For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

In my opinion, Donald Trump’s criminal trial, which starts in earnest today, is no more than the third most important thing happening to him this week. While I think charging Trump for alleged crimes for which his co-conspirators have already been punished and in which Bill Barr’s DOJ tampered has merit, and while I don’t think you can separate the allegations here from his other attempts to cheat to win elections, I believe the Trump Organization fraud case and the outcome of the January 6 case (and his claim to absolute immunity generally) have far more impact on Trump’s ability to continue to wreak havoc.

So I think Tish James’ bid to have Knight Specialty Insurance disqualified for providing Trump’s appeal bond and SCOTUS’ review of Trump’s absolutely immunity claims are far more important events this week than the Alvin Bragg trial.

The same is true of last week. Jury tampering — abetted by Jesse Watters and other Trump allies — will be an urgent, ongoing concern. But there are a slew of events — the UAW’s election win in a southern VW plant, the House’s passage of Ukraine funding (and follow-on repercussions we’re likely to see from it), continuing Israeli and Iranian tensions and attacks on Palestinians, the likelihood SCOTUS will narrow the application of the obstruction statute in the context of January 6, even the planned withdrawal of US troops from Niger — will be far more important to the fate of the US and the world than whether Trump glowered or slept or farted in the courtroom.

All of which is my way of saying: beware of letting this trial drown out more important events. Yes, it is unprecedented to see Trump subjected to discipline. But this trial is sucking up far, far too much attention that might better be directed elsewhere — and all that attention is one of the reasons why jury and witness tampering are such a risk.

Dreadlocks can’t smoke him pipe in peace
Too much informers and too much beast
Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su
Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su

-from “Tenement Yard”, by Jacob Miller

Happy Holiday! How about some good news for a change? Via the Associated Press:

Saturday marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when college students gather — at 4:20 p.m. — in clouds of smoke on campus quads and pot shops in legal-weed states thank their customers with discounts.

This year’s edition provides an occasion for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, with recreational pot now allowed in nearly half the states and the nation’s capital. Many states have instituted “social equity” measures to help communities of color, harmed the most by the drug war, reap financial benefits from legalization. And the White House has shown an openness to marijuana reform.

The origins of the date, and the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it derived from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody must get stoned” — 420 being the product of 12 times 35.

But the prevailing explanation is that it started in the 1970s with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School, in California’s Marin County north of San Francisco, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at nearby Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.

During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420” — would take on a life of its own. […]

A few weeks ago, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chris Quinn, became an instant hero to the legion of news consumers who are fed up with the media’s refusal to call Donald Trump what he is.

In his weekly “letter from the editor,” under the headline “Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts,” Quinn wrote:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

He continued, bluntly:

As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump.

On what upset some readers: “I have not minced words about Donald Trump”

We run a lot of op-eds. We run a collection of national columns. But we have a lot of different platforms, and one of our platforms is a weekday news discussion. I host it with three editors where we talk about the big stories of the day. We’ve been very openly critical of Donald Trump there. And so part of it’s that.

I also started four years ago sending out a daily text message — with a character limit, 640 characters — that talks about questions we’re asking, stories we’re working on, just general inside-the-newsroom kind of things.

You gotta come up with something every day, and in that I have not minced words about Donald Trump.

So some of this is direct to me. Some of it is about the opinion platform. Some of it is about the story choices. You know: “If you’re gonna run the story about Joe Biden, why aren’t you running the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” There’s always the false equivalence kind of thing going on. People try to equate kind of the monstrous stuff Donald Trump has done to the Afghanistan pullout, and there’s no comparison, but they want that comparison. And so there’s a lot of that kind of correspondence.

“By July 2019 ... federal prosecutors determined that no additional people would be charged alongside [Michael] Cohen. ... [Y]our apparent decision to pursue criminal charges where federal authorities declined to do so requires oversight....”

They were furious that Bragg would prosecute Trump for a crime that the federal Department of Justice had already decided in 2019 and announced that they weren’t going to pursue.

But why didn’t Bill Barr’s Department of Justice proceed after they’d already put Michael Cohen in prison for a year for delivering the check to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet at least until after the election, and then lying about it? Why didn’t they go after the guy who ordered the check written, the guy who’d had sex with Daniels, the guy whose run for the presidency was hanging in the balance?

Shuffling across the carpet to zap a friend may be the oldest trick in the book, but on a deep level that prank still mystifies scientists, even after thousands of years of study.

Now Princeton researchers have sparked new life into static. Using millions of hours of computational time to run detailed simulations, the researchers found a way to describe static charge atom-by-atom with the mathematics of heat and work. Their paper, "Thermodynamic driving forces in contact electrification between polymeric materials," appears in Nature Communications.

The study looked specifically at how charge moves between materials that do not allow the free flow of electrons, called insulating materials, such as vinyl and acrylic. The researchers said there is no established view on what mechanisms drive these jolts, despite the ubiquity of static: the crackle and pop of clothes pulled from a dryer, packing peanuts that cling to a box.

"We know it's not electrons," said Mike Webb, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, who led the study. "What is it?"

In other words, they used math to simulate the movement of around 80,000 atoms. Those simulations matched real-life observations with a very high degree of precision. It turns out, in all likelihood, static shock is a function of water, and more specifically, the free energy of stray water ions.

With that framework, Webb and Zhang revealed the molecular underpinnings of those familiar shocks in infinitesimal detail. They blew Sundaresan's black box wide open. If only Thales could see.

Without meaning to, the world’s soccer fans and sportswriters have opened a window into the secretive but influential world of Bermuda reinsurance. Just a glimpse is enough to raise concerns about the retirement security of millions of Americans.

We’re talking here about people who have either earned a defined-benefit pension at work or bought an annuity from a life insurer. No one ever asked them whether they would like to have their nest eggs moved offshore, or leveraged, or put in the hands of a non-U.S. regulator.

But increasingly, this is what’s happening. Countless Americans now depend on the skill and dedication of the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and they don’t even know it.

The full power of next-generation quantum computing could soon be harnessed by millions of individuals and companies, thanks to a breakthrough by scientists at Oxford University Physics guaranteeing security and privacy. This advance promises to unlock the transformative potential of cloud-based quantum computing and is detailed in a new study published in Physical Review Letters. The paper is titled "Verifiable blind quantum computing with trapped ions and single photons."

Quantum computing is developing rapidly, paving the way for new applications that could transform services in many areas like health care and financial services. It works in a fundamentally different way than conventional computing and is potentially far more powerful. However, it currently requires controlled conditions to remain stable and there are concerns around data authenticity and the effectiveness of current security and encryption systems.

"Never in history have the issues surrounding privacy of data and code been more urgently debated than in the present era of cloud computing and artificial intelligence," said Professor David Lucas. "As quantum computers become more capable, people will seek to use them with complete security and privacy over networks, and our new results mark a step change in capability in this respect."

The results could ultimately lead to commercial development of devices to plug into laptops, to safeguard data when people are using quantum cloud computing services.