The "Nickel" ...

 

Sam Rockwell, left, and Laurence Fishburne in a revival of “American Buffalo” at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yours's truly normally never talks about reviews of a given work as few critics really get the gist of what the artist is trying to say as it's easy to criticize, much harder to create but this is one review where Jesse Green's spot on, particularly in terms of articulating how American Buffalo relates to the state of America and how passionately it connects to rampant capitalism.

In the electric revival that opened on Thursday at Circle in the Square, Teach is embodied with coiled and then terrifyingly uncoiled ferocity by Sam Rockwell, making a great occasion of a great role. When he first skitters into the junk shop run by his poker buddy Don — Laurence Fishburne in a beautifully considered performance — he’s already seething about a petty insult and stalking the joint like a rat-peacock hybrid. By the time he inserts himself into a heist Don is planning with his dim young gofer and protégé, Bobby, played by the angelic if underpowered Darren Criss, he is so hopped up on delusions of profit that he endangers the operation he means to abet.

It's the way of things, right? 

To see “American Buffalo” now, in a time when everyone seems to talk like Teach, is to be unsurprised — and thus, in a way, more harrowed. What could be more terrible than to realize we’ve acclimated to the ideas the play introduced?

Channeling Godot with a twist ...

“I don’t think I’m saying anything here.”

“It makes no earthly difference in the world.”

“You want to find a reason we should jump all over each other all of a sudden like we work in a bloodbank, fine. But it’s not good business.”

Laurence Fishburne, left, with Darren Criss in the play. The audience sits on three sides of Circle’s capsule-shaped stage, with junk interrupting the sightlines.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

It's all about the money, always has been, always will be. - Robert E.

The Handmaid's Tale ... for real

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes with grace and gravitas, qualities in concert with how he played basketball with the Lakers back in the day. He speaks truth to power with eloquence and passion, something not often seen in the land of the free and home of the brave.

To whit.

Will Smith’s Oscar slap probably garnered more press and public reaction than any other story this year. But a couple days ago, Oklahoma delivered a collective slap to the faces of the nearly two million females who live in that state and raised a threatening hand to the 168 million females who live in this country.

The reaction? Mostly crickets.

I can’t think of anything that demonstrates just how much America disrespects women than the fact that state after state has recently passed restrictive 1950s-ish abortion laws and millions aren’t taking to the streets in outraged protest on a daily basis. A couple summers ago between 16 and 20 million people marched in the streets to support Black Lives Matter by decrying police brutality and systemic racism, making it the largest protest movement in U.S. history. We need that same commitment now in defense of the civil rights of half the population of the U.S.

The Republc of Gilead awaits if we let it.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Oklahoma Goes Full Agro on Women

Texas, Florida, and Mississippi may have started this patriarchal movement to hobble women the way Kathy Bates handles James Caan in Misery, but at least 19 other states are readying or have passed legislation to restrict abortion to the first 15 weeks. Worst of all, Oklahoma has decided to go a step further by outlawing abortion almost altogether. Senate Bill 612 would make performing an abortion in Oklahoma, “except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency,” a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $100,000. Did Oklahoma legislators watch The Handmaid’s Tale and think, “Yes, that’s the kind of forward-thinking orderly society where I’d like to raise my daughters.”

... The bill doesn’t just prohibit virtually all abortions, it copies Texas’s civilian bounty-hunting enforcement plan which encourages private citizens to sue an abortion provider for up to $10,000 if they violate the law. What shouts how much America values freedom more than the government rewarding citizens who inform on their friends, family, and neighbors? This week a Russian teacher was recorded by her 13- and 14-year-old students using anti-war rhetoric (she was against the bombing of the maternity hospital). She now faces loss of her profession and years imprisonment for “discrediting” the Russian army. When did Russia become our role model?

Time to wake up America before it's too late.

We have ...

 

We have ...

Size matters ...

 Mapping 3D on 2D creates size problems, something readily seen on Statista's size of Africa map. 

It's not that Africa is shown as being too small on the majority of world maps, it's how almost every other part of the world has been artificially inflated. If we want someone to blame for this distortion, then we need look no further than the year 1569 when the cartographer Gerardus Mercator devised a solution to the problem of representing a globe on a 2D map's surface.

Workshop of Titian - Gerard Mercator, ca. 1550

10x-100x

Optical lens for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Credit: Farrin Abbott/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Grinding glass or building mirrors made of gold or beryllium is labor-intensive and expensive to the max. It takes years to fabricate these lenses and are limited in size, especially if you want the tech to reside in space like the Webb but there's a way out when gravity's taken out of the picture.

The Hubble space telescope has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope also has a mirror measuring 2.4 meters, and the James Webb Space Telescope has a whopping 6.5 meter primary mirror. They get the job done that they were designed to do, but what if… we could have even bigger mirrors?

The larger the mirror, the more light is collected. This means that we can see farther back in time with bigger mirrors to observe star and galaxy formation, image exoplanets directly, and work out just what dark matter is.

But the process for creating a mirror is involved and takes time. There is casting the mirror blank to get the basic shape. Then you have to toughen the glass by heating and slow cooling. Grinding the glass down and polishing it into its perfect shape comes next followed by testing and coating the lens. This isn't so bad for smaller lenses, but we want bigger. Much bigger.

Enter the idea for using fluids to create lenses in space that are 10x–100x bigger. And the time it would take to make them would be significantly less than a glass-based lens.

Thus far, the tech works.

The theory and mathematical models underpinning the approach have been successfully validated in a laboratory setting, utilizing neutral buoyancy to simulate microgravity. Optical components of different sizes and geometries have been fabricated, including spherical, axisymmetric and off-axis aspherical, meniscus, cylindrical, saddle, bifocal, and doublets. The approach has been used to produce both refractive and reflective components with surface quality exceeding traditional manufacturing methods and approaching state-of-the-art — but at a small fraction of the typical fabrication time and cost.

Let the experiments begin. :)

Channeling Howard Beale ...

Peter Finch as Howard Beale

In indirect fashion, the city of Shanghai is mad as hell and is not going to take it any more thanks to Zero Covid and total lockdown even though said draconian practice's not working.

Disturbing footage captures the moment ordinary citizens in Shanghai appear to start screaming out of their windows, after being forbidden from leaving their houses for over a week.

It gets better ...

A journalist in Shanghai, who wanted to remain anonymous, told France 24: “There are much, much more cases than at the peak in Wuhan [in 2020]. This is extreme in terms of numbers, but actually, the cases are mainly Omicron.

“So the gravity of the situation isn’t that bad, but the government wasn’t sure how far it was going to go.

“They are still abiding by the zero-COVID policy. They are using a 2020 method for the 2022 virus.”

Food delivery apps are showing up as completely out of stock, pushing many to breaking point.

Chinese government censors have taken down videos and articles seen as critical of the lockdown, but this hasn’t stopped information leaking out.

Frustrated residents have taken to the Chinese social media network Weibo to complain about a lack of food and chaotic lockdown measures.

One wrote: “No matter where you live, whether you have money or not, you have to worry about what else you can eat and how you can buy things.”

The entire city of Shanghai has been under strict lockdown since April 5.

Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images

Addendum, the shutdown's beginning to ease ... slowly, very very slowly ...

BEIJING (AP) — Some residents of Shanghai were allowed out of their homes as the city of 25 million eased a two-week-old shutdown Tuesday after a video posted online showed what was said to be people who ran out of food breaking into a supermarket.

About 6.6 million people can go outdoors, but some must stay in their own neighborhoods, the online news outlet The Paper reported, citing city officials. The government said some markets and pharmacies would reopen.

Addendum II

An image of people in protective gear in Shanghai unloading groceries from a truck.

People in protective gear unload groceries from a truck before distributing them to locals under the Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, China.Wang Gang/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Shanghai is flying drones over districts to tell citizens under lockdown to 'curb your soul's desire for freedom' and comply with COVID-19 restrictions

• Videos have surfaced on Chinese social media platform Weibo of drones broadcasting COVID-19 rules.
• One of the drones instructed residents to "control your soul's desire for freedom" and stay indoors.
• Other drones were also seen flying around Shanghai to broadcast masking and social distancing rules.

Heavy Metal ...

One of the machines used to etch materials from silicon wafers as chips are fabricated.

Heavy Metal, the process to fab chips is complex and intense to the max.

Chip makers are packing more and more transistors onto each piece of silicon, which is why technology does more each year. It’s also the reason that new chip factories cost billions and fewer companies can afford to build them.

In addition to paying for buildings and machinery, companies must spend heavily to develop the complex processing steps used to fabricate chips from plate-size silicon wafers — which is why the factories are called “fabs.”

The packaging process starts after the chips are fabbed and sealed.

Individual chips are stored on tape and reels before packaging. 
The chips will be attached to a packaging substrate.

Eventually, the chips go on a motherboard, ready to crunch bits as needs warrant.

Water water everywhere ...

Hillsboro’s water treatment plant. Chip making requires millions of gallons of water a day.

Fabs are water-intensive operations. That’s because water is needed to clean wafers at many stages of the production process.

Intel’s two sites in Chandler collectively draw about 11 million gallons of water a day from the local utility. Intel’s future expansion will require considerably more, a seeming challenge for a drought-plagued state like Arizona, which has cut water allocations to farmers. But farming actually consumes much more water than a chip plant.

Building the fabs before any chip is fabricated is equally as intense.

Cranes moving construction materials at the Chandler site.
The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.

To build its future factories, Intel will need roughly 5,000 skilled construction workers for three years.

They have a lot to do. Excavating the foundations is expected to remove 890,000 cubic yards of dirt, carted away at a rate of one dump truck per minute, said Dan Doron, Intel’s construction chief.

The company expects to pour more than 445,000 cubic yards of concrete and use 100,000 tons of reinforcement steel for the foundations — more than in constructing the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Some cranes for the construction are so large that more than 100 trucks are needed to bring the pieces to assemble them, Mr. Doron said. The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.

Heavy metal indeed.

Bucha

Natalia Lukyanenko watches as authorities excavate a mass grave in the grounds of the Church of Andrew the Holy Apostle in Bucha. Photograph: Anastasia Taylor-Lind/The Observer

Words not needed here but outrage and sorrow are. War crimes committed by Russia, under the orders of Putin and his commanders, require justice to be meted out. How that happens, no one knows but it must be done now.

Sometimes the dead have more to say than the living. Those lying beneath the soft, yellow earth in the grounds of the church of Andrew the Apostle, in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, have many terrible stories to tell.

Residents of Bucha looking for their loved ones wait as the mass graves are investigated. 

Photograph: Anastasia Taylor-Lind/The Observer

War is a Racket - Smedley Butler

Fools rush in ...

Reactor Number 4 in Chernobyl, now tightly sealed, exploded in 1986. Early fears of a radiation leak from a spent fuel storage site last month under Russian occupation never materialized.

Well, the Russians were warned about the dangers of Chernobyl, not only in terms of just how fragile and dangerous messing around with the facility truly was in terms of what would happen if the power was shut off  but also in hanging around too much in the radiative grounds surrounding this zone of death, issues the Russians ignored at their own peril as seen by the NYTimes piece titled Russian Blunders in Chernobyl: ‘They Came and Did Whatever They Wanted.

Tank treads ripped up the toxic soil, bulldozers carved trenches and bunkers, and soldiers spent a month camped in — and dug into — a radioactive forest.’

It gets better.

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — As the staging ground for an assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on earth, was probably not the best choice. But that did not seem to bother the Russian generals who took over the site in the early stages of the war.

“We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeriy Simyonov, the chief safety engineer for the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview.

Apparently undeterred by safety concerns, the Russian forces tramped about the grounds with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation lingering beneath the surface.

In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.

Power was restored just in time to avert a nuclear disaster when the Russians left the scene.

An abandoned Russian checkpoint in the Exclusion Zone. The camps showed signs of Russian forces digging in soil that could contain radioactivity 1,000 times ambient levels, enough to cause cancers.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread - Marie Antoinette

Carte blanche :)