Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Pakistan has two things: very high mountains, and a very flat plain.

The plain, in turn, is either desert or the Indus Valley.

The Indus Valley is where the population is most concentrated. You can easily tell by just looking at the map of nightlights.

So when the Indus floods, it does so on the most fertile areas of its valley. The most fertile areas are also the most populous, and so a big share of Pakistan’s 220 million people is affected.

So why the floods? Why is the monsoon so aggressive this year? We need to understand the mechanics of the monsoon.

More here.

Steven Novella in Neurologica Blog:

One of the major challenges of space travel is that there are no ready-made resources there. Mars, for example, has no food, shelter, oxygen, fuel, or power. It likely has water, but it’s not certain how much and how accessible. So for now any human mission to Mars will have to bring all recourses from Earth. Getting stuff to Mars is massively expensive, and resupply can take 6-9 months, during optimal launch windows. Keeping humans alive on Mars for any length of time is therefore a very tenuous and expensive endeavor.

One obvious solution is what NASA calls “in-situ resource utilization,” – using stuff that is already there. The Perseverance rover on Mars contains an experiment called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) that has taken the first step toward the goal of in-situ resource use. MOXIE was developed by engineers at MIT, it is a lunch-box sized experiment onboard the Perseverance that makes oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. It is essentially a proof-of-concept, and if it works may be the forerunner of far larger machines in the future.

More here.

Ian Millhiser in Vox:

If all the criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump end in conviction, then Trump will be a true renaissance man of crime.

The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence because, as federal prosecutors said in a fiery court filing Tuesday, they believed not only did the former president possess “dozens” of boxes “likely to contain classified information” but also that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” In that search, the FBI said it did remove over 100 classified documents, some of which reportedly contained information about nuclear weapons. That’s all part of just one investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act, the improper handling of federal records, and obstruction of a federal investigation. Meanwhile, a second federal investigation is looking into the January 6 attack on the Capitol and broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election, an issue that obviously could implicate the man who spent most of the 2020 lame-duck period trying to erase his loss to President Joe Biden.

More here.

The Gust

In the mind
there comes a moment
when shadows fall back … like men
from a gust of something,
when the brain is light
as a fly on your wrist—

and in the jeweled eyes of that fly
you see your own six-legged self
white-shoed, dancing,
being on parade—
the gold tuba grown from your lips:
Um-pah-dah .. cha-cha .. huuh!

Meet me there.
.

by Tim Seibles
from Ploughshares at Emerson College
Spring, 1995