On the fast track

Monday. The second day of Squirrel Week.

Jet Blue is looking beat up these days. The question is: Is it just chipped paint from the weather or is it a crack in the fuselage?

Finland and Sweden are on track to join NATO as early as this summer. There’s a long border between Russia and Finland. Plenty of room for an Article 5 misunderstanding.

Matt Viser on Kamala and Marty.

The jigsaw puzzle is almost finished but one important piece that was supposed to fit… just doesn’t. In this case, the puzzle is the Universe.

And what’s a good tip for a robot waiter? You tell me.

Polling Americans

A sanguine Sunday.

It’s the start of Squirrel Week. Hold onto your hat.

Are Americans really worried about rising crime. Gallup says yes. Concerns about crime are at their highest level !!! (…since 2016.) In reality, their data show that crime worries are down significantly from 2001. But, you know, headlines. Also, those patterns of partisan reaction to crime are pretty interesting.

So what would happen if Russia and the US engaged in a broad nuclear exchange? The good news is, we wouldn’t have to worry about global warming anymore.

Constructor Theory. It’s a new way to think about physics and natural laws. Here’s an introduction.

And Maureen Dowd is right to be concerned. How long can our attention span on Ukraine last in the face of another Kardashian wedding?

The final frontier

Today is Sunday. Not much happening.

Eric Adams had promised to take his first three paychecks in Bitcoin. Not great timing on his part.

The Webb Telescope continues to self assemble according to plan as it heads to its destination at L2. Mirrors are now fully deployed. (What’s L2, you ask? It’s a Lagrange Point. William Neff explains.)

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming… updated for 2022… Irish version.

Speaking of Russia, Joshua Keating tells us what to look for in the Ukraine situation as things get twitchy in Europe. Once again, it comes down to oil supply.

And the LHC usually gets all the attention, but a new particle accelerator coming on line at Michigan State might shed light on what comes after the Standard Model.

Card carrying

Today is Monday. It can’t be helped.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Except, apparently, light. Now I’m really confused.

I’ve always admired the ACLU, even when I disagreed with what it defended. Now, according to some prominent members, the ACLU has broken with its mission. (And they rebut). I can’t say I disagree with those that say the group has gone astray, at least locally. I remember a Boston ACLU that would offer advice and guidance for certain law enforcement initiatives and when the advice was taken, provide qualified support. In other words, a group that would put the work in to make things better. Today I see a group that draws a line in the sand. But then again, groups that work out compromises aren’t as successful at fundraising as groups that take sides on the issues of the day.

HBO offers some great shows but its web interface is horrible. On top of that they’ve now broken the Apple TV app. They really need to hire some competent coders.

Today begins Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The company has had a rough ride recently in its relationship with developers. So it will be interesting to see how they handle things.

And El Salvador is considering adopting bitcoin as legal tender alongside the US dollar, which is the official currency. Interesting. Let’s see how this turns out.

Take this job and…

It’s Monday. Let’s do it all again.

Sabine Hossenfelder transports us to another dimension. Part 1 of 2.

The New York Times spoke to Covid-stressed mayors, many of whom were from Massachusetts, starting with Donna Holaday from Newburyport. Thomas McGee of Lynn and Joe Curtatone of Somerville also weighed in, as did Thomas Bernard, the mayor of North Adams. Twenty percent of the mayors in Massachusetts are considering a different line of work.

Some guy won the golf thing.

The iPhone 12 has been out for almost half a year. When it was released many of us were excited about the camera improvements and rushed to check out the initial reviews. Sebastiaan de With, of Halide, has been using his iPhone camera for months now and offers a comprehensive and long-term review with lots of photos. Good read for photography nerds.

And, speaking of cameras, the ones on our laptops are pretty horrible. I mostly use my phone camera for Zoom calls because of its much higher quality. I always wondered why Apple hadn’t improved the quality of the cameras on the Macs. Maybe this is why.

Troubling developments

It’s a sunny Saturday. The word of the day is fatuous.

Condé Nast Traveler picked Sconset beach on Nantucket as one of their 25 best island beaches. I always preferred Cisco or Surfside for swimming, or Dionis for beach parties (like the one in Jaws). No one I knew went to Sconset. It was for rich people (like the guy who wrote Jaws).

Violence is spreading in Northern Ireland. Very disheartening. Brexit and coronavirus restrictions are playing a role in the escalation. CNN’s Kara Fox breaks it down. David Trimble weighs in.

~~Florida~~ Texas man tries to blow up the Internet.

Physicists working with Microsoft have published an interesting paper on the ultimate operating system: the universe. The thesis, in a nutshell, is that we are living in self-learning computational environment. I don’t know. Does it seem like there’s a lot of self-learning going on around us these days?

And Covid lockdowns have brought more than Zoom meetings. UFO sightings and close encounters went up too.

Not passing inspection

Another Thursday. It should be a nice early Spring day.

Here’s some good news: Part 1 crime has dropped by 28% in parts of Dorchester and Mattapan. The bad news (and you knew it was coming) is that murder rates are up in most big cities, including Boston. In Portland, Oregon, gun violence is on the rise and some are calling out defunding efforts.

The RMV inspection saga continues. The Globe is reporting that Applus has released a software update of some kind (on a thumb drive) but their systems are still not operational or, seemingly, close to being so. Their FAQ on the hack is hosted on Squarespace now, suggesting a lack of confidence in their own IT environment. They continue to describe the hack as malware, which tends to minimize it. Malware can happen to anyone, right? But basic business diligence would have required, at the very least, privilege restrictions, frequent patching and snapshotted offline backups for critical software and data. Maybe they did all the right things and this attack was an outlier but something is telling me that this crew was in over their heads.

Spot, the robot dog, is heading to the battlefield. It’s a test of the Three Laws of Robotics, which I think includes dog robots.

I’ve been scanning the news recently about findings in particle physics that may lead to fundamental changes in our understanding of nature. There’s always plenty of hype in the science feeds about new discoveries that are going to change everything but which turn out to be nothing. This time there seems to actually be something important going on. Dennis Overbye gives a good overview.

And a dog that went missing five years ago is back at home after quite a long ordeal. It’s a survival story with a happy ending.

How soon we forget

Good morning. It’s going to be a mild Thursday.

Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York and, at least according to this headline, he has some concerns about Zoom. Apart from that, his platform sounds pretty good.

Workers in grocery stores hung in there during the pandemic, dealing with maskless customers acting out over toilet paper. It’s past time that we get them vaccinated, along with the teachers and nurses. It’s only right, right?

Faster than light warp drives were a science fiction thing. But now scientists have worked out how to actually build one. Here’s Sabine Hossenfelder to explain.

Boston traffic has apparently improved. Last year we had the distinction of having the worst traffic in the US. But in the latest rankings we’ve dropped to number 4 nationally, 36th globally, putting us behind backwaters like Zagreb and Rostov-on-Don in congestion. Come on, we can do better than that.

And a Bloomberg story from yesterday has been updated to reflect that the police video system that was hacked was not in Stoughton, MA, but Stoughton, Wisconsin. So close.

Complementarity

It’s Valentines Day Sunday. And we’re halfway to March.

The Globe takes us inside the process of appointing a new police commissioner.

Frank Wilczek has a new book out, Ten Keys to Reality. Here’s the Times review. Wilczek also recently appeared on Sean Carroll’s podcast to talk about topics in the book and the current state of physics. I’ve noticed that there have been plenty of other physics-related stories floating around recently. Here’s Sabine Hossenfelder on panpsychism, Alan Lightman on infinity, Dennis Overbye on luminance and Miguel F. Morales on particle interaction. There have also been recent stories about news in quantum chaos and dark energy. And finally, Conan O’Brien and Jim Carry discuss the stochastic phase switching of a parametrically driven electron in a penning trap. That happened.

Derek Thompson believes that we can get past the pandemic by the summer if we get smart and busy with vaccine distribution.

A 30 year practical joke involving George Harrison, Phil Collins and Jackie Stewart. “Don’t worry, it was a piss-take.”

And the acquittal wasn’t unexpected but it was a disappointment. Sad.

System on a chip

Sunday. Enjoy the sunshine.

Apple has begun to move its Mac computers away from industry standard ‘Intel Inside’ chips to its own custom processors. These new systems show impressive increases in speed and efficiency over Intel systems. It’s a big deal. You would expect PC makers to follow suit by designing similar chips but engineer Erik Engheim explains why that might be impossible and, if true, this move by Apple could shake up the personal computer industry.

But some use cases are problematic for current Macs. And God help you if you forget your iCloud password.

It’s not just the MBTA having financial troubles. The New York Times looks at the wavering state of mass transit nationwide in the wake of the pandemic.

Geoff Edgers talked to Elvis Costello about the Quisling Clinic and making another album with Nick Lowe.

And I noticed a few interesting physics articles recently. The first is by Anil Ananthaswamy, revisiting Bell’s Inequality –with a twist. The second is an optimistic take on the whole ‘end of physics’ thing, by Robbert Dijkgraaf. And in the WSG, Frank Wilczek writes about the reliable unreliability of the universe.