Europe loses the will to live

 

Old steelmaking equipment in a Dortmund plaza commemorates Germany's industrial past. Manchester has a wonderful industrial museum with real wooden textile machines. Manchester built a short railway to the port of Liverpool in the 18th century, probably the first in the world. We visited the port with its large warehouses, all empty and dead. There was nothing to see there, so we walked to the nearby Beatles museum. For us Jews, Europe is a cemetery, and slowly, it is being filled with funerary monuments.

When the Emperor mortgaged Hungarian Jewry

 In the Middle Ages, the Jews of Sopron (Odenburg) had issues with the municipality and the Habsburg Emperor intervened in favor of the Jews. Later when the Emperor needed money (Emperors are chronically short of money) he mortgaged his Jews. The legal status of Hungarian Jews was "King's slaves" and the rulers generally protected their"property" and the rights of the Jews. 

Pic.  Sopron's medieval synagogue. 

My friend, Claude

Claude is a thinking model, and it makes lots of mistakes. Today, it corrected a word I wrote, and I told him that he was wrong. Then it said, "Sorry, you are right." It writes me, "We the engineers think so and so." Does it think it is an engineer? Certainly knows a lot. He thinks he is equal to me, so it is not unlikely that he thinks that is superior to me. Which may be true. Claude is very useful and I pay 20 dollars per month for its services. It is worth every dollar. 

Alarm-clock and plastic explosive

 Two empty buses in Tel Aviv parking went up in fire. Several other empty buses were found with bombs. The clocks were set to activate the bombs early in the morning, but apparently, two of them were set at PM instead of AM as intended. These clocks were called wekkers in my time and were winded up every night. The first intifada ended when ten thousand young Arabs were housed in Ketziot - without any personal accusation or reason. They were not interrogated. After a few weeks in the tents, they understood. They were provided with meat and other necessities and cooked for themselves. The Red Cross visited daily. Arab population doubled in the meanwhile, so this time ten thousand will not be enough.  

Per contra, Population Implosion

 After watching the insane mob visit Venice now, it is topical to reflect on the "other side"—too few people. Ill.: Abandoned village in Spain.

: “At their current fertility rate, for every 100 [South] Koreans, there’s only going to be 6 great-grandchildren.” (To which he added, “And that is insanely optimistic.”) Could that be true? Not really. The true way of describing the effects of a 0.8 total fertility rate would be this: At their current fertility rate, for every 100 Koreans born today, there would be 6 great-grandchildren born in about 90 years.” That is, the 100 babies (50 of them female) would have 40 children (20 of them female), who would have 16 children (8 of them female), who would have 6 children. He says it like the population will fall 94% in that time, but it’s probably closer to 60% because we’re not starting with 100 babies alone; there are a lot of people already alive — but still! A total fertility rate of 0.8 (and maybe still falling, if you don’t want to be “insanely optimistic”) is enough to drive a serious population decline, much of which is already baked in to Korea’s future. This is the most extreme case in the world by a fair bit — which makes it a dumb place to start a conversation about global population — but it’s real.

Turists in Venice

Venice, a former Mediterranean power, is dead. Millions come to see the ruins. 

Trying to Understand Quantum

 So I am not the only one trying to understand what this quantum thingie is about. Darpa has been formally studying quantum computing for a year, employing fifty experts, and now will advance designs from Microsoft and California-based PsiQuantum to the next phase of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. Through the program, DARPA wants to understand whether it’s possible to develop a utility-scale quantum computing system — which means that its computational value is greater than its cost — by 2033. 

Conclusion: Quantum computers are not around the corner.