Pelé Has Died at Age 82

Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈɛdsõ(w) aˈɾɐ̃tʃiz du nasiˈmẽtu]; 23 October 1940 – 29 December 2022), known mononymously by his nickname Pelé (Portuguese pronunciation: [peˈlɛ]), was a Brazilian professional footballer who played as a forward.  Regarded as one of the greatest players of all time and labelled "the greatest" by FIFA, he was among the most successful and popular sports figures of the 20th century. In 1999, he was named Athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee and was include in the Time list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.  In 2000, Pelé was voted World Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) and was one of the two joint winners of the FIFA Player of the Century.  His 1,279 goals in 1,363 games, which includes friendlies, is recognised as a Guinness World Record.

Pelé began playing for Santos at age 15 and the Brazil national team at 16.  During his international career, he won three FIFA World Cups: 1958, 1962 and 1970, the only player to do so.  He was nicknamed O Rei (The King) following the 1958 tournament. Pelé is the joint-top goalscorer for Brazil with 77 goals in 92 games. At the club level, he was Santos' all-time top goalscorer with 643 goals in 659 games.  In a golden era for Santos, he led the club to the 1962 and 1963 Copa Libertadores, and to the 1962 and 1963 Intercontinental Cup. Credited with connecting the phrase "The Beautiful Game" with football, Pelé's "electrifying play and penchant for spectacular goals" made him a star around the world, and his teams toured internationally to take full advantage of his popularity.  During his playing days, Pelé was for a period the best-paid athlete in the world. After retiring in 1977, Pelé was a worldwide ambassador for football and made many acting and commercial ventures.  In 2010, he was named the honorary president of the New York Cosmos.

Averaging almost a goal per game throughout his career, Pelé was adept at striking the ball with either foot in addition to anticipating his opponents' movements on the field. While predominantly a striker, he could also drop deep and take on a playmaking role, providing assists with his vision and passing ability, and he would also use his dribbling skills to go past opponents. In Brazil, he was hailed as a national hero for his accomplishments in football and for his outspoken support of policies that improve the social conditions of the poor. His emergence at the 1958 World Cup, where he became a black global sporting star, was a source of inspiration.  Throughout his career and in his retirement, Pelé received numerous individual and team awards for his performance in the field, his record-breaking achievements, and his legacy in the sport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pel%C3%A9

  

2023 Is Already Shaping Up to Be a Very Bad Year

By opinion contributor Grady Means for The Hill

And available on line at:  The bad news: 2023 is already shaping up to be a very, very bad year (msn.com)

Weather Forecasts Have Greatly Improved.

Have You Noticed?

By Ross Pomeroy

Included in RealClear Science on December 23, 2022

People routinely make snide jokes about the inaccuracy of weather forecasts. It's a status quo that irks MIT Professor Emeritus Kerry A. Emanuel and Penn State Professors Richard Alley and Fuqing Zhang, because, as the trio of experts in atmospheric science and geoscience noted in a paper published to the journal Science in 2018, those jokesters "wouldn’t dream of planning an outdoor activity without first checking the weather forecast."

Moreover, the forecasts they mock have drastically improved in accuracy over the past few decades and continue to do so.

"Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts just 40 years ago," they wrote. "A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast in 1980, and useful forecasts now reach 9-10 days into the future," they added.

So though the weather prediction jokes continue, they are growing more and more unfounded every year.

Three key developments enabled weather forecasting's giant leap forward, the authors said, "Better and more extensive observations, better and much faster numerical prediction models, and vastly improved methods of assimilating observations into models." The improved observations have come from the proliferation of advanced weather satellites in Earth's orbit, including the incredible lineup of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European Space Agency's Meteosat satellites. Moreover, much faster computers have allowed for more advanced and detailed models.

The simple passing of time has also fed weather forecasting's advance. Each day, week, month, and year, reams of data are collected and fed into prediction models, which are then adjusted accordingly, granting more and more precision as additional data arrives. The Earth is a system, and the more we monitor that system, the better we can foresee its future.

Still, there are hard limits to predicting the weather, the authors said. "The details of weather cannot be predicted accurately, even in principle, much beyond roughly two weeks."

The good news, they added, is there's still a lot of room for refinement within that time frame. Flood forecasts for coastal storms still need work, as do predictions of sea ice extent in the Arctic and the movements of smoke from increasingly frequent wildfires.

Meteorology will also have a massive role in a future renewable-centered power grid.

"As renewables come to play an increasing role in power systems, forecasting the availability of sun, wind, and river flow will take on increased importance, as will forecasts of energy demand, a large part of which is driven by weather," the authors wrote.

But for weather prediction to keep improving, there needs to be a steady stream of monetary investment and human effort, they assert. Data collection needs to continue apace from the ground, sky, and space. Machine learning and neural networks need to be crafted and applied within earth sciences, particularly to learn more about intricate physical processes like cloud-aerosol interactions that still aren't well understood. Governments also need to pay for supercomputing infrastructure to run increasingly advanced weather prediction models.

"With strategic investments, the future of weather forecasting and related environmental services is bright," Emanuel, Alley, and Zhang concluded.

This article was originally published at Big Think.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2022/12/23/weather_forecasts_have_greatly_improved_over_the_past_few_decades_and_theyre_still_getting_better_871093.html

  

Degrowth Solutions Will Not Solve Global Warming

Shrinking the economy wouldn’t give the world the resources it needs to stop climate change or to lift billions out of poverty.

Opinion By Peter Morici for Market Watch

December 28, 2022 -- Climate change, pandemics, Putin’s madness and China’s ambitions threaten humanity with droughts and floods of biblical proportions, nonnavigable rivers and disappearing island nations, fractured global supply chains and shortages of vital resources like commercial fertilizer, and famine and mass migrations.

Much of this has been enabled or exacerbated by industrialization and globalization.

Prior to the industrial revolution per capita incomes grew very slowly—perhaps 0.2% or 0.3% a year. Even with late Middle Ages innovations like the three-part plow and horse harness, aggregate economic growth was largely tethered to population increase.

Progress and growth

The degrowth movement is amorphous with contributions from both the physical and social sciences. But it appears unified by a criticism of modern economics, which tends to associate human progress with GDP growth.

The movement generally asserts that climate change and inequality could be better addressed by shrinking the global economy—perhaps, a modest 0.5% a year, which would imply average per capita incomes losses of more than 1% a year.

This does not stand up well against the record of advanced market economies. From 2005 until the pandemic, those enjoyed GDP growth and substantially cut CO2 emissions. 

Green electricity will prove more expensive than fossil-fuel generation because even when it can be had cheaply, it requires expensive fossil fuel and battery backups to cope with severe cold and heat.

EVs are more expensive to produce because the batteries and electric motors require lots of lithium, copper, cobalt and other metals. Global capacity to produce those is often in politically and geographically awkward locations—the Congo, South America and China.

Progress means better lives

Without growth, adopting green technologies, building infrastructure to access vital resources and protecting against associated risks would require significant reductions in living standards and simply not be politically sustainable.

The pathogens that attack mankind are always mutating and posing new threats. Producing new vaccines and medicines—and making those transnationally available to rich and poor alike—is terribly expensive.

Even with NATO devoting over $1 trillion a year to defense, Russia, China, Iran and others are spending enough to create mischief that could end badly for democracy.

Unless we surrender to disease, capitulate to dictatorship, and let millions die or be enslaved, the United States and its allies must spend more, not less, money and manpower on health care and defense. That will require economic growth to be politically palatable.

Social and economic justice politicians are not buying into warnings about the dangers posed by rising autocratic power. While their views are not popular within the wider Democratic Party, if the United States and other rich countries undertook to shrink their economies to lower emissions, the left would likely seek concessions that imposed dramatically redistributive taxes on income and wealth to meet public health and security challenges to avoid impoverishing the bottom half of their populations.

Dividends of markets

The degrowth movement advocates smaller homes, eating less meat and more leisure to spend with children—all benefits simple GDP accounting does not capture. But indicators of well-being like infant mortality and leisure time improve as per capita incomes rise, and those are dividends of free-market dynamics.

Shrinking GDP without losing ground would require abandoning capitalism and markets for state planning. It’s doubtful personal liberty and democracy could survive all that. It bears mentioning autocracies and countries sympathetic toward them—like China and India—are burning more, not less coal these days.

The degrowth folks are remarkably silent on realistic policy prescriptions for downsizing advanced industrialized economies while simultaneously leveling up the poor in the developing world.

That process would require much more than a 0.5% per annual downshift in OECD GDP, while enabling developing countries to continue growing to improve the conditions of the poor, purchase CO2 abatement technologies, and mitigate against coastal flooding and unbearable heat.

We can’t go back

Developing country access to technology and growth are dependent on trade with and the growth of industrialized countries, but degrowth activists correctly point out that much North-South trade is based on resource extraction.

Weaning from that commerce would require fewer developing country imports of food from places like Ukraine, North America and prodigious developing country producers like Brazil, less dependence on commercial fertilizer produced from natural gas and mined potash from places like Russia and Canada and massive donations of CO2 abatement and mitigation hardware from richer countries.

With developed countries shrinking their economies, expecting such generosity would be naive, and alternative food supplies through sustainable local agriculture is a nostalgic fantasy.

Just prior to the industrial revolution the global population was about 1 billion. Today, at 8 billion, it is ludicrous to think developing countries could produce enough food relying on cow-dung fertilizer. Anyway, cattle exhale CO2, and the degrowth folks see virtue in us all becoming vegetarians.

Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.

        https://www.marketwatch.com/story/degrowth-solutions-wont-solve-global-warming-11672197683?mod=mw_latestnews

Car Makes Record-Breaking 621-Mile Trip on Single Charge Powered by the Sun

By Good News Network

 -

Dec 22, 2022

An electric car has made a record-breaking 621 mile (1,000km) trip on a single charge powered by the sun.

The solar-powered Sunswift 7 averaged nearly 53mph (85kph) in under twelve hours to set a Guinness World Record while completing 240 laps of a track to represent the distance from Sydney to Melbourne.

Sunswift 7 is the latest in a long line of successful solar-powered cars from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, since the first vehicle was produced in 1996.

It weighs just 1,200 pounds, (500kg)—about one quarter of a Tesla—and boasts impressive efficiencies thanks to its aerodynamic design, the efficiency of the motors and drive chain, and incredibly low rolling resistance.

The car is not road legal, as it is missing essentials like climate control and airbags. The cost is prohibitive as well, but a solid dataset is an important jumping off point for building future solar cars in a country like Australia that is blessed with almost year ’round sunshine.

For their World Record, the UNSW team put the car through the paces at the Australian Automotive Research Centre (AARC) in Wensleydale, Victoria. They now hold the record for the ‘Fastest EV over 1,000km on a single charge.’

“It feels very weird to think that we’ve helped to make something that’s the best in the entire world,” said Sunswift team manager Andrea Holden, a mechanical engineering student at UNSW.

“Two years ago, when we started to build this car, everything was going into lockdown and there were a lot of difficult moments. It was a lot of work and a lot of hours and a lot of stress, but it’s all been worth it. This world record is validation of all the effort everyone in the team has put in.”

RELATED: Largest Purchase of Electric Vehicles in History: Amazon Orders 100,000 EV Delivery Vans

As the car knocked out its 240 laps—greater than the distance to Melbourne from Sydney, the energy consumption was just 3.8 kWh/100km, a far more efficient rating than even the most efficient EVs on the road today, which average 15kWh-20kWh/100km.

“Let’s remember, these are not the best-paid professional car makers in Stuttgart working for Mercedes,” said team principal and four-time F1 world champion as Head of Operations at Red Bull, Professor Richard Hopkins.

“This is a bunch of very smart amateurs who have taken all the ingredients and put it together in a brilliant way.”

MORE EV NEWS: Student-Designed Electric Car Breaks World Record by Crossing Australia in 6 Days Using Only $50 of Power

“This team has focused on ultimate efficiency in order to break this world record. They have shown what is ultimately achievable if you concentrate on aerodynamics, and rolling resistance and the use of smart materials.”

“I used to work in Formula One and nobody thinks we’ll be driving F1 cars on the road in five or 10 years. But the technology they use in F1 really pushes the boundaries and some of that filters down [to regular vehicles] and that’s what we are trying to do with Sunswift and what this world record shows is achievable.”

        https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/car-makes-record-breaking-621-mile-trip-on-single-charge-powered-by-the-sun/

Mahsa Amini Protests in Iran

Civil unrest and protests against the government of Iran associated with the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini (Persian: مهسا امینی) began on 16 September 2022 and are ongoing as of early December 2022.  Amini had been arrested by the Guidance Patrol for allegedly violating Iran's mandatory hijab law by wearing her hijab "improperly" while visiting Tehran from Saqqez.  According to eyewitnesses, she had been severely beaten by Guidance Patrol officers, an assertion denied by Iranian authorities.  As the protests spread from Amini's hometown of Saqqez to other cities in the province of Kurdistan and throughout the country, the government responded with widespread Internet blackout s, nationwide restrictions on social media usage, tear gas and gunfire.

Although the protests have not been as deadly as those in 2019 (when more than 1,500 were killed), they have been "nationwide, spread across social classes, universities, the streets [and] schools", and called the "biggest challenge" to the government of Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. as of 17 December 2022 at least 469 people, including 63 minors, had been killed as a result of the government's intervention in the protests; an estimated 18,480 have been arrested throughout at least 134 cities and towns, and at 132 universities.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissed the widespread unrest not only as "riots" but also as a “hybrid war" caused by foreign states and dissidents abroad.  Women, including schoolchildren, have played a key role in the demonstrations. In addition to demands for increased rights for women, the protests have demanded the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, setting them apart from previous major protest movements in Iran, which have focused on election results or economic woes.  The government's response to the protests has been widely condemned.

Background

Since shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iranian women have been legally required to completely cover their hair in public with a hijab.  Enforcement of the unpopular law was eased during the 2013–2021 tenure of President Rouhani, but was then intensified under Rouhani's successor, the hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi.  Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was arrested by the Guidance Patrol on 14 September 2022 because of an "improper hijab."  The police were accused of beating her and inflicting a fatal head injury; Amini was pronounced dead on 16 September. After a CT scan confirmed that Amini sustained head injuries, the head of Iran's morality police was suspended.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests

  

Curse of the Bambino

The Curse of the Bambino was a superstitious sports curse in Major League Baseball (MLB) derived from the 86-year championship drought of the Boston Red Sox between 1918 and 2004.  The superstition was named after Babe Ruth, colloquially known as "The Bambino", who played for the Red Sox until he was sold to the New York Yankees in 1920.  While some fans took the curse seriously, most used the expression in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Prior to the drought, the Red Sox had been one of the most successful professional baseball franchises. They won five of the first fifteen World Series titles, including the first in 1903, more than any other MLB team at the time.  During this period, Ruth was a contributor to the Red Sox's three championships in 1915, 1916, and 1918.  Following the sale of Ruth, however, the once lackluster Yankees became one of the most dominant professional sports franchises in North America, winning more than twice as many World Series titles as any other MLB team.  The curse became a focal point of the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry over the years.

Talk of the curse as an ongoing phenomenon ended when the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series.  The Red Sox's championship was prefaced by them overcoming a 0–3 deficit against the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series (ALCS), the first and, as of 2022, only time an MLB team won a best-of-seven playoff series after losing the first three games.

The curse had been such a part of Boston culture that when a "reverse curve" road sign on Longfellow Bridge over the city's Storrow Drive was graffitied to read "Reverse The Curse," officials left it in place until the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. After the World Series that year, the road sign was edited to read "Reversed Curse" in celebration.

Lore About the Curse

Although it had long been noted that the selling of Ruth had been the beginning of a decline in the Red Sox' fortunes, the term "curse of the Bambino" was not in common use until the publication of the book The Curse of the Bambino by Dan Shaughnessy in 1990.  It became a key part of Red Sox lore in the media thereafter, and Shaughnessy's book became required reading in some high school English classes in New England.

Although the title drought dated back to 1918, the sale of Ruth to the Yankees was completed January 3, 1920.  In standard curse lore, Red Sox owner and theatrical producer Harry Frazee used the proceeds from the sale to finance the production of a Broadway musical, usually said to be No, No, Nanette.  In fact, Frazee backed many productions before and after Ruth's sale, and No, No, Nanette did not see its first performance until five years after the Ruth sale and two years after Frazee sold the Red Sox. In 1921, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow left to take over as general manager of the Yankees. Other Red Sox players were also later sold or traded to the Yankees.

Neither the lore, nor the debunking of it, entirely tells the story.  As Leigh Montville wrote in The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, the production No, No, Nanette had originated as a non-musical stage play called My Lady Friends, which opened on Broadway in December 1919.  That play had, indeed, been financed as a direct result of the Ruth deal.  Various researchers, including Montville and Shaughnessy, have pointed out that Frazee had close ties to the Yankees owners, and that many of the player deals, as well as the mortgage deal for Fenway Park itself, had to do with financing his plays.

Yankee fans taunted the Red Sox with chants of "1918!" one weekend in September 1990.  The demeaning chant echoed at Yankee Stadium each time the Red Sox were there.  Yankee fans also taunted the Red Sox with signs saying "1918!", "CURSE OF THE BAMBINO", pictures of Babe Ruth, and wearing "1918!" T-shirts each time they were at the Stadium.

Attempts to Break the Curse

Red Sox fans attempted various methods over the years to exorcise their famous curse. These included placing a Boston cap atop Mount Everest and burning a Yankees cap at its base camp and finding a piano owned by Ruth that he had supposedly pushed into a pond near his Sudbury, Massachusettsfarm, Home Plate Farm.

In 1976, Laurie Cabot, the Official Witch of Massachusetts, was brought in to end a 10-game losing streak. While the losing streak ended, the Curse of the Bambino did not.

In Ken Burns's 1994 documentary Baseball, former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee suggested that the Red Sox should exhume the body of Babe Ruth, transport it back to Fenway and publicly apologize for trading Ruth to the Yankees.

Some declared the curse broken during a game on August 31, 2004, when a foul ball hit by Manny Ramírez flew into Section 9, Box 95, Row AA and struck a boy's face, knocking two of his teeth out.  16-year-old Lee Gavin, a Boston fan whose favorite player was Ramirez, lived on the Sudbury farm owned by Ruth. That same day, the Yankees suffered their worst loss in team history, a 22–0 clobbering at home against the Cleveland Indians.

Some fans also cite a comedy curse-breaking ceremony performed by musician Jimmy Buffett and his warm-up team (one dressed as Ruth and one dressed as a witch doctor) at a Fenway concert in September 2004.  Just after being traded to the Red Sox, Curt Schilling appeared in an advertisement for the Ford F-150 pickup truck hitchhiking with a sign indicating he was going to Boston.  When picked up, he said that he had "an 86-year-old curse" to break.

End of the Curse

In 2004, the Red Sox once again met the Yankees in the American League Championship Series.  The Red Sox lost the first three games, including losing Game 3 at Fenway by the lopsided score of 19–8.

The Red Sox trailed 4–3 in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 4.  But the team tied the game with a walk by Kevin Millar and a stolen base by pinch-runner Dave Roberts, followed by an RBI single against Yankee closer Mariano Rivera by third baseman Bill Mueller, and won on a two-run home run in the 12th inning by David Ortiz.  The Red Sox won the next three games to become the first and only MLB team to win a seven-game postseason series after losing the first three games.

The Red Sox then faced the St. Louis Cardinals, the team to whom they had lost in 1946 and 1967, and led throughout the series, winning in a four-game sweep.  Cardinals shortstop Édgar Rentería, who wore the same number as Ruth (3), was the final out of the series, a ground ball back to pitcher Keith Foulke.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Bambino

  

What was the Star of Bethlehem?

Never stop looking at the skies in wonder.

From BigThink

December 21, 2022 – KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The approach of Christmas offers an opportunity to ponder our connection to the skies. 
• To many, the skies remain sacred, the realm of God or of gods. What happened 2,000 years ago? What was the Star of Bethlehem, if anything? Scholars have a lot to say about this. 
• Whatever your beliefs, reconnecting with the awe and wonder of celestial phenomena is a good idea.

The skies have always been a bridge between the known and the unknown. In ancient times, the skies were the realm of the gods, who dictated the fates of men down below. Across different faiths, religious rituals and practices are a way to establish a sort of dialogue with powers way beyond our control. It is how we can grab their attention. And if the skies are the realm of the gods, then celestial phenomena must be some kind of message, the way the gods talk to us down here. Across millennia, this has been the belief of countless religions across the globe. Even now, when this sort of supernatural connection with the skies is fading due to scientific knowledge, countless people believe in astrology, another way of extracting meaning from celestial phenomena that supposedly impact our lives. 

Searching the skies of yesteryear

To many, a comet or an eclipse may be a bad omen, while a rainbow might signal the arrival of good weather and prosperity. After the 17th century, these phenomena became part of science, even if this science was historically charged with religious undertones. Kepler and Newton, for example, were both devout believers in God’s actions in the world. It is easy to see the appeal of a science that is both prophetic and apocalyptic to these and many other scientists, and to the public in general. After all, we want to predict what will happen by observing and interpreting nature. And the question of “the end” figures prominently in research fields such as cosmology and astrophysics, just as it does in many religious texts. 

Given that we are almost at Christmas, it is timely to examine one of the most famous of these celestial symbols: the Star of Bethlehem, and the Three Wise Men who followed it.

Relating biblical narrative to historical events is a complex field of scholarship, one that attracts interest inside and outside academia. On one hand, the believer historian or astronomer wants to prove that there is a connection between what the Bible tells and what happened in the skies. If there is, it would legitimize the Bible as a historical document, anchored on real facts, including astronomical events. On the other hand, the nonbeliever wants to disprove any such thing. In between those two groups are those who want to investigate, as dispassionately as humanly possible, the historical and astronomical data in search of phenomena or events that justify the biblical mentions. 

Chief among such events is the appearance, as mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, of the Star of Bethlehem. It signaled the birth of Jesus and guided the Three Wise Men from the east toward his birthplace.

A book published in 2016, The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi, edited by astronomer Peter Barthel and theologian George Van Kooten, collects a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including experts on the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and modern astronomy. The book is the proceedings of an international conference that took place in 2014 at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. It is quite expensive, as academic books tend to be.

The articles in the book are a response to a previous study by astronomer Michael Molnar, published in his book The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi. Molnar claims that the star was actually an astronomical event, namely the appearance of Jupiter in conjunction with the Sun, the Moon, and Saturn in the constellation of Aries, which modern celestial mechanics calculations show occurred on April 17 in the year 6 BCE. Fortunately, this book has a new paperback edition from 2013 that is quite inexpensive. According to Molnar, astrologers would interpret such a celestial event as a major portent, signaling a sort of royal birth. Couple the impressive and rare celestial arrangement with the expectation of a Messiah born from the House of David, and the connection between a celestial event and the birth follows. According to Molnar, the Three Wise Men were astrologers well versed in the motion of the skies, and hence keen to see such powerful astrological signs relate to an actual event, which in this case was the birth of Jesus.

What the Star of Bethlehem tells us all

Barthel and Van Kooten organize the results of their conference into four questions. What, when, how, and why? Respectively, they investigate the nature of the real astronomical phenomenon that took place, if any; the chronology of events; the role of astronomy and astrology at the time; and the evangelist’s motivation to connect the skies and the birth of Jesus to legitimize an act of God.

On the nature of the astronomical phenomenon that took place (or not), there were three disparate reactions: Complete agreement with Molnar, qualified agreement, and radical disagreement. On the chronology of the events, most agreed that Jesus’s birth took place between 7-5 BCE. On the relation between astronomy and astrology, there was mostly disagreement on the intentions and the interpretations of astrologers from different regions in the Middle East. One major difficulty was to justify the visit of only three men, given the alleged power of the celestial portent. Why not a multitude of the devout? As for the “why,” Matthew was the one evangelist who considered celestial portents seriously, using them plentifully in his narrative. For example, in the End of Time prophecy, he famously associated the apocalypse with celestial chaos (Matthew 24:29): “The stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

Although opinions diverge on the details, dramatic celestial events did apparently occur around the birth of Jesus. The challenge is that they often do, although some are more spectacular than others. When they provide context to a religious narrative, they create a confluence between myth-building and expectation, the skies being the realm of God and thus sacred, sending us signals of what is to come. 

If nothing else, the Star of Bethlehem tells us of a time when looking up to the skies in awe and wonder was a part of people’s lives, something few of us relate to now. Christmas offers the perfect context for us to rekindle this ancient fire and search for our own connection to the skies, religious or not.

What was the Star of Bethlehem? - Big Think

  

The Pope Speaks on Christmas

Jesus was poor, so don’t be power-hungry

By Frances D'Emilio

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Recalling Jesus’ birth in a stable, Pope Francis rebuked those “ravenous” for wealth and power at the expense of the vulnerable, including children, in a Christmas Eve homily decrying war, poverty and greedy consumerism.

In the splendor of St. Peter’s Basilica, Francis presided over the evening Mass attended by about 7,000 faithful, including tourists and pilgrims, who flocked to the church on a warm evening and took their place behind rows of white-robed pontiffs.

Francis drew lessons from the humility of Jesus’ first hours of life in a manger.

“While animals feed in their stalls, men and women in our world, in their hunger for wealth and power, consume even their neighbors, their brothers and sisters,” the pontiff lamented. “How many wars have we seen! And in how many places, even today, are human dignity and freedom treated with contempt!”

“As always, the principal victims of this human greed are the weak and the vulnerable,” said Francis, who didn’t cite any specific conflict or situation.

“This Christmas, too, as in the case of Jesus, a world ravenous for money, power and pleasure does not make room for the little ones, for the so many unborn, poor and forgotten children,” the pope said, reading his homily with a voice that sounded tired and almost hoarse. “I think above all of the children devoured by war, poverty and injustice.”

Still, the pontiff exhorted people to take heart.

“Do not allow yourself to be overcome by fear, resignation or discouragement.” Jesus’ lying in a manger shows where “the true riches in life are to be found: not in money and power, but in relationships and persons.”

Remarking on the “so much consumerism that has packaged the mystery” of Christmas, Francis said there was a danger the day’s meaning could be forgotten.

But, he said, Christmas focuses attention on “the problem of our humanity — the indifference produced by the greedy rush to possess and consume.”

“Jesus was born poor, lived poor and died poor,” Francis said. “He did not so much talk about poverty as live it, to the very end, for our sake.”

Francis urged people to “not let this Christmas pass without doing something good.”

When the Mass ended, the pope, pushed in a wheelchair by an aide, moved down the basilica with a life-sized statue of Baby Jesus on his lap and flanked by several children carrying bouquets. The statue then was placed in a manger in a creche scene in the basilica.

Francis, 86, has been using a wheelchair to navigate long distances due to a painful knee ligament and a cane for shorter distances.

Traditionally, Catholics mark Christmas Eve by attending Mass at midnight. But over the years, the starting time at the Vatican has crept earlier, reflecting the health or stamina of popes and then the pandemic.

Two years ago, the start of Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica was moved up to 7:30 p.m. to allow faithful to get home before for a nighttime curfew imposed by the Italian government as a measure to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Although virtually all pandemic-triggered restrictions have long been lifted in Italy, the Vatican kept to the early start time.

During Saturday evening’s service, a choir sang hymns. Clusters of potted red poinsettia plants near the altar contrasted with the cream-colored vestments of the pontiff.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of Romans, tourists and pilgrims were expected to crowd into St. Peter’s Square to hear Pope Francis deliver an address on world issues and give his blessing. The speech, known in Latin as “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and to the world), generally is an occasion to review crises including war, persecution and hunger, in many parts of the globe.

___

Associated Press journalist Luigi Navarra contributed.

https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-religion-poverty-vatican-city-c93ef4dd7916d95153f0e8494ba1fa2a?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_03

 

Insolvency Specialist John J. Ray III

John J. Ray III (born January 1959) is an American attorney and insolvency professional.  He specializes in recovering funds from failed corporations. He was appointed CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in the aftermath of its November 2022 collapse. He previously served as chairman of Enron Creditors Recovery Corp., a company tasked with recovering creditor funds from Enron in the wake of its accounting scandal and subsequent collapse.  He also worked on the bankruptcies of Nortel, Residential Capital, and Overseas Shipholding.

Early life and education

Ray grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  He is the son of union plumber John J. Ray Jr. and his wife Florence. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Drake University.

Career

From 1998 through 2002, Ray was the chief administrative officer and general counsel of Fruit of the Loom after the company declared chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999.

After Enron went into chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001, Ray was appointed the chairman of the reorganized company that recovered money for creditors. He served in that role from 2004 to 2009. Under Ray’s leadership, the company returned $828.9 million to its creditors, which Ray said was nearly 52 cents on the dollar.

Starting in 2010, Ray was the principal officer of the bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company Nortel.

In 2014, Ray was appointed as an independent board member for GT Advanced Technologies.

In 2016, Ray managed a trust which liquidated the assets of the major subprime mortgage services company Residential Capital.

When cryptocurrency company FTX declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 11, 2022, Ray was appointed to succeed Sam Bankman-Fried as the company's CEO.  Six days later, in a filing with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Ray stated that in over 40 years of his experience in dealing with insolvencies, he had never encountered "such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here".  In addition, he stated that FTX was managed by "a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals".

According to FTX's court disclosures, the company pays Ray $1,300 per hour and a $200,000 retainer fee.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Ray_III

 

The First Lab-Grown Seafood Will Be Fancy

Oceans are under threat. Can cell-cultured fish help?

By Kenny Torrella

Published by Vox on Dec 14, 2022

Torrella’s article is thorough and thoughtful.  It is possible to grow seafood in laboratory settings, though it is expensive to do so.  So the first laboratory seafood is going to challenge the expensive sushi and specialty markets just as a matter of economic survival.  Read the entire article here:  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23507372/lab-grown-seafood-fish-bluenalu-wildtype-cultivated-cultured-meat 

Royal Thai Naval Ship Sinks in Heavy Seas

Six Sailors Die and 23 still are missing

HTMS Sukhothai (FS-442) (Thai: เรือหลวงสุโขทัย, RTGS: Sukhothai) was a corvette of the Ratanakosi class operated by the Royal Thai Navy.  The ship was named after the Kingdom of Sukhothai, traditionally regarded as the first Thai kingdom along the Chao Phrahya river.

On 18 December 2022, while on a weather patrol mission in the Gulf of Thailand, high winds and strong waves caused seawater to flow into the warship; this flooding caused a power outage and subsequent loss of control of machinery and steering mechanisms.  Sukhothai continued to take on water until eventually sinking overnight.  The Royal Thai Navy was dispatched to rescue the crew, and as of 21 December 2022, they have confirmed that they have picked up 76 sailors, with 23 of the 105 crew members still missing and 6 sailors dead.

2022 sinking

The ship sank after a storm in the Gulf of Thailand on 18 December 2022.  She developed a heavy list after flooding caused electrical systems and pumps to fail. The failures were caused by seawater entering an exhaust port in heavy seas, which led to a short circuit in the ship's electrical system.  She sank at around 23:30 local time (UTC+07:00).  A weather advisory for the area had been issued by the Thailand Meteorological Department before the sinking, warning of 4-meter-high (13 ft) waves and advising ships to "proceed with caution".

Sukhothai had been on a patrol 17 nautical miles (32 km) east of Bang Saphan, in the Prachuap Khiri Khan province, when she became caught in the storm on 18 December.  Other naval ships and helicopters were sent to assist, but only HTMS Kraburi reached the vessel before she sank, picking up most of her crew.

As of 21 December 2022, the Royal Thai Navy has confirmed that rescue efforts have saved 76 sailors, but 23 crew members out of the 105 onboard are still missing, with 6 sailors dead.  As of 21December 2022, rescue operations are still underway.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTMS_Sukhothai

 

Worst Shipwreck in Peacetime

MV Doña Paz was a Japanese built and Philippine-registered passenger ferry that sank after colliding with the oil tanker Vector on December 20, 1987.  Built by Onomichi Zosen of Hiroshima, Japan, the ship was launched on April 25, 1963 as the Himeyuri Maru, with a passenger capacity of 608. In October 1975, the Himeyuri Maru was bought by Sulpicio Lines and renamed the Don Sulpicio.  After a fire on board in June 1979, the ship was refurbished and renamed Doña Paz.

Traveling from Leyte island to the Philippine capital of Manila, the vessel was seriously overcrowded, with at least 2,000 passengers not listed on the manifest. It has also been claimed that the ship did not have a radio and that the life-jackets were locked away. However, official blame was directed at the tanker Vector, that collided with the Doña Paz, which was found to be unseaworthy and operating without a license, a lookout, or a qualified master. With an estimated death toll of 4,385 people and only 26 survivors, it remains the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history.

Service History

Doña Paz was built in 1963 by Onomichi Zosen of Onomichi, Hiroshima, Japan. It was originally named the Himeyuri Maru.  During the time she travelled Japanese waters, she had a passenger capacity of 608.  In October 1975, she was sold to Sulpicio Lines, a Filipino operator of a fleet of passenger ferries, and was renamed Don Sulpicio. She served the Manila to Cebu sector as her primary route.  The vessel became one of the company's two flagship vessels, the  other one being the Doña Ana (later renamed Doña Marilyn).

On June 5, 1979, the vessel was gutted by fire on her usual Manila-Cebu journey. All 1,164 aboard were rescued but the vessel was beached and declared a constructive total loss. The wreck was repurchased from the underwriters by Sulpicio Lines, and repaired. Structural changes were made and she returned to service under the new name Doña Paz.

As the MV Philippine Princess had already become the flagship of Sulpicio Lines serving the Manila-Cebu sector, the Doña Paz was reassigned to serve the Manila →Tacloban route, with the return trip having a stop in Catbalogan.  Sulpicio Lines operated the Doña Paz on this route, making voyages twice a week, until the time of her sinking.

1987 Collision with MT Vector

On December 20, 1987, at 06:30, Philippine Standard Time, Doña Paz departed from Tacloban, Leyte, for Manila, with a stopover at Catbalogan, Samar.  Commanded by Captain Eusebio Nazareno, the vessel was due in Manila at 04:00 the next day. It was reported that it last made radio contact at about 20:00.  However, subsequent reports indicated that Doña Paz did not have a radio.

At about 22:30, the ferry was at Dumali Point, along the Tablas Strait, near Marinduque.  A survivor later said that the weather at sea that night was clear, but the sea was choppy.  While most of the passengers slept, Doña Paz collided with MT Vector, an oil tanker en route from Bataan to Masbate.  Vector was carrying 1,050,000 litres (8,800 US bbl) or 1041 tonnes (1148 US tons) of gasoline and other petroleum products owned by Caltex Philippines.

Upon collision, Vector's cargo ignited and caused a fire on the ship that spread onto Doña Paz. Survivors recalled sensing the crash and an explosion, causing panic on the vessel.  One of them, Paquito Osabel, recounted that the flames spread rapidly throughout the ship, and that the sea all around the ship itself was on fire.

Another survivor, Philippine Constabulary corporal Luthgardo Niedo, claimed that the lights aboard had gone out minutes after the collision, that there were not any life vests to be found on Doña Paz, and that the crewmen were running around in panic with the other passengers, and none of the crew gave any orders or made any attempt to organize the passengers.  It was later said that the life jacket lockers had been locked up.

The survivors were forced to jump off the ship and swim among charred bodies in flaming waters around the ship, with some using suitcases as makeshift flotation devices.  Doña Paz sank within two hours of the collision.  Vector sank within four hours.  Both ships sank in about 545 meters (1,788 ft) of water in the shark-infested Tablas Strait.  

Rescue

Officers and the captain of a passing inter-island ship, MS Don Claudio, witnessed the explosion of the two ships and, after an hour, found the survivors of Doña Paz.  The officers of Don Claudio threw a net for the survivors to climb onto. Only 26 survivors were retrieved from the water: 24 of them were passengers from Doña Paz, while the other 2 were crewmen from Vector's 13-man crew.

A 25th survivor from Doña Paz, Valeriana Duma, was not originally accounted for by officials. She later revealed herself through the GMA Network program Wish Ko Lang! in 2012.  At 14, she was the second youngest passenger of Doña Paz to survive.  Often forgotten, one of the originally known survivors of the Doña Paz was a four-year-old boy, who has never been named. He was the youngest survivor.

None of the crew of Doña Paz survived.  Most of the survivors sustained burns from jumping into the flaming waters.  Doctors and nurses aboard the rescue vessel tended to their injuries. It reportedly took eight hours before Philippine maritime authorities learned of the accident, and another eight hours to initiate search-and-rescue operations.

Investigation of the causes of the incident

According to the initial investigation conducted by the Philippine Coast Guard, only one apprentice member of the crew of Doña Paz was monitoring the ship's bridge when the accident occurred.  Other officers were either drinking beer or watching television in the crew's recreation quarters.  The ship's captain was watching a movie on his Betamax machine in his cabin.  A similar testimony was given by one of the survivors, Luthgardo Niedo, wherein he stated that a fellow constabulary soldier informed him of "an ongoing party with laughter and loud music" on the ship's bridge with the captain as one of the attendees.

Survivors claimed that it was possible that Doña Paz may have carried as many as 4,000 passengers.  The signs that they considered were that they saw passengers sleeping along corridors, on the boat decks, and on bunks with three or four people on them.

Casualties

In the initial announcement made by Sulpicio Lines, the official passenger manifest of Doña Paz recorded 1,493 passengers and 59 crew members aboard.  According to Sulpicio Lines, the ferry was able to carry 1,424 passengers.  A revised manifest released on December 23, 1987, showed 1,583 passengers and 58 crew members on Doña Paz, with 675 persons boarding the ferry in Tacloban, and 908 coming aboard in Catbalogan.  However, an anonymous official of Sulpicio Lines told UPI that, since it was the Christmas season, tickets were usually purchased illegally aboard the ship at a cheaper rate, and those passengers were not listed on the manifest.  The same official added that holders of complimentary tickets and non-paying children younger than the age of four were not listed on the manifest.

Of the 21 bodies that had been recovered and identified as passengers on the ship five days after the accident, only one of the fatalities was listed on the official manifest. Of the 26 passengers who survived, only five were listed on the manifest.

On December 28, 1987,Representative Raul Daza of Northern Samar claimed that at least 2,000 passengers aboard Doña Paz were not on the ship's manifest.  He based that number on a list of names furnished by relatives and friends of missing people believed aboard the ferry, the names having been compiled by radio and television stations in Tacloban.  The names of these 2,000+ missing passengers were published in pages 29 to 31 of the December 29, 1987, edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.  At least 79 public school teachers perished in the collision.

During February 1988 the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation stated, on the basis of interviews with relatives, that there were at least 3,099 passengers and 59 crew on board, giving 3,134 on-board fatalities.  During January 1999 a presidential task force report estimated, on the basis of court records and more than 4,100 settlement claims, that there were 4,342 passengers.  Subtracting the 26 surviving passengers, and adding 58 crew, gives 4,374 on-board fatalities. Adding the 11 dead from the Vector crew, the total becomes 4,385, almost 3 times the design load.

Reactions and aftermath

President Corazon Aquino described the accident as "a national tragedy of harrowing proportions...[the Filipino people's] sadness is all the more painful because the tragedy struck with the approach of Christmas".  Pope John Paul II, Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom conveyed their official messages of condolence.  Given the estimated death toll, Time Magazine and others have termed the sinking of Doña Pa z "the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster of the 20th century".

Sulpicio Lines announced three days after the accident that Doña Paz was insured for ₱25,000,000 (US$668,780 in 2021 dollars), and it was willing to indemnify the survivors the amount of ₱20,000 (US$574 in 2021 dollars) for each victim.  Days later, hundreds of the victims' kin staged a mass rally at Rizal Park, demanding that the ship owners likewise indemnify the families of those not listed on the manifest, as well as to give a full accounting of the missing.  

Nonetheless, the Board of Marine Inquiry eventually exculpated Sulpicio Lines of fault in the accident.  Subsequent inquiries revealed that Vector was operating without a license, lookout or properly qualified master.  During 1999 the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled that it was the owners of Vector who were liable to indemnify the victims of the collision.

Some of the claims pursued against either Sulpicio Lines or the owners of Vector, such as those filed by the Cañezal family (who lost two members) and the Macasas family (who lost three members) were adjudicated by the Supreme Court, which found that even the families of victims whose names did not appear on the official manifest were entitled to indemnity.  Caltex Philippines, which had chartered Vector, was likewise cleared of financial liability.

Memorial

A memorial honoring the victims of Doña Paz is at the Pieta Park in Catbalogan.  Located at adjacent to St. Bartholomew Church and Saint Mary's College of Catbalogan, the park now serves as a public space for families and friends of the victims.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Do%C3%B1a_Paz

  

Daylong Wastewater Samples Yield Surprises

Method to find antibiotic-resistant genes shows limits of 'snapshot' samples, chlorination

From:  Rice University

December 19, 2022 -- Testing the contents of a simple sample of wastewater can reveal a lot about what it carries, but fails to tell the whole story, according to Rice University engineers.

Their new study shows that composite samples taken over 24 hours at an urban wastewater plant give a much more accurate representation of the level of antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) in the water. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), antibiotic resistance is a global health threat responsible for millions of deaths worldwide.

In the process, the researchers discovered that while secondary wastewater treatment significantly reduces the amount of target ARG, chlorine disinfectants often used in later stages of treatment can, in some situations, have a negative impact on water released back into the environment.

The lab of Lauren Stadler at Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering reported seeing levels of antibiotic-resistant RNA concentrations 10 times higher in composite samples than what they see in "grabs," snapshots collected when flow through a wastewater plant is at a minimum.

Stadler and lead authors Esther Lou and Priyanka Ali, both graduate students in her lab, reported their results in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology: Water.

The results could lead to better protocols for treating wastewater to lower the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant genes in bacteria that propagate at plants and can transfer those genes to other organisms in the environment.

The issue is critical because antibiotic resistance is a killer, causing an estimated 2.8 million infections in the U.S. every year, leading to more than 35,000 deaths, said Stadler, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and a pioneer in the ongoing analysis of wastewater for signs of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19.

Those statistics have made it a long-standing focus of efforts at Rice that led to the foundation of a new center, Houston Wastewater Epidemiology, a partnership with the Houston Health Department and Houston Public Works. The center is one of two designated by the CDC announced this year to develop tools and train other state and local health departments in the sciences of monitoring wastewater-borne diseases.

The takeaway for testers is that snapshots can lead to unintended biases in their results, Stadler said.

"I think it's intuitive that grabbing a single sample of wastewater is not representative of what flows across the entire day," said Stadler, who is also a faculty member of the Rice-based, National Science Foundation-supported Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Center. "Wastewater flows and loads vary across the day, due to patterns of water use. While we know this to be true, no one had shown the degree to which antibiotic-resistant genes vary throughout the day."

For the study, the Rice team took both grab and composite samples in two 24-hour campaigns, one during the summer and another during winter, at a Houston-area plant that routinely disinfects wastewater.

They took samples every two hours from various stages of the wastewater treatment process and ran PCR tests in the lab to quantify several clinically relevant genes that confer resistance to fluoroquinolone, carbapenem, ESBL and colistin, as well as a class 1 integron-integrase gene known as a mobile genetic element (MGE) for its ability to move within a genome or transfer from one species to another.

The samples they collected allowed them to determine the concentration of ARGs and loads across a typical weekday, the variability in removal rates at plants based on the grab samples and the impact of secondary treatment and chlorine disinfection on the removal of ARGs, as well as the ability to compare grabs and composites.

The team found that the vast majority of ARG removal occurred due to biological processes as opposed to chemical disinfection. In fact, they observed that chlorination, used as the final disinfectant before the treated wastewater is discharged into the environment, may have selected for antibiotic-resistant organisms.

Because the results from snapshots can vary significantly during any given day, they had to be collected at a steady pace over 24 hours. That required Lou and Ali to spend several long shifts at the City of West University Place wastewater treatment plant. "They camped out," Stadler said. "They set up their cots and ordered takeout."

Such commitment will not be necessary if real-time wastewater monitoring becomes a reality. Stadler is part of a Rice collaboration developing living bacterial sensors that would detect the presence of ARGs and pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, without pause at different locations within a wastewater system. The project underway at Rice to build bacterial sensors that emit an immediate electrical signal upon sensing a target was the subject of a study in Nature in November.

"Living sensors can enable continuous monitoring as opposed to relying on expensive equipment to collect composite samples that need to be brought back to the lab to analyze," she said. "I think the future is these living sensors that can be placed anywhere in the wastewater system and report on what they see in real time. We're working towards that."

Rice undergraduate Karen Lu and Prashant Kalvapalle, a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph. D. program, are co-authors of the study.

The National Science Foundation (2029025, 1805901, 1932000) and a Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D award supported the research.

Daylong wastewater samples yield surprises: Method to find antibiotic-resistant genes shows limits of 'snapshot' samples, chlorination -- ScienceDaily