Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia has built a giant freaking dam on the Blue Nile River just a few miles from their northern border where the Blue Nile River crosses into Sudan. Al Jazeera has a story.

With a planned installed capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, the dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa when completed, as well as among the 20 largest in the world. - Wikipedia

They started building it in 2011 and it started generating electricity this year.

I was thinking about putting up a post about this, just because I had never heard of this project before. Seems like I should have heard something about a big deal like this, but no. A couple of days ago I started reading Maelstrom by Peter Watts and somewhere in the first few dozen pages he mentions this dam. Well, I can't ignore a coincidence like this, so this post. I've read a couple other books by Peter Watts and he's pretty great.

Looking for information, I dug up some maps.

River Nile Map

Note that the Blue Nile branches off of the main river at Khartoum. It heads southeast toward Ethiopia and just after it crosses the border is where the dam is.

Google Maps doesn't do a good job of portraying waterways. Can't say as I blame them, only a small fraction of the population gets out on the water, and the government has a whole army of people devoted to mapping water. So if you want to look at maps of rivers, search for images of maps using your regular browser.

Still, Google Maps is terrific. Here we have two views of the area being inundated by the water being held back by the dam. Both maps are about 14 miles across. First is the map view:

Map View of Blue Nile Dam area

No sign of any lake. The black line along the left hand side is the border with Sudan. Now look at the satellite view:

Satellite View of Blue Nile Dam area

Not a lot of contrast between the land and the water, but if you look carefully you might be able to pick out the shore line and see that the lake is extensive.

Update two days later.

Main Dam and Saddle Dam of GERD (Source: Hydro World, 2016)

Looking at the satellite view of the lake I noticed a large, curved line in the lower left quadrant. A little digging reveals this is a three mile long saddle dam. The water hasn't reached it yet, but it means the lake is going to get a whole lot bigger in the coming years. The saddle dam is 160 feet tall. Not giant, but still substantial.

Comanches

The Gruesome History of the Comanche Tribe - Joe Rogan
The Sigma Life
Stopped by Powell's this afternoon. I was disappointed that they only had one book by Peter Watts (Blindsight) and I've already read it, so I went and looked at Neal Stephenson. There are a couple of shelves of his books including one I hadn't read - Termination Shock. The story opens in Waco, Texas, and one of the lead characters (Rufus, I believe) has some relation to the Comanches, and Comanches, Neal tells us, got a leg up on the other inhabitants of the region by being early adopters of the horse. And then this video pops up so I gotta share.

Military Crane

Bombay Victoria Dock, circa 1900

I'm reading Firefall by Peter Watts and it's pretty great. It's actually two of his books combined into one volume. I read both of those books before, and when I was looking for something to read I came across this volume. On one hand, it's kind of a rip-off. I've read these books before so I'm buying a second copy, except not really, because I didn't actually buy a copy of the first book (Blindsight), I read it on-line. Anyway, now I have a real printed copy of the first book and I read it again and it was great, again. Now I'm working my way through the second book (Echopraxia) and I come across a quote at the start of a chapter. I think there is a quote at the start of every chapter, but some of the quotes have dates 50 years into the future, so you know they are made up, but this one has no date, so maybe it's real. The quote is:

War does not teach us to love our enemies, it teaches us to hate our allies - W L George

Which rang a bell with me because of my recent come-to-Jesus realization that war making is an essential human activity, natural even.

Anyway, George was an English writer who lived around a hundred years ago. His first book was A Bed of Roses. You can buy a copy from Amazon, but you can also read it on Project Guttenberg. I get about halfway through the first page and he mentions the military crane at the port in Bombay India, so I go looking for a picture and while I didn't find any more about the military crane, you can see that there are a bunch of cranes at the port a hundred years ago.

Blindsight

Spaceship Theseus

Jack Baruth got me started with his article on Road & Track about how people can really not see things that are right in front of them, like, in his case, a man on a motorcycle. While talking about what you see, what you think you see, and what you miss, he mentions the Science-Fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Besides being the title of a novel, Blindsight is also a neurological phenomenon:

Blindsight challenges the common belief that perceptions must enter consciousness to affect our behavior; it shows that our behavior can be guided by sensory information of which we have no conscious awareness. - Wikipedia

I've started reading the book and it's pretty great. You can buy a copy from Amazon, or you can read it online here.

Dan Ghiordanescu has a page of fabulous artwork he did for this book.

Idiot AI

Logo, ChatGPT by OpenAI

AI would be artificial intelligence, aka ChatGPT. I've read a couple of science fiction novels by Peter Watts, and in some of them our hero is fighting against an idiot AI. The techniques the hero uses to get around the machine brain are interesting. I haven't got them entirely sorted, but it makes for an entertaining stories.

Hand Waving Freakoutery has a post up about ChapGPT and the biases that are built into it. It's kind of long, but you don't really need to read the whole thing, the first example is enough to give you the general idea. His conclusion is what I enjoyed:

While it’s certainly fun to trash the Woke Egregore with this sort of exercise, I daresay a LLM [Large Language Model] trained against the MAGA [Make America Great Again, i.e. Donald Trump] echo chamber could probably be just as easily trolled to produce just as absurd statements. But I’m bothered that the people arguing in this AI space today are arguing either against the idea that ChatGPT is biased, or arguing against making new biased tools, when the most useful thing in my mind would be to build biased ones on purpose.

With an echo-chamber specific LLM, you can talk to the Egregore directly. You can find out what it thinks, what it wants, and what it needs to propagate itself. You can use that dialogue for marketing reasons, to sell more MAGA hats on your pillow website or more fake Antifa membership cards. Roger Goodell could train a LLM against every post on every NFL Football forum on the internet, and then ask OblongSpheroidGPT whether he should make changes to the late-hit rules. The tech nerds could put focus groups of all kinds out of business, simply by training LLMs to enact the will of the Penultimate Soccer Mom Egregore.

And at the pinnacle of it all, we could LLM the major culture war egregores themselves and just have them fight each other, flooding Twitter with million man armies of bots to wage wars while we go outside and throw that pigskin around ourselves.

Anglerfish

Anglerfish

I've been reading Starfish by Peter Watts. We've got people living deep underwater and the occasional run-in with monsters is a daily hazard. Last night I watching YouTube shorts (a time sucker of the highest order) and I come across this image. It's the only one I found that gives you an idea of the scale of this thing. Kind of explains the image on the last post.

Anglerfish are not only big and ugly, they're pretty weird too.

Democracy

The cover for the latest Russian edition of Starfish. By Mikhail Yemelyanov.

I'm reading Starfish by Peter Watts. It's pretty great. On page 134 we have this little bit. Acton and Lenie Clarke are deep underwater in the Pacific Ocean and Acton picks up a starfish:

He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Action flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has tiny sucker at its tip.

"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."

Clarke stares, quietly repelled.

"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy,"

Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Graser

Far future science fiction novel. Sunday, our lead character, is on an asteroid that has been made into a giant spaceship. The ship is on a mission to build a series of wormhole jump gates all around the galaxy. Naturally, this is going to take some time, like zillions of years, so Sunday and all the rest of the crew spend most (like 99.999%) of their time in suspended animation. The A. I. (artificial intelligence) brain that runs the ship revives a portion of the crew whenever it's time to build a new gate, something about human brains being better able to cope with unexpected phenomena than the computer.

This mission has been going on for a while (zillions of years) and some of the crew start to notice that not everything is as copacetic as they have been led to believe. In particular, it seems that life support for a small fraction of the hibernating crew (3,000) was cut off and they all died. When they ask the A. I. (Chimp) about this he claims he does not know anything about it. Well, he's a computer, if the data that recorded such an event was erased, he wouldn't be able to remember it even if he wanted to, would he?

This prompts Sunday and a few of his / her (hir gender, nor any of the other characters, is never made clear) cohorts conspire to destroy the A. I. This is going to be a bit of a trick because the Chimp has sensors  almost everywhere. He has a neural link to every person on board. Further, the ship is riddled with computer hardware and since Chimp can relocate himself as he sees fit, there is no telling where the Chimp resides at any time.

To evade detection, the conspirators set up a music school / club where they write music. They encode their messages / information using special notations in their musical scores. They might even have written them out with paper and ink to further remove them from the Chimp's purview.

The conspirators are finally able to locate the Chimp by measuring the latency of signals being sent to it.

The ship is powered by a small black hole. Each wormhole they create is also powered by a black hole, a black hole that they create on the fly by aiming a bunch of grasers at a target (presumably a small ball of matter). This process is akin to setting off an atomic bomb. Each graser must fire at the exact same time otherwise bad things will happen.

The conspirators have deduced that the Chimp resides near the chamber used to build the black holes for the jump gates. Changing the firing parameters for one graser will result in Chimp's destruction. Cool. Except things go wrong and a couple of here-to-for unknown players enter the scene. One of the key conspirators has a secret agenda that upsets the applecart. Another is a person I don't remember, he may have shown up earlier, but it's been a while since I started this book and I don't remember him. Anyway, he's got another agenda. The third is a computer program whose existence was never even suspected. It has been dormant, just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

So all this happens at the very end and it's a little confusing as to just who is trying to accomplish what. The production of the black hole was successful, as usual, but because of the sabotage, they have lost control of it and it takes off on a course orbiting the black hole that powers the ship. Because it is so small (microscopic even) and so dense, it just blasts through everything leaving destruction in its wake. 

The survival of the ship would seem to be in doubt. Chimp coaxes Sunday to enter a hibernation chamber.

Goodreads has a page about this book.