Self Defeating Code of Honor

 Most of the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire milleu maintains internal sense, although there's magic and other mysterious stuff.   But occasionally, deep illogic creates terrible, fatal battles for which there is really no need.  I'll cite two examples that really bother me. 

 The fight between Arthur Dayne and allies versus Ned Stark and his allies outside the Tower of Joy is just stupid.  Arthur Dayne had been ordered to protect Raegar's new wife Lyanna, who is also Ned Stark's sister.  His absence at the battle of the Trident may have cost Raegar his life, although Raegar had no way to know that.  Arthur Dayne fights Ned to the death, and Ned wins.   But this makes no sense.  Arthur Dayne is protecting Lyanna, who is Ned's sister.  Ned would never have caused Lyanna to come to harm.

The back story is that Lyanna had been betrothed to Ned's good friend, Robert Baratheon, and he was in love.  Raegar "stealing" Lyanna away was ostensibly the cause of the war.   When Robert found out that Lyanna had betrayed him, he might have killed her, and more likely her newborn son, so to some degree she did need protection.  But Ned would never have hurt her, even had his friend ordered him to.  When Arthur Dayne realized who it was that he was fighting, and that his prince had fallen, reason dictates that he should have renegotiated.   Ned and Arthur were itching for a fight, but this fight just stretches credibility.  Ultimately, they both wanted the same thing: Lyanna and her heir's survival.  A tiny bit of renegotiation would have changed things.

When I read the books, it was clear that Lyanna was dying in Childbirth, although it was never explicitly said.  That Jon Snow was the outcome of this childbirth already seemed pretty likely, and what Robert would have done with him.  Ned, for all his loyalty to Robert, was even more loyal to his family and would have protected Lyanna and Child, even against Robert.  

Sandor "the Hound" Clegane had been traveling with Arya.  He seemed to have a special care for the Stark girls, although his stated goal at the start was to "Sell" Arya to her aunt, Lyssa.  But Lyssa was murdered and they continued north.  By this point, Arya and Sandor had become good friends.  After arriving too late to deliver her to her mother and brother--murdered at the Red Wedding--they continued on, and stumbled into Brienne of Tarth and Podrick.  Once again, the goal of these two "teams" was entirely aligned--they wanted to protect the Stark Girls and deliver them to safety--a little discussion before starting to fight would have stopped the whole thing.

I'd hope that real fighters in these situations would have had a discussion and worked things out.  In both cases, there was honor at stake, but the people the promises had been made to were dead.

A lot of the fans of the show like to see the battles, and indeed these two were among the better ones.  There was a lot of clamoring for "Clegane-Bowl", and the showrunners acceded to it.   That one was less dumb.

Archimedes Mirror

Lot's of people have thought that the great Syricusian polymath Archimedes made a weapon capable of setting the sails of ships on fire from a distance.  There is no historical evidence of this--the story seems to come from the middle ages.   The Mythbusters, several times tried to repeat this stunt, and failed every time.   While I can see problems with the individual experiments, I think they got it right--for several practical reasons, Archimedes probably did not try to set sails on fire by using individual flat mirrors focused by hand.  He may have experimented with it, but like the mythbusters, failed at every attempt.

That said, it is definitely possible to set things afire with a large mirror focusing the suns rays.  You can buy a hand held cigarette lighter that works this way, and a larger mirror can generate a fire at a distance of a few feet.    An accurately enough focused mirror could definitely start a fire at a distance, but it needs to be pretty accurate.  It's remotely possible that the mechanics of Syracuse could have made such a mirror, but I'm certain that had Archimedes seen such a mirror under production, he would have noticed the optical magnification it would have provided, and he'd have invented a reflecting telescope within days. This obviously did not happen, so I don't think Syracuse made such a mirror.   

Why the PNW Will Never Have High Speed Rail

 I live near Seattle, and I love it here.  We're a little isolated from the rest of the country, which is both good and bad.  One of the bad things is that it takes frustratingly long to get to any other part of the country.  If you want to get there in less than a day, you need to go by air.   It takes 24 hours to get to the nearest other region, the San Francisco Bay Area, by rail, or 13 hours by road, but only if you're lucky with traffic and break the speed limit a lot.

Lots of people advocate for High Speed Rail, and I am very much one of them.  An imaginary 200 MPH (300KPH) HSR system could get us from Seattle to San Francisco in 3.5 hours.  If the stations are near to your destinations, it would be practical to get to a meeting and back in a work day.  This isn't really practical by air unless you fly private--Airports are half an hour or more outside of town, and TSA adds 90 minutes or more.  Add that to 2 hours in the air each way and it adds up to 4.5-5 hours travel time each way.   Add that to the meeting itself and it's a 12 hour day or more.   Private Jets are slower, but not that much, and they subtract all of TSA, and they can be precisely scheduled--it makes the one day round trip possible, which it just isn't on scheduled flights.  So the people who can afford it, do so.

The Northwest has three big cities: Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.  Metro Vancouver has about 3.4M, Seattle, 4.2M and Portland 2.5M.  But those three cities are in a geographic island:  There's a huge mountain range between central Oregon and the Central Valley of California, and two even bigger mountain ranges to the east.  It's over 600 miles from Portland to San Francisco, and about 300 of them are really rugged terrain.  The SF Bay area has only about 8 million people: less than the PNW.  To make a High Speed Rail Corridor really practical, LA/San Diego, about 20 million people need to be added.  And once you've done that, you need to connect to the rest of the country.  Spokane, Boise, Helena and the other northwest cities are tiny.   You need to go down to Salt Lake City and Denver, or up to Calgary/Edmonton, to reach many folks.  

 There is already rail through all of these routes, but a lot of it is very far from being able to handle High Speeds.  Through the Siskiyous, it's barely able to handle moderate speeds and there are some radical twists and turns.  Making this capable of even 200KPH, will be incredibly expensive, much less 300.   A bunch of the existing route is comfortably able to do 80MPH--but less than half.  All the terrain north of Eugene will need to be moved into the Willamette/Cowlitz/Nooksak Corridor, and rebuilt to HSR standards.  The construction cost to do this is at least $100M/mile for the 700 miles from Eugene to Vancouver--$700B, and that doesn't factor in the cost to obtain the land and get other political clearances. Figure $2T.  Redding to San Diego is about the same: 700 miles/$2T.  Finally, you've got to do the mountains: Eugene to Redding is about 300 very mountainous miles.   That'll probably cost at least $2T, maybe even more.  

 Would it be worth it?   Perhaps.   The roadbed that's already in the various flat corridors will be cheaper to obtain than the portion that's not.  Near Seattle runs along the Puget Sound Coastline, and will be useless for our purposes--Everett to Olympia, well over 100 miles, and apart from the cities themselves, that's probably the most expensive land on the route.  Such a system will stimulate business enormously--but $6T is a lot of money: about 2 years GDP from the entire affected region.  

----

 In the long term--surely not in my lifetime, we will have some form of VacTrain.  Hyperloop or maybe something even better.  Many pundits argue that this will be quite a bit cheaper than HSR, and I see their point: Hyperloop takes a tiny amount of space, and tunnels and bridges are much less substantial than for trains.  A Tunnel Boring Machine through the Sikiyous would solve a mess of problems.  Not sure it's possible, but it's an appealing thought.  Not just 200MPH.  1000 MPH.  Seattle to SF in 45 minutes, no waiting anywhere. 

Firefly's Most Important Speech

 The story of the movie Serenity so far:   River Tam is now recognized as a Psychic, and she apparently took in what the Alliance had done 12 years ago when "in a room" with "leading members of Parliament".  She doesn't recognize what she knows, but the Alliance is terrified that people will find out.  She is accidentally triggered to remember, and what she remembers is the single word "Miranda".  The crew figures out how to go to Miranda, which is a planet in "Reaver Space", and when they get there, what they find is weird devastation.  The people have just laid down and let themselves die.  They find a recording of a scientist, who explains what happened--they'd been experimenting with an Aerosol drug that was supposed to calm down the population, but it went too far, and they quit living.  Except for a tiny number, who lost all self control and became exceptionally violent.  The scientist is killed by Reavers on the video, and the crew, with several interactions with Reavers, realize who the Reavers are and how they came to be, and why the Alliance so desperately wants this secret kept.

 Malcolm Reynolds, who despite his rural background has read quite a bit, knows the history of previous efforts to improve the species, such as the Nazi Eugenics programs, and realizes that though well intended, they are nearly always a really bad idea.   And he gives this speech:

 

 

He doesn't hold to that.  And he is right to.  Trying to overpower natural selection is risky at best.   It's hard to know what motivation led the scientists to try planet-level distribution before they did a pretty thorough small scale experiment at a level that would surely have shown both bad responses, but there may have been some unknown factor.

 

I think the Alliance chose the wrong response: they tried to keep the thing a secret, and they did a fairly good job.  But secrets eventually do find their way out, especially one this big.  They probably should have told the truth and sent the navy to exterminate the Reavers as soon as they realized what happened.  Most of the guilty died on Miranda, so they can put the blame there--even if the important member of Parliament actually was responsible.

 

I am sympathetic to the urge to Eugenics.   We've done it with our farm animals, with our vegetables, etc., etc.  And by and large it has worked.  But the successful efforts have taken hundreds or thousands of years to perfect, and there are lots of "errors" that have needed to be culled.   We cannot cull humans, although the Nazis did think we could.  

Progressive Taxation vs Monopoly

I think I'm what could be called a "Market Socialist".  I strongly believe that free, competitive markets drive innovation and successful response to changing circumstances.  I also believe regulation is strongly necessary for markets to be truly competitive and not subject to a variety of "market failures".  This include monopoly and various forms of near monopoly, "race to the bottom" enshitification, and several more.   This regulation has a cost and unfortunately, some of the solutions require replacement of an entire market area by government-operated business, which of course costs some money.

There are a few areas that history has shown the free market cannot work:  The first is the military.   Some humans are prone to aggressive acts, and occasionally are charismatic enough to get others to support them.   We need military and police forces to keep these in check, and history has shown, over and over, that if these things are operated by private enterprise, societal collapse is inevitable.   The cops and soldiers must be strongly controlled by highly democratic institutions that are only motivated by the public good: something, whether it's strong ethics rules, public transparency, or something else, keeps them from using the power that these agencies give them for selfish or destructive goals. 

 The list of these necessarily public services is long: the court system, the roads, the postal service, communications networks, health care, many more.  We can argue about exactly how to nationalize these systems: for example, the Bell System was a for-profit company that held a virtual monopoly on phone service in the US from early in the 20th century until 1984, and it worked.  Bell was strongly regulated, both that their prices and services they were required to provide were publicly regulated, and that they were required to keep advancing the technology.    Changing technologies, many of which had been created by Bell Labs, convinced regulators and the courts that it was no longer possible to do this.  This was a disaster for society, in many ways.  It created a bunch of new billionaires, but it created lots of what could be called "parallel monopolies", each of which has all the bad properties of the old monopolies, but there are more of them that we must deal with.

 We must fix this.  Ultimately, we need to set things up so that no functional monopoly is allowed to exist without regulation that prevents enshitification.    As a fan of markets, I believe the best way would be to enforce rules that prevent any market from having too few competitors to keep it really free.  I cannot think of a circumstance where this is fewer than a dozen roughly equal competitors,  and probably more.  There are also circumstances--and the phone company of old is a perfect example, where there are huge structural advantages to having a monopoly.  That monopoly needs to be regulated so that it provides a comfortable income for its workers and shareholders, but its growth is limited.  This would not inherently disallow competition: GTE competed with Bell in the old days.  I think the modern version would be a small number of tightly regulated collaborating companies providing the coax, optical fiber, microwave and cellular networks, with service providers licensing these carriers to provide specific services.  The carrier companies would be required to cover every place and everybody for the same price and service quality, and allow "roaming" at no cost--you shouldn't need to know which carrier you're using, or need to be in some special place.

 Of course, doing this massive regulation, and in many cases, massive government-run operations, would require taxation.  During the time that most people think America was at its greatest: 1933-1980, taxation was extremely progressive, and the same attitude that led to that led to competent monopoly enforcement.   Income over $400K was taxed at 91% marginal rate for much of the 1950s, and it worked extremely well.  Today, the top marginal rate is about 1/3rd of that.  And the billionaires are running amok--the worst of them are monopolies (including the host of this blog...).  We must stop this.

 I say: we need a progressive tax rate that creates a lot of revenue for public sector without hurting people who can't afford it.  Here;s my thinking:

income less than 2/3rds of median income ($50K):  0% tax

income between 2/3ds and double median ($150K): 10% marginal tax

various rates in the middle here, which I'll leave blank for the moment.

income over 25M: 70% marginal tax

income over $1B: 95% marginal tax

All income should be taxed, with NO mechanism for diverting income into lower-taxed brackets, such as carried interest, borrowing against assets, dividends, long term capital gains, allowed.  The top brackets may seem punitive, and to some degree they are.  Billionaires hurt society.  There are a few who do good things with their money, but too many use their money for bad.

There are ways for $billion earners to avoid taxes:  put large dollar values into actual charitable causes, like building schools, subsidizing food programs, etc, and they deserve a deduction for this. 

  

 

Recession and Inflation by president

This data is from St Louis Federal Reserve's "FRED" data.  Numbers are computed annually. 

Nixon1  1 recession 5.8%  peak inflation, 4.7% average, inherited 4.3%

Nixon2 1 recession, 11.1% peak inflation, 8.6% average, inherited 3.3%

Ford    0 recessions, 7.6% peak inflation 7.4% average, inherited 5.7%

Carter    1 recession, 13.5% peak inflation, 9.7% average, inherited 5.7%

Reagan11 recession  10.3% peak inflation, 5.7% average, inherited 13.5 

Reagan2 0 recessions 4.1% peak inflation, 3.3% average inherited 3.5%

Bush    1 recession, 5.4% peak inflation, 4.4% average, inherited 4.0

Clinton1    0 recessions, 2.9% peak inflation, 2.8% average, inherited 3.0%

Clinton2 0 recessions, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 2.9%

Bush1    1 recession, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Bush2    1 recession, 3.8% peak inflation, 3.3% average, inherited 2.6%

Obama1    0 recessions, 3.1% peak inflation, 1.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Obama2    0 recessions, 1.6% inflation, 1.1% average, inherited 2%

Trump1    1 recession, 2.4% peak inflation, 1.9% average, inherited 1.2%

Biden    0 recessions, 8% peak inflation, 4.9% average, inherited 4.6%

The Nixon, Carter, Reagan inflation was all very directly related to the OPEC crisis:
In October 1973, several Arab countries did a surprise attack on Israel, which, unlike the '67 attack, took a few months for Israel to push back.  Nixon threw his support wholeheartedly behind Israel, and the Arab countries formed an organization they called "the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries" and sharply reduced supplies to the US and other countries that had supported Israel.  OPEC continued to blockade oil until well into the 1980s, with the result of 3 recessions and a decade of high inflation.   All US presidents carefully kowtowed to OPEC since then.

 

 

Serenity Lies to Us.

My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred Firefly.  It was presented out-of-order, in the Friday Night Death Slot, by a network that clearly didn't understand what it had, but did let the show's writers and producers do a competent job.  Nearly all of the actors have gone on to have long and successful careers.  It was killed just as it was beginning to develop a following in spite of the horrible support the network had given, and that following quickly grew--sufficiently that the showrunners were given a chance to make a feature film 3 years later.   My thesis is that feature film, as likeable as it is, does not make sense in the context of the rest of the show.

 Almost everything in here is a spoiler.  If you haven't watched the show or the movie, and I urge that you do, don't read this essay until you have.

 There are a number of big screwups--killing off two of the main characters being the least of it.  Another is that the writers seemed to feel that a lot of the movie's viewers would not have seen the TV show.   That resulted in a lot of valuable movie time being spent in exposition.  But the most important is that the central plot element--the origin story of the Reavers and River Tam's connection to it, makes no sense.   As two separate stories, it makes perfect sense, but tying them together as they tried to was simply a mistake.

 I regard the entire movie as Retcon: Retroactive Continuity, meaning, in this case, significantly rewriting the story so that two unrelated back stories share a single plotline.  This was a mistake. 

The alliance, and most likely their corporate benefactors, especially the Blue Sun Corporation, have done and will continue to do a lot of shady things, and they have a staff of secret agents to defend them.   Some version of this is likely true of most powerful governments in our world too, and lots of good stories can be written about them.  They need talented operatives to do this work, and the unnamed "operative" is one of them.  I am virtually certain that River was being recruited and trained to be one too.  I'm pretty sure that Reverend Book was also an operative during the war, although perhaps not as high-level as the Chiwetel or River characters are.

 Similarly, I am comfortable with the story that the Alliance accidentally created the Reavers.    It makes sense, especially since we're aware that they've been learning how to fiddle with people's attitudes and self control with chemistry.  I find it profoundly unlikely that River had anything to do with this, or that The Operative did either.  It does make sense that those who are guilty of creating the Reavers would like to cover up their involvement, and might even use an operative or two to interfere with word getting out.   But I am profoundly skeptical that they would have gone so far as to bury a secret codeword into a trainee operative.

Why do they want River so much?  This secret is sold to us as the central premise of the movie.  They don't want the secret leaking.  Why would they give the secret to a not-yet-fully-trained operative?   I can't think of a single reason, and I can think of lots not to.  If you need for her to know for some reason, there's no reason not to wait until she's been sufficiently brainwashed to be as loyal as the Chiwetel character.   It's mission-specific info.  When the Chiwetel character learns the truth and realizes that he's been brainwashed, he flips.  "No longer their man" as he puts it.   

The answer is that they accidentally put a senior member of the Alliance in a room with River, and she apparently read his mind and found out about Miranda.

That said, central to the show is the message that the Alliance is incompetent.  They are massive, powerful, and most of all boring, and over and over they prove that one part of the administrative state has no idea what other parts are doing.   The operative has figured this out.  But he is

It is tragic that the show was cancelled when it was.  A decade later, the internet was advanced enough that rebooting a show like this would have been easy.  I put forth the example of "The Expanse", which was cancelled by SciFi, but brought back to life a few years later because Jeff Bezos personally liked it.  The actors were mostly all still available and pretty much looked as they had earlier.  Similarly, Serenity was released only 4 years after the show was cancelled.  They had to build a new set, and improved CG and budget made a real difference--and Summer and Jewell were both under 25.  But ten years after the movie, one of the actors had died, and the two that were purportedly teen-agers could no longer pull that off.    The story would have to explain the passage of so much time.

 Animation makes it much more possible to play these games.  Voices change almost as much as physical appearance, but AI voices are getting so good I think this could be faked now.   I hope the new show can pull it off.  I say: put it into the timeline between the show and the movie.  I think there are as many as three plausible years in there. 

Ranking Episodes of Firefly

 My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred "Firefly".  They did 14 episodes, one of them a double-length Pilot, and a feature movie.  The movie was good, albeit disappointing.

 If you haven't watched the show, do it.  Watch the episodes in order, most importantly the Pilot first.  Fox aired them out of order, and that was one of the things that damaged the show's popularity.  There are several spoilers in here.

 

Best Episode: Out of Gas.  This episode was full of flashbacks, many of which explained who members of the crew are and how they came to be part of Serenity's crew.  It's only best by a tiny bit.   The one real error is that Wash set up a call back button, but Mal never uses it.  The plot would make more sense if he had pressed it, and only a few lines would have to change.

Pilot: The initial, double-length episode is only in second place by a nose: it's also one of the best.   It's actual name is the same as the ship: Serentity.  It has several scenes from the battle that gave the ship its name.  We meet everybody, including several of the baddies.  Reverend Book, now aware that he's on a pirate ship rather than the Tramp Steamer that he thought he was boarding, expresses misgivings, which are completely gone by the next episode.

Ariel: Inara needs to go to a central planet for her annual medical certification, and Doctor Tam comes up with a job for the crew to do at that site.   We learn a lot about Jayne, a really lot about River and "The hands of blue".

Objects in Space: a Bounty Hunter attempts to capture River, but River turns the tables on him.  The bounty hunter was a terrific character, and River and Simon are at their best.  River goes from being a character that made the rest of the crew nervous, to being a full fledged part of the crew, that everybody loves--almost as much as they all love Kaylee.

 

The Train Job.   The "second pilot".  It was written quickly, over a weekend, and the network foolishly ran it instead of the real pilot.  It's a pretty good episode, but it fails to do a lot of the exposition that the pilot did so brilliant.  It has a bunch of very likable scenes, such as when the goon is pushed into the running engine and when the captain realizes that he's doing his theft right under the noses of a whole troop of Alliance soldiers.

Safe.   The doctor and River are kidnapped by hill people, who need a doctor.  I really like the world building that this episode does.   It almost ranks with the best episodes.

 Shindig.  while trying to make a deal for some goods to transport, Captain Reynolds gets crosswise with a local oligarch and is forced to fight him.  There's a lot to like about this episode, but it's in the bottom half only because there are others that are significantly better.

Jaynestown.  We learn a little about Jayne and his history.  While he is mostly a crude, money grubbing thug, he does care about things.   We see a lot of the character of various characters.

War Stories.  A great episode in a lot of ways.  Niska, from the earlier Train Job episode, is back and he's angry.  River is starting to recover, presumably with the aid of the treatment the Doctor was able to devise following the episode in Ariel, and we start seeing a little of what the alliance wanted to turn her into. 

Our Mrs Reynolds.  Christina Hendricks plays an interesting character--who seems like an incredibly naive young woman but turns out to be a highly cynical and skilled thief.

Trash.  Christina Hendrick's character is back.   It's a more straightforward episode and it does a little world-building, and it is a great episode overall, but it's definitely in the bottom half.

The Message: Mal and Zoey's army buddy shows up with a secret.    It's got a fulfilling but very sad ending, compounded with the fact that the actors had just been informed that the show had been cancelled

Heart of Gold:  Inara's old friend hires the crew to deal with a thug.   The plot shares a lot with the Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven".   It's the archetypical horses and spaceships in the same scene episode, although there are others.  Mal goes full Indiana Jones and chases down a hovercar with a horse.  

Bushwacked.  This is probably the most disappointing episode.   The crew comes upon a colony ship that had been attacked by Reavers, leaving behind a virus that infects the Serenity and the only survivor.  

----

 I rank the movie in the bottom half of this list.  It's a good movie, and it explains some important stuff, but I regard a lot of the plot as inappropriate Retcon.  I'd rank it above "The Message" and below the YoSaffBridge episodes.   I wish they had told more or less the same story with three or four regular episodes, and not tried to do the exposition: most of the audience were already fans, and at least 1/3rd of the movie was wasted on that.  River is now almost a human being, as well as being something considerably more, Simon and Kaylee end up together, and it looks like the Captain and Inara are right on the edge of the same thing.   Wash and the Preacher were killed, only because the authors felt the movie needed the weight of that, not because it added to the story.  Mr Universe is a character that should have either been left out, or had a stronger story arc.  The Operative is a great character and I think his arc was just about right--but should have been spread over three or four episodes.

 

Bison and the Dust Bowl

Did the massacre of the American Bison Cause the dust bowl?   It doesn't appear to be the only cause, but it's clearly a contributing factor.

 The Dust Bowl was an ecological disaster in the early 20th century that devastated American agriculture, and was one of the major causes of the Great Depression.  Millions of new settlers flooded into the Great Plains states after the Civil War, using farming techniques that were appropriate for smaller farms in wetter climates.  Where they had come from, they had not needed to irrigate their fields, and they arrived in the Plains ignorant of the methods.  To some extent, they benefited from a rare wet spell, and to a larger degree, from the immense Aquifer (the Ogallala Aquifer) reaches from South Dakota to Texas.  They drilled thousands of wells into the aquifer and captured much of the few rivers that flowed across it.  They believed a widespread myth that "Rain follows the plow", which was promoted by land speculators and others that profited from their settlement, but did not pay for the consequences of being wrong.   When the wet spell ended in the 1920s, a lot of the land dried up and blew away.  A lot of the landholders had mortgaged their farms, to buy equipment or other advances, which were now in arrears--a million or more "Okies" were forced to give up their farms, which had become the property of the bankers that had lended to them, and which were sold to Agribusinesses for very little.

At the same time, there was an effort to suppress the previous inhabitants of the land, called "Indians" and force them to live on reservations, leaving the best land for the new settlers.  The army killed a lot of indians directly, but probably more indirectly, largely by the mass slaughter of their primary food source, the American Bison.  Around 60 million Bison (sometimes called Buffalo) were killed and by 1889, there were just 541 bison left in the US.  Active conservation has allowed these numbers to rebound to as many as 500,000 today, but the giant herds are gone, and existing agriculture is unlikely to allow them to return.

The Bison, it turns out, do a bunch of unique things that other large Ruminants do not.  They tend to not stay in one place--they eat their favorite grasses down to where they're a little harder to reach, and then move on.  One of the consequences of this is that the seeds from these preferred grasses adhere to the animals fur, and often pass through their guts, but survive and with a nice dollop of fresh fertilizer, are replanted in the new place that the Bison is feeding.  This causes the preferred grasses to spread, and where possible, interbreed with whatever was already there, improving the quality of both.  The great herds would trample the grass...this broke up the ground, and drove the seed below the surface where it was most likely to germinate.  And perhaps most importantly, the Bison like to "Wallow", where they lie on their side and roll around, which digs great pits.   This apparently helps to clean their fur, and helps them scratch itches.  They also like to scratch against trees--they are huge animals and it's amazing to see a tree with the bark missing from one side, up to 9 feet high.

But the wallows have a wonderful secondary effect in the plains.  They catch rainfall.  Left to its own devices, or to regular cattle, any irregularities will tend to get flattened, and rainfall will flow downstream.  Since a lot of this land is clay, it doesn't percolate well, and the water quickly runs off.  But if millions of bison are creating millions of wallow pits every day, a lot of this water catches in the pits, and stays there until it evaporates or percolates in.  That is probably a big part of how the Ogallala got to be there, and we almost completely removed this source in the late 1800s.

 Can the the restoration of the Bison restore the Ogallala?  Since the present population is less than 1% of what it was before the great slaughter, probably not.  But it might go a long way toward helping. 

2026 Electricity Cost, by Source

These are the fully burdened costs of each electricity source, counting capitalization, construction, maintenance, fuel depreciation, etc., as of today

Coal                        .092 to .23 per kWh

Natural Gas            .065 to .10 per kWh

Hydro                     .02 to .06 per kWh

Nuclear                    .037 per kWh

Utility Scale Solar  .03 to .05 per kWh

Residential Solar    .14 to .18 per kWh

Wind                       .024 to .075 per kWh

 

The bottom line: as of today (a couple of years ago, actually), utility scale solar was cheapest and shows signs of continuing to come down.  Hydro is #2, where you can get it, and that price has been stable for some time.  Wind is #3.  Nuclear is potentially competitive, but there are a lot of complicated externalities which make the cost in the table nearly impossible to achieve.  The recent standby, Natural Gas, is now close to the bottom of the heap, and the old standby, Coal, is significantly more expensive.

There are very few externalities from Solar.  The initial cost of the panels, once very large, is approaching trivial and the cost of the land is dominant.  They have very few environmental consequences. (although not zero: the shade changes hunting patterns for predators, for example, and productivity of farmland is somewhat reduced).   The panels last for decades, although recycling them when they eventually do wear out is a small problem.

There are more externalities for wind.  Perhaps the worst is that they interfere with the flight of some birds.   They make a noise which can be annoying if you're close, and some people find them unsightly.  They last 10-20 years, and most of them can be recycled into new windmills when the time comes.

Hydroelectric power has a very high upfront cost, and a theoretical lifetime of about a century, but the production costs are extremely low.  They turn out to have had a much more profound impact than was at first realized, especially on wildlife, such as fisheries.  Fish ladders had seemed to work, but a lot of them were defective and only a tiny fraction of the fish got through, for example.

 Natural Gas, mostly produced in the US as a byproduct of oil drilling, or hydraulic fracturing, has come on line quite strongly in the last couple of decades.  The fuel is comparatively cheap, and produces less CO2 and other pollution per kWh than burning coal or liquid fuel, such as gasoline.  But still quite a lot.  Another useful technology has been Combined Cycle turbines, which pair an internal combustion gas turbine with a steam turbine that exploits the waste heat.  They're able to get 60% or more efficiency, while conventional turbines struggle to get 40%.  But perhaps the biggest advantage is that an individual turbine can be throttled, to match demand, without much efficiency loss.  This makes it incredibly useful as a variable power source that's easily adapted to rapidly changing situations.

Coal is a historic fuel.   Because it was easily available in most of the places to industrialize early (e.g. Scotland, northern Germany, much of the US, China), it was a convenient energy source, and in a very real way, powered the industrial revolution.   It is difficult to throttle power generation to match demand, and all of the ways cost a lot of efficiency.  Moreover, it's dirty, inefficient and has lot of nasty externalities, such as open pit mining and mountaintop removal.  It's been the most expensive of the leading ways to produce energy for about 3 decades and has been rapidly declining in popularity.

Sustainable Ponzi Schemes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ponzi1920.jpg Charles Ponzi, 1882-1949 was a swindler who made $millions in the 1920s by promising investors huge  returns if they would send him money to invest.  They did, and early investors did get these huge returns: Ponzi was giving early investors money from later investors.   He didn't invent the swindle that today bears his name, but he was an effective publicist who got caught.  Many people have tried it, both before and after.  Such swindles cannot work over the long term, because eventually you will run out of investors, but they certainly can in the short term.

 Many people have pointed out that US Social Security is such a Ponzi scheme.  Well, yes and no.  If the scheme is set up so that it can never run out of investors, it can run indefinitely, and by doing so, it can generate a lot of value for people in the mean time by using the float wisely.  The stock market, and ultimately, the entire economy are also such schemes.   The trick to success is providing enough of a win that most people agree it's a good idea, while not really hurting anybody in the process.  In other words: truly giving value for money to the investors while not screwing anybody.

 Social Security works because as long as new people keep being born, and retirees eventually die, there is an indefinite supply of new investors to keep up with the growing pool of retirees.  The managers need to keep a positive balance, and to date, they always have.   As I write this, they'll be forced to reduce payments after 2034, but by increasing income a small amount, they'll be able to extend this easily.  Historically, they've mostly done this by increasing the cap on payroll deductions.  It's presently $184,500.  20 years ago, it was $94,200.  CPI over that time grew from 201 to 335, so this is faster than baseline inflation (which would have it at $157K), but not much.

The stock market is also such a "swindle".  Stock shares are ultimately worthless, but because investors have a chance to profit, through dividends, in the success of the underlying company, they'll buy in.  So many people have done this that there's a significant market for companies that do not pay dividends, called "growth stocks", which is entirely supported by speculation in the stock shares themselves.   At present time, the value of these shares (called market capitalization) of the world stock markets is about double GDP for the entire world (called Gross World Product or GWP).    Is this sustainable?  Probably not.  Most billionaires (possibly all) and a lot of millionaires are that wealthy solely because they own stock with that much market capitalization, and for a lot of them, their net worth would be highly negative if they were forced to live on the actual profits of the businesses they own.  This is especially true for businesses like "Private Equity" and "Hedge Funds".     E.g.: Tesla/SpaceX owner Elon Musk owns a $trillion in market cap, but these businesses all together brought in around $8B in profit last year.  And these are companies that are actually producing something.  Elon owns less than 15% of Tesla and 42% of SpaceX, so his actual value is well under $1B.  Hedge funds are even worse:  they produce nothing but the financial return.

 With all this market cap, owners are able to borrow against the asset to buy things, so without actually spending the asset, they are able to buy other things, such as yachts, broadcasting networks, sports teams, etc.  Every time they do this, they dilute the real value of both the shares they own and the things they're buying.   Dilution is very bad for the overall economy, because the people who actually do produce things: the workers, have a smaller and smaller share of the total money supply.  Eventually, there will be a comeuppance, and I don't see it being anything other than very ugly.    Millions will probably die, as died in previous "corrections", such as the English and US civil wars, WWI and II, various revolutions, etc.   

 We need to get this thing in balance.  The Wealth Tax, as proposed by Elizabeth Warren, is one way, but it taxes in a way that's uncontrollable, which can cause unintended harm.   I think income taxes should be very much higher on high incomes (presently capital gains are taxed at less than half what earned income is), and there should be a high tax on borrowing against appreciated assets over some high amount.   (presently it's actually a tax exemption). 

North Shore Boatbuilding

In 1963, my parents went to the boat show (I think it was in the Cow Palace in San Francisco), and my dad bought a boat.  It was a kit, made in England, for a 13'3" sailboat called an Enterprise.  A few weeks later, the kit was delivered to the agent for the western US, a guy called Sam Guild, at a place called North Shore Boatbuilding.

Guild rhymes with Mild, it's not pronounced like guild or gild.    He was from Maine and my parents were from Massachusetts--they had surprisingly much in common, in addition to being New Englanders.  I found Sam's obituary: he passed away in 2009 at 80, having moved back to Maine after less than a decade in California. 

 North Shore Boatbuilding was about 2.3 miles north of Marshall, on Tomales Bay.   Marshall is a tiny town, which only has a population of 400 if you count the numerous dwellings along the shore of the bay there.   We went there to pick up the Enterprise kit.   It was just exactly 100 miles by road from our home in Cupertino.

Over the next few months, my dad built it in the garage.  I helped--A lot I thought, but as I was only 8, probably less than I thought at the time.  It was very interesting and I did learn a lot.   The kit had fairly complete instructions but Dad read a lot of books and other things.  After a few months working on it constantly, nights and weekends, it was ready to sail.  We took it to a lake near home and he and a friend went for a sail.  I was taken out for a sail but was not allowed to help.   A few weeks later, he took me out and did allow me to help (trim the jib) and I figured it out quickly.  Barely a year later, I was given the opportunity to sail in a boat by myself (an El Toro) and I was able to do it.  Not long after that, I took formal sailing lessons at one of the local yacht clubs (Sequoia YC in Redwood City), and learned a lot more stuff.

There were about 10 Enterprise class boats in the Bay area by 1965 or so, all built from kits that Sam Guild had imported from England.  Sam had a good facility, not just for building boats but also for sailing them, and several of the boatowners lived up north, making Sams place a central location, so Sam hosted an Enterprise Regatta every month or so for a couple of years.  I was still too little, so mostly my Mom crewed for my Dad, and my sister and I found stuff to do around North Shore Boatbuilding. I tried fishing several times, and never once caught anything.  But I explored a lot.

 The pier is still there.  It's just south of "The Inn on Tomales Bay".  I can't tell if Sam and Ann's house is still there because the trees have grown up (it's been 60 years...).  There were trees near the water back then, but there was a clearing about 300 feet wide between the road and that grove, which is now all covered by mature trees.   The roadbed for the North Pacific Coast narrow gauge railroad was still discernable in the 60s, even though the tracks had been torn out during the Depression, 25 years earlier.

Sam's obituary mentions an 11 foot dinghy that the Guilds carried around on their camper.   I remember that boat well: it was a "Gull" class, which looked a lot like an Enterprise but smaller.  The Guilds carried it on the back of their Volkswagen pickup truck.   They'd brought it down to Redwood City one time on the back of that, and when heading home, had apparently forgotten to tie it down.   We were following, towing the Enterprise on a trailer.  I saw the Gull take off skyward, and it flew moderately well, coming down for a pretty good landing on its hull.  It suffered surprisingly little damage.

 

This is about half the bay area Enterprise fleet in around 1965.  I think the photo was taken by my dad, but I'm not sure where it was taken.  It's not Tomales Bay, Sausalito, or Redwood City, which I'm quite familiar with.  The boat my dad built is 9606.  Disappointingly, I don't have any pictures of Enterprises on Tomales bay or of North Shore Boatbuilding as it was in the 1960s.

 

Ranking the Presidents of my Lifetime

I find it difficult to choose here between my top 3, so in order of their term:

Eisenhower got many things right, a few wrong.  He supported the Warren court.  He supported civil rights and the overturning of Brown vs Board.   He supported the Coup against Mossadegh in Iran, which has led to 73 years (so far) of bad relations with Iran.

Kennedy.  He was successful mainly because he was Martyred and his successor, LBJ, was masterful at exploiting it.  The worst thing he actually did was Bay of Pigs.  The best was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the space program, and advocacy of what would eventually be the Civil Rights Act.

Obama.  The best president that managed to serve full term.   PPACA was his best thing.  He served in the face of the most hostile congress since the civil war.   Hands down the best orator.

Biden was a better president in most respects than Obama, but he had one monumental failure that destroys him: He held on too long and left the field open to Trump.

Carter could have been a great president but for three things:

1: he had the bad luck of running against Reagan, who lied and cheated to make him seem bad

2: He had some foibles on the Iran Hostage crisis.  Mostly not his fault, but he gambled more than he should have

3: His relations with congress were not the best.

4: (totally not his fault) The holdover from Nixon's OPEC policy and the Iran crisis led to high inflation.  His Federal Reserve Chair (Volcker) cured the problem, but too late for it to do Carter any political good

Clinton: a pretty good president, but he did a lot of stupid stuff that left him open to the Gingrich congress.   Lewinsky and Iraq were /totally/ the doings of the Rs. 

LBJ was actually quite a good president, if you get down to it.  Unfortunately, Goldwater's tactic wound up destroying him in the end.   Johnson understood that expanding VietNam was a huge mistake and that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was nothing, but Goldwater managed to inflate it to something that Johnson could not pretend to ignore.  The Great Society, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, etc., were really good things.   He would be at the top of this list without VietNam.

Ford:  After Ike, the least bad GOP president.   He had the luck to serve in Nixon's wake and looked wonderful by comparison.   He did very little, and was convincingly (and rightly) defeated by Carter.

Bush41: Perhaps the most competent R since Nixon, but mostly a promoter of Evil.  His alignment with the Oil industry being his worst problem.  Clinton mopped the floor with him in '92.  GOP'ers will tell you that Clinton only won because Perot stole votes from Clinton, but the numbers tell a quite different story. 

Nixon.  Corrupt but somewhat competent.  Screwed up LBJ's peace settlement with VietNam to undermine him (and his successor Humphrey)  in the '68 election.  Understood environmental issues better than many of his successors.  Watergate.

Bush43: Incompetent and Corrupt. Knew he was out of his depth, so he hired crooked people to do most of his thinking for him.  Reacted exactly wrong when the CIA told him that Bin Laden was determined to attack again.   September 11 was one of his lesser failings.  Invading Afghanistan was a huge mistake.  Invading Iraq before he'd finished with Afghanistan was a disaster.   (The right solution:  Build and fund schools, and promote small business, with not-corrupt banking.  The military should only be there to keep the teachers (and students) safe.)

Reagan. Trump would have been impossible without Reagan's opening us to corruption.  Reagan was incompetent, corrupt, did lots of stupid stuff (e.g.: he sent soldiers to Beirut, despite repeated warnings.  A truck bomb killed hundreds of them.   So one week later, he invaded Grenada.)  Iran Contra.  There are lots and lots of these.  He had enormous personal charisma, which for those of us with functioning BS meters, is a disqualifier.

Trump.  Incompetent, Immensely Corrupt, Stupid, remained in power by threatening people.   Before Trump, it was a contest between Reagan, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Harding who was our very worst president.  Trump takes the prize in a landslide.  He may have destroyed the United States.  It's possible he will destroy life on earth.

Planets, Moons and Satellites

What is the difference between a planet, a moon, a dwarf planet, an asteroid, a comet, etc?   I'm interested here in objective, unambiguous differences.  Arbitrary distinctions such as the actual mass or dimensions of the object are at best a last resort.

 All of these things are satellites, orbiting a star.  A few definitions are easy to pick off:

 A comet is an object with an orbit so eccentric that the heat and solar wind from the star cause large amounts of detritus to be driven into space every time it approaches the star.   Thus it is possible for a comet to change its status over time: once enough stuff has been blown off, it becomes an asteroid.

 An asteroid is an object which is no longer getting stuff blown off by the star (everything starts out that way) but is small enough that gravity does not deform its shape into a spheroid.

A planet is an object which is large enough that its own gravity has turned it into a rough sphere, and is in orbit around the star itself.   A distinction is made between Planets and Dwarf Planets, in that Dwarfs have not cleared their orbit, where full Planets have.  Factors that affect this include size, distance and eccentricity of the orbit, and distance to the star.  A quite large planet on a very long orbit might not have cleared its space, while a small planet on a relatively circular orbit might have.

A moon is a satellite which is orbiting a planet.  It might be asteroid size or dwarf planet size.  There's an interesting theoretical case where a pair of planets is orbiting each other and the star. There are none of these around our star but it's a case which deserves analysis.  My thinking is that if the Center of Gravity of the combined pair is inside one of the objects, then they are planet and moon.  However, if the second object is large enough and the orbit circular enough that the CG is in the space between, they are both planets. co-planets maybe?

 

The way a solar system forms is that it starts with a mass of tiny particles, chaotically distributed.  They might be individual atoms or molecules, in which case we call it a gas cloud, or it might be larger chunks.  There was some initial event that caused all of these particles to be in one place--perhaps a different star blew up, or maybe something else.  But at the start of the analysis, they are near each other (within a few light-hours?) and moving in random directions, and there are enough of them that all of the particles are in orbit around all of the others.

 Now and then, there are collisions.  If the velocities are different enough, and the collisions are inelastic, the particles lose a lot of momentum, and they fall to a lower orbit.   This quickly causes a clumping of these lower velocity particles, which will tend to be in the center.  When the collisions are elastic, the particles bounce off in a new, highly random direction, but when they are inelastic, and the velocities are similar enough, they'll stick together and form larger and larger clumps.  Most of the particles lose enough velocity through this process that they fall into the center, but a few wind up in an orbit around the central mass.  Based on observations, it appears that nearly half the time, the center is actually several objects, which eventually get big enough they form double or triple stars.   Among the inner orbits, anything that's very far from circular quickly collides with something else, and the new mass adds their vectors to make a new orbit.  If the velocities are different enough, they fall into a lower orbit, or the star.  Large planets tend to attract lots of stuff and grow ever larger, and they also cause perturbations in the orbits of smaller objects, leading, eventually, to collisions.

Anything with an orbit that is out of the plane with the others will eventually have one of these velocity-sapping collisions, so eventually all that's left are things that are mostly in the same plane, or a few things that have managed to miss hitting something bigger to survive for a long time.   The direction is determined by the small statistical differences from the initial conditions.

 There inevitably be some clouds that have too little mass to create a star--these turn into brown dwarf stars or sometimes rogue planets.  There are probably a lot of them out there, but since they do not emit light, they have to block or otherwise interact with something for us to detect them.   A lot of it is simply interstellar dust.  It may turn into something if it collides with other objects or dust clouds, but for now, it's just dust. 

Crick, Watson, Franklin and Szillard

James Watson died yesterday.  He was the last of the people responsible for discovering the Double Helix structure.  Watson and Francis Crick won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their discovery, which is one of the most important of all time.

There are two other people who deserve mention.  Most people are aware of the previous work done by Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died 1958 but would have certainly deserved a share of the prize. 

The other important contributor was Leo Szilard.  Szilard's most famous achievement was realizing that nuclear decay is caused by a neutron chain reaction, and that by manipulating the density of neutron emitters, you could control the rate of nuclear fission, right up to, and including a runaway explosion, which became known as the Atom Bomb.  Fermi's experiments a few years later led to the first Nuclear Pile in 1938, and in 1945, the first Atom Bomb.  Szilard intentionally kept his idea for the bomb secret because he was terrified of the Nazis getting the A-Bomb first, but he and his friend Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, which motivated the creation of the Manhattan Project.  Szilard and Einstein were specifically kept out of it to try to keep the Nazis from pursuing the idea.  Turned out Hitler regarded this stuff as "Jewish Science" and had effectively blocked progress in his country (Szilard and Einstein, along with Openheimer, Fermi's wife, and many of the others involved were Jewish), but he had no way of knowing that, having fled to England in 1933 and America in 1938.

 Szilard's contribution to the discovery of DNA were severalfold.  He invented the electron microscope in 1928, which made it possible to see some detail in chromosomes for the first time.   And it was he that devised the XRay diffraction technique which Franklin and others would use to work out the physical structure of DNA.

I regard Szilard, who died of a heart attack in 1964 at age 66, as perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, in a league with only Einstein, Tesla, and Louis Alvarez.  

Geothermal vs Ground Source Heat Pumps

This entry is about an important point of terminology--and a short discussion of each.

Geothermal energy is a way of extracting heat from the earth.  Usually, this is heat from a volcano or geyser or other feature of the earth's surface that brings very hot material close enough to the surface that it's practical to extract energy from it, and either use it directly or turn it to electricity with a steam turbine or other mechanism.  The number of spots where mother nature has been cooperative enough to make this practical are relatively few--consequently, geothermal energy isn't viable in a majority of places.  There is a vast amount of heat down there, far more than we could ever use.  But there have been many attempts to drill down to it, and so far, all have failed.  It's only practical where geology has made an opening for us.

There is a significantly different technology which is often misleadingly called geothermal.  A more accurate name would be a Ground Source Heat Pump.  This technology takes advantage of the fact that large masses of soil, stone or especially water tend collect and store heat, and remain stable year round, at whatever the average temperature is.   This tends to be about 50F or 10C, although many factors affect this.   By passing liquid through it, a heat pump can extract the energy from this and use it to provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.   This has enormous efficiency advantages: to cool a space to 70F when it's 90 outside and the ground is 50 takes no energy at all, except for whatever is needed to power the pumps and heat exchanger, while heating above 50 when it's cold outside takes a lot less energy than heating above (say) 10F, a temperature at which heat pumps are very inefficient.   All it takes is some plumbing, buried deep enough and spread out enough to take advantage.

 

 

Al Gore was an early adopter of a Ground Source Heat Pump system in his Tennessee home, and spoke of it often during his presidential campaign, usually calling it Geothermal. 

 

Geothermal energy is one of the very few sources of energy that is not really just a way of extracting solar energy that's been stored up over time.  It's actually heat that's either left over from the formation of earth, compression by gravity, or nuclear reactions (both fission and fusion) occurring deep within the earth's core.  Ground Source, as well as wind, photovoltaic, fossil fuels, etc., are ultimately ways of using the energy from the sun that's stored up by the earth somehow.   e.g.: chlorophyll turns  CO2 from the air into cellulose and other burnable materials, which can be burned to get energy--either by burning it directly, or waiting until heat and pressure from the earth has turned it into fossil fuels over millions of years.  E.g. wind is air movement caused by the differential heating of the surface of the earth by the sun.

Hyperloop Criticism

There are plenty of difficulties with getting a hyperloop or other vactrain system installed, but none of the criticism I'm seeing of the concept is correct.

For example, they give the example of a tank truck that is evacuated and is crushed in a fraction of a second by atmospheric pressure.  This is a shockingly poor example.  These tanks are intended to be filled under positive pressure, and the metal cylinder has thin walls (1/8" or so) which can hold the load because they are loaded in tension, but not in compression.  Any competent engineer would simply make the wall thickness sufficient to sustain this pressure.  This varies with different tube diameters but Musk's original paper did some calculations on this and it's a half inch or more.

This same thing would also make the pipe immune from most forms of attack from terrorists.  It would take a gun caliber 2" or bigger to punch a hole, or a pretty large focused explosion, through a pipe this thick.

Even if the pipe is punctured or develops a leak, all that happens is pressure is lost, and the vehicles within slow down and air friction increases.

Their solution for earthquakes is also simple and effective.  The pipe is attached in a way that allows its support to move on the pipe.  For quakes with movement up to  the compliance of the mechanism, nothing will happen at all and operation can proceed unaffected.  This is well over magnitude 6.  For a bigger quake, there's a chance the travel of the mechanism will be exceeded.  This won't break the pipe but there may be damage.  Vehicles in operation would slow down and might need rescue, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where an earthquake, even of magnitude 9 or more, actually killing hyperloop passengers.

The Winds of Winter

George R R Martin has seemingly paused the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series after book 5.  The TV show did not pause there, but it went its own way...some of which was entertaining storytelling, but which ended one of the greatest TV shows in history with a disappointing, nonsensical fiasco.

 One of Martin's stylistic modes is that he does a lot of foreshadowing--hints about what is going to happen.  Some of this is intended to make the events make a lot more sense, to deepen our understanding of what is happening.   He has announced that the next book will be called "The Windows of Winter" and that it will probably need to be split into two books.  He insists that he's well along the writing of it but that he's got so many other projects that he's making less progress than the books fans would like.

Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, had made an alliance with the Wildlings to defend against the Night King and his zombies, but skeptics within the watch murdered him.   His allies, including the Red Witch, have recovered his dead body and have seen the clearly fatal wounds.  

Daenerys has escaped from the attack of the Harpies by riding Drogon for the very first time.  There seems to have been some telepathic communication going on there but it's not clear.  They have flown vaguely south, and have landed on a big hill, but she has no real idea where they are.  Drogon is severely injured and exhausted, and is unable to hunt on his own, and Daenerys is trying to bring him food while he recovers.

Barristan Selmy has survived the Harpy attack, where he was killed in the show.   Along with Jorah and the mercenary, they are planning a rescue of Daenerys, although they don't yet know where to begin.

Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings/Free Folk, is still alive, the red witch having cast a spell that convinced Stannis to burn one of Mance's more challenging underlings, thinking that it was Rayder himself.  Jon Snow shot an arrow into the victim to spare him the agony of being burned alive. 

Arya is in Braavos, apparently still in training for the Faceless Men.

Sansa and Theon have escaped from Ramsey Bolton and are still in the woods running. 

Meera, Bran and Hodor are cornered by the zombies in what appears to be an alliance with the Children of the Forest.  The old 3 eyed raven is in there with them, trapped in the roots of a weirwood tree.  It doesn't look good.  The incident that tells us how Hodor got his name is very clearly in the near future and will very likely happen just as it did in the show.

Bran has seen that his aunt Lyanna has died in childbirth, and knows that who he'd thought was his half-brother Jon Snow is in fact his cousin, Aegon Targerian, and that Ned Stark went to extraordinary lengths to protect him.  He has a stronger claim to the Iron Throne does Danerys.  Whether Bran knows whether he's legitimate or not is unclear.  The only living person with direct knowledge of this is Howland Reed, Meera's father.

What's about to happen?  I think the TV show got some things right.  The explanation of how Hodor got his name is clearly correct, although it may differ in detail.

I suspect that the show also got the location of Drogon and Danerys right.  How this will play out is unclear but the TV show version is vaguely plausible.  Will there be another demonstration of Daenerys special fire-gift or will her win over the Dothracki come from the dragons and the collaboration of what remains of her loyal Khalate.  Drogon played no apparent role in this in the show, which I find completely implausible.

In the show, the Harpies are innumerable and overwhelming.  This is implausible, although there were certainly be enough of them to force Danerys to flee.  Jorah, Barristan, etc., will plan a rescue.  This too will go more or less as in the show, although I suspect Barristan's presence will change quite a lot.

In the show, Jon Snow seems to have broken his vow to the Night's Watch, which should have severely damaged his credibility.  In fact, because he died and was brought back to life, his vow has been completed, but several times this is explicitly pushed under the rug in the show.  Martin would not have done this.

I think Jon Snow's recovery will happen in a way that is much more public and surprising.  Here's my guess:  Targarian "Dragons" have a special power that gives them some immunity to heat, and also allows them to come back to life in fire, at least if burned before too much decay has set in.   My guess is that the Red Witch will try to revive him, but fail, and then they will burn the corpse as is Night's Watch tradition.  Midway through the cremation, Jon Snow will come out of the fire--hair and clothing burned off as with Daenerys, but his wounds completely healed and apparently fully alive.  The entire night's watch, including those hostile to Jon, the wildlings and Stannis and his army, will see this and recognize that Jon is truly something special.

 Lady Stoneheart (Caitlyn Tully/Stark)  will hear of this and of Jon's true parentage, and realize that her hatred for Jon Snow was entirely misplaced and that Ned was protecting his nephew, not his own bastard, at great sacrifice to himself and her, and that Ned had probably been loyal to her the whole time.  Since Caitlyn is a POV character, we will see her agony of this revelation first hand.  She cannot speak, but will communicate that she now supports Jon/Aegon as not just King in the North, but King of the seven Kingdoms.  her deadly gang of assassins will play an important role in defeating Cersei, and possibly the battle against the night king.

Daenerys will initially be skeptical of Jon/Aegon's claim, but will eventually accede, including encouraging the dragon and Jon to join.  I suspect the incest in the TV show will not occur, but it might.   I suspect there will be an alliance to fight Cersei and there will ultimately be some cooperative Aunt/Nephew alliance.  Daenerys /is/ the mother of the dragons and will demand a more equal role despite her sex.  Several Targaryan sisters have effectively co-ruled, so this is not without precedent. The fact that the middle dragon is named Rhaegal, after Jon's true father, is some serious forshadowing.

Jamie will join Jon/Aegon/Daenerys after he comes clean about why he tried to kill Bran and how tired he is of his sister's destructive scheme--and buoyed by Tyrion's existing alliance with her.    I suspect the consumation and knighting of Brienne will happen much as it does in the show, but they will marry and live relatively happily ever after.

 I'm not sure who will actually strike the final blow against the night king.  In a way, I hope it's the red witch melesandre, who will kill herself and save the world by doing it.   Arya, with her drop move, is seriously implausible although I admit it was fun to watch.  Theon's dying heroism is very plausible, and he has shown signs of it in rescuing Sansa, but Bran's helpless inactivity is not.   I really like the blue flames coming from Viserion's injured neck, and I do think Viserion getting turned by the night king is a very plausible part of the plot.

 

Colonizing Space

 I'm a fan of shows and movies that depict the colonization of space: Firefly, The Expanse, 2001 a Space Odyssey, etc.     I'm a true believer: Unless we manage to destroy ourselves first, the Human Race will eventually have extensive colonies in space.

 Space colonies are a lot different than colonies in the new world, India, China, Africa, etc 4 centuries ago, or by various cultures around the Mediterranean and other places 2000 years ago.   For starters, there were already people living in most of these places--they had air to breathe, soil to plant crops in, etc.  This is not true in space.  We will either have to bring these things with us or make them there.  Colonization opened people up to new diseases and other problems in the old days; that will also be true of space: Radiation poisoning, lack of gravity, price of air and water, etc.   My dad, who worked for decades designing satellites, is skeptical that we will ever be able to overcome these, but I think we will.  But it will be hard and it will take much longer than people like Elon Musk imagine.

 The first nasty problem is the difficulty in getting people and goods from Earth's surface into space.  This is very hard, but there's nothing completely intractable about it.  Chemical rockets can do it, but at great expense.  SpaceX, to their credit, have moved the needle considerably.  Several science fiction writers have proposed some sort of fusion rocket, which can be profoundly more efficient.  This will require a breakthrough to achieve, although it's superficially plausible.  Several SF stories, Such as The Expanse and Firefly have followed this route.  Breakthroughs, unlike more straightforward engineering, are difficult to predict, but I understand enough of the physics to be pretty confident that the breakthrough will happen, most likely in the next half century or so...I'm guessing it will be some sort of rocket fueled by Nuclear Fusion, but I expect to be surprised...

The next problem is gravity.  It turns out that humans need some gravity to be healthy, although we can tolerate its absence for a little while.  Many SciFi stories imply or require some sort of artificial gravity--Star Trek and Firefly are two notable cases, although little detail is given. Gravity Plating, as suggested by Star Trek, will require a pretty big breakthrough--comparable to the Warp Drive of that same milieu.  It's plausible that they are related--In Einsteinian General Relativity, gravity is an artifact of the warping space by large masses.  There may be other ways to warp space, ways which allow faster than light travel or gravity plating, but these are completely outside our present understanding of physics.  

 The Expanse does away with artificial gravity: they make it the old fashioned way, by accelerating.  In space ships, they are designed so that thrust is aligned with the axis of the ship, and any acceleration or deceleration gives the occupants a pretty realistic impression of gravity.  In the stories, which are mostly about warfare in space, accelerations well over 1 G are commonplace, but I think the vast majority of ships will remain comfortably 1 G or less the vast majority of the time.  The second way, of course, is to spin things--centrifugal space ships.  Several of the space colonies in the stories are asteroids, which have been spun up to create artificial gravity and hollowed out.   A little engineering shows that this is implausible.  A 1 G force on a several mile long cable exceeds the tensile strength of most rocky-based materials, including iron.  Centrifugal colonies will be largely artificial and their diameter will be only a few miles at most.    They may be very long--more like O'neill cylinders and less like those envisioned by von Braun and Chesley Bonnestal.   They might be made from material harvested from asteroids like Ceres, but they will not simply be those asteroids.

Present chemical drives can only produce an acceleration sufficient to get out of the earth's gravity well for a few minutes.  But if there is some sort of fusion drive that can produce a sizable fraction of a G for weeks on end, this will have a profound effect on travel around the solar system.  A ship that can accelerate for many days at one G can go to Mars in a few days.  This would profoundly change economics of a colony.   It could even bring the duration of a trip to another star down to a few decades. 

The third difficult, but not intractable problem, is radiation.  All manned space missions so far have been one of two things:  very short or, beneath the van Allen Radiation belts, which protect us from a lot of radiation.  A colony on the moon, Mars, or in a space station or elsewhere, will need considerable radiation shielding.   The simplest way to do this today is using many feet of shielding.  Heavy metals like Lead are the most effective by thickness, but a much thicker layer of dirt or water is much more effective.  I'm think that most space habitations, including those in centrifugal stations, will be protected by ten meters or more of whatever material is most convenient.  Digging deep underground will be the simplest way to provide this on a planet or moon, but an O'neill cylinder will need to have a thick shell of some sort..

 Water is relatively common in space, but it will be a limited resource for most colonies because it'll need to be mined and transported.  Air is a little more problematic, but not really.   We can breathe any non-poisonous gas mixture that contains enough Oxygen and CO2.  On earth, Nitrogen is most convenient and likely will be in space too, but we're far from limited.  Oxygen can be made from water and other things by Electrolysis and is a byproduct of photosynthesis.

 We will need plants growing in space to feed ourselves.   Simply dedicating surface area to plants is not particularly efficient: The most solar-efficient plants are well under 1%, where present photovoltaics can easily do 15%.  Put photovoltaics on all possible surfaces and grow plants underground under efficient electric lighting.  The photovoltaics are much more tolerant of radiation than plants are and are relatively easy to replace, and to manufacture from materials that we already know are on The Moon and Mars and other objects.

Presuming we don't drive ourselves extinct first (and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are presently the leading individuals working towards making us extinct)  I think we will have permanent colonies in space by 2050 or so, and self-sufficient colonies some time after 2100.  The sorts of populations on Mars and Ceres envisioned in The Expanse are unlikely to occur until there is a major breakthrough, such as the Expanse's Epstein Drive, but I'd think that by 2200 there will be tens of thousands of people living, breeding and dying entirely in space.  Far from the millions portrayed by the Expanse. 

Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters are Stupid?

 

The following is by Florida writer Adam-Troy Castro, 2019

'An anguished question from a Trump supporter: "Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?"

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters - the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don't...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought "Fine."

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, "Okay."

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, "No problem."

That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, "Not an issue."

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn't care, you chirped, "He sure knows me."

That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, "That's cool!"

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.

That when you heard him brag that he doesn't read books, you said, "Well, who has time?"

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn't commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, "That makes sense."

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, "Yes!"

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man's coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, "What a great guy!"

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, "Thumbs up!"

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, "That's the way I want my President to be."

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they're supposed to be regulating and you have said, "What a genius!"

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, "That's smart!"

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, "That makes sense."

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, "falling in love" with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, "That's statesmanship!"

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas - he explains that they’re just “animals” - and you say, “well, ok then.”

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.

What you don't get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it's also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you're NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.