The Weekly Flail -- September 7, 2024
OVERVIEW
We live in a disintegrating world of human collapse. But not everything is collapsing. There is still hope to slow the climate disaster enough to transition to a managed, fully sustainable planetary culture. It is a long shot and hard going, but a managed transition would be better than a ten or twenty-year descent into chaos led by fascists and idiots.
To get the week’s political trainwrecks out of the way, Trump appears to be in severe mental decline, which the corporate media is covering up. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz have so far avoided disaster but clarified that they would change nothing significant as dictated by the corporatist oligarchs.
Nate Silver announced that Harris would win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. That could be the worst possible outcome as the tipping point for the breakup of the United States.
There are no indications of any ceasefire in Gaza, and Netanyahu is fully committed to genocide and the takeover, by settlement, of all remaining parts of the Palestinian state. Harris is entirely on board with Netanyahh’s plans, with mild complaints for ass-covering. Meanwhile, Iran keeps its cards close and is not launching direct attacks. That is more than can be said for Israel’s Zionists, who are starting their next war with Lebanon and Hezbollah.
For what it is worth, there are positive signs of accelerating the transition from fossil fuels.
GAZA
+ A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic. [Source: Counterpunch Roaming Charges]
Israeli attacks kill over a dozen people as war on Gaza enters 12th month
Published On 7 Sep 2024
At least 61 people have been killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza in the last two days as Israel’s war on the besieged enclave enters its 12th month with little sign of respite for the Palestinian territory.
Israeli air raids killed more than a dozen people overnight into Saturday, hospital and local authorities said, as health workers wrapped up the second phase of an urgent polio vaccination campaign designed to prevent a large-scale outbreak. [Source: Aljazeera]
Family demands independent probe into killing of US activist in West Bank
Published On 7 Sep 2024
The family of a Turkish-American activist shot and killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank urged the United States to launch an independent inquiry into her killing, saying an Israeli probe was not “adequate”.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot by an Israeli soldier while taking part in a demonstration against illegal Israeli settlements near the West Bank village of Beita, near the city of Nablus, on Friday, according to witnesses and local authorities.
An autopsy confirmed that Eygi, who died of her wounds at a Nablus hospital, was killed by a sniper bullet to the head, Nablus Governor Ghassan Daghlas told Al Jazeera on Saturday.
Nablus, the governorate where Beita is located, will hold an official ceremony commemorating Eygi after her body is handed to her family, said Daghlas.
“A US citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed,” said her family in a statement on Saturday, describing her as a “fiercely passionate human rights activist”.
“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully and violently by the Israeli military,” the statement said.
CLIMATE
+ The Global temperature in August 2024 tied with August 2023 for the warmest of any August on record. Up in Svalbard at 78° north latitude in the Arctic Ocean, the average temperature for August was a hitherto unfathomable 51.8 F (11 C)…
+ For three months, the temperature in Phoenix averaged 99F…On Wednesday, the temperature in Phoenix reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a record 100th straight day. [Source: Counterpunch Roaming Charges]
+ More than 20% of the Amazonian rainforest is already gone and much of what remains–dried out by a mega-drought and seared by extreme heat–is going up in flames…
[Source: Counterpunch Roaming Charges]
Hot days or heat waves? Researchers debate how to count deaths from heat
www.science.org Aug 23 (2024)
Focusing on temperature extremes can galvanize policy changes but risks undercounting.
More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes last year, the warmest on record globally, a study published this month found.
The number was surpassed only by the 60,000 Europeans who died of heat-related causes in 2022.
Another study this month found that the toll in Europe could triple by the end of the century if Earth continues to warm to 3°C or 4°C above preindustrial levels.
The numbers, though shocking, almost certainly understate the toll of hot weather, worsened by global warming. But scientists aren’t sure how to do better.
Heat Kills Thousands in the U.S. Every Year. Why Are the Deaths So Hard to Track?
Researchers estimate that heat kills more people than any other extreme weather event, and the number of heat-related deaths reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has steadily risen in recent years.
In 2023, the agency reported that heat played a role in approximately 2,300 deaths, though this number may be revised as more records are processed. But some researchers say the actual number is far higher. One study that examined data from the late 1990s to the early 2000s concluded that the average number of fatalities annually was roughly 10,000.
The C.D.C. relies on death certificates reported by local authorities for its tally, but the way these certificates are completed varies from place to place.
Many local officials do not have the time, funding or staffing needed to investigate heat-related questions. And officials do not apply a consistent set of criteria to determine whether heat contributed to a death — or even consider heat as a potential factor when filling out death certificates.
It’s actually a big issue on how to figure this out. The article does a good job discussing the various issues. Getting an accurate count is going to require federal standards and federal funding. [Source: SmokingTyger-Medium]
The US Is Adding Grid-Scale Batteries at 10 Times the Pace of Natural Gas This Year
Edd Gent September 2, 2024
As our energy mix shifts towards intermittent renewable sources, utility-scale batteries will be crucial for balancing power supply. The latest figures from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) show batteries are being deployed at 10 times the rate of new gas power capacity.
The pace of the green transition has been remarkable in recent years, but without careful planning it could quickly grind to a halt. While solar and wind power are now competitive with or even cheaper than fossil fuel plants, they are less reliable because output depends on the sun shining and the wind blowing.
This caps how much renewable capacity we can add to the grid without causing serious stability issues. That is, unless we can find ways to store renewable energy in times of excess so it can help plug the gaps when generation drops off.
And it seems this is starting to happen at pace. According to new data from the EIA, installation of grid-scale batteries accounted for nearly a fifth of new energy capacity installed in the first half of this year, outpacing wind, nuclear, and gas.
Overall, 20 gigawatts of new capacity was added between January and June, and unsurprisingly, solar made up the lion’s share at 12 gigawatts. But batteries, which are counted as power generation because they can dispatch power to the grid, came in second at an impressive 4.2 gigawatts. That dwarfed the 0.4 gigawatts of natural gas power added to the grid in the same period, and pushed batteries above both wind at 2.5 gigawatts and nuclear at 1.1 gigawatts. [Source: SingularityHub]
Waymo Robotaxis Are Giving 100,000 Rides a Week. It'll Soon Be More.
Jason Dorrier September 5, 2024
After years of overly aggressive forecasts about self-driving cars, here’s a statistic that snuck up on us: People are now hailing 100,000 automated rides a week—a number that’s double the 50,000 weekly rides provided a few months ago.
These rides are courtesy of Waymo, the self-driving car project incubated by Google and spun out as its own company under Alphabet. Waymo has been developing and testing its technology on public roads for over a decade. For much of that time, rides were free for willing guinea pigs and included a safety driver. But Waymo has been offering automated rides without safety drivers since 2020. And last year, the company began commercializing and expanding its ride-hail service, Waymo One.
Paid robotaxi rides are now available to anyone throughout Phoenix and San Francisco. Select riders added by waitlist can ride Waymo in parts of Los Angeles, and the company is also rolling out its services in Austin, Texas.
After a year of commercial operations in San Francisco without major incident, Waymo is eyeing expansion.
In August, the company moved into Daly City, Broadmoor, and Colma, just south of the city. Waymo has approval to operate in a total of 22 cities along the peninsula south of San Francisco, and although there’s no timetable yet, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, they also have ambitions to add operations in San Jose and East Bay, which would include Oakland and Berkeley. This territory would be tied together by travel on Bay Area freeways, which the company began testing with employee riders in August.
. . . . [Source: SingularityHub]
Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI
Matthew Hutson September 2, 2024
AI and tiny worms team up to get to treats
Scientists have given artificial intelligence a direct line into the nervous systems of millimeter-long worms, letting it guide the creatures to a tasty target—and demonstrating intriguing brain-AI collaboration. They trained the AI with a methodology called deep-reinforcement learning; the same is used to help AI players learn to master games such as Go. An artificial neural network, software roughly modeled on biological brains, analyzes strings of actions and outcomes, extracting strategies for an AI “agent” to interact with its environment and achieve a goal.
In the study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers trained an AI agent to direct one-millimeter-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms toward tasty patches of Escherichia coli in a four-centimeter dish. A nearby camera recorded the location and orientation of every worm’s head and body; three times per second the agent received this information for the previous 15 frames, giving it a sense of the past and present at each moment. The agent could also turn on or off a light aimed at the dish. The worms were optogenetically engineered so certain neurons would become active or inactive in response to the light, sometimes prompting movement.
The research team tested six genetic lines in which the number of light-sensitive neurons ranged from one to all 302 the worms possessed. Stimulation had a different effect in each line, making the worm turn, for instance, or preventing it from turning. The scientists first collected training data by flashing lights randomly at the worms for five hours, then fed the data to the AI agent to find patterns before setting the agent loose. [Source: Scientific American (paywall)]
Until next week.
Or, you can just buy me a coffee.