Flippy the robot uses AI to cook burgers – ZDNet

Posted on by

Flippy the robot is starting its culinary career with one simple task, but just like any rookie, it is learning on the job. With some practice and training, Flippy will be able to do everything from chopping vegetables to plating meals like a pro. Miso Robotics created the robot, which debuted in a kitchen at the restaurant chain CaliBurger in Pasadena, Calif., this week.

"Flippy will initially only focus on flipping burgers and placing them on buns," David Zito, CEO of Miso Robotics tells ZDNet. He adds, "But since Flippy is powered by our own cooking AI software, it will continuously learn from its experiences to improve and adapt over time. This means Flippy will learn to take on additional tasks including grilling chicken, bacon, onions, and buns in addition to frying, prepping, and finishing plates. Eventually, Flippy will support CaliBurger's entire menu."

The robot can be installed in kitchens in less than five minutes, and it's designed to work alongside restaurant staff. Flippy will even politely move aside if it gets in someone's way. Computer vision and deep learning software make it much smarter than your average kitchen appliance.

"Flippy features a Sensor Bar allowing it to see in 3D, thermal, and regular vision for detecting the exact temperatures of the grill as well as readiness of each burger, which will expand to other menu items as Flippy continues to learn and adapt," says Zito.

Flippy uses computer vision and AI to cook burgers. (Image: Miso Robotics)

Flippy will be installed in more than 50 CaliBurger restaurants worldwide by the end of 2019.

"The application of artificial intelligence to robotic systems that work next to our employees in CaliBurger restaurants will allow us to make food faster, safer and with fewer errors," said John Miller, chairman of Cali Group, in a statement. "Our investment in Miso Robotics is part of our broader vision for creating a unified operating system that will control all aspects of a restaurant from in-store interactive gaming entertainment to automated ordering and cooking processes, 'intelligent' food delivery and real-time detection of operating errors and pathogens."

Automation is creeping into kitchens in many forms. This week, Chowbotics (formerly Casabots) announced that it raised $5 million of Series A funding for food service robots. Then there's also Grillbot pro, which is like a Roomba for your grill. Moley Robotics is developing a fully automated and intelligent robotic chef. Various robots sell pizza, cook it, deliver it, and can even print it in outer space .

VIDEO: FDNY uses drone to tame Bronx fire

See original here:

Flippy the robot uses AI to cook burgers - ZDNet

Microsoft AI Lab Aims to Give Machines Common Sense – SDxCentral

Posted on by

Microsoft is building an artificial intelligence (AI) research hub to speed up the integration of AI into products and services.

Harry Shum, executive vice president for Microsofts AI and research group, spoke about the new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, for the first time this week at an event in the U.K.

In a blog post, he wrote that the lab will combine various disciplines such as machine learning, perception, and natural language processing to develop more sophisticated AI. This integrated approach aims to develop systems that can understand language and take action based on that understanding.

Machine reading, which combines AI disciplines such as natural language processing and deep learning, is an example.

We believe AI will be even more helpful when we can create tools that combine those functions and add some of the abilities that come naturally to people, Shum wrote. That includes things like applying our knowledge of one task to another task, or having a commonsense understanding of the world around us.

The company first launchedMicrosoft AI and Research in September 2016. The group brings together about 7,500 computer scientists, researchers, and engineers from the companys research labs and product groups such as digital assistant Cortana and Azure Machine Learning.

The new Microsoft AI lab will be based at the companys headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Bloomberg reports.

The announcement comes as competitors including Google are beefing up their AI efforts.

In May, Google announced its next-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). The Cloud TPUs aim to make Google Cloud Platform the bestcloudfor machine learning, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, adding that the investment reflects an overall shift in computing.

This is a shift from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, and we are driving it forward across all of our products and platforms, Pichai said.

Both companies are founding members of the Partnership on AI to Support People and Society. Microsoft and Google, along with IBM, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, andDeepMindformed the group in September 2016 to advance AI technologies including machine perception, learning, and automated reasoning.

Jessica is a Senior Editor, covering next-generation data centers and security, at SDxCentral. She has worked as an editor and reporter for more than 15 years at a number of B2B publications including Environmental Leader, Energy Manager Today, Solar Novus Today and Silicon Valley Business Journal. Jessica is based in the Silicon Valley.

Read the rest here:

Microsoft AI Lab Aims to Give Machines Common Sense - SDxCentral

AI is changing the way medical technicians work – TNW

Posted on by

When MIT successfully created AI that can diagnose skin cancer it was a massive step in the right direction for medical science. A neural-network can process huge amounts of data. More data means better research, more accurate diagnosis, and the potential to save lives by the thousands or millions.

In the future medical technicians will become data-scientists to support the AI-powered diagnostics departments that every hospital will need. Radiologists are going to need a different education than the one they have now theyre gonna need help from Silicon Valley.

This isnt a knock against radiologists or other medical technicians. For ages now, theyve worked hand-in-hand with doctors and been crucial in the diagnostic process. Its just that machines can process more data, with greater efficiency, than any human could. For what its worth, weve predicted that doctors are on their way out too, but this is different.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist at The University of Toronto, told the New Yorker:

I think that if you work as a radiologist you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon. Youre already over the edge of the cliff, but you havent yet looked down. Theres no ground underneath. Its just completely obvious that in five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. It might be ten years.

Its not about replacing, but upgrading and augmenting. Hinton might be a little dramatic, but not for nothing: hes the grandson of famed mathematician George Boole, the person responsible for boolean algorithms. Obviously, he understands what AI means for research. Hes not suggesting, however, that radiologists dont do anything beyond pointing out anomalies in pictures.

Instead, hes intimating that traditional radiology is going to change, and the way we train people now is going to be irrelevant. Which is, again, harsh.

Nobody is saying that medical trainers and educational facilities are doing a bad job. Its just that they need to be replaced with something better. Like machines.

We dont have to give neural-networks the keys to the shop; were not creating autonomous doctor-bots thatll decide to perform surgery on their own without the need for nurses, technicians, or other staff. Instead were streamlining things that humans simply cant do, like process millions of pieces of data at a time.

Tomorrows radiologist isnt a person who interprets the shadows on an X-ray. They are data-scientists. Medical technicians are going to be at the cutting-edge of AI technology in the near future. Technology and medicine are necessary companions. If were going to continue progress in medicine, we need a forward-thinking scientific attitude that isnt afraid of implementing AI.

Nowhere else is the potential to save lives greater than in medical research and diagnostics. What AI brings to the table is worth revolutionizing the industry and shaking it up for good. Some might say its long overdue.

A.I. VERSUS M.D. on The New Yorker

Read next: Snap Inc. is rumored to be buying a Chinese drone manufacturer

Read the original:

AI is changing the way medical technicians work - TNW

Human Compatible by Stuart Russell review AI and our future – The Guardian

Posted on by

Heres a question scientists might ask more often: what if we succeed? That is, how will the world change if we achieve what were striving for? Tucked away in offices and labs, researchers can develop tunnel vision, the rosiest of outlooks for their creations. The unintended consequences and shoddy misuses become afterthoughts messes for society to clean up later.

Today those messes spread far and wide: global heating, air pollution, plastics in the oceans, nuclear waste and babies with badly rewritten DNA. All are products of neat technologies that solve old problems by creating new ones. In the inevitable race to be first to invent, the downsides are dismissed, unexplored or glossed over.

In 1995, Stuart Russell wrote the book on AI. Co-authored with Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach became one of the most popular course texts in the world (Norvig worked for Nasa; in 2001, he joined Google). In the final pages of the last chapter, the authors posed the question themselves: what if we succeed? Their answer was hardly a ringing endorsement. The trends seem not to be too terribly negative, they offered. A lot has happened since: Google and Facebook for starters.

In Human Compatible, Russell returns to the question and this time does not hold back. The result is surely the most important book on AI this year. Perhaps, as Richard Brautigans poem has it, life is good when we are all watched over by machines of loving grace. But Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sees darker eventualities. Creating machines that surpass our intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. It may also be the last, he warns. Here he makes the convincing case that how we choose to control AI is possibly the most important question facing humanity.

Russell has picked his moment well. Tens of thousands of the worlds brightest minds are now building AIs. Most work on one-trick ponies the narrow AIs that process speech, translate languages, spot people in crowds, diagnose diseases, or whip people at games from Go to Starcraft II. But these are a far cry from the fields ultimate goal: general purpose AIs that match, or surpass, the broad-based brainpower of humans.

Its is not a ludicrous ambition. From the start, DeepMind, the AI group owned by Alphabet, Googles parent company, set out to solve intelligence and then use that to solve everything else. In July, Microsoft signed a $1bn contract with OpenAI, a US outfit, to build an AI that mimics the human brain. It is a high stakes race. As Vladimir Putin said: whoever becomes the leader in AI will become the ruler of the world.

Russell doesnt claim we are nearly there. In one section he sets out the formidable problems computer engineers face in creating human-level AI. Machines must know how to turn words into coherent, reliable knowledge; they must learn how to discover new actions and order them appropriately (boil the kettle, grab a mug, toss in a teabag). And like us, they must manage their cognitive resources so they can reach good decisions fast. These are not the only hurdles, but they give a flavour of the task ahead. Russell suspects it will keep researchers busy for another 80 years, but stresses the timing is impossible to predict.

Even with apocalypse camped on the horizon, this is a wry and witty tour of intelligence and where it may take us. And where exactly is that? A machine that masters all the above would be a formidable decision maker in the real world, Russell says. It would absorb vast amounts of information from the internet, TV, radio, satellites and CCTV and with it gain a more sophisticated understanding of the world and its inhabitants than any human could ever hope for.

What could possibly go right? In education, AI tutors would maximise the potential of every child. They would master the vast complexity of the human body, letting us banish disease. As digital personal assistants they would put Siri and Alexa to shame: You would, in effect, have a high-powered lawyer, accountant, and political advisor on call at any time.

And what of the downsides? Without serious progress on AI safety and regulation, Russell foresees messes aplenty and his chapter on misuses of AI is grim reading. Advanced AI would hand governments such extraordinary powers of surveillance, persuasion and control that the Stasi will look like amateurs. And while Terminator-style killer robots are not about to eradicate humanity, drones that select and kill individuals based on their faceprints, skin colour or uniforms are entirely feasible. As for jobs, we may no longer make a living by providing physical or mental labour, but we can still supply our humanity. Russell notes: We will need to become good at being human.

Whats worse than a society-destroying AI? A society-destroying AI that wont switch off. Its a terrifying, seemingly absurd prospect that Russell devotes much time to. The idea is that smart machines will suss out, as per HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that goals are hard to achieve if someone pulls the plug. Give a superintelligent AI a clear task to make the coffee, say and its first move will be to disable its off switch. The answer, Russell argues, lies in a radical new approach where AIs have some doubt about their goals, and so will never object to being shut down. He moves on to advocate provably beneficial AI, whose algorithms are mathematically proven to benefit their human users. Suffice to say this is a work in progress. How will my AI deal with yours?

Lets be clear: there are plenty of AI researchers who ridicule such fears. After the philosopher Nick Bostrom highlighted potential dangers of general purpose AI in Superintelligence (2014), a US thinktank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, gave its Luddism award to alarmists touting an artificial intelligence apocalypse. This was indicative of the dismal debate around AI safety, which is on the brink of descending into tribalism. The danger that comes across here is less an abrupt destruction of the species, more an inexorable enfeeblement: a loss of striving and understanding, which erodes the foundations of civilisation and leaves us passengers in a cruise ship run by machines, on a cruise that goes on forever.

Human Compatible is published by Allen Lane (25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

More:

Human Compatible by Stuart Russell review AI and our future - The Guardian

5 Reasons Artificial Intelligence Will Improve Greenhouse Production – Greenhouse Grower

Posted on by

Artificial intelligence (AI) involves using computers to do things that traditionally require human intelligence. This means creating algorithms to classify, analyze, and draw predictions from data. It also involves acting on data, learning from new data, and improving over time.

Thats the definition of AI, at least. But what does it actually mean for greenhouse growers?

According to Gursel Karacor, Senior Data Scientist at Grodan, a supplier of sustainable stone wool growing media solutions for the horticulture market, greenhouses will, to a large extent, be autonomous in the near future.

My mission is the realization of autonomous greenhouses through the use of all this data with state-of-the-art machine learning methodologies, Karacor says. I want to realize this goal step-by-step in five years.

Click here to learn more about why AI will change the way you work, for the better.

Gursel Karacor is a Senior Data Scientist with Grodan. See all author stories here.

View original post here:

5 Reasons Artificial Intelligence Will Improve Greenhouse Production - Greenhouse Grower

Wit.ai is shutting down Bot Engine as Facebook rolls NLP into its updated Messenger Platform – TechCrunch

Posted on by

Wit.ai announced this morning in a blog post that it would be sunsetting its Bot Engine. The Facebook-owned company builds developer tools for natural language processing to help engineers build speech and text chatbots faster and with less technical experience.

Bot Engine launched as a beta in April of 2016. The tool let developers train their own bots using sample conversations sharing similar structure. These examples could stand infor real conversations and be updated with authentic conversation logs to fine-tune. The goal was to allow for the training of a flexible bot on dozens of conversations, instead of millions.

But the Engine was designed for text-only interactions and the bot ecosystem has matured so quickly that the technology has become outdated. The team notes that Messenger and other platforms have been adding new means of interaction beyond text. All of this is for the better, but it hasnt been kind to the value-add of Bot Engine.

Wit.ai says that more than 100,000 developers use its services. But within that group, 90 percent of API calls are going to Wits NLP API. Bot Engine and the Stories UI will stay alive until February 1, 2018 to give developers time to migrate their apps.

Coincidentally, Facebook announced today it is integrating natural language processing tools intoMessenger Platform 2.1. With the update, developers can extract from messages information like date, time, location, amount of money, phone number and email. Wit.ai can then be used to customize the capabilities of the Messenger Platforms NLP integration.

Read more here:

Wit.ai is shutting down Bot Engine as Facebook rolls NLP into its updated Messenger Platform - TechCrunch

Teslas AI Chips Are Rolling Out, But They Arent A Self-Driving Panacea – Forbes

Posted on by

Tesla has opted to design and deploy their own AI chips, a strategy to achieve true self-driving car ... [+] capabilities but questions still remain.

According to several media reports, the new AI chips Tesla devised to achieve true self-driving car status have begun rolling out to older Tesla models that require retrofitting to replace the prior on-board processors.

Unfortunately, there has been some misleading reporting about those chips, a special type of AI computer processor that extensively supports Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), commonly referred to as Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL).

Before I explore the over-hyped reporting, let me clarify that these custom-developed AI chips devised by Tesla engineers are certainly admirable, and the computer hardware design team deserves to be proud of what they have done. Kudos for their impressive work.

But such an acknowledgement does not also imply that they have somehow achieved a singularity marvel in AI, and nor does it mean they have miraculously solved the real-world problem of how to attain a true self-driving driverless car.

Not by a long shot.

And yet many in the media seem to think so, and at times have implied in a wide-eyed overzealous way that Teslas new computer processors have seemingly reached a nirvana of finally getting us to fully autonomous cars.

Thats just not the case.

Time to unpack the matter.

Important Context About AI Chips

First, lets clarify what an AI chip consists of.

A conventional computer contains a core processor or chip that does the systems work when you invoke your word processor or spreadsheets or are loading and running an app of some kind.

In addition, most modern computers also have GPUs, Graphical Processing Units, an additional set of processors or chips that aid the core processor by taking on the task of displaying visual graphics and animation that you might see on the screen of your device such as on the display of a desktop PC, a laptop or a smartphone.

To use computers for Machine Learning or Deep Learning, it was realized that rather than necessarily using the normal core processors of a computer to do so, the GPUs actually tended to be better suited for the ML or DL tasks.

This is due to the aspect that by-and-large the implementation of Artificial Neural Networks in todays computers is really a massive numerical and linear algebra kind of affair. GPUs are generally structured and devised for that kind of numeric mashing.

AI developers that rely upon ML/DL computer-based neural networks fell in love with GPUs, utilizing GPUs for something not particularly originally envisioned but that happens to be a good marriage anyway.

Once it became apparent that having souped-up GPUs would help advance todays kind of AI, the chip developers realized that it could be a huge market potential for their processors and therefore merited tweaking GPU designs to more closely fit to the ML/DL task.

Tesla had initially opted to use off-the-shelf specialized GPU chips made by NVIDIA, doing so for the Tesla in-car on-board processing efforts of the Tesla version of ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance System), including and especially for their so-called Tesla AutoPilot (a naming that has generated controversy for being misleading about the actual driverless functionality to-date available in their so-equipped FSD or Full Self-Driving cars).

In April of this year, Elon Musk and his team unveiled a set of proprietary AI chips that were secretly developed in-house by Tesla (rumors about the effort had been floating for quite a while), and the idea was that the new chips would replace the use of the in-car NVIDIA processors.

The unveiling of the new AI chips was a key portion of the Investor Autonomy Day event that Tesla used as a forum to announce the future plans of their hoped-for self-driving driverless capability.

Subsequently, in late August, a presentation was made by Tesla engineers depicting additional details about their custom-designed AI chips, doing so at the annual Hot Chips conference sponsored by the IEEE that focuses on high performance computer processors.

Overall media interest about the Tesla AI chips was reinvigorated by the presentation and likewise further stoked by the roll-out that has apparently now gotten underway.

One additional important point most people refer to these kinds of processors as AI chips, which Ill do likewise for ease of discussion herein, but please do not be lulled into believing that these specialized processors are actually fulfilling the long-sought goal of being able to have full Artificial Intelligence in all of its intended facets.

At best, these chips or processors are simulating relatively shallow mathematically inspired aspects of what might be called neural networks, but it isnt at all anything akin to a human brain. There isnt any human-like reasoning or common-sense capability involved in these chips. They are merely computationally enhanced numeric calculating devices.

Brouhaha About Teslas New Chips

In quick recap, Tesla opted to replace the NVIDIA chips and did so by designing and now deploying their own Tesla-designed chips (the chips are being manufactured for Tesla by Samsung).

Lets consider vital questions about the matter.

Did it make sense for Tesla to have gone on its own to make specialized chips, or would they have been better off to continue using someone elses off-the-shelf specialized chips?

On a comparison basis, how are the Tesla custom chips different or the same as off-the-shelf specialized chips that do roughly the same thing?

What do the AI chips achieve in terms of aiming for becoming true self-driving cars?

And so on.

Here are some key thoughts on these matters:

Hardware-Only Focus

It is crucial to realize that discussing these AI chips is only a small part of a bigger picture, since the chips are a hardware-only focused element.

You need software, really good software, in order to arrive at a true self-driving car.

As an analogy, suppose someone comes out with a new smartphone that is incompatible with the thousands upon thousands of apps in the marketplace. Even if the smartphone is super-fast, you have the rather more daunting issue that there arent any apps for the new hardware.

Media salivating over the Tesla AI chips is missing the boat on asking about the software needed to arrive at driverless capabilities.

Im not saying that having good hardware is not important, it is, but I think we all now know that hardware is only part of the battle.

The software to do true AI self-driving is the 500-pound gorilla.

There has yet to be any publicly revealed indication that the software for achieving true self-driving by Tesla has been crafted.

As I previously reported, the AI team at Tesla has been restructured and revamped, presumably in an effort to gain added traction towards the goal of having a driverless car, but so far no new indication has demonstrated that the vaunted aim is imminent.

Force-fit Of Design

If you were going to design a new AI chip, one approach would be to sit down and come up with all of the vital things youd like to have the chip do.

You would blue sky it, starting with a blank sheet, aiming to stretch the AI boundaries as much as feasible.

For Tesla, the hardware engineers were actually handed a circumstance that imposed a lot of severe constraints on what they could devise.

They had to keep the electrical power consumption within a boundary dictated by the prior designs of the Tesla cars, otherwise it would mean that the Teslas already in the marketplace would have to undergo a major retrofit to allow for a more power hungry set of processors. That would be costly and economically infeasible. Thus, right away the new AI chip would be hampered by how much power it could consume.

The new processors would have to fit into the physical space as already set aside on existing Tesla cars, meaning that the size and shape of the on-board system boards and computer box would have to abide by a strict form factor.

And so on.

This is oftentimes the downside of being a first-mover into a market.

You come out with a product when few others have something similar, it gains some success, and so you need to then try to advance the product as the marketplace evolves, yet you are also trapped by needing to be backward-compatible with what you already did.

Those that come along after your product has been underway have the latitude of not being ensnared by what came before, sometimes allowing them to out-perform by having an open slate to work with.

An example of overstepping first movers includes the rapid success of Uber and Lyft and the ridesharing phenomena. The newer entrants ignored existing constraints faced by taxis and cabs, allowing the brazen upstarts to eclipse those that were hampered by the past (rightfully or wrongly so).

Being first in something is not necessarily always the best, and sometimes those that come along later on can move in a more agile way.

Dont misinterpret my remarks to imply that for self-driving cars you can wildly design AI chips in whatever manner you fancy. Obviously, there are going to be size, weight, power consumption, cooling, cost, and other factors that limit what sensibly can appropriately fit into a driverless car.

Improper Comparisons

One of my biggest beefs about the media reporting has been the willingness to fall into a misleading and improper comparison of the Tesla AI chips to other chips.

Comparing the new with the old is not especially helpful, though it sounds exciting when you do so, and instead the comparison should be with what else currently exists in the marketplace.

Heres what I mean.

Most keep saying that the Tesla AI chips are many times faster than the Tesla prior-used NVIDIA chips (but they ought to be comparing to NVIDIAs other newer chips), implying that Tesla made a breathtaking breakthrough in this kind of technology, often quoting the number of trillions of operations per second, known as TOPS.

I wont inundate you with the details herein, but suffice to say that the Tesla AI chips TOPS performance is either on par with other alternatives in the marketplace, or in some ways less so, and in selective other ways somewhat better, but it is not a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark revelation.

Bottom-line: I ask that the media stop making inappropriate comparisons between the Tesla AI chips and the Tesla prior-used NVIDIA chips, it just doesnt make sense, it is misleading to the public, it is unfair, and it really shows ignorance about the topic.

Another pet peeve is the tossing around of big numbers to impress the non-initiated, such as touting that the Tesla AI chips consist of 6 billion transistors.

On my gosh, 6 billion seems like such a large number and implies something gargantuan.

Well, there are GPUs that already have 20 billion transistors.

Im not denigrating the 6 billion, and only trying to point out that those quoting the 6 billion do so without offering any viable context and therefore imply something that isnt really the case.

For those readers that are hardware types, I know and you know that trying to make a comparison by the number of transistors is a rather problematic exercise anyway, since it can be an apples-to-apples or an apple-to-oranges kind of comparison, depending upon what the chip is designed to do.

First Gen Is Dicey

Anybody that knows anything about chip design can tell you that the first generation of a newly devised chip is oftentimes a rocky road.

There can be a slew of latent errors or bugs (if you prefer, we can be gentler in our terminology and refer to those aspects as quirks or the proverbial tongue-in-cheek hidden features).

Like the first version of any new product, the odds are that it will take a shakeout period to ferret out what might be amiss.

In the case of chips, since it is encased in silicon and not readily changeable, there are sometimes software patches used to deal with hardware issues, and then in later versions of the chip you might make the needed hardware alterations and improvements.

This brings up the point that by Tesla choosing to make its own AI chips, rather than using an off-the-shelf approach, it puts Tesla into the unenviable position of having a first gen and needing to figure out on-their-own whatever guffaws those new chips might have.

Typically, an off-the-shelf commercially available chip is going to have not just the original maker looking at it, but will also have those that are buying and incorporating the processor into their systems looking at it too. The more eyes, the better.

The Tesla proprietary chips are presumably only being scrutinized and tested by Tesla alone.

Proprietary Chip Woes

Using your own self-designed chips has a lot of other considerations worth noting.

At Tesla, there would have been a significant cost and attention that was devoted toward devising the AI chips.

Was that cost worth it?

Was the diverted attention that might have gone to other matters a lost opportunity cost?

Plus, Tesla not only had to bear the original design cost, they will have to endure the ongoing cost to upgrade and improve the chips over time.

This is not a one-time only kind of matter.

It would seem unlikely and unwise for Tesla to sit on this chip and not advance it.

Advances in AI chips are moving at lightening-like paces.

There are also the labor pool considerations too.

Having a proprietary chip usually means that you have to grow your own specialists to be able to develop the specialized software for it. You cannot readily find those specialists in the marketplace per se, since they wont know your proprietary stuff, whereas when you use a commercial off-the-shelf chip, the odds are that you can find expert labor for it since there is an ecosystem surrounding the off-the-shelf processor.

I am not saying that Tesla was mistaken per se to go the proprietary route, and only time will tell whether it was a worthwhile bet.

By having their own chip, they can potentially control their own destiny and not be dependent upon an off-the-shelf chip made by someone else, and not be forced into the path of the off-the-shelf chip maker, while the other side of that coin is they now find themselves squarely in the chip design and upgrade business, in addition to the car making business.

Its a calculated gamble and a trade-off.

From a cost perspective, it might or might not be a sensible approach, and those that keep trying to imply that the proprietary chip is a lesser cost strategy are likely not including the full set of costs involved.

Be wary of those that do those off-the-cuff cost claims.

Redundancy Assertions

There has been media excitement about how the Tesla AI chips supposedly have a robust redundancy capability, which certainly is essential for a real-time system that involves the life-and-death aspects of driving a car.

So far, the scant details revealed seemed to be that there are two identical AI chips running in parallel and if one of the chips disagrees with the other chip that the current assessment of the driving situation and planned next step is discarded, allowing for the next frame to be captured and analyzed.

On the surface, this might seem dandy to those that havent developed fault-tolerant real-time systems before.

There are serious and somber issues to consider.

Presumably, on the good side, if one of the chips experiences a foul hiccup, it causes the identical chip to be in disagreement, and because the two chips dont agree, the system potentially avoids undertaking an inappropriate action.

But, realize that the ball is simply being punted further down-the-field, so to speak.

This has downsides.

Suppose the oddball quirk isnt just a single momentary fluke, and instead recurs, over and over.

Does this mean that both chips are going to continually disagree and therefore presumably keep postponing the act of making a driving decision?

Follow this link:

Teslas AI Chips Are Rolling Out, But They Arent A Self-Driving Panacea - Forbes

The Bahamas’ Attorney General Defends Country’s Regulatory Regime Amid FTX ‘Debacle’ – CoinDesk

Posted on by
  1. The Bahamas' Attorney General Defends Country's Regulatory Regime Amid FTX 'Debacle'  CoinDesk
  2. FTX Tensions Intensify as Bahamas Blasts Companys New Chief Ray  Yahoo Finance
  3. Attorney General of The Bahamas Defends Its Crypto Savvy in Wake of FTX Crash  Decrypt
  4. FTX remains focus of 'active' investigation, Bahamas attorney general says  Reuters
  5. Crypto Firm FTX Landed in the Bahamas With a Bang, and Now the Bahamas Is Picking Up the Pieces  The Wall Street Journal
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

See the article here:

The Bahamas' Attorney General Defends Country's Regulatory Regime Amid FTX 'Debacle' - CoinDesk

Bahamas Population 2022 (Live) – worldpopulationreview.com

Posted on by

The Bahamas is made up of over 700 islands, islets and cays in the Atlantic Ocean. "Bahamas" may refer to the country or the largest island chain it shares with the Turks and Caicos Islands. The last official census took place in 1990, finding a population of 255,000.

The capital and largest city is Nassau, with a population of 255,000. The next-largest city is Freeport, with a population of about 50,000.

The population of the Bahamas is 85% African, 12% European and 3% Asian and 3% Latin Americans. Baptists account for 35% of the population, followed by Anglican (15%), Roman Catholic (13%) and Pentecostal (8%). The region was originally inhabited by the Lucayan, a branch of Arawakan-speaking Taino, although they were later shipped to Hispaniola for slavery by the Spaniards, who never colonized the Bahamas. For most of the 16th century, the islands were abandoned.

Afro-Bahamians are nationals with primary ancestry in West Africa. Afro-Bahamians represent the largest ethnic group in the country, accounting for 85%, with a Haitian community of around 80,000. There are also 17,000 Whites living in the country.

European Bahamians number 38,000 and are primarily descendants of English Puritans and American Loyalists who came to the islands in the 17th and 18th century. The account for 12% of the population and the largest minority group. The Bahamas is currently growing at a rate of around 1.5%. At this rate, the country will reach 396,000 by 2020.

See the original post here:

Bahamas Population 2022 (Live) - worldpopulationreview.com

Lessons Learned From The FTX Collapse: Congressional Committees Plan Hearings On FTX Collapse, Bahamas Defends Its Actions | Crowdfund Insider -…

Posted on by

Lessons Learned From The FTX Collapse: Congressional Committees Plan Hearings On FTX Collapse, Bahamas Defends Its Actions | Crowdfund Insider  Crowdfund Insider

Excerpt from:

Lessons Learned From The FTX Collapse: Congressional Committees Plan Hearings On FTX Collapse, Bahamas Defends Its Actions | Crowdfund Insider -...

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) – IMDb

Posted on by

I was a little surprised that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" wasn't on the top 250. Almost everyone loves this film. It was a major breakthrough for movies. The cartoon world meets reality.

Bob Haskins is to die for in this film, he plays such a great American detective and he didn't have much to work with. After all when he was talking to Roger, he wasn't really talking to anybody since it was a cartoon character. I love the way he develops his role so much, how he goes from this stick-to-the-book and all cartoons are bad to this lovable goofy guy due to Roger's insatiable love for life and cartoons. It's silly because it's a cartoon, but Roger and Bob clicked so well and are unforgettable.

Christopher Lloyd... shudder! This guy gave me so many nightmares as a kid from his character as the judge. The ending where he reveals his true form, he is just terrifying and effective. Jessica Rabbit is so cool and sexy for a cartoon. She's just too much fun for this movie and is wonderful as a cartoon. "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way". My favorite scene is without a doubt when Eddie(played by Bob) is looking for Jessica and meets the crazy look-a-like in Toon Town. Just great and hilarious.

Come on, fans! This is a terrific movie and deserves to be on the top 250 films of all time! It's a break through for cinema history and movies in general. It's a great one! I'd highly recommend this for the family and friends or just a Saturday with nothing to do.

10/10

Read more:

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) - IMDb

Midsommar movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert

Posted on by

The filmmaker fidgets with that peculiar breathlessness once again throughout Midsommar, a terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same. In the midst of wide-open pastoral surroundings we may be, but Aster still wants us to crave and kick for oxygen, perhaps in a less claustrophobic and more agoraphobic fashion. The tangible dread in Midsommaroftentimes alleviated by welcome flashes of comedy, always charged by tight choreography and Pogorzelskis atmospheric compositionsis so recognizably out of Hereditary that you'll immediately distinguish the connective headspace responsible for both tales.

And yet, this superb psychedelic thriller sowed somewhere amid an outdoorsy mother!, a blindingly lit Dogville and fine, a contemporary The Wicker Man, is different by way of Asters loosened thematic restraint. You wont exactly feel lost while disemboweling Asters inviting beast, but you can certainly argue that the sun never sets on the films cosmically vast subject matter: reaping notions of (white) male privilege, American entitlement (that literally pisses on whats not theirs) and most prominently, female empowerment. And this is also a fitting way to describe the location where most of the story unfolds, under nearly 24-hour sun. We are in a remote, hidden-from-view Swedish village nested somewhere in Hlsingland, among tranquilly dressed Harga folk who celebrate summer through initially quaint, but increasingly bizarre and downright petrifying rituals. There is only a slack sense of yesterday and tomorrow in Asters locale of choice where an endless string of hallucinatory traditions are exercised in broad daylight.

The folkloric practices start off appealingly enougha misleading gust of peace (superbly countered by The Haxan Cloaks skin-crawling score) breezes in the air while heady drugs dissolve in tempting cups of tea. But how did we even get here and find ourselves among these hippy-dippy proceedings cloaked in white linen? Well, we followed Florence Pugh, Asters second fearless female lead after Toni Collette,playing a grieving character marked by something unspeakable. In a deeply scarred, emotionally unrestricted performanceyou might hear her screams in your nightmaresPugh plays Dani, a graduate student aiming to put some distance between herself and an extreme case of trauma involving her bipolar sister. (A stunning prologue unravels the details of the tragic ordeal with top-shelf narrative economy.) And Dani isnt on her own. In fact, she embarks upon the picturesque Scandinavian adventure as an outsider at first, tagging along some fellow scholars of academia, a group that includes her self-absorbed longtime boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor, convincingly egotistical). Also in the clan are Christians buddies Josh (William Jackson Harper)headed to the festivities for academic researchthe blabber-mouthed Mark (Will Poulter, so hysterically douchey that he earns the jesters cap hed wear later on), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), the brainchild of the operation as well as a member of the makeshift family that would host the group.

Excerpt from:

Midsommar movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert

Roger B. Chaffee – Wikipedia

Posted on by

American astronaut, naval aviator and aeronautical engineer

Roger Bruce Chaffee (; February 15, 1935 January 27, 1967) was an American naval officer, aviator and aeronautical engineer who was a NASA astronaut in the Apollo program.

Chaffee was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated from Central High School in 1953, and accepted a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship. He began his college education at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was involved in the fraternity Phi Kappa Sigma. He transferred to Purdue University in 1954, continuing his involvement in Phi Kappa Sigma and obtaining his private pilot's license.

After graduating from Purdue in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering, Chaffee completed his Navy training and was commissioned as an ensign. He began pilot training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, flying aircraft such as the T-34, T-28, and A3D. He became quality and safety control officer for Heavy Photographic Squadron 62 (VAP-62). His time in this unit included taking crucial photos of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, earning him the Air Medal. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in 1966.

Along with thirteen other pilots, Chaffee was selected to be an astronaut as part of NASA Astronaut Group 3 in 1963. He served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for the Gemini 3 and Gemini 4 missions and received his first spaceflight assignment in 1966 as the third-ranking pilot on Apollo 1. In 1967, he died in a fire along with fellow astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Ed White during a pre-launch test for the mission at what was then the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34, Florida. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and a second Air Medal.

Roger Bruce Chaffee was born on February 15, 1935, in Grand Rapids, Michigan,[1] the second child of Donald Lynn Chaffee (19101998) and Blanche May (Mike) Chaffee (ne Mosher; 19121996). He had an older sister, Donna, born two years earlier. In January 1935, in their hometown of Greenville, Michigan, his father was diagnosed with scarlet fever, so his mother moved in with her parents in Grand Rapids, where Roger was born. The family spent the next seven years in Greenville before moving to Grand Rapids, where his father took a job as the chief Army Ordnance inspector at the Doehler-Jarvis plant.[4] Chaffee's interest in aerospace was sparked at a young age when his father, a former barnstorming pilot, took him on his first flight at the age of seven. Chaffee was thrilled by the flight and soon after started building model airplanes with his father.

Chaffee excelled as a Boy Scout, earning his first merit badge at the age of thirteen. He earned ten more badges that year. Many of these awards were typically earned by the older scouts. He continued his success by earning four more badges at the age of fourteen. He earned four badges for each of the next two years, almost all the badges available at the time. After becoming an Eagle Scout, he managed to earn another ten merit badges, for which he was awarded the bronze and gold palms. Between his camping trips with his family and his involvement with the Boy Scouts, Chaffee developed a passion for the outdoors.

Chaffee attended the Dickinson School in Grand Rapids, and later graduated from Central High School in the top 20% of his class in 1953. Turning down a possible appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, he accepted a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship, and in September 1953 enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He performed well, making the Dean's List and finishing with a B+ average. While enrolled, he joined Phi Kappa Sigma.[4]

Chaffee was passionate about flying, and had a strong aptitude for science and engineering. To apply those talents, he transferred to Purdue University in the autumn of 1954 to attend the school's well-known aeronautical engineering program.[4] Before arriving in West Lafayette, he reported for an 8-week tour on USSWisconsin as a part of the NROTC program. To qualify, he had to finish training and pass further tests. He initially failed the eye exam, but the physician permitted him to retake it the next morning, and he passed. He was then allowed to tour on Wisconsin to England, Scotland, France, and Cuba. Upon his return to American soil, he worked as a gear cutter.[4]

After starting classes at Purdue, Chaffee sought out a job to complement his coursework and involvement in the Phi Kappa Sigma social fraternity. His first job during his sophomore year was working as a server at one of the women's residences, but he disliked the job and sought new employment. He was hired as a draftsman at a small business near Purdue. As a junior, he was hired as a teaching assistant in the Mathematics Department to teach classes to freshman students.[4] He also joined the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Gamma Tau engineering honor societies.[10]In 1955, Chaffee took four flying lessons, but he did not have enough money to get his private pilot's license. Two years later, the NROTC sponsored flight training for him to become a naval aviator. He soloed on March 29, 1957, and obtained his private pilot's license on May 24, 1957. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree, with distinction, in aeronautical engineering at Purdue in 1957.

Chaffee met his future wife Martha Louise Horn on a double blind date in September 1955. They started dating, and he proposed to her on October 12, 1956. They married in Oklahoma City, Martha's hometown, on August 24, 1957. Martha was a homemaker. The couple had two children, Sheryl Lyn (born in 1958) and Stephen (born in 1961).[14]

After graduation, Chaffee completed his Navy training on August 22, 1957, and received commission as an ensign. Following his honeymoon, he was assigned to the aircraft carrier USSLake Champlain for a six-week assignment in Norfolk with the Naval Air Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. By the time Chaffee arrived at the base, the ship had already left port. He temporarily worked at the base until October 1957, when he attended flight school at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. He started his training by flying the T-28 and the T-34. He was posted to Naval Air Station Kingsville, Texas, from August 1958 to February 1959 as a part of Advanced Training Unit 212.[16] In Kingsville, he trained on the F9F Cougar jet fighter. His daughter Sheryl was born the day before he left for his first aircraft carrier training. He was awarded his naval aviator wings in early 1959.[1][4]

Chaffee was transferred to Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, to continue his training. His first project was not flying, but repairing an A3D twin-engine jet photo reconnaissance plane. This plane was typically flown by pilots with the rank of lieutenant commander or above, but Chaffee became so familiar with the plane from repairing it he became one of the youngest pilots ever to fly it. He joined Attack Squadron 44 (VA-44) in September 1959, and from October 1959 to March 1960 he trained with Heavy Attack Squadron 3 (VAH-3).[16]

There's only room for one mistake. You can buy the farm only once.

Roger Chaffee

Chaffee received a variety of assignments and participated in multiple training duties over the next several years, spending most of his time in photo reconnaissance squadrons. He was stationed at NAS Jacksonville as safety officer and quality control officer for Heavy Photographic Squadron 62 (VAP-62) flying the A3D.[1][10] He wrote a quality control manual for the squadron, although some of his peers saw this as too demanding. By coincidence, he was assigned to a mission where he flew over Cape Canaveral, during which aerial photographs of future launch sites were taken.

Between April 4, 1960, and October 25, 1962, including during the critical time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chaffee flew 82 missions over Cuba, sometimes up to three per day, and achieved over 100 flight hours each month. Some of these trips included shuttling three men per plane back and forth to Guantanamo Bay, including the pilot, co-pilot, and the photographer.[16] Some biographies credit him with flying the U-2 plane to spy on Cuba, but this is erroneous since he was a Navy pilot and the U-2 was an Air Force plane.

After this, Chaffee undertook aircraft carrier flight training, including time spent on USSSaratoga performing both day and night flights. He said of day flying, "Setting that big bird down on the flight deck was like landing on a postage stamp"; and of night flying, "Getting catapulted off that flight deck at night is like getting shot into a bottle of ink!" While working in Jacksonville, he concurrently worked on a master's degree. He was on a cruise to Africa when his son Stephen was born in Oklahoma City.

During Chaffee's Navy service he logged more than 2,300 hours flying time, including more than 2,000 hours in jet aircraft.[1][4] On February 1, 1966, he was promoted to lieutenant commander.[16]

The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that waythe way God intended it to beby giving everybody that new perspective from out in space.

Roger Chaffee[23]

In August 1962, Chaffee confided in his family that he had submitted an application for the NASA astronaut training program, and informed his superiors of his desire to train as a test pilot for astronaut status. In mid-1962, he was accepted in the initial pool of 1,800 applicants for the third group of NASA astronauts.[4] After his naval tour was over, and he had racked up over 1,800 hours of flying time, the Navy offered him the opportunity to continue work on his master's degree. In January 1963, he entered the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to work on his Master of Science degree in reliability engineering.[10]

While at AFIT, Chaffee continued participating in astronaut candidate testing as the pool of candidates dropped to 271 in mid-1963. It was noted during testing that he had a very small lung capacity but he used it better than most people with greater capacity. On his return from a hunting trip to Fairborn, Ohio, on October 14, 1963, he found a message from NASA in Houston, Texas. He called them back, and discovered he had been chosen as an astronaut.[4] On October 18, 1963, it was officially announced that he was one of fourteen chosen for NASA's third group of astronauts.[1] He said, "I was very pleased with the appointment. I've always wanted to fly and perform adventurous flying tasks all my life. Ever since the first seven Mercury astronauts were named, I've been keeping my studies up."

Phase one of training for the third group of astronauts began in 1964 in lecture halls. Lectures in several fields were supplemented with trips to locations with geological significance so the astronauts gained hands-on experience. As well as piloting the spacecraft, the astronauts were to perform scientific experiments and measurements on the Moon. The astronauts traveled to the Grand Canyon to learn about geography and to Alaska, Iceland, and Hawaii to learn about rock formations and lava flows.[4]

The second phase was contingency training, which focused on astronauts learning the skills required to survive if the landing did not occur where planned. The group started their training by being dropped off in the middle of the jungle in Panama. They performed the survival training in pairs, carrying only their parachutes and survival kits. Chaffee, with help from his Boy Scout training, foraged for enough food to survive during the three-day training mission. Following the jungle training, the astronauts traveled to an entirely different environment: the desert of Reno, Nevada. For clothing, the astronauts had only long underwear, shoes, and robes they manufactured from their parachutes. Lizards and snakes were the main source of food, and the astronauts used their parachutes as makeshift tents for shelter for the two days of desert training.[4]

The third and final phase was operational training for the astronauts. This focused on giving them hands-on experience using the instruments and equipment required during their spaceflight. They received training in the effects of microgravity and rapid acceleration. The astronauts spent time in simulators, aboard cargo planes that simulated weightlessness, underwater to practice extravehicular activities (EVAs), and on visits to manufacturing plants to check on the progress of the hardware.[4]

Every astronaut was required to have a specialty, and Chaffee's specialty was communications. He focused on the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility (DSIF), which the astronauts needed for navigation in space.

At the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Chaffee served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in March 1965 for Gemini 3.[29] Later that year, he was CAPCOM, along with Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Eugene Cernan, for the Gemini 4 mission, in which Ed White performed the first spacewalk by an American.[1][4] As CAPCOM, Chaffee relayed information between the crew members and the Director of Flight Operations, Chris Kraft.[4] He never got a seat on a Gemini mission, but was assigned to work on flight control, communications, instrumentation, and attitude and translation control systems in the Apollo program.[10] During this time, along with Grissom, he also flew chase planes at an altitude of between 30,000 and 50,000 feet (9,100 and 15,200m) to take motion pictures of the launch of an uncrewed Saturn 1B rocket.[4]

Chaffee received his first spaceflight assignment in January 1966, when he was selected for the first crewed Apollo-Saturn flight, AS-204. At the time, he was the youngest American astronaut to be selected for a mission.[31] Joining Command Pilot Grissom and Senior Pilot White, he replaced the injured Donn F. Eisele in the third-ranked pilot position.[4] Eisele required surgery for a dislocated shoulder, which he sustained aboard the KC-135 weightlessness training aircraft. He was reassigned to a second Apollo crew, commanded by Wally Schirra.[31]

The crew announcement was made public on March 21, 1966. The two-week flight of Apollo1 was to test the spacecraft systems and the control and ground tracking facilities.[4] While Chaffee had monitored the manufacture of the Gemini spacecraft, he had not witnessed the building of the Apollo spacecraft. Three days after being selected for the Apollo1 crew, he flew to the North American Aviation Plant in Downey, California, to see it.[4]

Later in April, the crew traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to study stars that were programmed into their flight computer. In October, the six crewmembers planned to test the spacecraft in sea level and altitude conditions. The failure of an oxygen regulator prevented them from performing the vacuum test, but they managed to complete the sea level test. They also performed egress tests, where capsule simulators were dropped in the Gulf of Mexico under various conditions and the crew had to exit the spacecraft. The crew was able to spend time with their families at Christmas. Chaffee entered a local Christmas decoration contest and he received first prize.[4] Four Purdue astronauts were requested to attend the Rose Bowl as guests of honor. Grissom, Gene Cernan, Armstrong, and Chaffee attended the game on January 2. Progress on pre-mission activities was nearing completion; NASA announced on January 23, 1967, that February 21 would be the target launch date. The primary and backup crews moved back to the Cape for the last few weeks of training. They had their own living quarters, a private waiter and chef, and gymnasium to remain fit.

On January 27, 1967, Grissom, White and Chaffee were participating in a "plugs-out" countdown demonstration test at Cape Kennedy in preparation for the planned February 21 launch. Chaffee was sitting at the right side of the cabin.[4] His main role was to maintain communications with the blockhouse. A momentary power surge was detected at 23:30:55 GMT, which was believed to accompany an electrical short in equipment located on the lower left side of the cabin, the presumed ignition source for the fire. At 23:31:04 GMT, a voice was heard declaring, "[We]'ve got a fire in the cockpit." Most investigative listeners believe that voice was Chaffee's.

Assigned emergency roles called for Grissom, in the left-hand seat, to open the cabin pressure vent valve, after which White in the center seat was to open the plug door hatch, while Chaffee in the right-hand seat was to maintain communications. Grissom was prevented from opening the valve by the intensity of the fire, which started in that region and spread from left to right. Despite this, White removed his restraints and apparently tried in vain to open the hatch, which was held closed by the cabin pressure. The increasing pressure finally burst the inner cabin wall on the right-hand side at 23:31:19 GMT. After approximately thirty seconds of being fed by a cabin atmosphere of pure oxygen at pressures of 16.7 to 29psi (115 to 200kPa), and now fed by nitrogen-buffered ambient air, the primary fire decreased in intensity and started producing large amounts of smoke, which killed the astronauts. Chaffee lost consciousness because of a lack of oxygen which sent him into cardiac arrest. He died from asphyxia due to the toxic gases from the fire, with burns contributing to his death.

Failed oxygen and ethylene glycol pipes near the fire's origin point continued burning an intense secondary fire which melted through the cabin floor. By the time firefighters were able to open the hatch, the fire had extinguished itself. The back of Chaffee's couch was found in the horizontal position, with the lower portion angled towards the floor. His helmet was closed and locked, his restraints were undone, and the hoses and electrical connections to the suit remained connected. As he was farthest from the origin of the fire, he suffered the least burn and suit damage.

Shortly after the AS-204 fire in 1967, NASA Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight George Mueller announced the mission would be officially designated as Apollo 1.[45][46] The capsule underwent a significant redesign as a result of the disaster. The atmosphere in the cabin was changed from 100% oxygen to a 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen environment at launch. The astronauts' spacesuits, originally made of nylon, were changed to beta cloth, a non-flammable, highly melt-resistant fabric woven from fiberglass and coated with Teflon. There were other changes, including replacing flammable cabin materials with self-extinguishing ones, and covering plumbing and wiring with protective insulation.[47]

Chaffee and Grissom were buried in Arlington National Cemetery,[48][49] while White was buried at West Point Cemetery.[50] Chaffee's widow received $100,000 from the life insurance portion of the contract the astronauts signed with two publishing firms so they would have exclusive rights to stories and photographs of the astronauts and their families. She also received $16,250 per year for the life of the contract.[51]

Chaffee is memorialized in many ways, from the Chaffee Crater on the far side of the Moon, to the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.[53] Another memorial is a hill on Mars, Chaffee Hill, 14.3 kilometres (8.9mi) south-southwest of Columbia Memorial Station, part of the Apollo 1 Hills.[54] Regor (Roger spelled backwards), is a seldom-used nickname for the star Gamma Velorum. Grissom used this name, plus two others for White and himself, on his Apollo1 mission planning star charts as a joke, and the succeeding Apollo astronauts kept using the names as a memorial.[55][56] A terrestrial memorial is Chaffee Island, an artificial island off Long Beach, California, created in 1966 for drilling oil (along with White, Grissom and Freeman Islands).[57][58][59] A park in Fullerton, California, was named after Chaffee; parks were also named after his fellow Apollo1 comrades.[60] Chaffee is named with his Apollo1 crewmates on the Space Mirror Memorial, which was dedicated in 1991.[61][62] Chaffee's name is included on the plaque left on the Moon with the Fallen Astronaut statue in 1971 by the crew of Apollo 15.[63]

The dismantled Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral bears two memorial plaques:

They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind's final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.

In memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice so others could reach for the stars. Ad astra per aspera (a rough road leads to the stars). God speed to the crew of Apollo 1.[64]

The Roger B. Chaffee scholarship named for him has been awarded annually since 1967 to exceptional students in the Kent Intermediate School District for high school seniors who will be pursuing a career in math and science.[65][66] Chaffee Hall, an engineering building, was dedicated to him at his alma mater, Purdue University, in 1968.[67][68] Grissom High School, Ed White Middle School and Chaffee Elementary School in Huntsville, Alabama, were named for the Apollo1 astronauts.[69]

Roger That! is an annual event sponsored by the Grand Rapids Public Museum and Grand Valley State University that celebrates space exploration and the life of Grand Rapids native, Roger B. Chaffee, a former American naval officer and aviator aeronautical engineer, and NASA astronaut in the Apollo program.[70]

Chaffee was awarded the Navy Air Medal for his involvement in Heavy Photographic Squadron 62. He completed 82 classified missions "of paramount military importance to the security of the United States".[16] The Apollo1 crew was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal posthumously in a 1969 presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Apollo 11 crew.[71] He was posthumously awarded a second Air Medal. He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983 and into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, on October 4, 1997.[23][72][73][74] Chaffee and White were awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously in 1997 (Grissom received the medal in 1978).[75] He was later awarded the NASA Ambassador of Exploration Award for involvement in the U.S. space program in 2007.[76]

On the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a fictional 24th century spacecraft was named after him, designed by Doug Drexler.[77][78] They named it after Chaffee as a reminder about the dangers of space exploration.[79] Star Trek and NASA have a long history of collaborations going back to the late 1960s when the television show made its debut.[80]

In 2018 a life-size bronze statue of Chaffee was unveiled outside the Grand Rapids Children's Museum in Chaffee's hometown. His wife, other family members, and astronaut Jack Lousma (a Grand Rapids native) were present for the event.[81]

Continued here:

Roger B. Chaffee - Wikipedia

Op-Ed: Eugenics is making a comeback. Stop it in its tracks – Los …

Posted on by

Politicians often flatter their audiences, but at a rally in Bemidji, Minn., last month, President Trump found an unusual thing to praise about the nearly all-white crowd: its genetics. You have good genes, he insisted. A lot of it is about the genes, isnt it, dont you believe? The racehorse theory. You have good genes in Minnesota.

In case it was not clear from the sea of white faces that he was making a point about race, Trump later said the quiet part out loud. Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Bidens extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet, he declared.

Trumps ugly endorsement of race-based eugenics got national attention, but in a presidency filled with outrages, our focus quickly moved to the next. Besides, this wasnt the first time wed heard about these views. A Frontlinedocumentary reported in 2016 that Trump believed the racehorse theory of human development that he referred to in Minnesota that superior men and women will have superior children. That same year, the Huffington Post released a video collecting Trumps statements on human genetics, including his declarations that Im a gene believer and Im proud to have that German blood.

On eugenics, as in so many areas, the scariest thing about Trumps views is not the fact that he holds them, but that there is no shortage of Americans who share them. The United States has a long, dark history with eugenics. Starting in 1907, a majority of states passed laws authorizing the sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable genes, for reasons as varied as feeblemindedness and alcoholism. The Supreme Court upheld these laws by an 8-1 vote, in the infamous 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, and as many as 70,000 Americans were sterilized for eugenic reasons in the 20th century.

Americas passion for eugenics waned after World War II, when Nazism discredited the idea of dividing people based on the quality of their genes. But in recent years, public support for eugenics has made a comeback. Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, tweeted in 2017, We cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies. The comment struck many as a claim that American children were genetically superior, though King later insisted he was concerned with the culture, not the blood of foreign babies.

Eugenics has also had a resurgence in England, where the movement was first launched in the 1880s by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In February, Andrew Sabisky, an advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, resigned after it was revealed that he had reportedly written blog posts suggesting that there are genetic differences in intelligence among races, and that compulsory contraception could be used to prevent the rise of a permanent underclass. Richard Dawkins, one of Britains most prominent scientists, added fuel to the fire by tweeting that although eugenics could be criticized on moral or ideological grounds, of course it would work in practice. Eugenics works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses, he said. Why on earth wouldnt it work for humans?

There is reason to believe the eugenics movement will continue to grow. Americas first embrace of it came at a time when immigration levels were high, and it was closely tied to fears that genetically inferior foreigners were hurting the nations gene pool. Eugenicists persuaded Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply reduced the number of Italian, Jewish and Asian people allowed in.

Today, the percentage of Americans who were born outside the United States is the highest it has been since 1910, and fear of immigrants is again an animating force in politics. As our nation continues to become more diverse, the sort of xenophobia that fueled Trumps and Kings comments is likely to produce more talk of better genes and babies.

It is critically important to push back against these toxic ideas. One way to do this is by ensuring that people who promote eugenics are denounced and kept out of positions of power. It is encouraging that Sabisky was forced out and that King was defeated for reelection in his Republican primary in June. Hopefully, Trump will be the next to go.

Education, including an honest reckoning with our own tragic eugenics history, is another form of resistance. It is starting to happen: Stanford University just announced that it is removing the name of its first president, David Starr Jordan, a leading eugenicist, from campus buildings, and that it will actively work to better explain his legacy. We need more of this kind of self-scrutiny from universities like Harvard, Yale and many others that promoted eugenics and pseudo race science, as well as institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, which in 1921 hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress, at which eugenicists advocated for eliminating the unfit.

Trumps appalling remarks in Minnesota show how serious the situation is now. Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, a United States president not only spoke about good genes in racialized terms he believed that his observations would help him to win in the relatively liberal state of Minnesota. It is crucial that everyone who understands the horrors of eugenics works to defeat these views before they become any more popular.

Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and, this year, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Courts Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.

Visit link:

Op-Ed: Eugenics is making a comeback. Stop it in its tracks - Los ...

Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States

Posted on by

Coercedsterilizationisa shameful part of Americas history, and one doesnt have to go too far back to find examples of it. Used as a means of controlling undesirable populations immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century. Driven by prejudicednotions of science and social control, these programs informed policies on immigration and segregation.

As historian William Deverell explains in a piece discussing the Asexualization Acts that led to the sterilization of more than 20,000 California men and women,If you are sterilizing someone, you are saying, if not to them directly, Your possible progeny are inassimilable, and we choose not to deal with that.

According toAndrea Estrada at UC Santa Barbara, forced sterilization was particularly rampant in California (the stateseugenics program even inspired the Nazis):

Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilizations took place in state institutions, comprising one-third of the total number performed in the 32 states where such action was legal. (from The UC Santa Barbara Current)

There is today one state, wrote Hitler, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States. (from The L.A. Times)

Researcher Alex Stern, author of the new bookEugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America, adds:

In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing degenerate stock.

Eugenicswas a commonly accepted means of protecting society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals deemed inferior or dangerous the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, and people of color.

More recently, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010.This article from the Center for Investigative reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion.

But California is far from being the only state with such troubled practices. For a disturbing history lesson, check outthis comprehensive database for your states eugenics history. You can find out more information on state-by-state sterilization policies, the number of victims, institutions where sterilizations were performed, and leading opponents and proponents.

While Californias eugenics programs were driven in part by anti-Asian and anti-Mexican prejudice, Southern states also employed sterilization as a means of controlling African American populations.Mississippi appendectomies wasanother name for unnecessary hysterectomies performed at teaching hospitals in the South on women of color as practice for medical students. ThisNBC news article discusses North Carolinas eugenics program, including stories from victims of forced sterilization likeElaine Riddick. A third of the sterilizations were done on girls under 18, even as young as 9. The state also targeted individuals seen as delinquent or unwholesome.

For a closer look, see Belle Boggs For the Public Good, withoriginal video by Olympia Stone that features Willis Lynch, who was sterilized at the age of 14 while living in a North Carolina juvenile detention facility.

Gregory W. Rutecki, MD writes about the forced sterilization of Native Americans, which persisted into the 1970s and 1980s, with examples of young women receiving tubal ligations when they were getting appendectomies. Its estimated thatas many as 25-50 percent of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.Forced sterilization programs are also a part of history in Puerto Rico,where sterilization rates are said to be the highest in the world.

Landmark Cases

The film No Ms Bebs follows the story of Mexican American women who were sterilized under duresswhile giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in the 1960s and 1970s. Madrigal v. Quilligan, the case portrayed in the film, is one of several landmark cases thats affected the reproductive rights of underserved populations, for better or for worse.

Here are some other important cases:

Buck v. Bell: In 1927, Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, was the first person to be sterilized in Virginia under a new law. Carries mother had been involuntarily institutionalized for being feebleminded and promiscuous. Carrie was assumed to have inherited these traits, and was sterilized after giving birth. This Supreme Court case led to the sterilization of 65,000 Americans with mental illness or developmental disabilities from the 1920s to the 70s. (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in reference to Carrie: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.)The court ruling still stands today. [Note: This story was also the subject of a 1994 made-for-TV movie starring Marlee Matlin.]

Excerpt from the documentary Fixed to Fail: Buck vs. Bell:

Relf v. Weinberger: Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, poor African American sisters from Alabama, were sterilized at the ages of 14 and 12. Their mother, who was illiterate, had signed an X on a piece of paper she believed gave permission for her daughters, who were both mentally disabled, to receive birth control shots. In 1974, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Relf sisters, revealing that 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were being sterilized each year under federally-funded programs.

Eugenics Compensation Act: In December 2015, theUS Senate voted unanimously to help surviving victims of forced sterilization. North Carolina has paid $35,000 to 220 surviving victims of its eugenics program.Virginia agreed to give surviving victims $25,000 each.

Reproductive Justice Today

While the case in No Ms Bebs occurred forty years ago, issues of reproductive justice are still relevant today, as state laws continue to restrict access to abortion and birth control.Deborah Reid of the National Health Law program writes:

The concept of reproductive justice, which is firmly rooted in a human rights framework that supports the ability of all women to make and direct their own reproductive decisions. These decisions could include obtaining contraception, abortion, sterilization, and/or maternity care. Accompanying that right is the obligation of the government and larger society to create laws, policies, and systems conducive to supporting those decisions.

For organizations such as theNational Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, reproductive justice involves not only access to affordable birth control, abortion, and health care, but also providing access to women who are being held in immigration detention centers.

Its work that connects the dots between power inequities and bodily self-determination somethingthe eugenics movement sought to limit. AsNo Ms Bebsdirector Renee Tajima-Pea says in an interview with Colorlines: The reproductive justice framework is to make sure that people listen to the needs and the voices of poor women, women of color and immigrant women whove been marginalized.

2022 Update:

Read this comprehensive new article by Natalie Lira for PBSs American Experience and The Latino Experience: Latinos and the Consequences of Eugenics.

2020 Updates:

The documentary Belly of the Beast tackles a more recent, equally shocking story of forced sterilizations in this case in womens prisons. As the women who investigate these cases discover, despite it being nearly forty years after being banned forced sterilization continued for decades in womens prisons, shielded by prison officials and doctors inside the correctional system. And may even still be happening. Read the interview with Belly of the Beast filmmaker Erika Cohn to learn more.

And as Cohn references in that interview, 2020 saw the revelation that there were forced sterilizations performed in an ICE detention center in Georgia. Learn more in this NPR piece, ICE, A Whistleblower and Forced Sterilization.

For Further Reading:Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, by Alex SternStates of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of Californias Juvenile Justice System, by Miroslava Chavez-GarciaFit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, by Natalia Molina

Lisa Ko is a New York City-based writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Hyphen, and many other publications.

View post:

Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States

Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today …

Posted on by

The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images hide caption

The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954.

Nearly 100 years ago, Congress passed a restrictive law that cut the overall number of immigrants coming to the United States and put severe limits on those who were let in.

Journalist Daniel Okrent says that the eugenics movement a junk science that stemmed from the belief that certain races and ethnicities were morally and genetically superior to others informed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted entrance to the U.S.

"Eugenics was used as a primary weapon in the effort to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans out of the country," Okrent says. "[The eugenics movement] made it a palatable act, because it was based on science or presumed science."

Okrent notes the 1924 law drastically cut the number of Jews, Italians, Greeks and Eastern Europeans that could enter the country. Even during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and dying, access remained limited. The limits remained in place until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended immigration restrictions based on nationality, ethnicity and race.

Okrent sees echos of the 1924 act in President Trump's hard-line stance regarding immigration: "The [current] rhetoric of criminality, the attribution of criminality not to individual criminals but to hundreds of thousands of people of various nationalities that's very similar to the notion of moral deficiency that was hurled by the eugenicists at the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the 1910s and '20s."

Okrent's new book is The Guarded Gate.

The Guarded Gate

Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America

by Daniel Okrent

On what immigration was like at the turn of the 20th century, before the Immigration Act of 1924

Ellis Island opens in 1892 and within a few years it becomes one of the busiest port spots anywhere in the U.S. Ellis Island was a teeming hive of activity as hundreds of thousands in some years more than a million immigrants came pouring through. [It] was a very, very busy place and a very alienating place for a lot of people, because of the examination that people had to go through, particularly for tuberculosis, trachoma and other diseases. But once through the line, and then onto the ferry boat that took people to Manhattan, it was really a wonderful place to have been.

On the Immigration Act of 1924, and the quotas set up to restrict immigration

First, there is an overall quota. At various times it was 300,000 people, then it got chopped down to ... 162,000 people. ... The second part is where did these people come from? And it was decided that, well, let's continue to reflect the population of America as it has become, so we will decide where people can come from based on how many people of their same nationality were already here. ...

If 10 percent of the current American population came from country A, then 10 percent of that year's immigrants could come from country A. Except and this is probably the most malign and dishonest thing that came out of this entire movement they didn't do this on the basis of the 1920 census, which had been conducted just four years before, or the 1910, or even the 1900. But those numbers were based on the population in 1890, before the large immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe had begun. So to any question about whether there was any racist or anti-Semitic or anti-Italian intent, this established there clearly was. ...

... in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 ...

Daniel Okrent

So if you take the Italians, in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 and similar numbers stretched across Eastern and Southern Europe. Suddenly the door has slammed in the faces of those people who had been coming in the largest numbers, based not only on bogus science, but based on a manipulation of American history itself.

On how eugenics began

The origin of eugenics was in England in the latter half of the 19th century. It really comes out of Darwin in a way, out of some very good science. Darwin upsets the entire balance of the scientific world with his discovery and the propagation of the ideas of evolution. And then, once you establish that we are not all derived from the same people from Adam and Eve which was the prevailing view at the time, then we learned that we are not all the same. We are not all brothers, if you wish to take that particular position. And the early eugenicists believed that and thought that we could control the nature of the population of a nation the U.K. at first, or the U.S. by selective breeding. Let's have only the "good" breed with the "good," and let's not let the less-than-good breed.

On how eugenicists believed morality was an inherited trait

You find some very well-established scientists, [Henry] Fairfield Osborn, the head of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, he outright declared that it is not just intelligence, it is also morality that is inherited, and criminality is inherited. It's really stunning to think that people who are very, very well-credentialed in the natural sciences could believe these things. But if you begin your belief by thinking that certain peoples are inferior to other peoples, it's very easy to adapt your science to suit your own prejudice.

On the evaluations to determine which ethnic groups were the smartest

There were any number of tests in various places, almost all of them of equal unreliability to determine whether people were of sufficient intelligence. One of the most famous ones was the so-called "Alpha Test" that was given to nearly 2 million soldiers in World War I by Robert M. Yerkes, who is now memorialized in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, a federal facility.

Yerkes gave tests that included questions that were almost [like] Jeopardy questions, although in reverse. A question like: "Is Bud Fisher a (choose one): outfielder; cartoonist or novelist?" If you've just been in the country for five years and you don't speak English terribly well, how are you possibly going to answer a question like that? But it was taken seriously as a measure of intelligence.

On how Trump's hard-line position on immigration echoes the anti-immigration and eugenicist sentiments of the early 1900s

When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.

Daniel Okrent

I think that one could say that today's Central Americans and today's Muslims ... are the equivalent of 1924's Jews and Italians, or ... the Jews and Italians then were treated and regarded as these Latin American and Muslim nationalities are today. When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.

Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

See the article here:

Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today ...

Atlas Shrugged Quotes by Ayn Rand – Goodreads

Posted on by

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Read more from the original source:

Atlas Shrugged Quotes by Ayn Rand - Goodreads

List of Atlas Shrugged characters – Wikipedia

Posted on by

This is a list of characters in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.

The following are major characters from the novel.[note 1]

Dagny Taggart is the protagonist of the novel. She is vice-president in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental, under her brother, James Taggart. Given James' incompetence, Dagny is responsible for all the workings of the railroad.

Francisco d'Anconia is one of the central characters in Atlas Shrugged, an owner by inheritance of the world's largest copper mining operation. He is a childhood friend, and the first love, of Dagny Taggart. A child prodigy of exceptional talents, Francisco was dubbed the "climax" of the d'Anconia line, an already prestigious family of skilled industrialists. He was a classmate of John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjld and student of both Hugh Akston and Robert Stadler. He began working while still in school, proving that he could have made a fortune without the aid of his family's wealth and power. Later, Francisco bankrupts the d'Anconia business to put it out of others' reach. His full name is given as "Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastin d'Anconia".[note 2]

John Galt is the primary male hero of Atlas Shrugged. He initially appears as an unnamed menial worker for Taggart Transcontinental, who often dines with Eddie Willers in the employees' cafeteria, and leads Eddie to reveal important information about Dagny Taggart and Taggart Transcontinental. Only Eddie's side of their conversations is given in the novel. Later in the novel, the reader discovers this worker's true identity.

Before working for Taggart Transcontinental, Galt worked as an engineer for the Twentieth Century Motor Company, where he secretly invented a generator of usable electric energy from ambient static electricity, but abandoned his prototype, and his employment, when dissatisfied by an easily corrupted novel system of payment. This prototype was found by Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Galt himself remains concealed throughout much of the novel, working a job and living by himself, where he unites the most skillful inventors and business leaders under his leadership. Much of the book's third division is given to his broadcast speech, which presents the author's philosophy of Objectivism.

Henry (known as "Hank") Rearden is one of the central characters in Atlas Shrugged. He owns the most important steel company in the United States, and invents Rearden Metal, an alloy stronger, lighter, cheaper and tougher than steel. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife Lillian, his brother Philip, and his elderly mother. Rearden represents a type of self-made man and eventually divorces Lillian, abandons his steel mills following a bloody assault by government-planted workers, and joins John Galt's strike.

Edwin "Eddie" Willers is the Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operations at Taggart Transcontinental. His father and grandfather worked for the Taggarts, and himself likewise. He is completely loyal to Dagny and to Taggart Transcontinental. Willers does not possess the creative ability of Galt's associates, but matches them in moral courage and is capable of appreciating and making use of their creations. After Dagny shifts her attention and loyalty to saving the captive Galt, Willers maintains the railroad until its collapse.

One of Galt's first followers, and world-famous as a pirate, who seizes relief ships sent from the United States to the People's States of Europe. He works to ensure that once those espousing Galt's philosophy are restored to their rightful place in society, they have enough capital to rebuild the world. Kept in the background for much of the book, Danneskjld makes a personal appearance to encourage Rearden to persevere in his increasingly difficult situation, and gives him a bar of gold as compensation for the income taxes he has paid over the last several years. Danneskjld is married to the actress Kay Ludlow; their relationship is kept hidden from the outside world, which only knows of Ludlow as a retired film star. Considered a misfit by Galt's other adherents, he views his actions as a means to speed the world along in understanding Galt's perspective.

According to Barbara Branden, who was closely associated with Rand at the time the book was written, there were sections written describing Danneskjld's adventures at sea, cut from the final published text.[1] In a 1974 comment at a lecture, Ayn Rand admitted that Danneskjld's name was a tribute to Victor Hugo's novel, Hans of Iceland[fr], wherein the hero becomes the first of the Counts of Danneskjld. In the published book, Danneskjld is always seen through the eyes of others (Dagny Taggart or Hank Rearden), except for a brief paragraph in the very last chapter.

The President of Taggart Transcontinental and the book's most important antagonist. Taggart is an expert influence peddler but incapable of making operational decisions on his own. He relies on his sister, Dagny Taggart, to actually run the railroad, but nonetheless opposes her in almost every endeavor because of his various anti-capitalist moral and political beliefs. In a sense, he is the antithesis of Dagny. This contradiction leads to the recurring absurdity of his life: the desire to overcome those on whom his life depends, and the horror that he will succeed at this. In the final chapters of the novel, he suffers a complete mental breakdown upon realizing that he can no longer deceive himself in this respect.

The unsupportive wife of Hank Rearden, who dislikes his habits and (secretly at first) seeks to ruin Rearden to prove her own value. Lillian achieves this, when she passes information to James Taggart about her husband's affair with his sister. This information is used to blackmail Rearden to sign a Gift Certificate which delivers all the property rights of Rearden Metal to others. Lillian thereafter uses James Taggart for sexual satisfaction, until Hank abandons her.

Ferris is a biologist who works as "co-ordinator" at the State Science Institute. He uses his position there to deride reason and productive achievement, and publishes a book entitled Why Do You Think You Think? He clashes on several occasions with Hank Rearden, and twice attempts to blackmail Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal. He is also one of the group of looters who tries to get Rearden to agree to the Steel Unification Plan. Ferris hosts the demonstration of the Project X weapon, and is the creator of the Ferris Persuader, a torture machine. When John Galt is captured by the looters, Ferris uses the device on Galt, but it breaks down before extracting the information Ferris wants from Galt. Ferris represents the group which uses brute force on the heroes to achieve the ends of the looters.

A former professor at Patrick Henry University, and along with colleague Hugh Akston, mentor to Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjld. He has since become a sell-out, one who had great promise but squandered it for social approval, to the detriment of the free. He works at the State Science Institute where all his inventions are perverted for use by the military, including a sound-based weapon known as Project X (Xylophone). He is killed when Cuffy Meigs (see below) drunkenly overloads the circuits of Project X, causing it to destroy itself and every structure and living thing in a 100-mile radius. The character was, in part, modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Rand had interviewed for an earlier project, and his part in the creation of nuclear weapons.`[2] To his former student Galt, Stadler represents the epitome of human evil, as the "man who knew better" but chose not to act for the good.

The incompetent and treacherous lobbyist whom Hank Rearden reluctantly employs in Washington, who rises to prominence and authority throughout the novel through trading favours and disloyalty. In return for betraying Hank by helping broker the Equalization of Opportunity Bill (which, by restricting the number of businesses each person may own to one, forces Hank to divest most of his companies), he is given a senior position at the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. Later in the novel he becomes its Top Co-ordinator, a position that eventually becomes Economic Dictator of the country. Mouch's mantra, whenever a problem arises from his prior policy, is to say, "I can't help it. I need wider powers."

The following secondary characters also appear in the novel.[note 3]

More:

List of Atlas Shrugged characters - Wikipedia

SpaceX Boca Chica beach case sparks appeal after lawsuit dismissed | Space

Posted on by

A dispute concerning SpaceX facilities and access to a nearby Texas beach is once again before the courts.

The Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of South Texas jointly appealed the 445th District Court's decision July 7 to dismiss a lawsuit concerning SpaceX testing of its next-generation Starship vehicle closing nearby Boca Chica Beach, the coalition said July 28.

In the dismissal, Judge Gloria Rincones argued there is "no private right of enforcement" concerning the beach access, according to KRGV.com (opens in new tab). The dismissal took place over the appellants' protests that closing the beach violates the Texas state constitution, along with access rights by traditional groups.

Related: 8 ways that SpaceX has transformed spaceflight

The Sierra Club's Brownsville organizer, Emma Guevara, stated the appeal is taking place because the beach is closed weekly to allow "a billionaire [to] launch deadly rockets near homes and wildlife."

Citing a fireball that briefly and unexpectedly engulfed Starship during testing July 12, Guevera said her family was "forced" to hear the noise, which "launched without any warning for the public."

None of the allegations have been proven in court, and the appeal does not name SpaceX among the entities pursued.SpaceX also did not respond to a Space.com request for comment.

The Boca Chica beach under dispute is located close to SpaceX's Starbase facility, where the next-generation Starship vehicle is being developed. A Federal Aviation Administration review in June allowed the development to continue as long as SpaceX addresses 75 matters to mitigate the environmental impact.

Not everyone agrees, however. The Sierra Club, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and non-profit Save RGV [Rio Grande Valley] all participated in the lawsuit alleging that restricting the beach access violates the Texas constitution.

The initial lawsuit alleged that Boca Chica Beach was closed for 196 hours, or roughly 8 days, in the first three months of 2022. In the previous year, the beach had about 600 hours, or 25 equivalent days, of closures.

Even after the lawsuit was dismissed, local residents continued to protest the beach closures, including at a unanimous vote July 14 by the Cameron County Commissioners Court to support SpaceX's Starship development, according to Texas Public Radio (opens in new tab).

Starship's team is targeting the program's first orbital flight later this year to support ambitious future plans for the program, including landing NASA astronauts on the moon and launching one of the Polaris program's private astronaut missions.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)and onFacebook (opens in new tab).

Read more:

SpaceX Boca Chica beach case sparks appeal after lawsuit dismissed | Space