AI in command

When I first heard about the story of PocketOS having its production database and backups deleted by an Anthropic AI I thought back to the Anthropic dispute with the Department of War claiming the DoW was using its products for military purposes. They thought that unsafe, and probably had other objections too. It would seem a 'shoot yourself in the foot' kind of demonstration, but human dumbness is pretty extensive.

It looks like somebody at PocketOS needs to be booted far. Their architecture was weird: the backups were on the same volume as the production database (????), everything was on the cloud with no local copy, the designer gave unfiltered control to the AI agent -- lots of dumbness. But the AI's "confession" seemed really weird. If the agent had rules, how did it ignore them? There's something odd here.

FWIW, we had databases too, some more mission critical than others. Depending on the "brand" of database (mysql/mariadb or postgres or mongodb or sqlite) we had different backup approaches, but the copy was always done by entirely different agents, and copies kept in different servers in different buildings. I can't think of a way anything but deliberate admin action on different machines that could damage both. The whole point of backup is to keep the data somewhere safely distant from problems on the original host. Ideally you'd like a copy that only a different admin can delete, just in case somebody goes postal.

It turns out the cloud provider here was able to provide a way to access the data after all, but that's not usually the case.

UPDATE: Not reading the documentation compounded with sloppy security compounded with trusting the AI

Connections

Some mathematician with a sense of humor decided to borrow a bit from the study of graphs to illustrate how significant Erdos has been in modern math. You are "connected" to Erdos if you have co-authored a paper with him, or with someone who has co-authored, or with … and so on. Erdos himself has number 0, someone who wrote a paper with him has number 1, someone who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him has 2, and so on. I have Erdos number 4 – not because I'm a good mathematician (far from it) but because I was part of a physics experiment in which some theorists (who I actually never met) had co-authored a paper with some mathematicians who had number 2. The connection between me and Erdos is tenuous enough to make the matter completely silly.

It's the "6 degrees of separation" thing, just applied to a particular man.

Just for fun, can we extend this to Epstein? He's number 0, and just for fun assign 0 to Maxwell too.

But what do we mean by connection? Having spent time with him or in his parties, or having had professional dealings with him? Maybe both? His guards or his chef would have "Null" for social connections and "1" for professional. Trump and Clinton have a "1" for social connections; dunno about professional ones. In fact, never mind the professional connections, it's boring.

Do I need to say that I'm not going to be in the lists? I don't run in "connected" circles. But pretty much everybody in the House and Senate is either a 1 or 2: knew him or knew someone who did. The people who know/work with them in turn are 2's or 3's in social connections. The next ring out will be the state legislators and such.

So if you know a state legislator (a former one was in a Bible class with me), you might have an Epstein number of 5 or so. Of course that's attenuated enough to be pretty meaningless too.

Me? Well, theorists like Hawking (a "1"; Epstein seems to have liked to hang out with scientists) tended to hang out with theorists, but the top guys do meet sometimes, so I'm probably at least a 5, maybe a 4. I don't feel particularly tainted by such a distant association.

Pick a figure or two you don't like. How connected are you to them?

It seems trivial to say that the "well-connected" will be have more connections to each other than to the rest of us, but the rest of us group into clusters too. I had one set of connections at the university, and a different set at church. At separations of less than about 3, there was pretty much no overlap.

Some of those clusters map onto tribes, and some of the tribes are hostile, but even so there are still connections. If your church is helping some of the poor, members will be establishing relationships with them (I hope), and have less separation from the underclasses than, say, members of the math department will have with them.

Connections can be curious. How is O'Hare airport connected to Al Capone? If you don't know…

UPDATE: Closer than I thought! Lisa Randall spent some time in the CDF control room. IIRC the accelerator was down and so we talked a bit about what I was reading to pass the time: Augustine's Confessions. This was before 2008, so I doubt that there would have been any.

Sports events

If I'm playing in the game,(*) I'm excited about it. If a family member or friend is playing, I'll watch and stay interested. If I don't know a soul, I have trouble caring.

I'm just not part of our harmless ritual of belonging: fans rooting for their team.

I've been like that all my life. It's probably a deficit of character somehow. It's not at though I spend the time with more productive pursuits -- I manage to waste time other, generally less social, ways.

It certainly cuts down on the small-talk possibilities.

(*) My knees say playing baseball is much less likely than it used to be, and once I was out of school and away from PE, it was improbable even then.

UPDATE: For anyone looking back on this years from now, wondering what brought the subject up, the Super Bowl was a few days ago and the Winter Olympics is still on.

Synthetics

I remember reading about krokodil some years ago--the writers were very worried about this synthetic morphine. It was a problem in Russia, but krokodil abuse in the US: urban legend or not? California poison control seems to take it seriously but says reports tapered off a decade ago. The first link cites cheap heroin (and presumably fentanyl) and difficulty getting codeine (to synthesize it) in the US as militating against its adaption here.

I don't hear much about bath salts (synthetic cathinones=khat), but I gather they're still a problem.

And for those watching West Africa, there's kush--a combination of synthetic opioid and synthetic cannabinoid (a combination which, despite media hype last year, doesn't have to use human bones in its synthesis). It's claimed to be particularly addictive, but I haven't found anything remotely like solid numbers on how many guys use it or what the mean expected lifetime is.

Fentanyl's a problem here, and a friend of a friend lost a kid to heroin. I wonder how elastic the demand is for euphoria. If we successfully suppress the current opioids significantly, will some of these others fill in?

There's more than one kind of slavery.

UPDATE: Wrt kush in Liberia: this story claims 100,000 addicts, which sounds like a nice round number from the air, and a UNFPA 2023 report estimating 1 in 5 use narcotics. Careless reporting is common; that may mean narcotics specifically or all drugs generically. Someone counted 866 "drug dens" in Monrovia, which is by far the largest city. If each serviced 20-50 addicts, the 100,000 doesn't sound too far out of line. If 32% of the 5.7 million are youth, that's about 1.8 million, and if UNFPA is right that's about 350,000 drug users.

Manipulating bird song

We've probably all heard the novelty Christmas songs with dogs barking or cats meowing the notes; and if we're old enough probably remember Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphone.

A bark can approximate a note in the scale, and if it isn't quite there you can tune it to fit, and with enough samples you could program your synthesizer to bark out whatever tune you cared to. All you need to worry about is the note, duration, and volume, and a good synthesizer will know how to deal with key velocity. You have an alphabet; you can plug in whatever sounds you want.

But what about birdsong? What would you need to take into account if you wanted to compose music using recorded bird chirps, cheeps, chips, warbles, etc?

Bird chirps run faster than human-sung notes. In the time it takes me to sing "la" the bird runs through a trill and a chirp to top it off, even shifting back and forth between notes. Maybe it crescendos, rises and falls. The warbling won't be the same frequency from one species to another.

Matching one "note" to the next isn't like picking letters from an alphabet, but matching textures, speeds, even which sets of notes were used in what isn't a chord. It's more like picking characters from a Chinese typewriter.

You could get around that by slowing the bird calls way down, trimming out a clean part, and "autotuning." It would probably sound interesting, and maybe even good, but I doubt it would sound much like the birdsong it came from.

Maybe the Chinese typewriter is the way to go. To get started, suppose we limit ourselves to 2 octaves of the primary note: 24 primary notes. No warble or warble at a set frequency (we can fiddle with the sound to fit one of our set values): say 8. The secondary note: probably a choice of 8, but some will sound nice together with different ones. Rise and fall shape: 5. Hmm. So far that's 7680 different sounds in the sound bank, with 4 descriptors. I hate to think how many calls you'd have to listen through to settle on that number.

Of course you can take different parts of a single call to represent different ... I can't call it a note, because it's more than just the note ... complexes. Still, even without more descriptors, that's a lot of time somebody (you) has to invest to sort out the complexes, before you start playing.

OK, start simple. Sort out a single type of sound you want to work with (warble type, flat "rise and fall", secondary note difference from the primary). That'll be maybe several weeks of work to get 24 notes (getting a feel for the territory takes a while), and then you program your synthesizer and try it out.

I'd bet that it wouldn't sound quite clean right out of the gate--that attack will be hard to make smooth; and probably some things I didn't think of will jump out at the musician who tries to play it for the first time.

Maybe start even simpler: take some bird chirps, split them into sections, and find the primary frequency for each--if there is one. If there isn't, trying to shoehorn them into notes may not be the way to go. You might have fun trying to assemble your own bird calls, though.

Would it be good enough to be an instrument in its own right, or merely a novelty?

No clue.

UPDATE: birdsong can include ultrasonic notes

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke. AVI recommended Piranesi. It sounded interesting, and our library system, with about 40 copies, had 51 holds. I got a call from the library about 3 days later -- the book must circulate quickly.

Long ago I read a short story about an infinite library full of books of random letters--probably Borges', but I don't recall the name, just the myth. The protagonist, called Piranesi (he's sure it isn't his name), lives in a statue-bedecked infinite house, with room after room, the bottom of the three stories washed by the sea.

Fortunately for the reader there's some meaning and discovery in the story, and struggles with memory and against madness.

As AVI notes, there are plenty of references to other writers, most of which I probably missed. I had to look up who Piranesi was, for exaample, and I didn't recognize most of the sculptures.

If you've a taste for mythic writing (like the infinite library story), or the patience for it while the mystery is solved, read it.

I'll probably never re-read it.

UPDATE: I probably should have waited a few hours before reviewing a work aimed at myth. There are a couple of other things: Although it was only touched on at the end, the other world seems to be a world of archetypes, but we only live as instances of ourselves; what happens if we try to live among the archetypes? (The Place of the Lion?) And of course, how much of us is our memory?

Fire in Liberia

"fire engulfed the Capitol Building, the seat of Liberia’s Legislature." Also: "The Liberia National Fire Service and the Liberia National Police responded promptly to the emergency, but their efforts were hampered by limited and outdated firefighting equipment."

Second fire in about a week--first was attributed to an electrical fault, with no major damage. I'm not expert enough to know if a smolder can last a week and flare up again. If you don't have equipment to look for hot spots...

There's blame. Two factions in the House of Representatives claim to be in charge--one group removed Speaker Koffa from his position. Rep Foko is being arrested for questioning, accused of making "incendiary remarks" ("If they want us to burn the session, we will burn it.") Protestors had been out in front the day before, and were dispersed aggressively. You may believe Johnson or not as you please: ""rights as enshrined in our constitution can’t be trampled upon by neither Mr. Boakai, nor his irresponsible homophile police Director Gregory Coleman. The firing of live bullets at unarmed citizens speaks to the undemocratic and tyrannical nature of the Unity Party government and this reminds us of the numerous bloodshed orchestrated and executed by Unity Party over the years,” he said. "

I don't think I'd care to pay them a visit until the dust settles a bit.

UPDATE: 8-Jan-2025

Investigators say that a) the fire started in multiple places and b) they found a container with an accelerant. They have invited some people to appear to explain themselves.

Interesting. There's a chance for me to visit, but we wonders, aye we wonders.

Drone defense

Some of the video from Ukraine suggests that drones are getting to be quite effective weapons. If they were quieter, I suspect the criminal cartels would be using them for assassinations already--loiter and attack the witness/judge/competitor.

Some of the videos show them capable of entering shelters through windows or passages. And, of course, they're good at watching for things, whether they have offensive capacity or not.

OK, how do you stop them? You're with your buddies in a truck and hear/spot something headed your way. Shooting won't do much unless you're super-super-accurate. Net guns... they look nice, but I wonder how practical those are in the field. Hide behind trees...

Pros and amateurs try their hands at downing drones in this video (which has a very annoying long commercial in the middle). Some of the methods are more amusing than useful.

One of the methods tried is the vortex ring cannon, which can pack more of a punch than you might expect. For sufficiently large vortex cannons, of course. Of course, you could also try using guns adapted (with blanks) for the purpose. The article cited talks about "knock-down effect" on humans (mediocre), but it might be suitable for trying to knock down lighter flying objects.

Copter-type drones are somewhat at risk for vortex ring state, where instead of pushing the air down the propellers push air down and around and up and back through the blades again, in a "circle" that doesn't provide lift. The article explains how designers have been mitigating this. However, if a strong vortex ring hits a quadcopter, it should provide some impact, some twisting, and maybe cause one or more of the propellers to get into VortexRingState.

If the equipment is just an adapter on the end of your rifle (and maybe blank rounds, maybe not), it might be easy to carry, cheap(*), and relatively quick to field. The vortex ring is a lot bigger than a rifle bullet, so your chances of hitting are better.

There are obvious possible issues--would it destabilize the drone enough with an average hit? would the ring move fast enough to reliably hit a moving target (80 m/sec??? with my sloppy estimates for vorticity)? and can soldiers/civilians aim well enough, especially at night? Oh, and is the effective range good enough?

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(*) "Cheap" would probably be the kiss of death, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I found an Army report. The Wikipedia image of the vortex ring was out of a 40mm barrel, and they developed 100kpsi in their chamber, using a "rupture disk" to get the cleanest possible flow. They did not design the test system for rapid fire. So this probably wouldn't be a snap-on, but a separate (hopefully light) blunderbuss. They found that C4 wasn't great--the ring momentum was low--so they converged on "exotic" explosives like Red Dot and Bulls Eye (up to 30g). They were getting about 160'/sec.

Their aim, so to speak, was attacking humans, who are typically less fragile than drones in flight. The idea might work. I assume that with lower pressures the final velocity would be proportionately lower, but fluid dynamics is messy.

Assassination try

I was afraid this would happen. (and glad Trump wasn't killed!) The relentless demonization of Trump, and other politicians as well, logically leads to this kind of action. You don't negotiate with demons.

I was expecting a leftist loon of the usual stripe, the kind nobody wants to be around, stimulated to save the world by killing the demon. I wasn't expecting one of the brownshirts to be the attempted assassin. I expect to hear of very careful failure to analyze the funding for Antifa.

UPDATE: To be clear: I suspect he acted alone without his colleagues knowing, but logically you should investigate his associates as well, and I think that investigation would reveal that prominent figures are associated with the organization--and that therefore an investigation of Antifa will not be thorough.

UPDATE: The initial ID seems to have been wrong, and loon is probably the correct category. Fortunately.

Making progress?

I spent very little of the day out of bed. When you can't sleep for coughing, and you can't concentrate enough to read, and you haven't the strength to do any of the growing list of chores, what do you do?

I finally managed enough energy to finish watching a youtube series I've been watching(*): unfortunately he's only about 3/5 done with it.

I think it was Erma Bombeck who wrote that being pregnant was like taking a cruise in at least one respect: you might just be sitting in a chair watching the ocean, but you're making progress.

As long as I sleep a little longer, and cough a little less, I suppose I am.

UPDATE: My teaching daughter said 2/3 of 3'rd grade was out sick yesterday.

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(*) Including "the square root of a vector". The series is much more accessible than the titles suggest, though you do need to have a little matrix theory under your belt. He repeats everything, and uses simple examples. It's nice to see an explanation of Clifford algebras, and how spinors can be represented in them, but it isn't transparent what gain we then have in comprehensiveness, new physics, or simplicity.

Unexpected harvest

For the curious: the giant puffball is edible when its flesh is white, before it reaches the gills and spores and fun stage. We were given a 15" wide one the other day. They do not keep long, so you have to deal with them quickly.

Basting a slab with olive oil and garlic and a few other seasonings and grilling it like a steak works ok, though the result is much like eating tofu. I would think sauteeing thin slabs in butter will be good, but it's a bit late to try since we dehydrated the rest already, resulting in several quarts of mushroom powder. I'm told the powder works very well as an ingredient for stock.

Our neighbor's parent's farm produced a lot of them this year.

UPDATE: A word to the wise: my daughter put the dehydrator in their garage for this exercise, since the mushroom aroma was intense.

Were those really part of the shipment?

The Customs Department of the Liberia Revenue Authority has seized and transferred three boxes of confiscated narcotics drugs and 13 pieces of guns to the appropriate government entities.

Those look like home-made shotgun-shell-shooting pistols. The contents of the plastic bags in the right side of the picture seem fibrous--marijuana or khat? But those pistols: it looks likes there's a cottage industry churning them out. I wonder what the trigger mechanism looks like. I also wonder if those are the pistols that LRA found in the shipment, or something LRA already had on hand. If I had the money to smuggle lots of drugs, I'd smuggle some better weapons along with them.

UPDATE: not-homemade, Grim identified them. Still, they look like substitutes.

WW-2 drones and a rabbit hole

We all know about the V1's. Youtube's algorithm threw a peice about WW-2 pilotless planes at me: mostly the TDR-1. It was slow and guided by a "mother ship" flying out of sight behind it. The mother plane monitored where the drone went using a TV camera in the drone's nose.

It wasn't on anybody's short list--cranking out lots of ordinary planes came first, and when we had enough spare capacity it wasn't so vital anymore. And the things were pretty slow and vulnerable to flak. But in their final mission, 31 of 50 drones hit their targets--often by being crashed into them.

The rest of the air force wasn't that accurate, was it? 60% is pretty good! UPDATEOr 46 and 21=45%?

The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys say no, they weren't that good.

Conventionally the air forces designated as "the target area" a circle having a radius of 1000 feet around the aiming point of attack . While accuracy improved during the war, Survey studies show that, in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area. A peak accuracy of 70% was reached for the month of February 1945.

That's hitting within 1000 feet. I don't know if the "hit their targets" metric for the drones was that loose, but the video suggests it was at least sometimes much better

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I should not indulge this sort of research when I have to get up early. A few quotes from the report:

Germany was scoured for its war records, which were found sometimes, but rarely, in places where they ought to have been ; sometimes in safe-deposit vaults, often in private houses, in barns, in caves ; on one occasion, in a hen house and, on two occasions, in coffins.

and a note about industrial capacity

Because the German economy through most of the war was substantially undermobilized, it was resilient under air attack.

wrt steel: Germany didn't have to build up as much as fast as the US did, so steel shouldn't have been a bottleneck, but

Although steel was considered a bottleneck by the Germans, a detailed examination of the control machinery together with interrogation of officials in the Speer ministry and its predecessor organizations, reveals that the trouble was partly an inefficient allocation system and partly, in the early years of the war especially, an unwillingness to cut out nonessential construction and civilian consumption . German industrialists were also found to have had a marked propensity to hoard steel.

and

German steel producers were required by the government to keep records of production losses and their causes. These records show that air raid alerts in 1943 were a more serious cause of the lost production than the actual damage from the raids.

Another oddity: Japan lost 50,000 planes, 60% of them to "training, ferrying, and other noncombat losses". The USA lost 27,000, of which we lost 70% to non-combat losses.

Kamikaze missions had an 18.6% hit rate--we got better at stopping them. Probably the Japanese would have gotten better at stopping drones too.

10.1 millon tons of Japanese shipping was reduced by 8.9 million tons by our actions; about 55% due to subs, 30% to planes, 9% to mines and less than 1% to surface gunfire--the rest to accidents.

And I had not heard before that thanks to disruption of the nitrogen fixing plants, Germany was so low on explosives that they were adding rock salt to shells.

Dumbo

I saw the movie in elementary school in LA during a heat wave. The auditorium was the only air-conditioned space, so they stuffed us all in there and played a movie. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Dumbo; I don’t remember much about it. I didn’t think the weather was all that hot, but I was just a kid. I didn’t mind not being in class: a boy’s natural habitat is “anywhere but class.”

Somehow or other, around that time, I acquired the conviction that Disney animations were kid-stuff, childish and beneath me. No, I don’t know why–maybe it was being crowded in with all those really little kids, or maybe I picked up on some older kids’ blase attitudes. Just guessing, since I remember neither.

It didn’t matter much, because shortly the scene changes to Africa. At that time the theaters were about an hour’s drive away, and we didn’t see a lot of movies anyway. When we did, it was generally something my parents thought they might want to see and didn’t suspect would be inappropriate for us. (The trailers were not matched to the current movie ratings, and I suspect they regretted some of the trailers.)

With very few movies and not much TV as alternatives, I read a lot. We had a set of the Book of Knowledge, which at that time mixed art, poetry, story summaries and science and history and all, all together in each book. You had to use the index to find a topic you wanted, but at the end of an article you probably found something else completely different but interesting. Kind of like the internet...

We also had the Britannica. One of the volumes had a special illustration page–it must have been a serious extra cost to produce–that showed how animators created an image based on layers. Transparent layers lifted off to show the various cells that made up the final image.

It was fascinating. I’d take it out, lift off the layers, and let them fall one by one to make the picture. I went to it dozens of times.

The image was Dumbo.

I was fascinated, but I didn’t want anyone to see me looking at a kid’s cartoon. When once or twice someone did, I acted like I’d been caught looking at porn. (Which I wasn’t familiar with–my mother’s medical books were decidedly not erotic, though many parts were interesting, even bizarre.) It wasn’t that it was wrong, just unworthy.

I suppose the same sort of thing happens now, if I follow a link to a link to a reference to a reference and wind up looking at something that isn’t really part of my interests–and someone looks over my shoulder.

Curiosity is too strong a word for how I got to where I was, and it’s embarrassing to realize how far drifting will go. No, I’m not really interested in horse breeds, or obsolete Japanese calibers, and the steps for how I got from Haydn to here is one of shameful unthinking “a-musing”.

UPDATE: On the other hand “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ― C.S. Lewis Still, drifting is not a noble use of the mind.

Long yams

Dr. Boli mentioned that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was making some of its coffee-table books freely available. In the book on art of Oceania, page 65, it says: "The Abelam recognize and cultivate two distinct categories of yams, a small variety used as ordinary food and long yams--massive tubers that commonly attain lengths of six to nine feet and, in exceptional cases, can be up to twelve feet long. An Abelam man's social standing is determined not only by his abilities as an orator and, formerly, a warrior; it is also, quite literally, measured by his success in growing long yams."

UPDATE: For more details there's an Abelam culture web site.

Census starts

Press Release: "the International Community wishes to encourage all not to politicize or disrupt the ongoing 2022 National Population and Housing Census. We have observed with dismay calls by some elements within the country to boycott the Census."

But who would boycott the census? unpaid census workers.

They planned big: biometric tools and on-the-spot ID card printing. It turns out the firm couldn't provide that, and all I've seen about that since is handwaving. I suspect they agreed to ignore the requirements. And they bumbled the training (more likely someone ate the money), and the census started two days ago (several years late) and is supposed to end next Tuesday. I wonder how long it will really take, and how many of the numbers will just be made up. The bigger the rush, the more imagination...

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UPDATE: President Weah just fired a couple of administrators of LISGIS "based on administrative reasons". I wonder if he's a fall guy or got caught.

They declared a National Census Day but didn't quite get the word out.

nordstream video and guessing

My first naive thought was outside explosion, but I gather that internal issues can cause RUD too. Unfortunately the first publicly released video is short and doesn't show much. The top of the pipe shown is dented down, but that's not proof of an outside explosion. If you've broken a pipe you'll have seen that the last bit to fail is at the top, and the twisting around that last bit is apt to push the last contact point down into the pipe. My intuition could be wrong applied to such large pipes embedded in a trench, but it looks sort of like what's left after the previous chunk of pipe was wrenched up and away.

50 meters seems like a lot of pipe to rip away. There was a lot of gas pressure inside that thing, of course, and the sections looked about 12 meters long in the construction video (and in an estimate from the length and numbers, assuming by line they mean one of the pair). I'd guess that the pressure would blow a damaged section out of the way. One from each end, and one or more destroyed by the explosion, and we could account for the absent span.

So what would we expect to find? The continual blowing would have stirred up no end of mud (probably why we haven't seen images before now(*)), and rolled away some of the smaller debris. Unless you can find and sort-of reconstruct the pipe fragments from the point of the explosion it'd be hard to tell if it blew from the outside or the inside. They should be nearby somewhere.

The surrounding area might be partly protected from the blowing by the pipe being in a trench, which would help deflect force upward. If the water flow is largely upward, that might pull mud and debris in towards the pipe.

Let's see how well my intuition works. If the explosion were a high speed slug of hydrite ice bursting from the inside of the pipe, I'd expect the bulk of the pipe fragments to be distributed in a "cone" along the pipeline in the direction of the slug's motion, with some chunks ripped out by the initial pressure near each of the open pipe ends. Near the open pipe ends there shouldn't be much mud. (Video suggests there isn't a huge amount, but it's hard to see.) As some pointed out, there might be a secondary explosion as the hydrites evaporated on impact, which would make the debris field a little more symmetric.

If it were an external explosion (or some kind of weld failure), you'd still get chunks ripped out near each of the open pipe ends, but the main explosion point's debris would be more symmetrical, with more chunks still at the explosion site.

I wonder what they'll find.

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(*) I'd be astonished if there weren't submarines from several different navies on the spots within hours of the explosions, but whatever they were able to see is probably classified. The blowing would have stirred up too much mud for video, but I assume there are other ways to inspect, but how and with what kind of resolution would be secret. Sonar might pick out the big chunks, but the noise from the pipes would be a huge background. I'm sure private exploration was deprecated until the gas dispersed.

UPDATE: Swedes say sabotage--they detected explosive residues. So everybody's first thought was right. I really really really hope it wasn't our official doing. If it is, the disconnect between the actors and what the country as a whole wants and would benefit from is so huge that I'd worry about our stability. Best case is that it was a private party, and everybody starts looking to harden their infrastructure, and nobody starts a war.

Nord Streams

You know about the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines: we can safely conclude they were sabotaged. Commander Salamander discusses it, and in the comments one finds that many people blame the US--not surprisingly, given Biden's -- shall we say ill-considered? -- remarks.

Trying to figure out why is a bit harder.

Russia already had them shut down, so what could they gain by breaking them? They could get credibility as a "we can do more than just this without going nuclear" as someone suggested at that link above, or demonstrate a bit of Stenka Razin-esque resolve (I won't let any benefits or joys distract me from the fight!)--but only if it is known that they did it.

I don't quite see how the US benefits, though there are factions here or in Germany eager to make permanent dents in hydrocarbon use--it's really scary if they've run amok. The pipelines aren't that deep; non-state actors could have done it. But I don't think Biden's handlers would let him actually damage the pipelines.

Ukraine, to try to damage Russian interests long-term--but these things can be fixed, and on the time-scale of the war would be if Russia cared to.

I'm missing something here. Maybe the internal factions have more freedom of action than I suspect.

UPDATE: The pipes involved are fascinating.

UPDATE2: I was out of town for a bit when this came up. An unmaintained gas pipeline with dropping pressure on one side can be a time bomb--and tinkering with it carelessly can trigger problems. So, maybe we can't safely conclude sabotage.

How to celebrate Father's Day

At 6 in the morning, one of the stair steps broke.

So, before we have to head off to music rehersal for the morning service, the father reseats the step and screws a temporary reinforcement in place.

The old carpet on the steps concealed a flaw that the home inspector missed 28 years ago: the free-standing stringer is splayed slightly at the bottom. Lower steps just barely fit in the slots, and are mostly held in place by the nails.

UPDATE: the carpet is held in place with over 55 staples per tread, each 1 1/2 inch long. In order to get the fresh support to be wood-to-wood, the carpet has to come off, and yanking those staples raises blisters.

T-rex again

A new theory about T-Rex suggests they had short arms to keep them out of the way of each other when chomping on a carcass. I'd wondered if it was to keep them out of the way when attacking with its jaws--both of us assuming that small is beautiful for the creatures.

But, of course, why have any arms left at all?

This fluffy peice claims that T-rex hatchlings had longer arms in proportion to their bodies than adults did. I'm still looking for details. These images show a bit more fragmentation that I'd like--maybe the juvenile was just related to T-rex.

If baby T-rexes had different proportions, presumably their arms were more useful to them than to adults. Tails on a little one wouldn't be as good for weapons as those on an adult, and their bites wouldn't be as incapacitating. Maybe they needed to grapple with the smaller prey to keep it around long enough to finish off. As they got bigger and either faced deadlier reprisals (my notion) or careless co-feasters (Padian's notion), the arms just wouldn't grow as fast, and be vestigial wrt its youth, not wrt its ancestors.

"Tiny tots of either sex Adore Tyrannosaurus Rex Indeed, all little ones adore Any savage carnivore Of which, O Rex, though rightly boastest Thou art not only first, but mostest." ~ Ogden Nash

UPDATE: wrt my notion of keeping fragile parts away from angry prey--a modern comparison : "Most experienced wolves have broken (and healed) their ribs on several occasions." I gather that a number of T-Rex's also have had broken ribs.