global warming is, they need to be aware that yes, indeed, the world is round and that there’s more to the climate than what’s happening in their own home town.

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Sunday Reading

The Best Path — Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker on the way forward for Democrats.

One of the worst side effects of Trumpism is the way that it drives its opponents into reactive mode, amid an atmosphere of cooked-up chaos. Donald Trump wants to build a “great, great wall,” and last week he considered declaring a national emergency to do it, despite the fact that illegal border crossings have drastically decreased since 2000, and that many of those trying to cross these days are women and children who are not evading border guards but seeking them out, to ask for asylum. At the outset of 2019, we’re in the second week of a partial government shutdown—which Trump said could last for months or years—because congressional Democrats have had to take his fixation seriously and insist that they won’t allocate the five billion dollars that he wants for the wall. (The actual costs of a concrete barrier could climb as high as forty billion dollars, according to an analysis in M.I.T. Technology Review, and a report from the Government Accountability Office warns that the wall could “cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”)

Democrats are offering two compromises that would reopen government agencies and give the Department of Homeland Security $1.3 billion to improve border-security technology and other measures, including fortified fencing. Meanwhile, some sense of the psychological vagaries that Democrats have to contend with can be derived from the increasingly peculiar way that Trump talks about the wall, as though it were not a policy but a totem—for the protection of his own ego, perhaps. “The wheel, the wall, some things never get old,” he said last week, at a rambling Cabinet meeting.

Still, whatever compromise is eventually reached to reopen the government, the best path forward for the Democrats as they take over the House of Representatives—the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder.

Such proposals are backed by the Party’s fired-up progressives, but not all Democrats in the House support them, and they are highly unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, let alone be signed into law by Trump. Yet they strike many people as fair and humane, if politically complicated. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, seventy per cent of respondents were in favor of Medicare for All. Support has also grown among doctors, who were once vocal critics of any single-payer system. It’s true that support tends to drop when pollsters tell people that they may have to pay more taxes, or that the government may exert “too much control.” But opponents can also be swayed when told that the plan would reduce the role of private insurers, or guarantee “that all Americans have health insurance as a basic right.”

Even if such proposals can’t make it out of Congress this term, they can help form a blueprint for a future in which the Democrats control the White House or the Senate. And, by bringing them up now, Democrats create the occasion to hammer out what a Green New Deal might actually look like, or how a national minimum wage might affect the working poor, while forcing Republicans to explain why they reject these approaches. Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana—and a potential Presidential candidate—told the Times that it was important for Democrats to air big ideas, such as “whether guaranteed income is now right,” in part because only sweeping proposals to improve people’s lives can compete with the starkness and the simplicity of walls and bans and MAGA. In a sign that the Democratic leadership is listening, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, announced last week that she would support holding hearings on Medicare for All.

The 116th Congress is unusual in many ways. It has the largest freshman class in fifty years, the most women ever (a hundred and twenty-seven), the first Muslim and Native American women, and the first Latinas elected from Texas. It skews younger (eleven freshmen are under the age of thirty-five, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at twenty-nine, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress) and more progressive (the Congressional Progressive Caucus has grown from seventy-eight members to ninety-six). Its brightest lights are more likely to break protocol—by joining a sit-in at Pelosi’s office, or by dishing about the arcane workings of the Capitol on Instagram—than their predecessors were. The freshman class is hipper, over all, and more unpredictable. It’s one of the most highly educated groups of incoming House members in modern history, according to the Brookings Institution, and also the least politically experienced: only forty-one per cent have held prior office. This may mean that they will be refreshingly unwilling to get hung up on precedent, but it could also make them a fractious bunch.

There are already tensions: between the progressives with activist backgrounds and the moderates who painstakingly peeled away districts that went for Trump in 2016; between senior members who want the newbies to wait their turn and the newbies who aren’t looking for their permission. The Los Angeles Times reported that “several freshmen have asked for—some have demanded—prime slots on powerful legislative committees.” Representative Jackie Speier said of her new colleagues, “They’re going to shake this place up, and that’s kind of a good thing.” Some mutual befuddlement will be unavoidable. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, shortly after being sworn in, told a group of activists, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker,” Pelosi allowed that, “generationally, that would not be the language I would use.”

If all this sounds daunting, here’s a hopeful point to keep in mind about that record number of women, a hundred and six of whom are Democrats: research shows that women in Congress are more effective than their male counterparts at securing spending for their districts, which perhaps bodes well for the bipartisan project of infrastructure investment. They also sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation.

Inevitably, the House Democrats will be preoccupied with investigating Trump and with the traps that he keeps setting for them. Their challenge will be to work with the Senate to pass what positive legislation they can—while reminding Americans of how much more might be accomplished once the Trump era is over.

Brace For Impact — Marina Koren in The Atlantic on the impending collision of galaxies. No, really.

Ah, the Milky Way, our glittering home in the cosmos. Seen in an unencumbered night sky, far from the glare of city lights, it seems magnificent and eternal in its enormity. Nothing could shift this ancient web of stars, nothing could disturb its transcendent stoicism.

Except, that is, another galaxy. Galaxies orbit millions of light-years apart, but gravity, the immutable magnet of the cosmos, can pull them together, producing spectacular collisions that reshuffle stars millions of years. According to the leading theory, the Milky Way will collide with one of its closest neighbors, Andromeda, sometime between 6 billion and 8 billion years from now.

But the Milky Way may face another galactic threat before that, from a different neighbor. A new study predicts our galaxy will collide with a galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud between 1 billion and 4 billion years from now.

This is a rather surprising change in schedule, considering that the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is close enough to be seen with the naked eye, is currently moving away from the Milky Way. What gives?

Marius Cautun, an astrophysicist at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, says that recent observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud have revealed that the galaxy has more mass than previously thought. Cautun and his fellow researchers decided to run computer simulations that took this new factor into account and fast-forwarded the conditions of our cosmic neighborhood. They tested multiple scenarios, making adjustments in mass, velocity, and other measures. In the end, the simulations predicted that in several hundred million years, the Large Magellanic Cloud will turn around and head straight for the center of the Milky Way.

“The collision between our galaxy and the [Large Magellanic Cloud] takes place in the majority of cases—over 93 percent,” Cautun says.The collision would be a slow showdown, unfolding over the course of billions of years. Stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud would ricochet like pinballs, dislodging some of the Milky Way’s stars from their orbits. Our galaxy as a whole would survive, but some stars may be flung right out of the Milky Way, Cautun says.Meanwhile, the sleeping, supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way would wake up. Like volcanoes, black holes alternate between peaceful dormancy and ferocious activity, depending on the surrounding conditions. Ours is in a quiet period. But the chaos of the merger would send cosmic gas swirling toward it, and cosmic gas is dinner to black holes. The resulting feast is a spectacular show. A disk of luminous, hot cosmic material swirls around the black hole at great speed, and bursts of high-energy radiation erupt from its center. Cautun says one serving of a Large Magellanic Cloud could lead our black hole to gobble up enough material to grow 10 times its current size.And what would happen to us, if there is any kind of “us”—life in some form—on Earth when this all goes down?It is possible that our sun could be among the small fraction of stars that gets lobbed from the galaxy. The jostling would disturb the orbits of our solar system’s planets, which could be perilous for any inhabitants. Even a small change in the relationship between the sun and the Earth could knock it out of the region where liquid water (and, therefore, life) can exist.If life on Earth survived, though, it would take ages for anyone to realize the planet’s position in the cosmos has shifted. Like the merger, the solar system’s ejection would occur over such a large timescale that it’d be almost meaningless to humans. “Only at the end of the collision could our descendants tell if we have been kicked out of our galaxy,” Cautun says.

The change in scenery would be remarkable. In this scenario, “our descendants will see a very different night sky, much darker than currently, with only a modest bright patch that will correspond to the Milky Way galaxy,” Cautun says. “It will be tremendously more difficult for our descendants to travel to other stars—if they haven’t yet done so by that time.”

If this imagined future scares you, consider that a collision with Andromeda would be much worse. The Milky Way would easily devour the smaller Large Magellanic Cloud and maintain its signature spiral shape, even if its insides will be all jumbled. Andromeda, on the other hand, is about the same size as the Milky Way. Astronomers expect that mashup to be destructive, and the Milky Way as we know it—the neat, shimmering band of stars—is unlikely to survive.

Cautun says that a collision between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud would shift our galaxy’s position in space. Even still, Andromeda will still come for it, however many billions of years later.

“Ultimately, there is no escape,” he says.

[Photo: ESO/S. Brunier]

Doonesbury — Correcting the record.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Random Youtubery

What lies beyond.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Sunday Reading

First Contact — Charles Q. Choi in the Washington Post looks at the possibility that there were other civilizations here on Earth long before we came along.

Reptilian menaces called Silurians evolved on Earth before humankind — at least in the “Doctor Who” rendition of the universe. But, science fiction aside, how would we know if some advanced civilization existed on our home planet millions of years before brainy humans showed up?

This is a serious question, and serious scientists are speculating about what traces these potential predecessors might have left behind. And they’re calling this possibility the Silurian hypothesis.

When it comes to the hunt for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that might exist across the cosmos, one must reckon with the knowledge that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. In contrast, complex life has existed on Earth’s surface for only about 400 million years, and humans have developed industrial civilizations in only the past 300 years. This raises the possibility that industrial civilizations might have been around long before human ones ever existed — not just around other stars, but even on Earth itself.

“Now, I don’t believe an industrial civilization existed on Earth before our own — I don’t think there was a dinosaur civilization or a giant tree sloth civilization,” said Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and a co-author of a new study on the topic. “But the question of what one would look like if it did [exist] is important. How do you know there hasn’t been one? The whole point of science is to ask a question and see where it leads. That’s the essence of what makes science so exciting.”

Artifacts of human or other industrial civilizations are unlikely to be found on a planet’s surface after about 4 million years, wrote Frank and study co-author Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For instance, they noted that urban areas currently take up less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface and that complex items, even from early human technology, are very rarely found. A machine as complex as the Antikythera mechanism — used by the ancient Greeks, it is considered the world’s first computer — remained unknown when elaborate clocks were being developed in Renaissance Europe.

One may also find it difficult to unearth fossils of any beings who might have lived in industrial civilizations, the scientists added. The fraction of life that gets fossilized is always extremely small: Of all the many dinosaurs that ever lived, for example, only a few thousand nearly complete fossil specimens have been discovered. Given that the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens are only about 300,000 years old, there is no certainty that our species might even appear in the fossil record in the long run, they added.

Instead, the researchers suggested looking for more-subtle evidence of industrial civilizations in the geological records of Earth or other planets. The scientists focused on looking at the signs of civilization that humans might create during the Anthropocene, the geological age of today, characterized by humans’ influence on the planet.

“After a few million years, any physical reminder of your civilization may be gone, so you have to look for sedimentary anomalies, things like different chemical balances that just look wacky,” Frank said.

One sign of industrial civilization may have to do with isotopes of elements such as carbon.

For instance, humans living in industrial civilizations have burned an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels, releasing more than 500 billion tons of carbon from coal, oil and natural gas into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels ultimately derive from plant life, which preferentially absorb more of the lighter isotope carbon-12 than the heavier isotope carbon-13. When fossil fuels get burned, they alter the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 normally found in the atmosphere, ocean and soils — an effect that could later be detected in sediments as hints of an industrial civilization.

In addition, industrial civilizations have discovered ways to artificially “fix” nitrogen — that is, to break the powerful chemical bonds that hold nitrogen atoms together in pairs in the atmosphere, using the resulting single nitrogen atoms to create biologically useful molecules. The large-scale application of nitrogenous fertilizers generated via nitrogen fixing is already detectable in sediments remote from civilization, the scientists noted.

The Anthropocene is also triggering a mass extinction of a wide variety of species that is probably visible in the fossil record. Human industrial activity may also prove to be visible in the geological record in the form of long-lived synthetic molecules from plastics and other products, or radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.

One wild idea the Silurian hypothesis raises is that the end of one civilization could sow the seeds for another. Industrial civilizations may trigger dead zones in oceans, causing the burial of organic material (from the corpses of organisms in the zones) that could, down the line, become fossil fuels that could support a new industrial civilization. “You could end up seeing these cycles in the geological record,” Frank said.

All in all, thinking about the impact that a previous civilization has on Earth “could help us think about what effects one might see on other planets, or about what is happening now on Earth,” Frank said.

Doonesbury — Forgive me, Father…

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Short Takes

87 million: That’s the number of Facebook users who got swept by Cambridge Analytics.

Trump backs off immediate Syrian withdrawal.

National Guard at the border will not touch immigrants.

No kidding: Rubio says federal funds needed to help the Keys recover from hurricane damage.

There are dozens of black holes at the center of the Milky Way.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Short Takes

Trump says he will speak with Mueller under oath.

Toys R Us will close 180 stores.

Cecile Richards to step down from Planned Parenthood.

Gay couple sues after son denied U.S. citizenship.

First monkey clones created in a lab.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Sunday Reading

Cognitive Decline — Charles P. Pierce.

On Thursday, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago sat down with Michael Schmidt of The New York Times for what apparently was an open-ended, one-on-one interview. Since then, the electric Twitter machine–and most of the rest of the Intertoobz–has been alive with criticism of Schmidt for having not pushed back sufficiently against some of the more obvious barefaced non-facts presented by the president* in their chat. Some critics have been unkind enough to point out that Schmidt was the conveyor belt for some of the worst attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton emanating from both the New York FBI office and the various congressional committees staffed by people in kangaroo suits. For example, Schmidt’s name was on a shabby story the Times ran on July 23, 2015 in which it was alleged that a criminal investigation into HRC’s famous use of a private email server was being discussed within the Department of Justice. It wasn’t, and the Times’ public editor at the time, the great Margaret Sullivan, later torched the story in a brutal column.

Other people were unkind enough to point out that the interview was brokered by one Christopher Ruddy, a Trump intimate and the CEO of NewsMax, and that Ruddy made his bones as a political “journalist” by peddling the fiction that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered, one of the more distasteful slanders that got a shameful public airing during the Clinton frenzy of the 1990s. Neither of those will concern us here. What Schmidt actually got out of this interview is a far more serious problem for the country. In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (The president*’s father developed Alzheimer’s in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (If someone on the panel had asked him, he’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.” In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? That’s part of the reason why it’s always “the failing New York Times,” and his 2016 opponent is “Crooked Hillary.”

In addition, the president* exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys—or, as one social worker in rural North Carolina told me, their shotguns. For example, a discussion on healthcare goes completely off the rails when the president* suddenly recalls that there is a widely held opinion that he knows very little about the issues confronting the nation. So we get this.

But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.

This is more than simple grandiosity. This is someone fighting something happening to him that he is losing the capacity to understand. So is this.

We’re going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and we’re being respected again. But another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, “Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.” O.K.

In Ronald Reagan’s second term, we ducked a bullet. I’ve always suspected he was propped up by a lot of people who a) didn’t trust vice-president George H.W. Bush, b) found it convenient to have a forgetful president when the subpoenas began to fly, and c) found it helpful to have a “detached” president when they started running their own agendas—like, say, selling missiles to mullahs. You’re seeing much the same thing with the congressional Republicans. They’re operating an ongoing smash-and-grab on all the policy wishes they’ve fondly cultivated since 1981. Having a president* who may not be all there and, as such, is susceptible to flattery because it reassures him that he actually is makes the heist that much easier.

So, no, I don’t particularly care whether Michael Schmidt was tough enough, or asked enough follow-up questions. I care about this.

I’m always moving. I’m moving in both directions. We have to get rid of chainlike immigration, we have to get rid of the chain. The chain is the last guy that killed. … [Talking with guests.] … The last guy that killed the eight people. … [Inaudible.] … So badly wounded people. … Twenty-two people came in through chain migration. Chain migration and the lottery system. They have a lottery in these countries. They take the worst people in the country, they put ‘em into the lottery, then they have a handful of bad, worse ones, and they put them out. ‘Oh, these are the people the United States. …” … We’re gonna get rid of the lottery, and by the way, the Democrats agree with me on that. On chain migration, they pretty much agree with me.

We’ve got bigger problems.

He Believed — Dan Barry in The New York Times on his father’s belief in UFO’s.

The year now ending has been so laden with tumultuous news that one astounding report in the exhausted final days of 2017 seemed almost routine: that for years, an intelligence official burrowed within the Pentagon warren was running a secret program to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects.

Beg your pardon?

That scoop, by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean for The New York Times, was underscored by a companion article that detailed how in 2004 an oval object played a game of aeronautic hide-and-seek off Southern California with two Navy fighter jets assigned to the aircraft carrier Nimitz. The object then zipped away at a speed so otherworldly that it left one of the Navy pilots later saying he felt “pretty weirded out” — as you might if you watch the video of the encounter that the Department of Defense has made public.

In considering these reports, my mind turned to all those reasonable people who were dismissed and ridiculed over the years because they believed that something was out there. I thought in particular of believers who had died without savoring these official revelations.

Believers like my late father.

I can hear what he would have said, there at the veterans’ home, his broken vessel of a body in a wheelchair but his mind as quick and bright as a shooting star. “I’ve been saying it for years,” he’d assert, followed by a choice epithet he reserved for government officials, followed by, “I knew it.”

Then, a satisfying drag on a cigarette.

My father, Gene, finished high school at night and served three years in the Army; he did not attend college. But he had a fearsome intellect, read voraciously and developed a command of such subjects as American history, numismatics — and U.F.O. investigations. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he joined many others in monitoring reports of aerial anomalies, tracking down reams of redacted official reports and swapping theories about credible sightings and government cover-ups.

They bandied about the names of well-known U.F.O. researchers — J. Allen Hynek, Donald Keyhoe, Stanton Friedman — and read the latest newsletters from an organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or Nicap. They remained resolute, even when many others gave up the cause after an Air Force-funded report in 1969 concluded that further study of U.F.O.s was unlikely to be of much scientific value, leading to the termination of the official Air Force program investigating the subject.

To the likes of Gene Barry, the report was merely part of the cover-up.

He was no astronomer or physicist. Just a working stiff who endured the anonymous drudgery of a daily commute but then, at night, often felt connected to something larger than himself, larger than all of us. While his neighbors focused on the fortunes of the New York Jets, he was contemplating whether the “wheel in the middle of a wheel” mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel referred to a flying object of some kind. If so, just consider the implications!

In our family, the horizontal line separating earth and sky often blurred. My father’s supernaturally patient wife and four impressionable children carried small blue membership cards for a research and investigative organization called the Mutual U.F.O. Network, or Mufon. We applauded my father when he spoke at a U.F.O. symposium at a local university. At his behest, my sister Brenda even brought a blueprint for a spacecraft that he had received in the mail — mysterious packages often arrived in the mail — to Sts. Cyril and Methodius parochial school to ask her science teacher what he made of it.

The teacher handed it back without a word.

In other households of the 1960s, Barney and Betty referred only to the Rubbles of Bedrock, loyal neighbors of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. But in our home, those names might also refer to Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple who claimed to have been abducted and examined by aliens in 1961.

Then there were the family outings. Every so often our parents would pack us into the Chevy station wagon for a nighttime drive to that rare Long Island hill with an unimpeded view of the sky, or to Wanaque, N.J., 70 miles away, where strange lights were said to have been hovering over a local reservoir.

Gradually, we children would doze off, our necks stiff from craning. My mother, the tolerant sidekick and chauffeur, would light another cigarette, while my father continued to train his cheap binoculars on the celestial infinity, confident in the certainty of the still uncertain.

Over the years, life on terra firma intruded. Career setbacks, sickness, that daily anonymous grind. My father’s unofficial cell of believers quietly disbanded — exhausted, perhaps, by government silence and the false reports caused by weather balloons, satellites and people just seeing things. Then, when my mother died in 1999, he lost the person who grounded him, the Betty to his Barney.

He died in 2008, still believing without having seen, still questioning the government, still marveling at the arrogance of those who insisted we were the only intelligent life in the universe.

A decade passed, and then came this month’s report of a secret Pentagon program with the delightful name of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Funded by the government between 2007 and 2012, the program investigated aerial threats that included “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or U.A.P.s — which is just a less-polarizing way of saying U.F.O.s.

To hardened veterans of the U.F.O. wars, the news of the government program was less surprising than it was validating. And the video of the encounter between Navy fighter jets and an unidentified object moving at extraordinary velocity provided a helpful visual to the cause of those U.F.O. groups with long acronyms.

“Very interesting, very interesting,” said Fran Ridge, the archivist of the research accumulated by Nicap, now defunct. “But the very first thing that entered my mind was — why now? Is this a distraction? Is this something to get the people’s attention off politics?”

Mr. Ridge’s skeptical words reminded me of my father, who half-joked that he believed in a conspiracy — about everything.

“Finally, the kimono is being opened a little,” said Jan Harden, the director of Mufon. “Personally, I don’t need verification from the government. But for the mass public, it’s important to know that there is advanced technology in our skies.”

The news of the Pentagon’s program received a stunning amount of attention that included the usual dismissive commentary.

“Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien,” the celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said on CNN, a comment that would have driven my father to distraction. Classic redirection, he would have railed, the tip of his cigarette reddening with rage.

But my father would also have nodded in agreement to what the good astrophysicist had to say about that almost playful aerial anomaly captured on government video. “It’s a flying object and we don’t know what it is,” Dr. Tyson said. “I would hope somebody’s checking it out.”

Exactly, the old man would have grunted. Been saying it for years.

74 Things — The Atlantic’s science, technology, and health reporters on amazing things we learned this year.

This past year, reporters on The Atlantic’s science, technology, and health desks worked tirelessly, writing hundreds of stories. Each of those stories is packed with facts that surprised us, delighted us, and in some cases, unsettled us. Instead of picking our favorite stories, we decided to round up a small selection of the most astonishing things we learned in 2017. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and we hope you’ll be back for more in 2018:

The record for the longest top spin is over 51 minutes. Your fidget spinner probably won’t make it past 60 seconds.

Flamingos have self-locking legs, which makes them more stable on one leg than on two.

If your home furnace emits some methane pollution on the last day of 2017, it’ll almost certainly leave the atmosphere by 2030—but it could still be raising global sea levels in 2817.

By analyzing enough Facebook likes, an algorithm can predict someone’s personality better than their friends and family can.

There are cliff-hanging nests in northern Greenland that have been used continuously for 2,500 years by families of the largest falcons in the world. Researchers read the layers of bird poop in the nests like tree rings.

Hippos can’t swim.

Six-month-old babies can understand basic words like mouth and nose. They even know that concepts like mouth and nose are more related than nose and bottle.

Most common eastern North American tree species have been mysteriously shifting west since 1980.

In 2016, Waymo’s virtual cars logged 2.5 billion miles in simulated versions of California, Texas, and Arizona.

America’s emergency 9-1-1 calling infrastructure is so old that there are some parts you can’t even replace anymore when they break.

The transmitters on the Voyager spacecraft have as much power as refrigerator light bulbs, but they still ping Earth every day from billions of miles away.

By one estimate, one-third of Americans currently in their early 20s will never get married.

Donald Trump has a long and gif-heavy presence on the early web.

Somewhere around 10,000 U.S. companies—including the majority of the Fortune 500—still assess employees based on the Myers-Briggs test.

Humans have inadvertently created an artificial bubble around Earth, formed when radio communications from the ground interact with high-energy particles in space. This bubble is capable of shielding the planet from potentially dangerous space weather like solar flares.

Climate-change-linked heat waves are already making tens of thousands of Americans sleep worse.

China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.

A lay minister and math Ph.D. was the best checkers player in the world for 40 years, spawning a computer scientist’s obsessive quest to solve the entire game to prove the man could be beaten.

There is a huge waterfall in Antarctica, where the Nansen Ice Shelf meets the sea.

On Facebook, Russian trolls created and promoted dual events on May 21, 2016, bringing Muslim and anti-Muslim Americans into real-world conflict at an Islamic center in Houston.

Boxer crabs wield sea anemones like boxing gloves, and if they lose one of these allies, they can make another by ripping the remaining one in half and cloning it.

Cocktail napkins on airplanes may be essentially useless to travelers, but to airlines they are valuable space for advertising.

Scientists can figure out the storm tracks of 250-year-old winter squalls by reading a map hidden in tree rings across the Pacific Northwest.

On islands, deer are occasionally spotted licking small animals, like cats and foxes—possibly because the ocean breeze makes everything salty.

People complained of an “epidemic of fake news” in 1896.

Languages worldwide have more words for describing warm colors than cool colors.

Turkeys are twice as big as they were in 1960, and most of that change is genetic.

Two Chinese organizations control over half of the global Bitcoin-mining operations—and by now, they might control more. If they collaborate (or collude), the blockchain technology that supposedly secures Bitcoin could be compromised.

U.S. physicians prescribe 3,150 percent of the necessary amount of opioids.

Physicists discovered a new “void” in the Great Pyramid of Giza using cosmic rays.

Daily and seasonal temperature variations can trigger rockfalls, even if the temperature is always above freezing, by expanding and contracting rocks until they crack.

The eight counties with the largest declines in life expectancy since 1980 are all in the state of Kentucky.

The decline of sales in luxury timepieces has less to do with the rise of smartwatches and more to do with the rising cost of gold, the decline of the British pound, and a crackdown on Chinese corruption.

Spider silk is self-strengthening; it can suck up chemicals from the insects it touches to make itself stronger.

Intelligence doesn’t make someone more likely to change their mind. People with higher IQs are better at crafting arguments to support a position—but only if they already agree with it.

Among the strangest and yet least-questioned design choices of internet services is that every service must be a global service.

Steven Gundry, one of the main doctors who has contributed to Goop, believes Mercola.com, a prominent anti-vaccine site, is a site that gives “very useful health advice.”

At many pumpkin- and squash-growing competitions, entries are categorized by color: Any specimen that’s at least 80 percent orange is a pumpkin, and everything else is a squash.

Only 2 percent of all U.S. Google employees are black, and only 4 percent are Hispanic. In tech-oriented positions, the numbers fall to 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

The weight of the huge amount of water Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas pushed the earth’s crust down 2 centimeters.

Russian scientists plan to re-wild the Arctic with bioengineered woolly mammoths.

The NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter can never take the same picture of the gas planet because the clouds of its atmosphere are always moving, swirling into new shapes and patterns.

During sex, male cabbage white butterflies inject females with packets of nutrients. The females chew their way into these with a literal vagina dentata, and genitals that double as a souped-up stomach.

If all people want from apps is to see new stuff scroll onto the screen, it might not matter if that content is real or fake.

Cardiac stents are extremely expensive and popular, and yet they don’t appear to have any definite benefits outside of acute heart attacks.

Animal-tracking technology is just showing off at this point: Researchers can glue tiny barcodes to the backs of carpenter ants in a lab and scan them repeatedly to study the insects’ movements.

One recommendation from a happiness expert is to build a “pride shrine,” which is a place in your house that you pass a lot where you put pictures that trigger pleasant memories, or diplomas or awards that remind you of accomplishments.

Some ancient rulers, including Alexander the Great, executed a substitute king after an eclipse, as a kind of sacrificial hedge.

A colon-cancer gene found in Utah can be traced back to a single Mormon pioneer couple from the 1840s.

In November and December 2016, 92,635 people called the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line to ask for turkey-cooking advice. That’s an average of over 1,500 calls per day.

In the United States as a whole, less than 1 percent of the land is hardscape. In cities, up to 40 percent is impervious.

Half of murdered women are killed by their romantic partners.

Among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, storytelling is valued more than hunting, fishing, or basically any other skill.

The familiar metal tokens in the board game Monopoly didn’t originally come with the game, to save costs. Popular bracelet charms of the Great Depression were only added to the box later.

Thanks to the internet, American parents are seeking out more unique names for their children, trying to keep them from fading into the noise of Google. The median boy’s name in 2015 (Luca) was given to one out of every 782 babies, whereas the median boy’s name in 1955 (Edward) was given to one out of every 100 babies.

America’s five most valuable companies are all located on the Pacific Coast between Northern California and Seattle.

President Kennedy secretly had Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder, which he treated with injections of amphetamines and steroids from Max Jacobson, a doctor whose nickname was “Dr. Feelgood.”

Some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way were actually “stolen” from a nearby galaxy as the two passed near each other.

Hummingbirds drink in an unexpected way: Their tongues bloom open like a flower when they hit nectar, and close on the way out to grab some of the sweet liquid.

New York City has genetically distinct uptown and downtown rats.

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 created one of the most detailed maps of the deep ocean ever.

People who can’t find opioids are taking an over-the-counter diarrhea drug. Some are consuming as many as 400 to 500 pills a day.

It used to take 10,000 pounds of pork pancreas to make one pound of insulin. (Insulin is now made by genetically engineered microbes.)

Astronauts on the International Space Station can’t enjoy the yummy aromas of hot meals like we can on Earth because heat dissipates in all different directions in microgravity.

“Sex addiction” isn’t recognized by the psychiatric community in any official capacity, and it’s actually a deeply problematic concept that risks absolving men of agency in sexual violence.

The peculiar (and previously unidentified) laughter that was recorded for the Golden Record was—well, we won’t spoil it for you until you read the story.

The oldest rocks on Earth, which are 4 billion years old, have signs of life in them, which suggests that the planet was biological from its very infancy.

Fire ants form giant floating rafts during floods. But you can break up the rafts with dish soap.

Until this year, no one knew about a whole elaborate system of lymphatic vessels in our brains.

People are worse storytellers when their listeners don’t vocally indicate they’re paying attention by saying things like “uh-huh” and “mm-hmm.”

China’s new radio telescope is large enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet.

Scientists calculated that if everyone in the United States switched from eating beef to eating beans, we could still get around halfway to President Obama’s 2020 climate goals.

The reason that dentistry is a separate discipline from medicine can be traced back to an event in 1840 known as the “historic rebuff”—when two self-trained dentists asked the University of Maryland at Baltimore if they could add dental training to the curriculum at the college of medicine. The physicians said no.

Naked mole rats can survive for 18 minutes without any oxygen at all.

Doonesbury –Quitting time.

Friday, November 3, 2017

Short Takes

GOP tax plan is out.

Trump nominates Jerome Powell to be Fed chair.

Sam Clovis withdraws from consideration for Dept of Ag job.

Manafort and Gates monitored as flight risks.

Big empty in Great Pyramid.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Short Takes

Trump looking into drug czar appointment after “60 Minutes” report.

Iraqi forces seize Kirkuk.

Wildfires kill 30 in Portugal and northern Spain.

Security flaw puts every WiFi connection at risk.

Scientists catch neutron star collision… 132 million years ago.

Fun fact: This is the 2,900th edition of Short Takes.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Short Takes

Three American soldiers killed in ambush in Niger.

Gunman’s girlfriend unaware of his plans.

Infighting in the West Wing.

Nobel for chemistry went to cool imaging technique.

5 former presidents to headline hurricane benefit concert.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Short Takes

Catalonia independence declaration could happen “in a matter of days.”

Trump compares Hurricane Maria deaths to Katrina.

U.S. expels 15 Cuban diplomats.

House passes GOP late-term abortion ban.

Gravitational wave work wins Nobel for physics.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Sunblock

Here’s what we saw of the eclipse from the roof of the parking garage of my office in downtown Miami.

Picture by my co-worker Jeff.

We got about 78% of the sun blocked out at our latitude. The light got a little dimmer, like the first hint of approaching evening, and we had clouds passing over at times. While others went with the glasses and the cereal boxes for viewing, I reverted to the ancient method (learned during the eclipse of July 20, 1963) of the camera obscura: a pinhole projected on a flat surface using two (CF-free) Styrofoam plates from the cafeteria salad bar.

Picture by my co-worker Carmen.

We got to maximum obscurity at 2:58 p.m. and then went back to work. And in true Miami form, it rained heavily an hour later.