An image of the wildfires in Rhodes, taken on July 23rd, showing the flames and the plume of smoke.
Greece, in late July, faced a heatwave in which over 8 million people experienced temperatures about 41C, with some areas reaching above 45C - all in all, both the longest heatwave in Greek history, as well as some of the highest temperatures on record.
Due to these high temperatures, Greece was then struck by hundreds of wildfires this summer, affecting nearly 200,000 hectares. About half of the total burned area was in the north-east of Greece, in the Dadia national park near the city of Alexandropoulis - the single largest blaze that the EU has recorded. Other parts of the country were also struck, such as Attica, Magnesia, and islands like Corfu and particularly Rhodes; the last one prompted an evacuation of 20,000 people, the largest evacuation operation the island had ever seen. Of course, this is just one country of many that have been caught in the European wildfires this year, of which the total burned area approached 500,000 hectares - the only consolation is that this was less than last year.
Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkiye were impacted in early September by flooding caused by massive storms bringing a deluge of water - in Greece, this mainly impacted Thessaly, in the centre of Greece.
Luckily for Greece, despite being a very earthquake-prone country, they have experienced no significant quakes lately to round out the four (I hope I haven’t jinxed it) - though, of course, earlier this year, a major earthquake struck nearby Turkiye, killing 60,000 people and injuring 120,000.
The Country of the Week is Greece! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week’s update is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
An interesting article on China’s chipbuilding efforts, including a proposal for a giant chip factory with a particle accelerator 100-150 meters in circumference, and a discussion of the physics behind it (which I get the gist of, I think).
ASML is the only company that owns the technology and therefore dominates the market. As of the end of 2022, ASML had delivered 180 EUV systems. It also plans to ship 60 EUVs this year, according to a Bloomberg report published in April.
While there are many researchers chasing the technology, the Chinese scientists have been exploring a different path. It is a project that has been running since 2017, but due to Huawei’s breakthroughs in chip manufacturing, it was recently catapulted into public view.
“One of the potential applications of our research is as a light source for future EUV lithography machines. I think this is why the international community is paying close attention,” said project leader Professor Tang Chuanxiang from Tsinghua University in a report on the university’s website.
The theory behind the team’s research is a new luminescence mechanism called steady-state microbunching (SSMB). It was first proposed by Professor Zhao Wu at Stanford University and his student Daniel Ratner in 2010. Zhao is a former student of the famous physicist Yang Zhenning.
In short, SSMB theory uses the energy released by charged particles during acceleration to act as a light source. The result is a narrow bandwidth, small scattering angle and continuous pure EUV light. Charged particles emit light when they are accelerated, and accelerators that use this phenomenon are among the brightest artificial sources of light available.
“The main challenge lies in guiding the distribution of electrons within the storage ring of the accelerator, causing them to achieve collective synchronous radiation. The device could produce high-quality radiations from terahertz waves at a wavelength of 0.3mm to EUV waves at wavelengths of 13.5nm,” Zhao said in an academic report at Tsinghua in October 2022.
“Unlike free-electron lasers, which produce pulsed lasers with high peak power, SSMB sources produce continuous light with high average power,” he said. This characteristic has led to the broad application prospects of SSMB.
Compared with current ASML EUV technology, SSMB is a more ideal light source. It has a higher average power and higher chip production output with lower unit cost.
ASML creates an EUV source from laser-produced plasma, where strong laser pulses are projected to liquid microdroplets of tin. The laser crushes the droplets and produces EUV pulse light during the impact. After complex filtering and focusing, an EUV light source with a power of about 250W is produced.
Before reaching the chip, the EUV beam undergoes reflection from 11 mirrors, each causing about a 30 per cent energy loss. As a result, the power of the beam is less than 5W when reaching the wafer. This can become an issue when manufacturing turns to 3nm or 2nm. SSMB technology avoids such concerns. SSMB beams achieve a higher output power of 1000W, and due to its narrow bandwidth, fewer reflecting mirrors are needed, which naturally generates higher terminal power.
It would be exceedingly funny if China uses this and can get down to 2nm chips or whatever. I’m not an expert on the subject but seems like what they’re working on has the potential be better than what’s currently used and licensed, if what I’m understanding is correct? I know one of the issues is we’re pretty close to the smallest size physics will let chips go, not sure how much this helps there.
Yeah since China has no need to export EUV machines, they can be as big as they want, in this case, it’s also a better solution. We can get potentially even smaller transistors with near x-ray wavelengths, but there’s a possibility of quantum tunneling once you hit 3nm or smaller and I’m curious to see if that can be overcome or if it ends up being a hard limit to junction size.
