It’s time once again this year for the Perseid meteor shower, and most years, it’s a marquee stargazing event, but not this year. You can blame it on the moon, which will be washing out most of the “shooting stars” of the Perseids. The Perseids peak on Wednesday morning after midnight, but at the same time, the heavens will also be filled with a bright waning full moon that’ll visually wash out the sky, even in the countryside. For sure, you’ll still see some meteors, but many of them will be lost in the moonlight bath. In years when the moon isn’t a factor, you may see over 50 meteors an hour. You may see only about half as many this year or fewer.

A meteor. (Mike Lynch)

Meteor showers occur when the Earth, in its orbit around the sun, runs into a trail of small debris left behind by a comet. Comets are mainly dirty snowballs of ice with embedded debris that, for the most part, have highly elongated orbits that take them from the far outer regions of our solar system to the inner neighborhood near the sun. As they swing close to our home star, the dirty snowballs at least partially melt, liberating and littering small bits of debris, usually ranging from dust grains to pebble-sized.

As Earth swings into these debris trails, the debris gets gravitationally sucked into the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up. The meteors are slamming into our atmosphere with speeds as high as 44 miles per second. Much of the light streaks that we see as meteors are not so much because of incineration but rather the temporary atomic destabilizing of the column of air they’re coming through.

Even though the Perseids will be “moonwashed” out this year, it’s still a lot of fun to lie back on a reclining lawn chair, roll your eyes all around the sky, and see how many meteors you can spot. Again the best time to watch for them will be Wednesday morning from about midnight to the start of early morning twilight. You’ll probably also catch a few falling stars on Monday and Tuesday morning as well. There’s a great app called NightCap that turns your smartphone into an astronomical camera. It costs around $3, but it is so worth it. It has a mode that allows you to take a photo of any part of the sky, and it detects and photographs meteors. It’s wonderful!

While you’re out in that lawn chair trying to view the diminished Perseid show, there’s going to be a fantastic celestial conjunction, or what I like to call a celestial hugging, between the very bright planets Jupiter and Venus in the predawn hours of Aug. 12. Moonlight will have no effect on the spectacle! It should be a stunning site! About a couple of hours before sunrise they’ll rise together above the eastern horizon less than a degree apart. That’s less than the width of your finger held at arm’s length. They’ll resemble cat’s eyes, although Venus will be much brighter than Jupiter. You’ll be able to see Venus and Jupiter, along with Jupiter’s moons, in the same field of view with binoculars or a small telescope. You can also capture a wonderful image of the planets using a smart photographic telescope, such as the ZWO SeeStar 50 or SeeStar 30.

(Mike Lynch)

Both planets will still be visible well into morning twilight before fading out as sunrise approaches. Obviously, both planets are not physically close together but are nearly in the same line of sight. It’s a lot of fun if you get a chance to watch the two planets approach each other in the early morning hours leading up to Aug. 12. Next week on Aug. 19 and 20, as the planets separate from each other, the waning crescent moon will be close by. That’s worth setting the alarm for!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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“America’s AI Action Plan,” unveiled by the White House on July 23, aims to accelerate the innovation of artificial intelligence by dismantling regulations and privatizing infrastructure. What the plan does is conflate innovation with deregulation and frame AI as a race to be won rather than a technology to be governed.

President Donald Trump signed three executive orders to ensure that the federal government approves data centers as quickly as possible, promote the exporting of AI models for the sake of American dominance and guarantee that federally supported AI systems are “ideologically neutral” and reject “wokeism and critical race theory.”

In its 24 pages, the plan does not mention “ethics” at all and cites “responsibility” once, in the context of securing AI systems against adversarial attacks. The “Build World-Class Scientific Datasets” section is the only part of the action plan that explicitly mentions human rights: “The United States must lead the creation of the world’s largest and highest quality AI-ready scientific datasets, while maintaining respect for individual rights and ensuring civil liberties, privacy, and confidentiality protections.” However, without protection measures, there is no encouragement for responsible use and deployment.

For example, the plan prioritizes a narrow interpretation of national security without addressing critical ethical needs such as the protection of vulnerable populations, children, neurodivergent individuals and minorities — issues that the European Union AI Act addresses.

And the plan’s only nod to misinformation is framed as a free speech issue. Instead of trying to address it, the plan suggests that references to it should be eliminated: “Revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Placing misinformation, DEI and climate change in one bucket suggests that these very different things can be treated the same way. The implications of this policy include that Google search, now enabled by AI, might censor references to these topics.

The plan also contains significant accountability gaps. By rejecting “onerous regulation,” the administration effectively green-lights opaque AI systems, prioritizing deregulation over transparency. It does not incentivize processes to help us understand the results produced by AI, enforceable standards or oversight mechanisms.

For example, when AI systems discriminate in hiring or health care, there is no clear answer to questions such as: How did this happen? Who is responsible? And how can we prevent this in the future?

The plan delegates oversight to private corporations, relying on self-policing as a substitute for governance. This hands-off approach mirrors a broader deregulatory playbook: During a May 8 Senate hearing led by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican from Texas hailed “a light-touch regulatory style” as a key strategy.

This approach to data governance also raises serious concerns about fairness. While it calls “open-weight” and “open-source” AI the engines of innovation, it mandates that federally funded researchers must disclose “non-proprietary, non-sensitive datasets” used in AI research. This creates a double standard: Academic researchers and institutions should share data in the name of transparency, while private corporations are free to hoard proprietary datasets in their ever-expanding data centers. The result is an ecosystem in which public research fuels private profit, reinforcing the dominance of tech giants.

Indeed, rather than leveling the playing field, the plan risks entrenching imbalances in access, ownership, possession and control over the data that powers AI.

Furthermore, by ignoring copyright, the plan invites the unchecked scraping of creative and scientific work, which risks normalizing extracting data without attribution and creating a chilling effect on open scholarship. Researchers might ask themselves: Why publish clean and reusable data if it becomes free training material for for-profit companies such as Meta or OpenAI?

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During his introductory remarks at a White House AI summit, Trump provided the rationale: “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied you’re supposed to pay for.” However, before the recent wave of deregulation, AI companies had begun forming licensing agreements with publishers. For instance, OpenAI’s two-year agreement with The Associated Press signed in 2023 showed that publishers could license high-quality, fact-checked archives for training purposes and also allow their content to be displayed with proper attribution in AI-generated outputs.

Without a doubt, the plan can turbocharge corporate American AI — but likely at the expense of the democratic values the U.S. has long worked to uphold. The document positions AI as a tool of national self-interest and a driver of global divides. While Americans have the right to want to win the AI race, the greater danger is that they might win it on terms that erode the very values the nation has for so long declared to defend.

Mohammad Hosseini, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

The Flame night club in downtown St. Paul lived up to its name in August 1950.

A fire that started inside the club, which was housed on the ground floor of the Hotel Jewell on Fifth Street, ripped through the five-story building on a Sunday afternoon.

Firefighters quickly gave up on saving the hotel and focused their efforts on rescuing guests and preventing the flames from spreading to neighboring structures.

“Dense smoke pouring from the building made the State Capitol only a blurred image to spectators on the scene,” the Pioneer Press reported the next day. “At Lexington baseball park, spectators standing on the roof could see only the top of the First National Bank building poking up through a layer of smoke.”

Although no one was seriously injured by the blaze, the hotel — located where Osborn370 is today — was reduced to a burned-out shell standing in a pile of rubble.

With losses estimated at $275,000, it was one of the most destructive fires in St. Paul history.

‘Looks like there’s a fire in there’

The fire was first reported about 3 p.m. by a passing motorist, who saw smoke escaping from the offices of the St. Paul Hockey Club, which shared the first floor of the Jewell with the Flame.

“You’d better send someone to the hockey club office,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s smoke coming out under the door and it looks like there’s a fire in there.”

The hockey club and the Flame were both closed, but roughly 85 people were registered at the Jewell.

Hotel staff quickly began evacuating guests while firefighters rushed to the scene. Most of the Jewell’s occupants were able to leave safely, but some made dramatic escapes down fire department ladders.

Thousands of curious onlookers flocked to the burning building as firefighters deployed 30 hoses at once to hammer the flames with at least 6 million gallons of water.

The St. Paul Fire Department summoned all 410 of its personnel to duty — even some who were on vacation rushed back to battle the blaze. They worked late into the night, extinguishing flare-ups with the help of firefighters from neighboring cities.

Totally gutted

A pair of Minneapolis firefighters arrive with hoses outside downtown St. Paul’s Hotel Jewell to aid the city’s fire department in battling the blaze that destroyed the building on Aug. 13, 1950. (Ted Strasser / Pioneer Press)

By morning, the Jewell had been totally gutted and two of its exterior walls had collapsed. Demolition crews worked for more than a week straight to tear down the building’s remains and clear rubble blocking Fifth Street.

In the days following the fire, officials determined the cause was likely a discarded cigarette or faulty wiring in the Flame, which was known at the time for drawing big-name musical acts to its stage.

The owner of the Flame later told St. Paul Dispatch columnist Oliver Towne that he was on a flight home from Chicago when he saw flames from the plane as it passed over downtown.

“My God, that’s my investment going up in smoke,” he screamed.

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There are about 160,000 gas stations in the United States, the vast majority of them built and run through the private sector to maximize efficiency and convenience for motorists. And then there’s the EV charging network overseen by federal bureaucrats that cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion and produced 68 stations with 384 ports.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark.

In 2021, the Democratic Congress passed and former President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion monstrosity larded with pork and payouts to favored green interests. Included among the “investments” were billions to subsidize a national EV charging network in an effort to jump-start the sale of electric vehicles. The Biden White House insisted the program would fund 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

As is typical of government infrastructure projects today, the program became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiae. Democrats larded the grant requirements with all types of woke nonsense dictating, among other things, where the stations had to be built and who would be allowed to build them. At a Senate hearing last year, a Federal Highway Administration official testified that, after three years, the effort had produced seven charging stations and a “few dozen” charging ports, Reuters reported.

A year later, that number has increased. But the result remains underwhelming. The National Review reported last month that “the Biden administration’s program will have cost approximately $19.5 million per charger once the funding dries up in 2026.”

A recently released report from the Government Accounting Office concluded that the joint office set up by the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation to oversee such projects “generally does not have fully defined performance goals for its activities and, consequently, is generally unable to use the performance information it collects to assess progress toward goals.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February directing states to stop spending the Biden money allocated for EV chargers. This is a step forward for fiscal sanity, given the program’s dismal record. The for-profit sector is capable of meeting demand for EV ports — as Tesla has aptly demonstrated. “Private companies have collectively spent billions on this infrastructure,” The Associated Press reported this year. “Industry leaders say that the demand from drivers for EV chargers will propel companies to build more of them.”

And it’s a sure bet that when these companies fund the construction of new stations and ports, they’ll do it in a timely fashion — and for far less than $19.5 million per charger.

— The Las Vegas Review-Journal

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