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```
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/four ...
```

line 279, column 304: summary should not contain HTML unless declared in the type attribute:   (14 occurrences) [help]

... ivil War turned hot and the United...]]></summary>
                                             ^

Source: http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/atom_10.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title>Fourmilog: None Dare Call It Reason</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/" />
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/atom_10.xml" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2021:/fourmilog//1</id>
<updated>2021-10-20T15:40:26Z</updated>
<subtitle>John Walker's Fourmilab Change Log</subtitle>
<generator uri="http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/">Movable Type 4.23-en</generator>
<entry>
<title>Announcing: Fourmilab Blockchain Tools</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2021-10/003181.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2021:/fourmilog//1.3181</id>
<published>2021-10-20T15:38:54Z</published>
<updated>2021-10-20T15:40:26Z</updated>
<summary>Fourmilab Blockchain Tools provide a variety of utilities for users, experimenters, and researchers working with blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are divided into two main categories. Bitcoin and Ethereum Address Tools These programs assist in generating, analysing,...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Business" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Computing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Investing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/blockchain/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">Fourmilab Blockchain Tools</a>
provide a variety of utilities for users, experimenters, and
researchers working with blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as
Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are divided into two main categories.
<h2>Bitcoin and Ethereum Address Tools</h2>
These programs assist in generating, analysing, archiving,
protecting, and monitoring addresses on the Bitcoin and
Ethereum blockchains. They do not require you run a local
node or maintain a copy of the blockchain, and all
security-related functions may be performed on an "air-gapped"
machine with no connection to the Internet or any other computer.
<ul>
<li>
Blockchain Address Generator creates address and private key
pairs for both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, supporting a
variety of random generators, address types, and output formats.
</li>
<li>
Multiple Key Manager allows you to split the secret keys
associated with addresses into n multiple parts, from which any
k ≤ n can be used to reconstruct the original key, allowing a variety
of secure custodial strategies.
</li>
<li>
Paper Wallet Utilities includes a Paper Wallet Generator
which transforms a list of addresses and private keys generated by the
Blockchain Address Generator or parts of keys produced by the Multiple
Key Manager into a HTML file which may be printed for off-line "cold
storage", and a Cold Storage Wallet Validator that provides
independent verification of the correctness of off-line copies of
addresses and keys.
</li>
<li>
Cold Storage Monitor connects to free blockchain query services
to allow periodic monitoring of a list of cold storage addresses to
detect unauthorised transactions which may indicate they have been
compromised.
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Bitcoin Blockchain Analysis Tools</h2>
This collection of tools allows various kinds of monitoring and
analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain. They do not support Ethereum.
These programs are intended for advanced, technically-oriented users
who run their own full <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/" target="_blank">Bitcoin Core</a> node on a local computer. Note
that anybody can run a Bitcoin node as long as they have a computer
with the modest CPU and memory capacity required, plus the very large
(and inexorably growing) file storage capacity to archive the entire
Bitcoin blockchain. You can run a Bitcoin node without being a
"miner", nor need you expose your computer to external accesses from
other nodes unless you so wish.
These tools are all read-only monitoring and analysis utilities.
They do not generate transactions of any kind, nor do they require
unlocked access to the node owner's wallet.
<ul>
<li>
Address Watch monitors the Bitcoin blockchain and reports any
transactions which reference addresses on a "watch list", either
deposits to the address or spending of funds from it. The program may
also be used to watch activity on the blockchain, reporting statistics
on blocks as they are mined and published.
</li>
<li>
Confirmation Watch examines blocks as they are mined and reports
confirmations for a transaction as they arrive.
</li>
<li>
Transaction Fee Watch analyses the transaction fees paid to
include transactions in blocks and the reward to miners and produces
real-time statistics and log files which may be used to analyse
transaction fees over time.
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Details</h2>
You can download the complete source code distribution, including
ready-to-run versions of all of the programs, from the
<a href="/webtools/blockchain/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">Fourmilab Blockchain Tools</a>
home page.
All of this software is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Please see the
<a href="/webtools/blockchain/blockchain_tools_user_guide.pdf" target="Fourmilog_Aux">Fourmilab Blockchain Tools User Guide</a> [PDF]
for details or read the
<a href="/webtools/blockchain/blockchain_tools.pdf" target="Fourmilog_Aux">complete source code</a> [PDF] in Perl and Python written using the
<a href="http://literateprogramming.com/" target="Fourmilog_Aux"">Literate Programming</a> methodology with the <code><a href="http://nuweb.sourceforge.net/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">nuweb</a></code> system.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Flashback Version 1.8 Update Released</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2021-07/002800.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2021:/fourmilog//1.2800</id>
<published>2021-07-31T11:45:44Z</published>
<updated>2021-07-31T12:04:03Z</updated>
<summary>I have just posted an update, version 1.8, of Flashback, my instant directory tree snapshot utility for Linux and other Unix-like systems. The major change in this release is fixing problems which occurred with file names that contain spaces and...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Administration" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Computing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[I have just posted an update, version 1.8, of <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/flashback/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">Flashback</a>, my instant directory tree snapshot utility for Linux and other Unix-like systems. The major change in this release is fixing problems which occurred with file names that contain spaces and characters which have special meanings to the shell, including horrors such as:
<blockquote>
<tt>File with rogue's gallery: ~`#$&*()\|[]{};"'''<>?!</tt>
</blockquote>
In addition, Flashback can be configured to use a variety of file compression utilities such as <tt>gzip</tt>, <tt>bzip2</tt>, and <tt>xz</tt>, automatically back up to removable media such as USB drives when inserted, and mirror backups on remote systems with <tt>scp</tt>.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>UNUM 3.2: Updated to Unicode 13</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-05/001868.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1868</id>
<published>2020-05-16T12:26:07Z</published>
<updated>2020-05-16T12:35:52Z</updated>
<summary> Version 3.2 of UNUM is now available for downloading. Version 3.2 incorporates the Unicode 13.0.0 standard, released on March 10th, 2020. The update to Unicode adds support for four scripts for languages, additional CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) symbols,...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Administration" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Computing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[
Version 3.2 of <a href="/webtools/unum/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">UNUM</a> is now available for downloading. Version 3.2 incorporates the<a href="http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/" target="Fourmilog_Aux"> Unicode 13.0.0</a> standard, released on March 10th, 2020. The update to Unicode adds support for four scripts for languages, additional CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) symbols, 55 new emoji, and symbols from legacy computer and teletext systems and Creative Commons licenses. There are a total of 143,859 characters in 13.0.0, of which 5930 are new since 12.1.0. (UNUM also supports an additional 65 ASCII control characters, which are not assigned graphic code points in the Unicode database.)

This is an incremental update to Unicode. There are no structural changes in how
characters are defined in the databases, and other than the presence of the new
characters, the operation of UNUM is unchanged.

UNUM also contains a database of HTML named character references (the sequences like “<tt>&lt;</tt>” you use in HTML source code when you need to represent a character which has a syntactic meaning in HTML or which can't be directly included in a file with the character encoding you're using to write it). There have been no changes to this standard since UNUM 2.2 was released in September 2017, so UNUM 3.2 will behave identically when querying these references except, of course, that numerical references to the new Unicode characters will be interpreted correctly.

<a href="/webtools/unum/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">UNUM Documentation and Download Page</a>]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>ISBNiser and ISBNquest Version 2.1 Released</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-05/001867.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1867</id>
<published>2020-05-09T19:57:36Z</published>
<updated>2020-05-09T20:24:52Z</updated>
<summary>I have just posted version 2.1 of the ISBNiser utility and ISBNquest Web resource. These are utilities which validate, inter-convert, and properly format all varieties of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) specifications. Both utilities have been updated to use the...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Administration" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Computing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[I have just posted version 2.1 of the <a href="/webtools/isbniser/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">ISBNiser</a> utility and <a href="/webtools/ISBNquest/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">ISBNquest</a> Web resource. These are utilities which validate, inter-convert, and properly format all varieties of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number" target="Fourmilog_Aux">International Standard Book Number</a> (ISBN) specifications. Both utilities have been updated to use the most recent version of the ISBN Range database (Wed, 6 May 2020 14:51:46 CEST), replacing the October 2018 version previously used. The range database is used to parse ISBNs into their components (Prefix, Registration group, Registrant, Publication, and Checksum) and used by these tools to re-format ISBNs with the correct punctuation.

ISBNquest has been updated to use the new Amazon Product Advertising API 5.0 to look up books on Amazon and find title, author, and other information for a book from its ISBN. This replaces the 4.0 version of the API which has been retired and no longer works. The mechanism used to locate Kindle editions of print books has been completely redesigned and should now work for many more (but, due to limitations in the API, not all) books.

There are no user interface changes in either of these utilities, and updating to them should be completely transparent for all human and programmatic queries.]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>The Fourmilab Reading List Returns to its Roots</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-04/001866.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1866</id>
<published>2020-04-21T15:00:11Z</published>
<updated>2020-04-25T11:40:38Z</updated>
<summary>When I began the Fourmilab Reading List in January 2001, it was just that: a list of every book I'd read, updated as I finished books, without any commentary other than, perhaps, availability information and sources for out-of-print works or...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Administration" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[When I began the Fourmilab <a href="/documents/reading_list/" target="Fourmilab_Aux">Reading List</a> in January 2001, it was just that: a list of every book I'd read, updated as I finished books, without any commentary other than, perhaps, availability information and sources for out-of-print works or those from publishers not available through Amazon.com. As the 2000s progressed, I began to add remarks about many of the books, originally limited to one paragraph, but eventually as the years wore on, expanding to full-blown reviews, some sprawling to four thousand words or more and using the book as the starting point for an extended discussion on topics related to its content.

This is, sadly, to employ a term I usually despise, no longer sustainable. My time has become so entirely consumed by system administration tasks on two Web sites, especially one in which I made the disastrous blunder of basing upon WordPress, the most incompetently and irresponsible piece of...software I have ever encountered in more than <a href="/documents/fifty/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">fifty years of programming</a>; shuffling papers, filling out forms, and other largely government-mandated bullshit (Can I say that here? It's my site! You bet I can.); and creating content for and participating in discussions on the <a href="https://www.ratburger.org/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">premier anti-social network</a> on the Web for intelligent people around the globe with wide-ranging interests, I simply no longer have the time to sit down, compose. edit, and publish lengthy reviews (in three locations: in the Reading List, here, and at Ratburger.org) of every book I read.

But that hasn't kept me from reading books, which is my major recreation and escape from the grinding banality which occupies most of my time. As a consequence, I have accumulated, as of the present time, a total of no fewer than twenty-four books I've finished which are on the waiting list to be reviewed and posted here, and that doesn't count a few more I've set aside before finishing the last chapter and end material so as not to make the situation even worse and compound the feeling of guilt.

I will no longer post books I've read here, except those for which I write full reviews. If you'd like to keep up with new books as they are posted on the Reading List, subscribe to its <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/index.rdf" target="Fourmilog_Aux">RSS feed</a>.]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: Collapse</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-03/001865.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1865</id>
<published>2020-03-27T15:48:21Z</published>
<updated>2020-03-27T15:50:46Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Schlichter, Kurt. Collapse. El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7341993-0-7. In his 2016 novel People's Republic (November 2018), the author describes North America in the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War turned hot and the United...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Schlichter, Kurt.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/173419930X/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Collapse</a></cite>.
El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-7341993-0-7.</dt>
<dd>
In his 2016 novel <cite><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1148" target="_top">People's Republic</a></cite>
(<a href="/documents/reading_list/?month=2018-11" target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">November 2018</a>), the author describes North America in
the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War
turned hot and the United States split into the People's
Republic of North America (PRNA) on the coasts and the
upper Midwest, with the rest continuing to call itself the
United States, its capital now in Dallas, purging
itself of the “progressive” corruption which
was now unleashed without limits in the PRNA. In that book
we met Kelly Turnbull, retired from the military and veteran
of the border conflicts at the time of the Split, who made
his living performing perilous missions in the PRNA to rescue
those trapped inside its borders.

In this, the fourth Kelly Turnbull novel (I have not yet
read the second, <cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0988402963/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Indian Country</a></cite>,
nor the third, <cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/098840298X/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Wildfire</a></cite>),
the situation in the PRNA has, as inevitably happens in socialist
paradises, continued to deteriorate, and by 2035 its sullen population
is growing increasingly restive and willing to go to extremes
to escape to Mexico, which has built a big, beautiful wall to
keep the starving hordes from El
Norte overrunning their country. Cartels smuggle refugees
from the PRNA into Mexico where they are exploited in factories
where they work for peanuts but where, unlike in the PRNA, you
could at least buy peanuts.

With its back increasingly to the wall, the PRNA ruling class
has come to believe their only hope is what they view as an
alliance with China, and the Chinese see as colonisation,
subjugation, and a foothold on the American continent. The PRNA
and the People's Republic of China have much in common in
overall economic organisation, although the latter is patriotic,
proud, competent, and militarily strong, while the PRNA is
paralysed by progressive self-hate, grievance group conflict,
and compelled obeisance to counterfactual fantasies.

China already has assimilated Hawaii from the PRNA as a formal
colony, and runs military bases on the West Coast as effectively
sovereign territory. As the story opens, the military balance
is about to shift toward great peril to the remaining United
States, as the PRNA prepares to turn over a nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier they inherited in the Split to China, which
will allow it to project power in the Pacific all the way to the
West Coast of North America. At the same time, a Chinese force
appears to be massing to garrison the PRNA West Coast capital of
San Francisco, allowing the PRNA to hang on and escalating any
action by the United States against the PRNA into a direct
conflict with China.

Kelly Turnbull, having earned enough from his previous missions
to retire, is looking forward to a peaceful life when he is
“invited” by the U.S. Army back onto active duty for
one last high-stakes mission within the PRNA. The aircraft
carrier, the former <cite>Theodore Roosevelt</cite>, now
re-christened <cite>Mao</cite> is about to become operational,
and Turnbull is to infiltrate a renegade computer criminal,
Quentin Welliver, now locked up in a Supermax prison, to work
his software magic to destroy the carrier's power plant.
Welliver is anything but cooperative, but then Turnbull can be
very persuasive, and the unlikely team undertake the perilous
entry to the PRNA and on-site hacking of the carrier.

As is usually the case when Kelly Turnbull is involved, things
go sideways and highly kinetic, much to the dismay of Welliver,
who is a fearsome warrior behind a keyboard, but less so when
the .45 hollow points start to fly. Just when everything seems
wrapped up, Turnbull and Welliver are “recruited” by
the commando team they thought had been sent to extract them for
an even more desperate but essential mission: preventing the
Chinese fleet from landing in San Francisco.

If you like your thrillers with lots of action and relatively
little reflection about what it all means, this is the book for
you. Turnbull considers all of the People's Republic slavers
and their willing minions as enemies and a waste of biochemicals
better used to fertilise crops, and has no hesitation wasting
them. The description of the PRNA is often very funny, although
when speaking about California, it is already difficult to parody
even the current state of affairs. Some references in the book
will probably become quickly dated, such as Maxine Waters Pavilion
of Social Justice (formerly
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoFi_Stadium"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">SoFi Stadium</a>)
and the Junipero Serra statue on Interstate 280, whose Christian
colonialist head was removed and replaced by an effigy of pre-Split
hero Jerry Nadler. There are some delightful whacks at
well-deserving figures such as “Vichy Bill” Kristol,
founder of the True Conservative Party, which upholds the
tradition of defeat with dignity in the PRNA, winning up to 0.4%
of the vote and already planning to rally the stalwart
aboard its “Ahoy: Cruising to Victory in 2036!”
junket.

The story ends with a suitable bang, leaving the question of
“what next?” While <cite>People's Republic</cite>
was a remarkably plausible depiction of the situation after the
red-blue divide split the country and “progressive”
madness went to its logical conclusion, this is more cartoon-like,
but great fun nonetheless.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: Sonic Wind</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-02/001864.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1864</id>
<published>2020-02-02T16:00:30Z</published>
<updated>2020-02-02T16:02:33Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Ryan, Craig. Sonic Wind. New York: Livewright Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-0-631-49191-0. Prior to the 1920s, most aircraft pilots had no means of escape in case of mechanical failure or accident. During World War I, one out of every eight combat...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Ryan, Craig.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0631491910/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Sonic Wind</a></cite>.
New York: Livewright Publishing, 2018.
ISBN 978-0-631-49191-0.</dt>
<dd>
Prior to the 1920s, most aircraft pilots had no means of escape
in case of mechanical failure or accident. During World War I,
one out of every eight combat pilots was shot down or killed in
a crash. Germany experimented with cumbersome parachutes stored
in bags in a compartment behind the pilot, but these often
failed to deploy properly if the plane was in a spin or became
tangled in the aircraft structure after deployment. Still, they
did save the lives of a number of German pilots. (On the other
hand, one of them was Hermann Göring.) Allied pilots were
not issued parachutes because their commanders feared the loss
of planes more than pilots, and worried pilots would jump rather
than try to save a damaged plane.

From the start of World War II, military aircrews were
routinely issued parachutes, and backpack or seat pack
parachutes with ripcord deployment had become highly
reliable. As the war progressed and aircraft performance
rapidly increased, it became clear that although parachutes
could save air crew, physically escaping from a damaged plane
at high velocities and altitudes was a
formidable problem. The U.S.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_P-51_Mustang"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">P-51
Mustang</a>, of which more than 15,000 were built, cruised at
580 km/hour and had a maximum speed of 700 km/hour. It was
physically impossible for a pilot to escape from the cockpit
into such a wind blast, and even if they managed to do so,
they would likely be torn apart by collision with the fuselage or
tail an instant later. A pilot's only hope was that the plane
would slow to a speed at which escape was possible before
crashing into the ground, bursting into flames, or disintegrating.

In 1944, when the Nazi Luftwaffe introduced the first
operational jet fighter, the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Messerschmitt
Me 262</a>, capable of 900 km/hour flight,
they experimented with explosive-powered
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejection_seat"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">ejection
seats</a>, but never installed them in this front-line fighter.
After the war, with each generation of jet fighters flying
faster and higher than the previous, and supersonic performance
becoming routine, ejection seats became standard equipment in
fighter and high performance bomber aircraft, and saved many
lives. Still, by the mid-1950s, one in four pilots who tried to
eject was killed in the attempt. It was widely believed that
the forces of blasting a pilot out of the cockpit, rapid
deceleration by atmospheric friction, and wind blast at
transonic and supersonic speeds were simply too much for the
human body to endure. Some aircraft designers envisioned
“escape capsules” in which the entire crew cabin
would be ejected and recovered, but these systems were seen to
be (and proved when tried) heavy and potentially unreliable.

John Paul Stapp's family came from the Hill Country of
south central Texas, but he was born in Brazil in 1910
while his parents were Baptist missionaries there. After
high school in Texas, he enrolled in Baylor University
in Waco, initially studying music but then switching
his major to pre-med. Upon graduation in 1931 with a
major in zoology and minor in chemistry, he found that
in the depths of the Depression there was no hope of
affording medical school, so he enrolled in an M.A.
program in biophysics, occasionally dining on pigeons he
trapped on the roof of the biology building and grilled
over Bunsen burners in the laboratory. He then entered
a Ph.D. program in biophysics at the University of
Texas, Austin, receiving his doctorate in 1940. Before
leaving Austin, he was accepted by the medical school
at the University of Minnesota, which promised him
employment as a research assistant and instructor to
fund his tuition.

In October 1940, with the possibility that war in Europe and
the Pacific might entangle the country, the U.S. began
military conscription. When the numbers were drawn from
the fishbowl, Stapp's was 15th from the top. As a
medical student, he received an initial deferment,
but when it expired he joined the regular Army under
a special program for medical students. While
completing medical school, he would receive private's
pay of US$ 32 a month (around US$7000 a year in today's
money), which would help enormously with tuition and
expenses. In December 1943 Stapp received his M.D.
degree and passed the Minnesota medical board examination.
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the
Army Medical Corps and placed on suspended active duty
for his internship in a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota,
where he delivered 200 babies and assisted in 225
surgeries. He found he delighted in emergency and
hands-on medicine. In the fall of 1944 he went on full
active duty and began training in field medicine. After
training, he was assigned as a medical officer at
Lincoln Army Air Field in Nebraska, where he would
combine graduate training with hospital work.

Stapp had been fascinated by aviation and the exploits
of pioneers such as Charles Lindbergh and the stratospheric
balloon explorers of the 1930s, and found working at an
air base fascinating, sometimes arranging to ride along
in training missions with crews he'd treated in the hospital.
In April 1945 he was accepted by the Army School of Aviation
Medicine in San Antonio, where he and his class of 150
received intense instruction in all aspects of human
physiology relating to flight. After graduation and
a variety of assignments as a medical officer, he was
promoted to captain and invited to apply to the Aero Medical
Laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for a research
position in the Biophysics Branch. On the one hand, this
was an ideal position for the intellectually curious Stapp,
as it would combine his Ph.D. work and M.D. career. On
the other, he had only eight months remaining in his
service commitment, and he had long planned to leave the
Army to pursue a career as a private physician. Stapp
opted for the challenge and took the post at Wright.

Starting work, he was assigned to the pilot escape technology
program as a “project engineer”. He protested,
“I'm a doctor, not an engineer!”, but settled
into the work and, being fluent in German, was assigned to
review 1200 pages of captured German documents relating to
crew ejection systems and their effects upon human subjects.
Stapp was appalled by the Nazis' callous human experimentation,
but, when informed that the Army intended to destroy the
documents after his study was complete, took the initiative
to preserve them, both for their scientific content and as
evidence of the crimes of those whose research produced it.

The German research and the work of the branch in which Stapp
worked had begun to persuade him that the human body was far
more robust than had been assumed by aircraft designers and
those exploring escape systems. It was well established by
experiments in centrifuges at Wright and other laboratories that
the maximum long-term human tolerance for acceleration (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">g-force</a>) without
special equipment or training was around six times that of
Earth's gravity, or 6 g. Beyond that, subjects would lose
consciousness, experience tissue damage due to lack of blood
flow, or structural damage to the skeleton and/or internal
organs. However, a pilot ejecting from a high performance
aircraft experienced something entirely different from a subject
riding in a centrifuge. Instead of a steady crush by, say, 6 g,
the pilot would be subjected to much higher accelerations,
perhaps on the order of 20—40 g, with an onset of
acceleration
(“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">jerk</a>”)
of 500 g per second. The initial blast of the mortar or rockets
firing the seat out of the cockpit would be followed by a
sharp pulse of deceleration as the pilot was braked from
flight speed by air friction, during which he would be
subjected to wind blast potentially ten times as strong as
any hurricane. Was this survivable at all, and if so, what
techniques and protective equipment might increase a pilot's
chances of enduring the ordeal?

While pondering these problems and thinking about ways to
research possible solutions under controlled conditions,
Stapp undertook another challenge: providing supplemental
oxygen to crews at very high altitudes. Stapp volunteered
as a test subject as well as medical supervisor and
began flight tests with a liquid oxygen
breathing system on high altitude B-17 flights. Crews flying
at these altitudes in unpressurised aircraft during World
War II and afterward had frequently experienced symptoms
similar to
“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">the
bends</a>” (decompression sickness) which struck divers
who ascended too quickly from deep waters. Stapp diagnosed
the cause as identical: nitrogen dissolved in the blood coming
out of solution as bubbles and pooling in joints and other
bodily tissues. He devised a procedure of oxygen pre-breathing,
where crews would breathe pure oxygen for half an hour before
taking off on a high altitude mission, which completely
eliminated the decompression symptoms. The identical procedure
is used today by astronauts before they begin extravehicular
activities in space suits using pure oxygen at low pressure.

From the German documents he studied, Stapp had become
convinced that the tool he needed to study crew escape was a
rocket propelled sled, running on rails, with a brake mechanism
that could be adjusted to provide a precisely calibrated
deceleration profile. When he learned that the Army was
planning to build such a device at Muroc Army Air Base
in California, he arranged to be put in charge of Project MX-981
with a charter to study the “effects of deceleration
forces of high magnitude on man”. He arrived at Muroc in
March 1947, along with eight crash test dummies to be used in
the experiments. If Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base) of the
era was legendary for its Wild West accommodations (Chuck Yeager
would not make his first supersonic flight there until October
of that year), the North Base, where Stapp's project was
located, was something out of Death Valley Days. When Stapp arrived
to meet his team of contractors from Northrop Corporation they
struck the always buttoned-down Stapp like a “band of
pirates”. He also discovered the site had no electricity, no running
water, no telephone, and no usable buildings. The Army,
preoccupied with its glamourous high speed aviation projects, had
neither interest in what amounted to a rocket powered train with
a very short track, nor much inclination to provide it the
necessary resources. Stapp commenced what he came to call
the Battle of Muroc, mastering the ancient military art of
scrounging and exchanging favours to get the material he
needed and the work done.

As he settled in at Muroc and became acquainted with his fellow
denizens of the desert, he was appalled to learn that the
Army provided medical care only for active duty personnel,
and that civilian contractors and families of servicemen,
even the exalted test pilots, had to drive 45 miles to the
nearest clinic. He began to provide informal medical care to
all comers, often making house calls in the evening hours on
his wheezing scooter, in return for home cooked dinners. This
built up a network of people who owed him favours, which he
was ready to call in when he needed something. He called
this the “Curbstone Clinic”, and would continue
the practice throughout his career. After some shaky starts
and spectacular failures due to unreliable surplus JATO
rockets, the equipment was ready to begin experiments with
crash test dummies.

Stapp had always intended that the tests with dummies would be
simply a qualification phase for later tests with human and
animal subjects, and he would ask no volunteer to do something
he wouldn't try himself. Starting in December, 1947, Stapp
personally made increasingly ambitious runs on the sled,
starting at “only” 10 g deceleration and building to
35 g with an onset jerk of 1000 g/second. The runs left him
dizzy and aching, but very much alive and quick to recover.
Although far from approximating the conditions of ejection from
a supersonic fighter, he had already demonstrated that the Air
Force's requirements for cockpit seats and crew restraints,
often designed around a 6 g maximum shock, were inadequate and
deadly. Stapp was about to start making waves, and some of the
push-back would be daunting. He was ordered to cease all human
experimentation for at least three months.

Many Air Force officers (for the Air Force had been founded in
September 1947 and taken charge of the base) would have saluted
and returned to testing with instrumented dummies. Stapp,
instead, figured out how to obtain thirty adult chimpanzees,
along with the facilities needed to house and feed them, and
resumed his testing, with anæsthetised animals, up to
the limits of survival. Stapp was, and remained throughout his
career, a strong advocate for the value of animal
experimentation. It was a grim business, but at the time
Muroc was frequently losing test pilots at the rate of one
a week, and Stapp believed that many of these fatalities were
unnecessary and could be avoided with proper escape and
survival equipment, which could only be qualified through animal
and cautious human experimentation.

By September 1949, approval to resume human testing was given,
and Stapp prepared for new, more ambitious runs, with the
subject facing forward on the sled instead of backward as before,
which would more accurately simulate the forces in an ejection or
crash and expose him directly to air blast. He rapidly ramped up
the runs, reaching 32 g without permanent injury. To
avoid alarm on the part of his superiors in Dayton, a “slight
error” was introduced in the reports he sent: all
g loads from the runs were accidentally divided by two.

Meanwhile, Stapp was ramping up his lobbying for safer seats in
Air Force transport planes, arguing that the existing 6 g
forward facing seats and belts were next to useless in many
survivable crashes. Finally, with the support of twenty
Air Force generals, in 1950 the Air Force adopted a new
rear-facing standard seat and belt rated for 16 g which weighed
only two pounds more than those it replaced. The 16 g requirement
(although not the rearward-facing orientation, which proved
unacceptable to paying customers) remains the standard for
airliner seats today, seven decades later.

In June, 1951, Stapp made his final run on the MX-981 sled
at what was now Edwards Air Force Base, decelerating from
180 miles per hour (290 km/h) to zero in 31 feet (9.45
metres), at 45.4 g, a force comparable to many aircraft
and automobile accidents. The limits of the 2000 foot
track (and the human body) had been reached. But Stapp was
not done: the frontier of higher speeds remained. Shortly
thereafter, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and
given command of what was called the Special Projects
Section of the Biophysics Branch of the Aero Medical
Laboratory. He was reassigned to Holloman Air Force Base
in New Mexico, where the Air Force was expanding its
existing 3500 foot rocket sled track to 15,000 feet
(4.6 km), allowing testing at supersonic speeds.
(The
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloman_High_Speed_Test_Track"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Holloman
High Speed Test Track</a> remains in service today, having been
extended in a series of upgrades over the years to a total of
50,917 feet (15.5 km) and a maximum speed of Mach 8.6, or
2.9 km/sec [6453 miles per hour].)

Northrop was also contractor for the Holloman sled, and
devised a water brake system which would be more reliable
and permit any desired deceleration profile to be
configured for a test. An upgraded instrumentation system would
record photographic and acceleration measurements with
much better precision than anything at Edwards. The
new sled was believed to be easily capable of supersonic
speeds and was named <cite>Sonic Wind</cite>. By March
1954, the preliminary testing was complete and Stapp
boarded the sled. He experienced a 12 g acceleration
to the peak speed of 421 miles per hour, then 22 g
deceleration to a full stop, all in less than eight seconds.
He walked away, albeit a little wobbly. He had easily
broken the previous land speed record of 402 miles per hour
and become “the fastest man on Earth.” But
he was not done.

On December 10th, 1954, Stapp rode <cite>Sonic Wind</cite>,
powered by nine solid rocket motors. Five seconds later,
he was travelling at 639 miles per hour, faster than the
.45 ACP round fired by the M1911A1 service pistol he was
issued as an officer, around Mach 0.85 at the elevation of
Holloman. The water brakes brought him to a stop in 1.37
seconds, a deceleration of 46.2 g. He survived, walked
away (albeit just few steps to the ambulance), and although
suffering from vision problems for some time afterward,
experienced no lasting consequences. It was estimated
that the forces he survived were equivalent to those from
ejecting at an altitude of 36,000 feet from an airplane
travelling at 1800 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). As this
was faster than any plane the Air Force had in service or
on the drawing board, he proved that, given a suitable
ejection seat, restraints, and survival equipment, pilots
could escape and survive even under these extreme
circumstances. The Big Run, as it came to be called, would
be Stapp's last ride on a rocket sled and the last human
experiment on the Holloman track. He had achieved the
goal he set for himself in 1947: to demonstrate that crew
survival in high performance aircraft accidents was a
matter of creative and careful engineering, not the limits
of the human body. The manned land speed record set on the
Big Run would stand until October 1983, when Richard
Noble's jet powered
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust2"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Thrust2</a>
car set a new record of 650.88 miles per hour in the
Nevada desert. Stapp remarked at the time that Noble had
gone faster but had not, however, stopped from that speed
in less than a second and a half.

From the early days of Stapp's work on human tolerance to
deceleration, he was acutely aware that the forces experienced
by air crew in crashes were essentially identical to those in
automobile accidents. As a physician interested in public
health issues, he had noted that the Air Force was losing more
personnel killed in car crashes than in airplane accidents. When
the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) adopted his
recommendation and installed 16 g aft-facing seats in its
planes, deaths and injuries from crashes had fallen by
two-thirds. By the mid 1950s, the U.S. was suffering around
35,000 fatalities per year in automobile
accidents—comparable to a medium-sized war—year in
and year out, yet next to nothing had been done to make
automobiles crash resistant and protect their occupants in case
of an accident. Even the simplest precaution of providing lap
belts, standard in aviation for decades, had not been taken;
seats were prone to come loose and fly forward even in mild
impacts; steering columns and dashboards seemed almost designed
to impale drivers and passengers; and “safety” glass
often shredded the flesh of those projected through it in a
collision.

In 1954, Stapp turned some of his celebrity as the fastest man
on Earth toward the issue of automobile safety and organised, in
conjunction with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the
first Automobile Crash Research Field Demonstration and
Conference, which was attended by representatives of all of the
major auto manufacturers, medical professional societies, and
public health researchers. Stapp and the SAE insisted that the
press be excluded: he wanted engineers from the automakers free
to speak without fear their candid statements about the safety
of their employers' products would be reported sensationally.
Stapp conducted a demonstration in which a car was towed into a
fixed barrier at 40 miles an hour with two dummies wearing
restraints and two others just sitting in the seats. The belted
dummies would have walked away, while the others flew into the
barrier and would have almost certainly been killed. It was at
this conference that many of the attendees first heard the term
“second collision”. In car crashes, it was often
not the crash of the car into another car or a barrier that
killed the occupants: it was their colliding with dangerous
items within the vehicle after flying loose following the
initial impact.

Despite keeping the conference out of the press, word of
Stapp's vocal advocacy of automobile safety quickly
reached the auto manufacturers, who were concerned both
about the marketing impact of the public becoming aware
not only of the high level of deaths on the highways but
also the inherent (and unnecessary) danger of their
products to those who bought them, and also the
bottom-line impact of potential government-imposed safety
mandates. Auto state congressmen got the message, and
the Air Force heard it from them: the Air Force threatened
to zero out aeromedical research funding unless car crash
testing was terminated. It was.

Still, the conferences continued (they would eventually
be renamed “Stapp Car Crash Conferences”), and Stapp
became a regular witness before congressional committees
investigating automobile safety. Testifying about whether
it was appropriate for Air Force funds to be used in studying
car crashes, in 1957 he said, “I have done autopsies
on aircrew members who died in airplane crashes. I have
also performed autopsies on aircrew members who died in
car crashes. The only conclusion I could come to is that
they were just as dead after a car crash as they were
after an airplane crash.” He went on to note
that simply mandating seatbelts in Air Force ground
vehicles would save around 125 lives a year, and if they
were installed and used by the occupants of all cars in
the U.S., around 20,000 lives—more than half the
death toll—could be saved. When he appeared
before congress, he bore not only the credentials of
a medical doctor, Ph.D. in biophysics, Air Force colonel,
but the man who had survived more violent decelerations
equivalent to a car crash than any other human.

It was not until the 1960s that a series of mandates
were adopted in the U.S. which required seat belts,
first in the front seat and eventually for all passengers.
Testifying in 1963 at a hearing to establish a National
Accident Prevention Center, Stapp noted that the Air Force,
which had already adopted and required the use of seat
belts, had reduced fatalities in ground vehicle accidents
by 50% with savings estimated at US$ 12 million per year.
In September 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed two
bills, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety
Act and the Highway Safety Act, creating federal agencies
to research vehicle safety and mandate standards. Standing
behind the president was Colonel John Paul Stapp: the
long battle was, if not won, at least joined.

Stapp had hoped for a final promotion to flag rank before
retirement, but concluded he had stepped on too many toes
and ignored too many Pentagon directives during his career
to ever wear that star. In 1967, he was loaned by the Air Force
to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to
continue his auto safety research. He retired from the
Air Force in 1970 with the rank of full colonel and in
1973 left what he had come to call the “District
of Corruption” to return to New Mexico. He continued
to attend and participate in the Stapp Car Crash Conferences,
his last being the Forty-Third in 1999. He died at his
home in Alamogordo, New Mexico in November that year at
the age of 89.

In his later years, John Paul Stapp referred to the survivors
of car crashes who would have died without the equipment
designed and eventually mandated because of his research as
“the ghosts that never happened”. In 1947, when
Stapp began his research on deceleration and crash survival,
motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. were 8.41 per 100 million
vehicle miles travelled (VMT). When he retired from the
Air Force in 1970, after adoption of the first round of
seat belt and auto design standards, they had fallen to
4.74 (which covers the entire fleet, many of which were
made before the adoption of the new standards). At the time of
his death in 1999, fatalities per 100 million VMT were 1.55,
an improvement in safety of more than a factor of five.
Now, Stapp was not solely responsible for this, but it was
his putting his own life on the line which showed that
crashes many considered “unsurvivable” were
nothing of the sort with proper engineering and knowledge
of human physiology. There are thousands of aircrew and
tens or hundreds of thousands of “ghosts that never
happened” who owe their lives to John Paul Stapp. Maybe
you know one; maybe you are one. It's worth a moment
remembering and giving thanks to the largely forgotten man
who saved them.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>UNUM 3.1: Updated to Unicode 12.1.0, UTF-8 Support Added</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-01/001863.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1863</id>
<published>2020-01-07T14:53:26Z</published>
<updated>2020-01-07T15:31:09Z</updated>
<summary>Version 3.1 of UNUM is now available for downloading. Version 3.1 incorporates the Unicode 12.1.0 standard, released on May 7th, 2019. Since the Unicode 11.0.0 standard supported by UNUM 3.0, a total of 555 new characters have been added, for...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Computing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[Version 3.1 of <a href="/webtools/unum/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">UNUM</a> is now available for downloading. Version 3.1 incorporates the<a href="https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.1.0/" target="Fourmilog_Aux"> Unicode 12.1.0</a> standard, released on May 7th, 2019. Since the Unicode 11.0.0 standard supported by UNUM 3.0, a total of 555 new characters have been added, for a total of 137,929 characters. <a href="https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/" target="Fourmlog_Aux">Unicode 12.0.0</a> added support for 4 new scripts (for a total of 150) and 61 new emoji characters. Unicode 12.1.0 added the single character U+32FF, the Japanese character for the Reiwa era. (In addition to the standard Unicode characters, UNUM also supports an additional 65 ASCII control characters, which are not assigned graphic code points in the Unicode database.)

This is an incremental update to Unicode. There are no structural changes in how
characters are defined in the databases, and other than the presence of the new
characters, the operation of UNUM is unchanged. There have been no changes to the HTML named character reference standard since the release of UNUM version 2.2 in September 2017, so UNUM 3.1 is identical in this regard.

UNUM 3.1 adds support for the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, and allows specification of characters as UTF-8 encoded byte streams expressed as numbers, for example:
<pre>
$ unum utf8=0xE298A2
Octal Decimal Hex HTML Character Unicode
023042 9762 0x2622 &#9762; "☢" RADIOACTIVE SIGN
</pre>
A new <code>--utf8</code> option displays the UTF-8 encoding of characters as a hexadecimal byte stream:
<pre>
$ unum --utf8 h=sum
Octal Decimal Hex HTML UTF-8 Character Unicode
021021 8721 0x2211 &Sum;,&sum; 0xE28891 "∑" N-ARY SUMMATION
</pre>
<a href="/webtools/unum/" target="Fourmilog_Aux">UNUM Documentation and Download Page</a>]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: The Simulation Hypothesis</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-01/001862.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1862</id>
<published>2020-01-07T00:00:34Z</published>
<updated>2020-01-07T00:02:33Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Virk, Rizwan. The Simulation Hypothesis. Cambridge, MA: Bayview Books, 2019. ISBN 978-0-9830569-0-4. Before electronic computers had actually been built, Alan Turing mathematically proved a fundamental and profound property of them which has been exploited in innumerable ways as they developed...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Virk, Rizwan.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983056900/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">The Simulation Hypothesis</a></cite>.
Cambridge, MA: Bayview Books, 2019.
ISBN 978-0-9830569-0-4.</dt>
<dd>
Before electronic computers had actually been built,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Alan Turing
mathematically proved</a> a fundamental and profound property of
them which has been exploited in innumerable ways as they
developed and became central to many of our technologies and
social interactions. A computer of sufficient complexity, which
is, in fact, not very complex at all, can simulate any
other computer or, in fact, any deterministic physical
process whatsoever, as long as it is understood sufficiently to
model in computer code and the system being modelled does not
exceed the capacity of the computer—or the patience of the
person running the simulation. Indeed, some of the first
applications of computers were in modelling physical processes
such as the flight of ballistic projectiles and the
hydrodynamics of explosions. Today, computer modelling and
simulation have become integral to the design process for
everything from high-performance aircraft to toys, and many
commonplace objects in the modern world could not have been
designed without the aid of computer modelling. It certainly
changed my life.

Almost as soon as there were computers, programmers realised
that their ability to simulate, well…anything
made them formidable engines for playing games. Computer gaming
was originally mostly a furtive and disreputable activity,
perpetrated by gnome-like programmers on the graveyard shift
while the computer was idle, having finished the
“serious” work paid for by unimaginative customers
(who actually rose before the crack of noon!). But as the
microelectronics revolution slashed the size and price of
computers to something individuals could afford for their own
use (or, according to the computer Puritans of the previous
generations, abuse), computer gaming came into its own. Some
<a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/games/bioshock_infinite/"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">modern
computer games</a> have production and promotion budgets larger
than Hollywood movies, and their characters and story lines have
entered the popular culture. As computer power has grown
exponentially, games have progressed from tic-tac-toe, through
text-based adventures, simple icon character video games, to
realistic three dimensional simulated worlds in which the players
explore a huge world, interact with other human players and
non-player characters (endowed with their own rudimentary
artificial intelligence) within the game, and in some games and
simulated worlds, have the ability to extend the simulation by
building their own objects with which others can interact. If
your last experience with computer games was the Colossal Cave
Adventure or Pac-Man, try a modern game or virtual
world—you may be amazed.

Computer simulations on affordable hardware are already
beginning to approach the limits of human visual resolution,
perception of smooth motion, and audio bandwidth and
localisation, and some procedurally-generated game worlds are
larger than a human can explore in a million lifetimes.
Computer power is forecast to continue to grow exponentially for
the foreseeable future and, in the Roaring Twenties, permit
solving a number of problems through “brute
force”—simply throwing computing power and massive
data storage capacity at them without any deeper fundamental
understanding of the problem. Progress in the last decade in
areas such as speech recognition, autonomous vehicles, and
games such as Go are precursors to what will be possible
in the next.

This raises the question of how far it can go—can computer
simulations actually approach the complexity of the real world,
with characters within the simulation experiencing lives as rich
and complex as our own and, perhaps, not even suspect they're
living in a simulation? And then, we must inevitably speculate
whether we are living in a simulation, created by
beings at an outer level (perhaps themselves many levels deep in
a tree of simulations which may not even have a top level).
There are many reasons to suspect that we are living in a
simulation; for many years I have said it's “more likely
than not”, and others, ranging from Stephen Hawking to
Elon Musk and Scott Adams, have shared my suspicion. The
argument is very simple.

First of all, will we eventually build computers sufficiently
powerful to provide an authentic simulated world to conscious
beings living within it? There is no reason to doubt that we
will: no law of physics prevents us from increasing the power of
our computers by at least a factor of a trillion from those of
today, and the lesson of technological progress has been that
technologies usually converge upon their physical limits and
new markets emerge as they do, using their
capabilities and funding further development. Continued growth in
computing power at the rate of the last fifty years should begin
to make such simulations possible some time between 2030 and the
end of this century.

So, when we have the computing power, will we use it to build
these simulations? Of course we will! We have been
building simulations to observe their behaviour and interact
with them, for ludic and other purposes, ever since the first
primitive computers were built. The market for games has only
grown as they have become more complex and realistic. Imagine
what if will be like when anybody can create a whole
society—a whole universe—then let it run to
see what happens, or enter it and experience it first-hand.
History will become an experimental science. What
would have happened if the Roman empire had discovered the
electromagnetic telegraph? Let's see!—and while we're at
it, run a thousand simulations with slightly different initial
conditions and compare them.

Finally, if we can create these simulations which are so
realistic the characters within them perceive them as their real
world, why should we dare such non-Copernican arrogance as to
assume we're at the top level and not ourselves within a
simulation? I believe we shouldn't, and to me the argument that
clinches it is what I call the “branching factor”.
Just as we will eventually, indeed, I'd say, inevitably, create
simulations as rich as our own world, so will the beings within
them create their own. Certainly, once we can, we'll create
many, many simulations: as many or more as there are running copies of
present-day video games, and the beings in those simulations
will as well. But if each simulation creates its own
simulations in a number (the branching factor) even a
tiny bit larger than one, there will be exponentially
more observers in these layers on layers of simulations than at
the top level. And, consequently, as non-privileged observers
according to the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Copernican
Principle</a>, it is not just more likely than not, but
overwhelmingly probable that we are living in a simulation.

The author of this book, founder of
<a href="https://www.playlabs.tv/"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Play Labs @ MIT</a>,
a start-up accelerator which works in conjunction with the
<a href="http://gamelab.mit.edu/"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">MIT Game Lab</a>,
and producer of a number of video games, has come to the same
conclusion, and presents the case for the simulation hypothesis
from three perspectives: computer science, physics, and the
unexplained (mysticism, esoteric traditions, and those enduring
phenomena and little details which don't make any sense when
viewed from the conventional perspective but may seem perfectly
reasonable once we accept we're characters in somebody else's
simulation).

Computer Science. The development of computer games is
sketched from their origins to today's three-dimensional
photorealistic multiplayer environments into the future, where
virtual reality mediated by goggles, gloves, and crude haptic
interfaces will give way to direct neural interfaces to the
brain. This may seem icky and implausible, but so were pierced
lips, eyebrows, and tongues when I was growing up, and now I see
them everywhere, without the benefit of directly jacking in to a
world larger, more flexible, and more interesting than
the dingy one we inhabit. This is sketched in eleven steps, the
last of which is the Simulation Point, where we achieve the
ability to create simulations which “are virtually
indistinguishable from a base physical reality.” He
describes, “The Great Simulation is a video game that is
so real because it is based upon incredibly sophisticated
models and rendering techniques that are beamed directly into
the mind of the players, and the actions of artificially
generated consciousness are indistinguishable from real
players.” He identifies nine technical hurdles which
must be overcome in order to arrive at the Simulation Point.
Some, such as simulating a sufficiently large world and
number of players, are challenging but straightforward
scaling up of things we're already doing, which will become
possible as computer power increases. Others, such as
rendering completely realistic objects and incorporating
physical sensations, exist in crude form today but will
require major improvements we don't yet know how to
build, while technologies such as interacting directly with
the human brain and mind and endowing non-player characters
within the simulation with consciousness and human-level
intelligence have yet to be invented.

Physics. There are a number of aspects of the physical
universe, most revealed as we have observed at very
small and very large scales, and at speeds and time intervals
far removed from those with which we and our ancestors
evolved, that appear counterintuitive if not bizarre
to our expectations from everyday life. We can express them
precisely in our equations of quantum mechanics, special
and general relativity, electrodynamics, and the
standard models of particle physics and cosmology, and
make predictions which accurately describe our observations,
but when we try to understand what is really going on or
why it works that way, it often seems puzzling and
sometimes downright weird.

But as the author points out, when you view these aspects of
the physical universe through the eyes of a computer game
designer or builder of computer models of complex physical
systems, they look oddly familiar. Here is how I expressed
it thirteen years ago in my 2006 review of Leonard Susskind's
<cite><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=487" target="_top">The Cosmic Landscape</a></cite>:

<blockquote>
What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well,
there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in
position fixed by the time and position resolution of the
simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance
appear to behave this way in our universe. There would probably
be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could
directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating
updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light.
There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could
observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we
cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic
background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a
still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of
physical measurements due to the finite precision of the
computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg
uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would
be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check:
quantum mechanics.
</blockquote>

Indeed, these curious physical phenomena begin to look
precisely like the kinds of optimisations game and simulation
designers employ to cope with the limited computer power
at their disposal. The author notes, “Quantum
Indeterminacy, a fundamental principle of the material
world, sounds remarkably similar to optimizations made
in the world of computer graphics and video games, which
are rendered on individual machines (computers or mobile
phones) but which have conscious players controlling and
observing the action.”

One of the key tricks in complex video games is
“conditional rendering”: you don't generate the
images or worry about the physics of objects which the player
can't see from their current location. This is remarkably like
quantum mechanics, where the act of observation reduces the
state vector to a discrete measurement and collapses its complex
extent in space and time into a known value. In video games,
you only need to evaluate when somebody's looking. Quantum
mechanics is largely encapsulated in the tweet by Aatish Bhatia,
“Don't look: waves. Look: particles.” It seems our
universe works the same way. Curious, isn't it?

Similarly, games and simulations exploit discreteness and
locality to reduce the amount of computation they must
perform. The world is approximated by a grid, and actions
in one place can only affect neighbours and propagate at a
limited speed. This is precisely what we see in field
theories and relativity, where actions are local and no
influence can propagate faster than the speed of light.

The unexplained. Many esoteric and mystic traditions,
especially those of the East such as Hinduism
and Buddhism, describe the world as something like a dream,
in which we act and our actions affect our permanent
identity in subsequent lives. Western traditions, including
the Abrahamic religions, see life in this world as a temporary
thing, where our acts will be judged by a God who is outside
the world. These beliefs come naturally to humans, and
while there is little or no evidence for them in
conventional science, it is safe to say that far more
people believe and have believed these things and have
structured their lives accordingly than those who have adopted
the strictly rationalistic viewpoint one might deduce from
deterministic, reductionist science.

And yet, once again, in video games we see the emergence of a
model which is entirely compatible with these ancient
traditions. Characters live multiple lives, and their actions
in the game cause changes in a state (“karma”) which
is recorded outside the game and affects what they can do. They
complete quests, which affect their karma and capabilities, and
upon completing a quest, they may graduate (be reincarnated) into
a new life (level), in which they retain their karma from
previous lives. Just as players who exist outside the game can
affect events and characters within it, various traditions
describe actors outside the natural universe (hence
“supernatural”) such as gods, angels, demons, and
spirits of the departed, interacting with people within the
universe and occasionally causing physical manifestations
(miracles, apparitions, hauntings, UFOs, etc.). And perhaps the
simulation hypothesis can even explain absence of evidence: the
sky in a video game may contain a multitude of stars and
galaxies, but that doesn't mean each is populated by its own
video game universe filled with characters playing the same
game. No, it's just scenery, there to be admired but with which
you can't interact. Maybe that's why we've never detected
signals from an alien civilisation: the stars are just procedurally
generated scenery to make our telescopic views more interesting.

The author concludes with a summary of the evidence we may
be living in a simulation and the objection of sceptics
(such that a computer as large and complicated as the
universe would be required to simulate a universe). He
suggests experiments which might detect the granularity
of the simulation and provide concrete evidence the
universe is not the continuum most of science has assumed it
to be. A final chapter presents speculations as to who
might be running the simulation, what their motives might
be for doing so, and the nature of beings within the
simulation. I'm cautious of delusions of grandeur in
making such guesses. I'll bet we're a science fair project,
and I'll further bet that within a century we'll be creating
a multitude of simulated universes for our own science
fair projects.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: The City of Illusions</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2020-01/001861.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2020:/fourmilog//1.1861</id>
<published>2020-01-01T19:59:09Z</published>
<updated>2020-01-01T20:00:29Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Wood, Fenton. The City of Illusions. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2019. ASIN B082692JTX. This is the fourth short novel/novella (148 pages) in the author's Yankee Republic series. I described the first, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves (May 2019), as “utterly charming”,...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Science Fiction" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Wood, Fenton.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B082692JTX/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">The City of Illusions</a></cite>.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2019.
ASIN B082692JTX.
</dt>
<dd>
This is the fourth short novel/novella (148 pages) in the author's
<cite>Yankee Republic</cite> series. I described the first,
<cite><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1161" target="_top">Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves</a></cite>
(<a href="/documents/reading_list/?month=2019-05" target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">May 2019</a>), as “utterly charming”, and the
second, <cite><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1167" target="_top">Five Million Watts</a></cite>
(<a href="/documents/reading_list/?month=2019-06" target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">June 2019</a>), “enchanting”. The third,
<cite><a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1189" target="_top">The Tower of the Bear</a></cite> (<a href="/documents/reading_list/?month=2019-10" target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">October 2019</a>),
takes Philo from the depths of the ocean to the Great Tree in
the exotic West.

Here, the story continues as Philo reaches the Tree, meets its
Guardian, “the largest, ugliest, and smelliest bear”
he has ever seen, not to mention the most voluble and endowed
with the wit of eternity, and explores the Tree, which holds
gateways to other times and places, where Philo must
confront a test which has defeated many heroes who have come
this way before. Exploring the Tree, he learns of the
distant past and future, of the Ancient Marauder and Viridios
before the dawn of history, and of the War that changed the
course of time.

Continuing his hero's quest, he ventures further westward along
the Tyrant's Road into the desert of the Valley of Death.
There he will learn the fate of the Tyrant and his enthralled
followers and, if you haven't figured it out already, you
will probably now understand where Philo's timeline diverged
from our own. A hero must have a companion, and it is in
the desert, after doing a good deed, that he meets his: a
teddy bear, Made in Japan—but a very special
teddy bear, as he will learn as the journey progresses.

Finally, he arrives at the Valley of the Angels, with pavement
stretching to the horizon and cloaked in an acrid yellow mist
that obscures visibility and irritates the eyes and throat.
There he finds the legendary City of Illusions, where he is
confronted by a series of diabolical abusement park attractions
where his wit, courage, and Teddy's formidable powers will
be tested to the utmost with death the price of failure.
Victory can lead to the storied Bullet Train, the prize he
needs to save radio station 2XG and possibly the world, and the
next step in his quest.

As the fourth installment in what is projected to be one long
story spanning five volumes, if you pick this up cold it will
probably strike you as a bunch of disconnected adventures and
puzzles each of which might as well be a stand-alone short-short
story. As they unfold, only occasionally do you see a
connection with the origins of the story or Philo's quest,
although when they do appear (as in the linkage between the
Library of Infinity and the Library of Ouroboros in <cite>The
Tower of the Bear</cite>) they are a delight. It is only toward
the end that you begin to see the threads converging toward what
promises to be a stirring conclusion to a young adult classic
enjoyable by all ages. I haven't read a work of
science fiction so closely patterned on the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">hero's
journey</a> as described in Joseph Campbell's
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">The
Hero with a Thousand Faces</a> since Rudy Rucker's 2004 novel
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0765310597/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Frek and the Elixir</a></cite>; this is
not a criticism but a compliment—the eternal hero myth
has always made for tales which not only entertain but endure.

This book is currently available only in a Kindle edition. The
fifth and final volume of the <cite>Yankee Republic</cite> saga
is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2020.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Books of the Year: 2019</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2019-12/001859.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2019:/fourmilog//1.1859</id>
<published>2019-12-31T11:56:21Z</published>
<updated>2019-12-31T11:57:11Z</updated>
<summary>Here are my picks for the best books of 2019, fiction and nonfiction. These aren't the best books published this year, but rather the best I've read in the last twelve months. The winner in both categories is barely distinguished...</summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[Here are my picks for the best <a href="/documents/reading_list/?year=2019" target="Fourmilog_Aux">books of 2019</a>, fiction and nonfiction. These aren't
the best books published this year, but rather the best I've read in the
last twelve months. The winner in both categories is barely distinguished from
the pack, and the runners up are all worthy of reading. Runners up appear
in alphabetical order by their author's surname. Each title is linked to my review of the book.

<h3>Fiction:</h3>
<blockquote>
Winner:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1157" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>The Powers of the Earth</cite></a>
and
<a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1157" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Causes of Separation</cite></a>
by Travis J. I. Corcoran
<blockquote style="margin-top: 0px;">
I am jointly choosing these two novels as fiction books of the year. They are
the first two volumes of the <cite>Aristillus</cite> series and may be read
as one long story spanning two books.
</blockquote>
</li>
</ul>
Runners up:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1158" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>The Code Hunters</cite></a> by Jackson Coppley</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1163" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>The Dawn of the Iron Dragon</cite></a> and <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1170" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>The Voyage of the Iron Dragon</cite></a> by Robert Kroese</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1172" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Delta-</cite>v</a> by Daniel Suarez</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1161" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves</cite></a>, <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1167" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Five Million Watts</cite></a>, and <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1189" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>The Tower of the Bear</cite></a> by Fenton Wood</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<h3>Nonfiction:</h3>
<blockquote>
Winner:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1160" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Stalin, Vol. 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941</cite></a> by Stephen Kotkin</li>
</ul>
Runners up:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1155" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>At Our Wits' End</cite></a> by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1191" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Sunburst and Luminary</cite></a> by Don Eyles</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1162" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Churchill: Walking with Destiny</cite></a> by Andrew Roberts</li>
<li><a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/?book=1169" target="Fourmilog_Aux"><cite>Billion Dollar Whale</cite></a> by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: The Sword and the Shield</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2019-12/001860.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2019:/fourmilog//1.1860</id>
<published>2019-12-29T15:07:03Z</published>
<updated>2019-12-29T15:08:15Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield. New York: Basic Books, 1999. ISBN 978-0-465-00312-9. Vasili Mitrokhin joined the Soviet intelligence service as a foreign intelligence officer in 1948, at a time when the MGB (later to become...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465003125/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">The Sword and the Shield</a></cite>.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.
ISBN 978-0-465-00312-9.</dt>
<dd>
Vasili Mitrokhin joined the Soviet intelligence service as a
foreign intelligence officer in 1948, at a time when the MGB
(later to become the KGB) and the GRU were unified into a single
service called the Committee of Information. By the time he was
sent to his first posting abroad in 1952, the two services had
split and Mitrokhin stayed with the MGB. Mitrokhin's career
began in the paranoia of the final days of Stalin's regime, when
foreign intelligence officers were sent on wild goose chases
hunting down imagined Trotskyist and Zionist conspirators
plotting against the regime. He later survived the turbulence
after the death of Stalin and the execution of MGB head Lavrenti
Beria, and the consolidation of power under his successors.

During the Khrushchev years, Mitrokhin became disenchanted
with the regime, considering Khrushchev an uncultured
barbarian whose banning of avant garde writers betrayed
the tradition of Russian literature. He began to entertain
dissident thoughts, not hoping for an overthrow of the Soviet
regime but rather its reform by a new generation of leaders
untainted by the legacy of Stalin. These thoughts were
reinforced by the crushing of the reform-minded regime
in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and his own observation of how
his service, now called the KGB, manipulated the Soviet
justice system to suppress dissent within the Soviet
Union. He began to covertly listen to Western broadcasts
and read samizdat publications by Soviet dissidents.

In 1972, the First Chief Directorate (FCD: foreign intelligence)
moved from the cramped KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka
in central Moscow to a new building near the ring road.
Mitrokhin had sole responsibility for checking, inventorying,
and transferring the entire archives, around 300,000 documents,
of the FCD for transfer to the new building. These files
documented the operations of the KGB and its predecessors
dating back to 1918, and included the most secret records,
those of Directorate S, which ran “illegals”:
secret agents operating abroad under false identities.
Probably no other individual ever read as many
of the KGB's most secret archives as Mitrokhin. Appalled
by much of the material he reviewed, he covertly began to
make his own notes of the details. He started by committing
key items to memory and then transcribing them every evening
at home, but later made covert notes on scraps of paper
which he smuggled out of KGB offices in his shoes.
Each week-end he would take the notes to his dacha outside
Moscow, type them up, and hide them in a series of locations
which became increasingly elaborate as their volume grew.

Mitrokhin would continue to review, make notes, and add them
to his hidden archive for the next twelve years until his
retirement from the KGB in 1984. After Mikhail Gorbachev
became party leader in 1985 and called for more openness
(glasnost), Mitrokhin,
shaken by what he had seen in the files regarding Soviet
actions in Afghanistan, began to think of ways he might
spirit his files out of the Soviet Union and publish
them in the West.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin tested the new
freedom of movement by visiting the capital of one of the
now-independent Baltic states, carrying a sample of the material
from his archive concealed in his luggage. He crossed the
border with no problems and walked in to the British embassy to
make a deal. After several more trips, interviews with British
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers, and providing more
sample material, the British agreed to arrange the exfiltration
of Mitrokhin, his entire family, and the entire
archive—six cases of notes. He was debriefed at a series
of safe houses in Britain and began several years of work typing
handwritten notes, arranging the documents, and answering
questions from the SIS, all in complete secrecy. In 1995, he
arranged a meeting with Christopher Andrew, co-author of the
present book, to prepare a history of KGB foreign intelligence
as documented in the archive.

Mitrokhin's exfiltration (I'm not sure one can call it a
“defection”, since the country whose information he
disclosed ceased to exist before he contacted the British) and
delivery of the archive is one of the most stunning intelligence
coups of all time, and the material he delivered will be an
essential primary source for historians of the twentieth
century. This is not just a whistle-blower disclosing
operations of limited scope over a short period of time, but an
authoritative summary of the entire history of the foreign
intelligence and covert operations of the Soviet Union from its
inception until the time it began to unravel in the mid-1980s.
Mitrokhin's documents name names; identify agents, both
Soviet and recruits in other countries, by codename; describe
secret operations, including assassinations, subversion,
“influence operations” planting propaganda in
adversary media and corrupting journalists and politicians,
providing weapons to insurgents, hiding caches of weapons and
demolition materials in Western countries to support special
forces in case of war; and trace the internal politics and conflicts
within the KGB and its predecessors and with the Party and
rivals, particularly military intelligence (the GRU).

Any doubts about the degree of penetration of Western
governments by Soviet intelligence agents are laid to rest by
the exhaustive documentation here. During the 1930s and
throughout World War II, the Soviet Union had highly-placed
agents throughout the British and American governments, military,
diplomatic and intelligence communities, and science and
technology projects. At the same time, these supposed allies had
essentially zero visibility into the Soviet Union: neither
the American OSS nor the British SIS had a single agent in
Moscow.

And yet, despite success in infiltrating other countries
and recruiting agents within them (particularly prior to
the end of World War II, when many agents, such as the
“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Magnificent
Five</a>” [Donald Maclean, Kim Philby,
John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt] in
Britain, were motivated by idealistic admiration for the
Soviet project, as opposed to later, when sources tended
to be in it for the money), exploitation of this vast
trove of purloined secret information was uneven and
often ineffective. Although it reached its apogee during
the Stalin years, paranoia and intrigue are as Russian as borscht,
and compromised the interpretation and use of intelligence
throughout the history of the Soviet Union. Despite having
loyal spies in high places in governments around the world,
whenever an agent provided information which seemed “too
good” or conflicted with the preconceived notions of
KGB senior officials or Party leaders, it was likely to be
dismissed as disinformation, often suspected to have been planted
by British counterintelligence, to which the Soviets
attributed almost supernatural powers, or that their agents had
been turned and were feeding false information to the Centre.
This was particularly evident during the period prior to the
Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. KGB archives record
more than a hundred warnings of preparations for the attack having
been forwarded to Stalin between January and June 1941, all
of which were dismissed as disinformation or erroneous due to
Stalin's idée fixe that
Germany would not attack because it was too dependent on raw
materials supplied by the Soviet Union and would not
risk a two front war while Britain remained undefeated.

Further, throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union,
the KGB was hesitant to report intelligence which
contradicted the beliefs of its masters in the Politburo
or documented the failures of their policies and initiatives.
In 1985, shortly after coming to power, Gorbachev lectured
KGB leaders “on the impermissibility of distortions of
the factual state of affairs in messages and informational
reports sent to the Central Committee of the CPSU and other
ruling bodies.”

Another manifestation of paranoia was deep suspicion of
those who had spent time in the West. This meant that often
the most effective agents who had worked undercover in the
West for many years found their reports ignored due to fears
that they had “gone native” or been doubled by
Western counterintelligence. Spending too much time on
assignment in the West was not conducive to advancement
within the KGB, which resulted in the service's senior
leadership having little direct experience with the West and
being prone to fantastic misconceptions about the institutions
and personalities of the adversary. This led to delusional
schemes such as the idea of recruiting stalwart anticommunist
senior figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski as KGB agents.

This is a massive compilation of data: 736 pages in the
paperback edition, including almost 100 pages of
detailed end notes and source citations. I would be less
than candid if I gave the impression that this reads like
a spy thriller: it is nothing of the sort. Although such
information would have been of immense value during the
Cold War, long lists of the handlers who worked with
undercover agents in the West, recitations of codenames
for individuals, and exhaustive descriptions of now
largely forgotten episodes such as the KGB's campaign
against “Eurocommunism” in the 1970s and 1980s,
which it was feared would thwart Moscow's control over
communist parties in Western Europe, make for heavy
going for the reader.

The KGB's operations in the West were far from flawless.
For decades, the Communist Party of the United States
(CPUSA) received substantial subsidies from the KGB
despite consistently promising great breakthroughs and
delivering nothing. Between the 1950s and 1975, KGB
money was funneled to the CPUSA through two undercover
agents, brothers named Morris and Jack Childs,
delivering cash often exceeding a million dollars a
year. Both brothers were awarded the Order of the Red
Banner in 1975 for their work, with Morris receiving his
from Leonid Brezhnev in person. Unbeknownst to the KGB,
both of the Childs brothers had been working for, and
receiving salaries from, the FBI since the early 1950s,
and reporting where the money came from and went—well,
not the five percent they embezzled before passing it on.
In the 1980s, the KGB increased the CPUSA's subsidy to
two million dollars a year, despite the party's never
having more than 15,000 members (some of whom, no
doubt, were FBI agents).

A second doorstop of a book (736 pages) based upon the Mitrokhin
archive,
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465003133/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">The World Was Going our Way</a></cite>,
published in 2005, details the KGB's operations in the Third
World during the Cold War. U.S. diplomats who regarded the globe
and saw communist subversion almost everywhere were accurately
reporting the situation on the ground, as the KGB's own files
reveal.

The <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004LLIPVA/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Kindle edition</a> is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: Vandenberg Air Force Base</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2019-12/001858.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2019:/fourmilog//1.1858</id>
<published>2019-12-23T17:02:48Z</published>
<updated>2019-12-23T17:03:37Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Page, Joseph T., II. Vandenberg Air Force Base. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4671-3209-1. Prior to World War II, the sleepy rural part of the southern California coast between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo was best known as...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Page, Joseph T., II.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1467132098/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Vandenberg Air Force Base</a></cite>.
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014.
ISBN 978-1-4671-3209-1.</dt>
<dd>
Prior to World War II, the sleepy rural part of the
southern California coast between Santa Barbara
and San Luis Obispo was best known as the location
where, in September 1923, despite a lighthouse having
been in operation at Arguello Point since 1901, the
U.S. Navy suffered its worst peacetime disaster, when
seven destroyers, travelling at 20 knots,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">ran
aground at Honda Point</a>, resulting in the loss of
all seven ships and the deaths of 23 crewmembers. In the
1930s, following additional wrecks in the area, a
lifeboat station was established in conjunction
with the lighthouse.

During World War II, the Army acquired 92,000 acres
(372 km²) in the area for a training base which
was called Camp Cooke, after a cavalry general who
served in the Civil War, in wars with Indian tribes, and
in the Mexican-American War. The camp was used for
training Army troops in a variety of weapons and in
tank maneuvers. After the end of the war, the base was
closed and placed on inactive status, but was re-opened
after the outbreak of war in Korea to train tank crews.
It was once again mothballed in 1953, and remained
inactive until 1957, when 64,000 acres were transferred
to the U.S. Air Force to establish a missile base on
the West Coast, initially called Cooke Air Force Base,
intended to train missile crews and also serve as the
U.S.'s first operational intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) site. On October 4th, 1958, the base was
renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base in honour of the late
General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoyt_Vandenberg"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Hoyt
Vandenberg</a>, former Air Force Chief of Staff and
Director of Central Intelligence.

On December 15, 1958, a Thor intermediate range ballistic
missile was launched from the new base, the first of hundreds of
launches which would follow and continue up to the present day.
Starting in September 1959, three Atlas ICBMs armed with nuclear
warheads were deployed on open launch pads at Vandenberg, the
first U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles to go on alert.
The Atlas missiles remained part of the U.S. nuclear force until
their retirement in May 1964.

With the advent of Earth satellites, Vandenberg became a key
part of the U.S. military and civil space infrastructure.
Launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida are restricted to a
corridor directed eastward over the Atlantic ocean. While this
is fine for satellites bound for equatorial orbits, such as the
geostationary orbits used by many communication satellites, a
launch into polar orbit, preferred by military reconnaissance
satellites and Earth resources satellites because it allows them
to overfly and image locations anywhere on Earth, would result
in the rockets used to launch them dropping spent stages on
land, which would vex taxpayers to the north and hotheated Latin
neighbours to the south.

Vandenberg Air Force Base, however, situated on a point
extending from the California coast, had nothing to the
south but open ocean all the way to Antarctica. Launching
southward, satellites could be placed into polar or
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Sun
synchronous orbits</a> without disturbing anybody but the
fishes. Vandenberg thus became the prime launch site
for U.S. reconnaissance satellites which, in the early
days when satellites were short-lived and returned film
to the Earth, required a large number of launches. The
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_%28satellite%29"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Corona</a>
spy satellites alone accounted for
144 launches from Vandenberg between 1959 and 1972.

With plans in the 1970s to replace all U.S. expendable launchers
with the Space Shuttle, facilities were built at Vandenberg
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Space
Launch Complex 6</a>) to process and launch the Shuttle, using a
very different architecture than was employed in Florida. The
Shuttle stack would be assembled on the launch pad, protected by
a movable building that would retract prior to launch. The
launch control centre was located just 365 metres from the
launch pad (as opposed to 4.8 km away at the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida), so the plan in case of a catastrophic launch
accident on the pad essentially seemed to be “hope that
never happens”. In any case, after spending more than
US$4 billion on the facilities, after the <cite>Challenger</cite>
disaster in 1986, plans for Shuttle launches from Vandenberg
were abandoned, and the facility was mothballed until being
adapted, years later, to launch other rockets.

This book, part of the “Images of America” series,
is a collection of photographs (all black and white) covering
all aspects of the history of the site from before World War II
to the present day. Introductory text for each chapter and
detailed captions describe the items shown and their
significance to the base's history. The production quality is
excellent, and I noted only one factual error in the text (the
names of crew of Gemini 5). For a book of just 128 pages, the
paperback is very expensive (US$22 at this writing). The
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SSLV6HO/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Kindle edition</a> is still pricey (US$13
list price), but may be read for free by Kindle Unlimited
subscribers.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: The Compleat Martian Invasion</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2019-12/001857.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2019:/fourmilog//1.1857</id>
<published>2019-12-22T16:20:51Z</published>
<updated>2019-12-22T16:22:07Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Taloni, John. The Compleat Martian Invasion. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2016. ASIN B01HLTZ7MS. A number of years have elapsed since the Martian Invasion chronicled by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds. The damage inflicted on the Earth was...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Science Fiction" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Taloni, John.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HLTZ7MS/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">The Compleat Martian Invasion</a></cite>.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2016.
ASIN B01HLTZ7MS.
</dt>
<dd>
A number of years have elapsed since the Martian Invasion
chronicled by H.G. Wells in
<cite><a href="/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">The War of
the Worlds</a></cite>. The damage inflicted on the Earth was
severe, and the protracted process of recovery, begun in the
British Empire in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, now
continues under Queen Louise, Victoria's sixth child and eldest
surviving heir after the catastrophe of the invasion. Just as
Earth is beginning to return to normalcy, another crisis has
emerged. John Bedford, who had retreated into an opium haze
after the horrors of his last expedition, is summoned to Windsor
Castle where Queen Louise shows him a photograph. “Those
are puffs of gas on the Martian surface. The Martians are
coming again, Mr. Bedford. And in far greater numbers.”
Defeated the last time only due to their vulnerability to
Earth's microbes, there is every reason to expect that this time
the Martians will have taken precautions against that threat to
their plans for conquest.

Earth's only hope to thwart the invasion before it reaches the
surface and unleashes further devastation on its inhabitants is
deploying weapons on platforms employing the anti-gravity
material Cavorite, but the secret of manufacturing it rests with
its creator, Cavor, who has been taken prisoner by the ant-like
Selenites in the expedition from which Mr Bedford narrowly
escaped, as chronicled in Mr Wells's
<cite><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Men_in_the_Moon"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">The
First Men in the Moon</a></cite>. Now, Bedford must embark on a perilous
attempt to recover the Cavorite sphere lost at the end of his
last adventure and then join an expedition to the Moon to rescue
Cavor from the caves of the Selenites.

Meanwhile, on Barsoom (Mars),
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Princess_of_Mars"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">John Carter
and Deja Thoris</a> find
their beloved city of Helium threatened by the Khondanes, whose
deadly tripods wreaked so much havoc on Earth not long ago and
are now turning their envious eyes back to the plunder that
eluded them on the last attempt.

Queen Louise must assemble an international alliance, calling on
all of her crowned relatives: Czar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, and
even those troublesome republican Americans, plus all the
resources they can summon—the inventions of the Serbian,
Tesla, the research of Maria Skłowdowska and her young
Swiss assistant Albert, discovered toiling away in the patent
office, the secrets recovered from Captain Nemo's island, and
the mysterious interventions of the
<a href="/etexts/www/wells/timemach/html/"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Time
Traveller</a>, who flickers in and out of existence at various
moments, pursuing his own inscrutable agenda. As the conflict
approaches and battle is joined, an interplanetary effort is
required to save Earth from calamity.

As you might expect from this description, this is a
rollicking good romp replete with references and tips of
the hat to the classics of science fiction and their
characters. What seems like a straightforward tale of
battle and heroism takes a turn at the very end into
the inspiring, with a glimpse of how different human
history might have been.

At present, only a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HLTZ7MS/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Kindle edition</a> is
available, which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Reading List: Three Laws Lethal</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2019-12/001856.html" />
<id>tag:www.fourmilab.ch,2019:/fourmilog//1.1856</id>
<published>2019-12-21T14:33:40Z</published>
<updated>2019-12-21T14:50:11Z</updated>
<summary><![CDATA[ Walton, David. Three Laws Lethal. Jersey City, NJ: Pyr, 2019. ISBN 978-1-63388-560-8. In the near future, autonomous vehicles, “autocars”, are available from a number of major automobile manufacturers. The self-driving capability, while not infallible, has been approved by regulatory authorities...]]></summary>
<author>
<name>kelvin</name>
<uri>http://www.fourmilab.ch/</uri>
</author>
<category term="Reading List" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<category term="Science Fiction" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
<content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/">
<![CDATA[<dl>
<dt>Walton, David.
<cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1633885607/?tag=fourmilabwwwfour"
target="Amazon_Fourmilab">Three Laws Lethal</a></cite>.
Jersey City, NJ: Pyr, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-63388-560-8.</dt>
<dd>
In the near future, autonomous vehicles, “autocars”,
are available from a number of major automobile manufacturers.
The self-driving capability, while not infallible, has been
approved by regulatory authorities after having demonstrated
that it is, on average, safer than the population of human
drivers on the road and not subject to human frailties such as
driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, while tired, or
distracted by others in the car or electronic gadgets. While
self-driving remains a luxury feature with which a minority of
cars on the road are equipped, regulators are confident that as
it spreads more widely and improves over time, the highway
accident rate will decline.

But placing an algorithm and sensors in command of a vehicle
with a mass of more than a tonne hurtling down the road at 100
km per hour or faster is not just a formidable technical
problem, it is one with serious and unavoidable moral
implications. These come into stark focus when, in an incident
on a highway near Seattle, an autocar swerves to avoid a tree
crashing down on the highway, hitting and killing a motorcyclist
in an adjacent lane of which the car's sensors must have been
aware. The car appears to have made a choice, valuing
the lives of its passengers: a mother and her two children, over
that of the motorcyclist. What really happened, and how the car
decided what to do in that split-second, is opaque, because the
software controlling it was, as all such software, proprietary
and closed to independent inspection and audit by third
parties. It's one thing to acknowledge that self-driving
vehicles are safer, as a whole, than those with humans behind
the wheel, but entirely another to cede to them the moral agency
of life and death on the highway. Should an autocar value the
lives of its passengers over those of others? What if there
were a sole passenger in the car and two on the motorcycle? And
who is liable for the death of the motorcyclist: the auto
manufacturer, the developers of the software, the owner of car,
the driver who switched it into automatic mode, or the
regulators who approved its use on public roads? The case was
headed for court, and all would be watching the precedents it
might establish.

Tyler Daniels and Brandon Kincannon, graduate students in the
computer science department of the University of Pennsylvania,
were convinced they could do better. The key was going beyond
individual vehicles which tried to operate autonomously based
upon what their own sensors could glean from their immediate
environment, toward an architecture where vehicles communicated
with one another and coordinated their activities. This would
allow sharing information over a wider area and be able to avoid
accidents resulting from individual vehicles acting without the
knowledge of the actions of others. Further, they wanted to
re-architect individual ground transportation from a model of
individually-owned and operated vehicles to transportation as a
service, where customers would summon an autocar on demand with
their smartphone, with the vehicle network dispatching the
closest free car to their location. This would dramatically
change the economics of personal transportation. The typical private
car spends twenty-two out of twenty-four hours parked, taking up
a parking space and depreciating as it sits idle. The
transportation service autocar would be in constant service
(except for downtime for maintenance, refuelling, and times of
reduced demand), generating revenue for its operator. An angel
investor believes their story and, most importantly, believes in
them sufficiently to write a check for the initial demonstration
phase of their project, and they set to work.

Their team consists of Tyler and Brandon, plus Abby and Naomi
Sumner, sisters who differed in almost every way: Abby outgoing
and vivacious, with an instinct for public relations and
marketing, and Naomi the super-nerd, verging on being “on
the spectrum”. The big day of the public roll-out of the
technology arrives, and ends in disaster, killing Abby in what
was supposed to be a demonstration of the system's inherent
safety. The disaster puts an end to the venture and the
surviving principals go their separate ways. Tyler signs on as
a consultant and expert witness for the lawyers bringing the
suit on behalf of the motorcyclist killed in Seattle, using the
exposure to advocate for open source software being a
requirement for autonomous vehicles. Brandon uses money
inherited after the death of his father to launch a new venture,
Black Knight, offering transportation as a service initially in
the New York area and then expanding to other cities. Naomi,
whose university experiment in genetic software implemented as
non-player characters (NPCs) in a virtual world was the
foundation of the original venture's software, sees Black Knight
as a way to preserve the world and beings she has created as
they develop and require more and more computing resources.
Characters in the virtual world support themselves and compete
by driving Black Knight cars in the real world, and as
generation follows generation and natural selection works its
wonders, customers and competitors are amazed at how Black
Knight vehicles anticipate the needs of their users and maintain
an unequalled level of efficiency.

Tyler leverages his recognition from the trial into a new
self-driving venture based on open source software called
“Zoom”, which spreads across the U.S. west coast and
eventually comes into competition with Black Knight in the
east. Somehow, Zoom's algorithms, despite being open and having
a large community contributing to their development, never seem
able to equal the service provided by Black Knight, which is so
secretive that even Brandon, the CEO, doesn't know how Naomi's
software does it.

In approaching any kind of optimisation problem such as
scheduling a fleet of vehicles to anticipate and respond to
real-time demand, a key question is choosing the
“objective function”: how the performance of the
system is evaluated based upon the stated goals of its
designers. This is especially crucial when the optimisation is
applied to a system connected to the real world. The parable of
the
“<a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">Clippy
Apocalypse</a>”, where an artificial intelligence put in
charge of a paperclip factory and trained to maximise the
production of paperclips escapes into the wild and eventually
converts first its home planet, then the rest of the solar
system, and eventually the entire visible universe into paper
clips. The system worked as designed—but the objective
function was poorly chosen.

Naomi's NPCs literally (or virtually) lived or died based upon
their ability to provide transportation service to Black
Knight's customers, and natural selection, running at the
accelerated pace of the simulation they inhabited, relentlessly
selected them with the objective of improving their service and
expanding Black Knight's market. To the extent that, within
their simulation, they perceived opposition to these goals, they
would act to circumvent it—whatever it takes.

This sets the stage for one of the more imaginative tales of how
artificial general intelligence might arrive through the back
door: not designed in a laboratory but emerging through the
process of evolution in a complex system subjected to real-world
constraints and able to operate in the real world. The moral
dimensions of this go well beyond the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem"
target="Fourmilab_readingListAux">trolley
problem</a> often cited in connection with autonomous vehicles,
dealing with questions of whether artificial intelligences we
create for our own purposes are tools, servants, or slaves, and
what happens when their purposes diverge from those for which we
created them.

This is a techno-thriller, with plenty of action in the
conclusion of the story, but also a cerebral exploration of the
moral questions which something as seemingly straightforward and
beneficial as autonomous vehicles may pose in the future.
</dd>
</dl>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
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