Fascinating stuff from Wired.

Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome

Looking for reviews on McAfees books on the Second Machine Age / The Geek Way and ran across this short piece from MIT Sloan from 2018.

How to approach the second machine age

A good discussion on things like base load and how this sort of full transition will happen. From Canary Media.

A huge battery has replaced Hawaii’s last coal plant

As a bit of an experiment I started using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop machine a few years back. While adequate for email and text editing it was a bit underpowered for other uses.

This week I got my new Raspberry Pi 5 in the mail. Thought I would just have to move all the cables over and it should boot.

Not quite. I was running Ubuntu 22 LTS and the Pi 5 needs 23. So I had to upgrade to 22.04 then again to 22.10. It’s ok. I was watching a basketball game. Boot from my USB SSD looked good until the very end. Then it froze to a blank screen and a little white underscore text prompt in the upper left corner.

I did a boot of the Raspberry Pi OS from the microSD card and it worked fine. At least it didn’t seem to be a hardware problem. Then I gave up and went to bed.

Today I decided to put Ubuntu 23 on the microSD flash card and give it a go. Surprisingly, shockingly, it booted. From the USB drive. I suppose the lack of something (anything) in the micro SD slot was a problem. Would not have guessed.

Early benchmarks show a solid 2x performance increase. Seems snappier and maybe even better on the disk side. Looking forward to an Ubuntu 23 LTS.

From Umberto Eco. From the Wiki page Ur-fascism. Worth reading the entire page.

1. The cult of tradition

2. The rejection of modernism

3. The cult of action for action’s sake

4. Disagreement is treason

5. Fear of difference

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class

7. Obsession with a plot

8. Enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy

10. Contempt for the weak

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero

12. Machismo

13. Selective populism

14. Newspeak

From PBS.

Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters broke U.S. record in 2023, NOAA says

I was introduced to computers during the microprocessor / home computer era of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a bunch of tinkerers and amateurs who went on to found companies like Apple and Microsoft. When I turned pro and went to school to study computing my influences were a group of older European academics like Hoare, Dijkstra and Wirth. These were the folks who really lead the way and solved the problems that nobody else could solve. We wouldn’t be where we are without them.

REMEMBERING NIKLAUS WIRTH: FATHER OF PASCAL AND INSPIRATION TO MANY

I happen to have inherited a Purple Heart. It was my grandmother’s brother, Anthony Scaccia, who died at the end of WW II. A fascinating read from the History News Network.

75 Years Later, Purple Hearts Made for an Invasion of Japan are Still Being Awarded

Was wondering how many solar panels it would take to power the US. Seems the US produces about 4,000 teraWatt-hours of electricity per year. That is 4 x 10e15. A modern solar panel will produce about 1800 Watt-hours per day or 657,000 Watt-hours per year. That’s 6.57 x 10e5. Dividing the production by production per panel gives the number of panels, or 1.6 x 10e10 panels. That 16 billion panels. Roughly 50 panels per person. This is for all electricity, including industrial uses. Sounds about right.

Panels are about 15 square feet each which gives 240 billion square feet. There are about 28 million square feet in a square mile, so we are looking at a bit over 8,000 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. Again, sounds about right. Thats about 5% of the US covered in solar panels. To be fair, the US is a big place with lots of open area. And nobody thinks 100% solar is a near term solution. But looking at the numbers, this isn’t far fetched.

The ice maker in our somewhat new Korean manufactured refrigerator is broken. A quick Google reveals that it is a common problem and a class action lawsuit may be in the works. My wife decided to contact The Manufacturer and see if they would fix it without charge. Texting on-line she was able to get a confirmation from the Manufacturer that yes, we could get it fixed, for free.

When my wife went to schedule a repair, she couldn’t get the charges waived. Around this time she gets an email to rate the response. One of the first questions was: were you aware that this was a chatBot handling your service? Uh, no. But that makes sense.

So AI promised us a free repair, but there seems to be no record of this, except the log of the chat. Will the Manufacturer honor the promises of its AI? We will see.