The Rise of the Drones

The Drone Explosion

Drones are experiencing an evolutionary explosion as they invade every domain of military conflict. In the air, on land, at sea, and even in space, drones promise to change dramatically the character of armed conflict. (...)

The complete replacement of human combatants by drone forces is a technologically feasible end state for the evolution of drone weaponry. There is no reason why the command hierarchy of human armed forces cannot be emulated and improved upon by appropriate software, with every level of operational units responsive to commands from above it and directing the levels below. The greater decision-making bandwidth of automated control nodes would likely result in a highly efficient and flexible organization of forces. Thus, under competitive evolutionary pressure, it is likely that the current hybrid human/drone order of battle will steadily shift its composition toward a full drone force, with considerable autonomy, operating under high-level human directives.

The reason why drones are evolving so rapidly and unpredictably is that both microchip power and AI software technology are on exponential growth curves. The cheap and capable cameras and processors in our phones are providing the eyes and brains for inexpensive drones. At the same time, fierce competition in AI development is pushing out the frontiers of machine vision, problem solving, and adaptive behavior for drones. Weapons designers can now use COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the cost of drones. Moreover, the ability to upgrade the “intelligence” of drones via software downloads means that, unlike conventional military hardware, the capabilities of a drone arsenal can continue to grow after the hardware is deployed.

[ed. I read somewhere about "drone swarms" (maybe a Neal Stephenson book), no bigger than small birds, or in some cases, bees. Hundreds, guided in sync. Imagine that.]

Eastern Promises

The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being. Sure, I can extract the basics of a television news report or a newspaper article, but that’s asking for too much concentration to pleasurably distract me.

Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture, and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance. Now, some eighty years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria—a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and Third World middlemen—the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. It is perhaps unintentional that the authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter economically, culturally, and demographically. Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades,” and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past fifteen years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesando, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.

Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address vacationers thronging formerly sedate neighborhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savor the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution,” a term born in the academy before becoming ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.

Tokyo’s race toward peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of around five thousand square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities like Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.

Still, mass tourism is as demoralizing and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank—I know it is not maliciousness on their part—but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offenses invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathizes with the family of sightseers blundering their way onto a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the sidewalk at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.

Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been perpetually relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omotenashi—basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese—has been popularized by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists, or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlor.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.

by Dylan Levi King, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Yue Zhang

Pat Metheny

DOGE Is Replacing Fired Workers With a Chatbot

"Hey senator. Did you read my shirt?"

"Yeah, I saw that."

"It says TECH SUPPORT. That's funny, right? It's because I know computers."

"Yeah. That's.... that is definitely a t-shirt."

"And it's a joke! I saw it on Red.... I made it up! Hey Marco! Did you read my shirt!? It's because I'm the computer guy. Do you know computers?"

"Yes, Elon. I know computers. Would you please excuse me, I have to be... anywhere else."

"Hey Kristi! Did you see my..."

"Get away from me, Elon."

via:

Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best (Wired)

Images: My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away (Deviant Art)

[ed. Gotta say, Spirited Away is my favorite.]

Music Therapy

‘She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk’: music therapy helped Joni Mitchell recover from a stroke – could it ward off depression and dementia too?

In 2015, Joni Mitchell suffered a catastrophic stroke. According to her friend, the musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “when she got back from the hospital, she couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, and the doctors were so pessimistic about her recovery, they hadn’t scheduled any follow-ups”. For a while it looked as though one of the most gifted songwriters of the 20th century would be permanently silenced.

One day, though, the nurses caring for her at her home found Levitin’s number on a piece of paper in the kitchen, and called him. They had noticed that Mitchell perked up when she heard music coming from their phones, and wondered if he had any suggestions for songs she might respond to. Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). Their picks ranged from Debussy to Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen.

Here was the perfect solution, then: a tailor-made music therapy programme. The personalised aspect is something Levitin, whose new book is called Music As Medicine, knows to be all-important. As he explains to me from his home office in Los Angeles, “If you’re talking about therapeutic effects, you have to like the music. If you don’t like it, your walls are going to go up, your cortisol levels will spike. [You’ll say] ‘Get me away from this.’” As luck would have it, Mitchell had set down exactly what she’d need in these circumstances while she was well, and Levitin knew precisely where the nurses could find it – in the corner of the bookcase at the far end of her living room. He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.”

Mitchell made steady progress with the help of speech and physical therapists, but Levitin sees music as a crucial part of the picture. “One of the things we know is that music you like increases dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical that motivates you to do things … having that music as a reminder of who she is, who she was, and what she cares about, helped her to do the very difficult job of recovery, and to follow through with the protocols of the therapists.”

In a touching anecdote from the book, Levitin describes how, a year after Mitchell’s stroke, he brought flowers on one of his regular visits. “She walked over to a cabinet by herself to get a vase for them,” he writes. “She moved some vases out of the way to find a particular one in the back, a glass vase with a single handle and flowers painted on it. ‘That’s a beautiful vase, where did you get it?’ I asked. ‘I bought it when I was living in Laurel Canyon with Graham.’ Oh. That vase.” (...)

In 2006 he published This Is Your Brain on Music, a mix of the technical and personal that became a runaway bestseller and was translated into 18 languages. It covered the gamut of musical theory – from rhythm, harmony and pitch (including the “Levitin effect” – the fact that even non musicians usually remember songs in the correct key) to their neural correlates and why our musical preferences are defined by what we hear up to the age of 18.

Music As Medicine marks a return to his core subject, after successful books on the neuroscience of ageing and the psychology of misinformation. “When I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, I wanted to have at least a chapter on medical benefits of music, but there really wasn’t any good science about it – and I’m not one of those who doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a story. So I couldn’t write about it until now, because there’s actually been some good work,” he tells me. “We’re learning enough about the underlying mechanisms of music and brain and body that we can apply them, not just in the laboratory, but in clinics and hospitals and care facilities and outpatient treatments.” (...)

Since prevention is better than cure, is there any evidence that engaging with music can protect against dementia? Yes and no. “It’s not going to prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will prevent you from seeing the effects or symptoms of Alzheimer’s for some time.” And the more active your engagement, the better. “Playing an instrument is neuroprotective, because you’re creating something. You’re orchestrating your limbs and your fingers and your vocal cords in ways that you haven’t before. No two performances are ever identical, and so they’re creating new neural pathways.” This is the concept of cognitive reserve: “I think of it as being like an athlete. If you can bench press 250 pounds on a regular basis, even with a cold and a sore arm, you’re going to be able to bench press more than I can.”

So is music a bit like a workout for the brain? “Yeah: it engages every part of the brain that we know of. It invokes memory, emotion, reward systems, eye-hand coordination, planning. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you’re not a professional musician or particularly good at it, you get all the benefits.”

That’s why Levitin recommends (prescribes?) playing music, whatever your ability or age. For anyone who can’t see the point when someone like Yo-Yo Ma has a 65-year head start, he has a clear message: the idea that you need to emulate professionals or be well trained in theory is “bullshit”. “It was 500 years ago or so, when the Europeans built the first concert halls, that we created this artificial distinction between the performers and the audience. But for tens of thousands of years, music was participatory. Still, in most cultures on the planet – not in our hyper-success-oriented western culture – people are singing unselfconsciously in groups, and nobody’s making a big deal out of it.”

by David Shariatmadari, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jack Robinson/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Ted Gioia's excellent (and free) serialized book Music to Raise the Dead (HB).]

Robert Rauschenberg, Nectar (Waterworks), (inkjet dye transfer on paper), 1993

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How New York Drove a Steak Through the Heart of Texas

They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and that’s certainly true regarding the job of lieutenant governor. It’s an express train to obscurity in most states; in Texas, the lieutenant governor controls the state Senate and chairs the budget process. So when the incumbent, Dan Patrick, sketched his legislative priorities the other day, people paid heed — even when he was trolling the state of New York.

Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”

“Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” Patrick wrote on X after meeting with Texas cattle raisers last week.

Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)

In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”

How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.

But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.

But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.

And then they got killed.

Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”

Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.

Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).

by David Von Drahle, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post

[ed. Some days it feels like we're living in a Saturday Night Live skit. See also: No harm, no fowl: Trump recommends a return to subsistence farming (WSJ):]

***

Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission. (...)

Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.

“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)

Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.

This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]

NFL Teams See Aaron Rodgers Opportunity

NEW YORK—Leaping at the opportunity to make their intentions clear, numerous NFL front offices expressed interest this week in quarterback Aaron Rodgers playing elsewhere, sources confirmed Tuesday. “Aaron Rodgers feels like he could be a great fit for the culture of other places,” said an anonymous NFC general manager among the flurry of teams across the NFL frantically stating their commitment to keeping Rodgers off their roster. “We immediately reached out to his agent to improve our chances of keeping Aaron Rodgers as far away as possible from our franchise. This puts us in a much better position than many of the other teams in the league who now risk acquiring the former Jets quarterback because they waited too long to make an insultingly low salary offer or mock his weird beliefs and idiotic conspiracy theories.” At press time, several NFL teams reportedly entered a bidding war offering high draft picks to any franchise willing to suffer Aaron Rodgers.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ferenc Lantos (Hungarian, 1929-2014) - Shift in balance

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Chris Ware
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[ed. Anywhere, USA.]

Barbarians at the Gate

Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of stale beer, bright young men outnumbering bright young women whose attention they desire. Starry-eyed, badly-dressed, trying way too hard — the essence of DC.

(Incidentally, Democrats are no better — every bit the caricature as their opposite. But these CPAC afterparties usually nail the Washington striver stereotype in singular fashion.)

This party was very different, however. It wasn’t even a CPAC party. It was billed as a “DOGE appreciation party.” And while that may sound plenty dorky, it surfaced something else that’s novel in Trump’s DC. It surfaced a kind of gleeful barbarism that I’ve just not seen before.

Everything about the party was over the top. After you RSVP’d, you needed to get vetted. (For whatever reason, I was approved fairly quickly.) An email went out the day of the party saying that the whole thing was “strictly off the record” — presumably because journalists had breached the defenses. The note was intentionally edgy. “Security will be tight, so arrive prepared.” There were guard goons at the door. Word had spread on social media that the party was hard-right, so a handful of cops were called in to protect attendees from a dozen or so people out front chanting “Fuck off, fascists!” in that familiar protester cadence. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this resistance was being paid by the organizers to be there, for ambience. It all felt curated.

The space was rented, I was told; Meta had apparently held a party there earlier in the week. Walking up to the third floor, you were confronted by a massive stuffed bison by the entrance. The whole place was shabby chic — a penthouse loft, with a massive split-level living room that no one would ever live in, with dusty bookshelves and odd furniture scattered about. There was an industrial-sized kitchen that looked unused. A bar in the living room and a second one at the exit to the rooftop were further tip-offs that this is an event space and not a home. (That said, I did wander into a bedroom decorated Buddhist-style, so who knows?)

Respecting the “off the record” injunction, I’ll stick with the mood, as in truth it was more instructive than any conversation I had.

The mood was jubilant. But it wasn’t just that sense of liberating triumph that Trump’s victory has injected into many conservatives. It was a kind of agitated truculence. The DOGE theme had everyone drunk on destruction. There certainly was a lot of camaraderie, you could feel it in all the conversations. But there was no sense of restraint, and no sense of positive mission. The mission itself was to tear down, to punish.

The evening was not free of cliché: At one point, I overheard a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire. My mind turned to the sack of Rome, a point of no return. Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when the Visigoths entered the city in 410AD, retold the instructions of Alaric, their Christian king:

He encouraged his troops boldly to seize the rewards of valour, and to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people; but he exhorted them at the same time to spare the lives of the unresisting citizens, and to respect the churches of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, as holy and inviolable sanctuaries.

Today, the barbarians have also entered the gates. But King Trump has no Christian virtues to speak of, and he has counseled no restraint. His taunting address last night to a joint session of Congress brooked no pity for the vanquished. There will certainly be much plunder and self-enrichment as the wealthy and effeminate stand by helplessly and watch. But unlike back then, it feels like no denizen, and no institution, will be spared.

I don’t want to pretend that I somehow stand above and apart from all of this. The giddy glee feels in part driven by the prospect of smashing decadence. And I feel it too. Moreover, I suspect that the feeling is shared much more broadly across the country — and that it’s what keeps Trump’s revolutionary radicalism still above-water in the polls. Only a slim majority voted for Trump, but the rejection of the progressive identity agenda — call it “wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever you want — feels broader. (...)

I saw a familiar face at the party at one point later in the evening. I drunkenly tried to communicate the above to him. “These people are having fun right now, but they don’t know what’s coming. This is not an organized army, these are bandits and vandals, and no one has full control. They’ll turn on each other eventually. Everyone is backslapping tonight, but they’ll all be swimming in each others’ blood in a year’s time!” Yes, drunkenly. But I still can’t shake the feeling.

by Damir Marusic, Wisdom of Crowds |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Happily tearing the country apart and ruining people's lives over something as insignificant as political correctness. See also: 50 Thoughts on DOGE (Statecraft). And, There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball (NYT).]

How AI Takeover Might Happen in Two Years

How AI Takeover Might Happen in Two Years 
Image: uncredited

I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios.

I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what could go wrong. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I should clarify what this is exactly. It's not a prediction. I don’t expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It’s not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It’s a sampling from the futures that are among the most devastating, and I believe, disturbingly plausible – the ones that most keep me up at night.

I’m telling this tale because the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

by joshc, LessWrong |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Life Lessons From a Coastal Wolf Pack

Pleasant Island is two miles from the town of Gustavus, Alaska, and less than 30 miles from where we’d anchored. A wolf pack arrived there in 2013, after swimming across the narrow channel from the mainland. Initially, they did what wolves typically do: eat every ungulate they could clamp their jaws around. After they’d decimated the island’s limited deer population, their next act seemed obvious: The pack would move, or starve. Several decades earlier, an ill-fated and ethically dubious ecological experiment on Alaska’s far-flung Coronation Island demonstrated what happens when introduced wolves eat all the local deer and have nowhere else to go: In the absence of prey, the wolves starved, resorting to cannibalism before eventually dying out entirely.

But, as Juneau-based biologist Gretchen Roffler and her colleagues revealed in a pair of studies published in 2021 and 2023, the Pleasant Island wolves found another way. When deer disappeared from the menu, the pack shopped around, and did so with remarkable success.

Roffler’s first glimpse of a Pleasant Island wolf eating a sea otter seemed like an anomaly. But when she observed the same behavior again, she suspected a larger phenomenon might be at play. To test this, she and her colleagues began the unglamorous work of scooping poop from the island’s beaches and forested trails. By analyzing the scat using a technique called DNA metabarcoding — akin to a prey fingerprinting tool for feces — Roffler, Taal Levi and other partners at Oregon State University could determine whether the wolves were eating terrestrial herbivores, like deer, or marine predators, like seals or otters. Combining this research with on-the-ground field observations and GPS collars that tracked the wolves, they found that the pack was not merely sampling otters; they were devouring them en masse. Despite being fierce adversaries, with sharp teeth and claws, otters provided the wolves with a reliable alternative to venison.

The sea otters were relative newcomers themselves. After near-extirpation throughout much of the North Pacific, otters were reintroduced to the outer islands of Southeast Alaska in the 1960s, and their population rapidly expanded. Whether the first Pleasant Island otter meal was a lucky accident or the result of a strategically planned hunt, the pack wasted no time in capitalizing on this now-abundant resource. In 2015, wolf scats collected from the island consisted of approximately 98% deer; by 2018, deer had disappeared entirely and sea otters made up more than two-thirds of their diet.

Though what wolves eat for lunch might not seem revolutionary, this demonstration of their flexibility is, particularly when it comes to shaping our scientific understanding of their lives. Wolves are known to be opportunistic, but this pack’s quick and dramatic prey shift sent shock waves through the wildlife world: in just three years, they’d upended classic predator-prey dynamics and bent the supposed “rules” of their lives.

Most wolves specialize on ungulates, including deer, moose and elk. Pleasant Island’s wolves seemed no different until they amended the core tenets of this long-standing exchange, and did so in a matter of just a few years. By crossing a dietary threshold, they had propelled themselves across ecotones and trophic levels — switching their primary food source from a bottom-up terrestrial herbivore (deer) to a top-down marine carnivore (otters). This isn’t just a matter of semantics; conserving the health of wildlife populations requires knowledge about what animals eat, where they live, and what they might do next. And these island-hopping wolves were full of surprises. (...)

The idea that carnivores’ dietary habits can influence their environments isn’t new. However, as our awareness of wolves’ ability to shift what they eat — quickly and sometimes dramatically — grows, so does the need for a more nuanced scientific approach. Traditionally, ecological theory has prioritized models that simplify relationships in the wild: Wolves dine on ungulates, predators need prey, and the lives of deer, beavers and otters have little in common. However, otter-eating wolves and other so-called exceptions may actually be teaching us just how capable some species are of responding rapidly when the need arises. Ecologists sometimes refer to this potential to pivot as “adaptive capacity;” i.e., how fast a species can change the rules of its own game.

by Caroline Van Hemert, High Country News |  Read more:

Image: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

[ed. Taking down a full grown otter would be quite a feat. They can grow up to nearly 5 ft. long and 100 lbs., with clam cracking jaws. Here's one (below) being cleaned of oil (took six people to hold him down, even moderately sedated):]

Image: markk

Spruce Pine Powers the World's Electronics

We have already identified some key resources involved in AI development that could be restricted. The economic bottlenecks are mainly around high energy requirements and chip manufacturing.

Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can't currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won't be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.

A recent hurricane flooding high-purity quartz mines made headlines because chip producers require it for the crucibles used in making silicon wafers. Lower purity means accidental doping of the silicon crystal, which means lower chip yields per wafer, at best. Those mines aren't the only source, but they seem to be the best one. There might also be ways to utilize lower-purity materials, but that might take time to develop and would require a lot more energy, which is already a bottleneck.

The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now. LessWrong (...)

***

High-quality quartz is the cornerstone of the semiconductors operating nearly every tech gadget worldwide. Cellphones, solar panels and artificial intelligence all rely on this resource.

However, such pure quartz is rare—it can only be found at a handful of places on Earth. And a North Carolina town home to the world’s biggest deposit of the mineral was just hit by Hurricane Helene.

Sitting an hour northeast of Asheville, the small town of Spruce Pine, also known as Mineral City, is home to about 2,000 people. It also contains a crucial supply of the natural high-purity quartz required for the computers and devices that run our modern world.

When Hurricane Helene struck, Spruce Pine was doused in more than two feet of rain, flooding its downtown, knocking out power and forcing businesses to shutter. The quartz mines in Spruce Pine, owned by Belgian mining company Sibelco and the local Quartz Corp, supply 80 to 90 percent of all high-quality quartz in the world, per CNN’s Clare Duffy and Dianne Gallagher. But the two companies closed down operations a day before the storm crossed the region, with no word on when work would resume.

“I don’t think the nation really realizes how this little, small town is so critical,” Michael Vance, a local real estate developer who has been informally coordinating some relief efforts after the storm, tells the Washington Post’s Eva Dou. ~ Smithsonian

***

Ultra-high-purity quartz is an essential component to semiconductor chips, and the only places in the world that can meet this need are two mines in a small North Carolina town. The mines' owner, Sibelco, is investing $700 million to expand capacity, but is that enough to keep up with AI-fueled chip demand?

Spruce Pine is a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, NC. You can get to the general area via a number of ways, depending on your point of origin, but for the last stretch of the trip, you need to travel down Fish Hatchery Rd. It's a two-lane rural highway, as depicted in Google Maps, set amid a pleasant scenic backdrop.

It's on this road that the modern economy rests, according to Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick, who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. That's because the road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

This is not the first time these mines – owned by Sibelco, which mines, processes, and sells specialty industrial minerals – have been highlighted as integral not only to the global semiconductor industry but also to the solar photovoltaic markets.

It is an alarming prospect to contemplate, and it is fair to wonder whether Mollick is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But there is no denying the fact that digital devices around the world contain a small piece of Spruce Pine's unique ultra-high-purity quartz. "It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you'll find quartz from Spruce Pine," Rolf Pippert, mine manager at Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, tells the BBC.~ TechSpot

by LessWrong, Smithsonian, TechSpot |  Read more: here, here and here.

Image: uncredited via

[ed. So of course, guess what: Trump calls for an end to the Chips Act, redirecting funds to national debt (TechSpot). And, for once, Republicans finally find a backbone and say NO.]

The Natural History of Vacant Lots (University of California Press, 1987)

via:

Tobacco Field on the Philippines. American vintage postcard

via:

The Empathy Struggle

“More federal layoffs at Eastern WA nuclear contamination site,” read the headlines this past week.

Prompted by the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting spree, the Department of Energy has in the past month slashed 16% of its administrators who oversee the cleanup of the old Hanford nuclear-bomb-making factories.

A Hanford site manager predicted more carnage is coming: “I don’t think we are at the end.”

This has upset locals. The newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, recently excoriated their congressman, U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, for not doing anything to stop it.

“Residents of Washington’s 4th Congressional District did not elect Newhouse to stand idly by as President Donald Trump dismantles the federal government,” an editorial fumed.

To which I wondered: Didn’t they?

The 4th Congressional District runs from Canada to Oregon in a strip in Central Washington. It’s the reddest sector of the state, having just voted for Trump by a landslide 21-point margin.

Trump explicitly campaigned on taking a chain saw to federal programs and the civil service. Before the election, he said Musk would be his “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” and the two pledged to hack “at least $2 trillion” out of federal spending — about 30% of the total budget.

Where did the good residents of the 4th think that money was going to come from?

The 4th is famously the most government-dependent part of the state. It’s basically a company town, where the company is Uncle Sam.

Partly this is due to the $3 billion-per-year Hanford project. Partly it’s the system of federal dams and reclamation projects that provide farms with subsidized irrigation water. But it’s also the place in the state where residents rely most heavily on government assistance programs.

Example: 38% of the people in the 4th are enrolled in Medicaid, the low-income health program. This is by far the highest percentage in the state. By contrast, in Seattle’s 7th District it’s just 14%, according to the Washington State Health Care Authority.

Yet Republicans, led by Trump and including the 4th’s Newhouse, are pushing a budget downsizing that if adopted will lead to major cuts in Medicaid.

Or take education. Trump campaigned on shuttering the federal Department of Education completely. Which Washington district is most reliant on spending from that department? The 4th.

The anti-government politics of the 4th has been a paradox for decades. Fifteen years ago, its congressman was a leading national critic of the 2009 federal “stimulus” program that aimed to jump start America out of the Great Recession. Except out of all 435 congressional districts, which one got the most financial bang from that stimulus — more than $3,700 per person? You guessed it.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, has been doing what Newhouse has not — fighting like crazy against the worst of the above cuts that excessively target his district. But lately I’ve been thinking: Voters there keep asking for all this. So why not let them have it?

Same with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who this past week pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s tariffs in his first term cost Eastern Washington farmers millions, and that the repeat will be worse. It’s “a nightmare for our farmers,” she said.

OK, but Trump pledged endlessly in the campaign to impose big tariffs, and farmers tended to back him anyway. So surely nothing is so predictable as this nightmare?

I keep reading these interviews of Trump voters who got fired, or whose family member got deported, or whose business is being whipsawed by tariffs. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as it is for the 4th District: What in the world did you expect?

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren/The Associated Press, 2022
[ed. This seems to be the only plan Democrats have going forward - waiting for the realities of cuts to sink in (which should tell you something about their leadership as well). If you don't understand how a machine works, you won't know how to fix it when it's broke, or should expect it to run any better just by stripping out random parts.]

Geno Smith Trade Begs the Question: What are the Seahawks Doing?

It was hard to look at that Seahawks roster and see something beyond mediocrity. This was true last week and became even more so when receiver DK Metcalf requested a trade Wednesday.

It’s been a position Seattle has been stuck in for several years, missing the past two postseasons with winning records and sneaking into the playoffs three seasons ago at 9-8.

 

It’s about the most unexciting place you can be in sports — barely relevant but with no juice for the future. So it seems general manager John Schneider pressed reset, for better or for worse.

And it could very well be worse.

On Friday, reports surfaced that the Seahawks will trade starting quarterback Geno Smith to the Raiders for a third-round draft pick, which was confirmed by Seattle Times reporter Bob Condotta. Hey, there have been third-round picks that have changed franchises, but the odds of grabbing a true impact player that low are slim.

So the big question is: Are the Seahawks punting on the 2025 season? Or are they targeting another quarterback that they think can be an upgrade over Smith? (...)

It’s hard to find good quarterbacks in this league, and make no mistake — Smith was a good one. His iffy decision-making kept him shy of being a great one, but the man who passed for 4,320 yards (fourth in the NFL) last season while completing 70.4 percent of his passes (fifth) was more than productive behind center. Throw in that he had four game-winning drives and four fourth-quarter comebacks, all while playing behind one of the shoddiest lines in the league, and you have to wonder if they can find someone better anytime soon.

The Seahawks sit 18th in the draft order, staring at a draft class that isn’t particularly deep at QB. Might Shedeur Sanders be sporting green and blue?

If I had to pick one scenario, I would say the Seahawks go hard after Darnold in what just became an extremely intriguing offseason. They might even be thankful he played so poorly in his last two games so as to bring down his price. And if they don’t get him, my guess is Schneider is content with having a down year so that they can improve through the draft. That said, it’s fair to question the Seahawks’ draft acumen at this point.

Remember, they got back-to-back first- and second-round picks from the Broncos when they traded Russell Wilson. Yet they weren’t able to turn themselves into a contender despite having a surprisingly capable quarterback in Smith. If you’re a nervous 12 right now, it’s justified. It’s possible this team will struggle for a while.

As for Smith himself, he’ll always be welcomed in Seattle. He became an instant fan favorite after his 2022 debut against Denver, which started with “Ge-no!” chants and ended with his famous “they wrote me off, I ain’t write back, though” quote. And his incessant grace endeared him to the fan base even more. He might not have had the hardware, but he had the heart. That matters around here.

What matters more, however, are those W’s. And the best way to get them in the NFL is by having a productive quarterback. The Seahawks don’t have that right now, and might be without their most imposing receiver soon, too.

by Matt Calkins, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Buchanan

[ed. Well, crap. This really sucks. First Russell, then Bobby Wagner, Pete Caroll, Tyler Lockett, DK Metcalf, and now Geno. Some of the greatest, most endearing/loyal players/coaches in franchise history, all with some productive years left in their careers. Forget what the fans want. The NFL is as cutthroat and cold-hearted as any business in the world, focused solely on two bottom-line metrics: wins and money (as if we didn't already know this, but keep getting shocked anyway). So, they've finally depleted all my good will and interest. I don't root for corporations. See also: Seahawks trading quarterback Geno Smith to Raiders, source confirms (ST).]

Bill Evans

[ed. See also: Live '64 '75.]