A Bit More Detail

• This alarming VICE report notes the ways in which our phones--and other mobile devices, I'm sure--are in fact listening to us.


• This distressing story looks at how HIV denialism has become popular among many Russians, and the terrible toll this belief system inflicts on people victimized by it (children, particularly).


• Smithsonian Magazine notes how the 1856 discovery of the greenhouse effect created by carbon dioxide by pioneering scientist Eunice Foote was overlooked because she was a woman.


• The detonation of more than 100 substantial nuclear weapons, this report notes, would doom civilization through climate change and agricultural collapse. Motherboard has it.


• Asteroids in orbits linked to that of the Earth would be excellent first targets for asteroid mining, Universe Today reports.

• Bloomberg describes the FCC report on the Hawaii missile scale earlier this month.


• The British Virgin Islands are apparently continuing to undergo their recovery from Hurricane Irma, enough to become tourist attractions again. The Guardian reports.


• Jonathan Levin and Yalixa Rivera look at Bloomberg at the astonishing lack of good data on Puerto Rico's demographics after Hurricane Maria. How many have left? Estimates run all the way up to a half-million departures by the end of 2019.


• Reddit's unresolvedmysteries shares the story of the supposed Polynesian island of Tuanaki, which went suddenly missing in the 1840s. What happened? Did it ever exist?

• Archeology in Canada is starting to take a leading role in the reconciliation process with First Nations. The Globe and Mail reports.


• Baker Boy, an Australian Aborigine rapper from the Milingimbi community, is becoming a star with his raps in his native Yolngu Matha language. (Touring with 50 Cent is an achievement.) Australia's SBS carries the story.


• Threads, the infamous 1984 British film depicting the aftermath of nuclear war, is coming to Blu-ray. VICE's Motherboard reports.


• Andrei Fert writes at Open Democracy about how, after the appalling refusal of a priest in a Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox church to preside over the burial of a toddler baptized into a Kyiv-aligned church, that whole denomination is coming into disrepute.


• blogTO notes the introduction, by the Toronto Public Library, of a new video streaming service, Kanopy, offering more than thirty thousand movies free to members.

• Centauri Dreams links to archival video painstakingly collected from the Voyager missions.


• Citizen Science Salon notes ways ordinary people can use satellite imagery for archaeological purposes.


• Good news: Asian carp can't find a fin-hold in Lake Michigan. Bad news: The lake is so food-deprived nothing lives there. The Crux reports.


• D-Brief notes that, once every second, a fast radio burst occurs somewhere in the universe.


• Dangerous Minds looks at the psychedelic retro-futurism of Swedish artist Kilian Eng.


• Dead Things notes the recovery of ancient human DNA from some African sites, and what this could mean for study.


• Cody Delistraty reconsiders the idea of the "coming of age" narrative. Does this make sense now that we have abandoned the idea of a unitary self?


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the evolution of icy bodies around different post-main sequence stars.


• The Great Grey Bridge's Philip Turner notes anti-Putin dissident Alexei Navalny.


• Hornet Stories notes reports of anti-gay persecution in Azerbaijan.


• Language Log takes a look at the dialectal variations of southern Ohio.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money starts a discussion about what effective disaster relief for Puerto Rico would look like.


• The LRB Blog looks at the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Mexico, and the story of the buried girl who was not there.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Toronto real estate companies, in light of rent control, are switching rental units over to condos.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the origins and stories of migrant sex workers.


• The NYR Daily talks about the supposedly unthinkable idea of nuclear war in the age of Trump.


• Drew Rowsome gives a strongly positive--and deserved review to the Minmar Gaslight show The Seat Next to the King, a Fringe triumph now playing at the Theatre Centre.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains how so many outer-system icy worlds have liquid water.


• Towleroad features Jim Parsons' exploration of how important is for him, as a gay man, to be married.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russian language policy limiting minority languages in education could backfire, and wonders if Islamization one way people in an urbanizing North Caucasus are trying to remain connected to community.

• D-Brief considers if gas giant exoplanet Kelt-9b is actually evaporating.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that considers where to find signs of prior indigenous civilizations in our solar system. (The Moon, Mars, and outer solar system look good.


• Joe. My. God. reveals the Israeli nuclear option in the 1967 war.


• Language Log shares a clip of a Nova Scotia Gaelic folktale about a man named Donald.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the ongoing deportations of Hispanic undocumented migrants from the United States.


• The LRB Blog notes the brittle rhetoric of May and the Conservatives.


• The NYRB Daily mourns the Trump Administration's plans for American education.


• Savage Minds considers the world now in the context of the reign of the dangerous nonsense of Neil Postman.


• Strange Maps shares a map documenting the spread of chess from India to Ireland in a millennium.


• Window on Eurasia argues that the Russian government needs to do more to protect minority languages.

• Bloomberg notes the closure of Poland's frontier with Kaliningrad, looks at how Google is beating out Facebook in helping India get connected to the Internet, notes British arms makers' efforts to diversify beyond Europe and examines the United Kingdom's difficult negotiations to get out of the European Union, looks at the problems of investing in Argentina, looks at the complications of Germany's clean energy policy, observes that the Israeli government gave the schools of ultra-Orthodox Jews the right not to teach math and English, examines the consequences of terrorism on French politics, and examines at length the plight of South Asian migrant workers in the Gulf dependent on their employers.


• Bloomberg View notes Donald Trump's bromance with Putin's Russia, examines Melania Trump's potential immigrant problems, and is critical of Thailand's new anti-democratic constitution.


• CBC looks at how some video stores in Canada are hanging on.


• The Inter Press Service notes that the Olympic Games marks the end of a decade of megaprojects in Brazil.


• MacLean's approves of the eighth and final book in the Harry Potter series.


• The National Post reports on a Ukrainian proposal to transform Chernobyl into a solar farm, and examines an abandoned plan to use nuclear weapons to unleash Alberta's oil sands.


• Open Democracy looks at the relationship between wealth and femicide in India, fears a possible coup in Ukraine, looks at the new relationship between China and Africa, examines the outsized importance of Corbyn to Britain's Labour Party, and looks how Armenia's defeat of Azerbaijan has given its veterans outsized power.


• Universe Today notes proposals for colonizing Mercury, looks at strong support in Hawaii for a new telescope, and examines the progenitor star of SN 1987A.


• Wired emphasizes the importance of nuclear weapons and deterrence for Donald Trump, and looks at how many cities around the world have transformed their rivers.

We already knew about Operation RYAN, the Yuri Andropov-inspired maximum effort search for intelligence offering strategic warning of a putative Western preventive war against the Soviet Union, and that it intersected dangerously with the war scare of 1983. We also knew that part of it was something to do with an effort to assess the intelligence take using some sort of computer system, but not in any detail. A lot more documents have just been declassified, and it turns out that the computer element was not just a detail, but absolutely central to RYAN.

At the end of the 1970s the USSR was at the zenith of its power, but the KGB leadership especially were anxious about the state of the economy and about the so-called scientific-technological revolution, the equivalent of the Revolution in Military Affairs concept in the US. As a result, they feared that once the US regained a substantial advantage it would attack. The answer was to develop an automated system to predict when this might happen and what the key indicators were.

Model the whole problem as a system of interconnected linear programming problems. They said. Load up the data. They said. Comrades, let’s optimise. They said.

In all, the RYAN model used some 40,000 data points, most of which were collected by greatly increased KGB and Joint GRU field activity. It generated a numerical score between 0 and 100. Higher was better – above 70 peace was probable, whereas below 60 it was time to worry. The problem was the weighting applied to each of those parameters. Clearly, they had to train the model against some existing data set, and the one they chose was Nazi Germany in the run-up to Operation BARBAROSSA.

Who needs theory? They said. We’ve got the data. They said. A simple matter of programming. They said.

The battle was the turning point in modern history. That first operation on Japanese soil—Okinawa was politically part of Japan to which it reverted in 1972—was also the last battle before the start of the atomic age. Without the essential facts, it is impossible to understand the decision, made some six weeks after the campaign ended, to use the atomic bomb.

Although no precise assessment of the rights and wrongs of that decision is likely to be made, the debate deserves to be conducted with evidence as well as emotion. The deep revulsion still provoked by the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is of course wholly appropriate. But it is difficult to evaluate the destruction of those cities out of context, without the knowledge that Okinawan civilians, not to mention the fighting men of both armies there, endured worse. The best estimate of the dead in the two obliterated cities is around 200,000. The Okinawan campaign killed fewer noncombatants, some 150,000. But the total number of dead, including servicemen, was significantly higher. And conventional explosives on the island caused far greater damage to Okinawan tradition, culture and well-being than the atomic bombs did to the Japanese. Measure by sheer suffering as well as by devastation of national life, the battle of Okinawa was a greater tragedy. And had the war progressed to the Japanese mainland, the next battleground after Okinawa, the damage would have been incomparable.

I mention this at the start not to stake a claim in some ghoulish competition to crown the greatest catastrophe, but to point out that the Okinawan suffering has never been recognized; proportionately far smaller losses to Japan and America always prompted much greater sorrow. This book was conceived as an account of the fighting men's ordeal that never won rightful gratitude in America. I hope it will convey a hint of the immense exertion, terror, agony and carnage in that battle. But nonmilitary issues that emerged during the course of my research pushed me toward a larger story.

Okinawans' punishment and suffering continue to this day as a direct result of that conflict, although they, the accommodating, exceptionally peaceful islanders, were among its chief victims then. That was one of the war's plentiful ironies—or inevitable consequences: the weakest and poorest usually bear the greatest burdens.

Moses Weisberg was walking his bicycle through the National Arboretum in Northeast Washington when he stopped at a mushroom-shaped tree. The first thing he noticed was the thickness of the trunk, estimated at almost a foot and a half in diameter. And then there was the abundance of spindly leaves, a healthy head of hair for a botanical relic 390 years old.

But it was only when he learned the full history of the tree, a Japanese white pine donated in 1976, that he was truly stunned. The tree, a part of the Arboretum’s National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, has not only navigated the perils of age to become the collection’s oldest; it survived the blast of an atomic bomb, Little Boy, dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, during the Second World War.

“For one, it’s amazing to think that something could have survived an atomic blast,” said Weisberg, a 26-year-old student at the Georgetown University Law Center. “And then that by some happenstance a Japanese tree from the 1600s ended up here.”

The bonsai tree’s history is being honoured this week, as Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. But visitors can see the tree as part of the museum’s permanent collection throughout the year.

The tree, donated by a bonsai master named Masaru Yamaki, was part of a 53-specimen gift to the United States for its 1976 bicentennial. Little was known about the tree until March 8, 2001, when — with no advance notice — two brothers visiting from Japan showed up at the museum to check on their grandfather’s tree.

• blogTO shares ten interesting facts about Scarborough.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at orbits where two or more objects can share a path.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on Lockheed's allegedly promising plan for near-term fusion reactors.


• Eastern Approaches notes concerns about media bias in Slovakian print media.


• Geocurrents notes how recent events show that Ukraine does not cleave neatly into pro- and anti-Russian halves.


• Joe. My. God. observes that the Micronesian state of Palau has decriminalized homosexuality.


• Language Hat looks at the history of how fonts get their names.


• Marginal Revolution notes the arguably stagnant and over-regulated labour market of France.


• James Nicoll has announced his ongoing effort, to commemorate the Cuban missile crisis, to review books on nuclear war.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that astronomers have found a second small Kuiper belt object for the New Horizons probe to survey.


• Spacing Toronto blogs about the demographic and economic challenges of millennials in Canadian cities.


• Towleroad looks at problems with gay intimacy visibility on American television.


• Window on Eurasia considers tensions over migration in post-Soviet Russia.


• The World notes the devastating impact on living standards of the Greek recession.