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sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx libxdamage1 libegl1 libxkbcommon0 libopengl0 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libfontconfig

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The reviewer begs the reader’s indulgence for combining a book review with an appreciation of the author. Yes, Leonard Read is my guide and inspiration, and I was thrilled to learn of the republication of Government: An Ideal Concept (FEE, 1997, $12.95 paperback). This book is to me much like the fruits of scripture.

In 1982, I wrote to Read asking if he still believed what he had written in 1954. His reply: Just the other day I re-read Government: An Ideal Concept. Today I wouldn’t change a word of it. All of my books have been consistent with this book you like.

I have read all of Leonard Read’s books; they are consistent. Read is constant in character and consistent in thought. Given his premises, his freedom philosophy, as he called it (to disassociate himself from the anarchists who had appropriated his earlier use of libertarian), is consistent and corroborated by history. Read has grasped and described a natural law.

In Government: An Ideal Concept, he limits himself to basics and a few clear examples. Other issues and secondary points he leaves for other books, other writers. The argument of this work is logical, consistent, and neither circular nor abstruse.

Read is never a polemicist but warns against provoking antagonism with unnecessary personal attacks and criticisms of error, when what is needed is self-improvement and demonstration of truth. Although he says Government: An Ideal Concept is an essay in clarifying his own thinking, he writes with the authority and serenity of someone already possessed of a truth.

Not at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 nor when Read wrote Government: An Ideal Concept, says Read, was there any well-defined . . . principled, spelled-out ideal theory of government or liberty. The founders attempted to limit government, but lacking was a well-defined theory or positive rationale as to why limitation.[1]

Read was familiar with political and philosophical ideas from earliest writings to the present. Yet he was convinced that extant theories of liberty and government were inadequate and that this lack would have to be supplied before American society could secure the Blessings of Liberty cited in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

Read’s plan is to try to justify government, an effective but surprising strategy for one who sees that government, the immune system of society, designed to protect from internal and external dangers, has itself grown unhealthy, and, by proliferation, become an agent of social dysfunction. He seeks to understand the healthy state of government in society as the ideal—a key word in this book’s title. Properly limited government, he asserts, because it is necessary, must be a positive good rather than a necessary evil.

Fundamental to Read’s theory of limited government is his analysis of social versus individual problems, and the role of force and coercion in society. By definition, government is organized force. It monopolizes the legal use of force in those geographical, social, and economic areas under its jurisdiction. Read posits, Man’s purpose on earth is to come as near as possible in his lifetime to the attainment of those creative aptitudes peculiarly his own. He then explains why all of creative human emergence can only be a personal, voluntary undertaking. This leaves those actions of man which impair the source of creative energy and stifle its exchange, and also the actions which are parasitic on the flowing energy as the only social problem. To remove these inhibitory actions, it is necessary to restrain aggressive force and/or penalize those persons who indulge in it. Read explains why force can only restrain, never create. Therefore, the only proper use of force is to restrain aggressive use of force and fraud.
...

American Founders
Leaders at the Creation of the Republic

Download Link

Key Topics
The Founding Era

Why the American Founding Matters

Leading Founders

Their lives, ideas, public service, and selected writings

Primary Documents

Records of the Founding

Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. William Happer cover the sound reasons for climate science skepticism, the politicization of research funding, and the limitations of current climate models. //

Happer and Lindzen discuss how government funding mechanisms and political narratives shape climate research priorities. They argue that scientists who challenge mainstream views risk career marginalization and loss of funding. Rogan’s audience was treated to a robust review on how ideology and media framing have amplified what Happer calls a “CO₂ cult,” and how vital it is to question the reliability of predictive climate models. //

rhhardin | October 24, 2025 at 7:22 am
It was clear that science had nothing to say about global warming right from the hockey stick curve long ago, for two reasons that intersected with what was known about other things:

1. You can’t solve the Navier Stokes equations, which govern fluid flow. In 2D, flows go to larger and larger scales, and there’s no problem with numerical calculations. In 3D, flows go to shorter and shorter scales, and no numerical calculation can do the physics because the grid size is always too coarse no matter how fine it is. (The mechanism is that in 3D, vortices can kink and break up, which they cannot do in 2D. Those fine scale flows resulting feed back on larger scale flows by way of constituting a change in viscosity – transport of x momentum in the y direction etc. – on the large scale flows. Actually a tensor, not a scalar)
   So every calculation includes a term “effective viscosity” which does not appear in the Navier Stokes equation, and at that point stops doing physics. So no calculation is possible.

Weather forecasts are good for two or three days, which is how long it takes large scale vortices to kink. After that they’re no good.

2. You can’t say any historical change in temperature isn’t part of a long cycle and not a trend. A long cycle can’t be man-caused, a trend might be. The mathematical mechanism is that the linear system you have to solve to distinguish long cycles from trends develops eigenvectors of about 10 to the 30th power, which instantly multiplies any noise in the measurements and swamps the effort to distinguish. You need data that’s not shorter than they cycles that you want to eliminate, called the uncertainty principle in math (and quantum mechanics which has the same math but not other relation).

So there are no models and no data in support of man-caused global warming, in principle. //

DaveGinOly in reply to rhhardin. | October 24, 2025 at 11:58 am
The models themselves can’t provide any predictive authority. Even the UN cautions that the results spit out by models aren’t predictions. The trouble with models is that they are built by modelers who have preconceptions of how the climate works and changes over time. If a researcher thinks CO2 has an effect (there are good arguments that it doesn’t, for instance the geologic record shows the CO2 rises in response to warming, and not the other way around, there is also some – I think – very convincing science that CO2 causes warming up to a certain concentration, after which adding more CO2 has no effect), then he builds a model in which the virtual climate reacts to its virtual CO2 levels. If you had a theory that said the climate responds to the number of houses that are painted yellow, you’d build a model that had such a feedback mechanism in it. And, sure enough, if you increase the number of virtual yellow houses in the model, the virtual climate would respond. But that wouldn’t mean it isn’t utter nonsense.

Models can only show how a natural system might work. They represent theories and therefore prove nothing. Real-world observations are necessary to validate the theory. Even if the climate models are accurate, nobody has demonstrated, with real-world observations, that the actual climate behaves like their models.

Also note that there are literally dozens of climate models. Nearly every research group creates their own. This should inform us that no climate researchers have any faith in the climate models of any other researcher. What does that say about the reliability of the models?

“Science…requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results.”
Dr. Michael Crichton
Speaking at the California Institute of Technology, 2023. //

Ironclaw in reply to rhhardin. | October 24, 2025 at 12:32 pm
I understood that political science is the only science involved with climate when they started going back and “correcting” measurements made nearly a century ago.

4 days
jakeSilver badge
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Locking MollyGuards.

Available at a sparky supply shop near you; usually under $CURRENCY20 each. //

Sorry for Molly? Nah.
She has a story to tell that nobody else does.

Many moons ago I took my daughter to SLAC on take your kid to work day. At the ripe old age of 9, she had been there many times before and knew the ropes, but I figured she deserved a day out of school.

She told me as we were walking in that it'd cost me ten bucks for her to not push any buttons. I gave her the money.

On the way back out, I told her that it'd cost her ten bucks for me not to tell her mother she was running a protection racket. She made a face and paid up ... and promptly told her mother as soon as we got home. They both still laugh about it :-)

Call it a badge, sticker, button, or whatever you'd like. Create yours below. Pick some colors, enter some text, and you'll get a button you can download for your site.

Beef costs have stayed relatively stable over the last 50 years. One pound of ground beef in 1980 was equivalent to the earnings of less than 15 minutes of labor, and that ratio is roughly the same in 2025.

At the same time, input costs have soared. //

“A hamburger full of high-quality protein and nutrients for $6 is an incredible deal, especially when you consider the cost of foods with far less to offer,” said Justin Tupper, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.

Others contrast beef prices to the cost of nutritionally empty, mass-produced products.

“A Snickers bar weighs 1.86 ounces,” said Chris Earl of Reverse Rocking R Ranch in New Mexico. “At $2.69 a bar, that equals $23 dollars a pound for a Snickers.” //

Many producers believe Trump is responding to demands from powerful meatpacking companies to increase supply and slash the premium prices they are being forced to pay for American beef products.

The advocacy group R-CALF USA has long criticized the unchecked power of the four meatpacking companies that process 85 percent of the American beef supply.

“Packers and retailers have become so concentrated they now control the market,” R-CALF posted in an X statement. “A generation ago, ranchers earned over 60% of the consumer beef dollar. Today, they get under 40%. Trying to lower prices by inviting even more imports only speeds up the dismantling of America’s beef industry. We don’t need more foreign beef. We need fair markets and country of origin labels.”

At the very least, ranchers argue, they should have the right to compete against imported beef with clear and transparent labeling.

“I don’t really care if Argentina imports beef, as long as it’s clearly labeled,” said Arizona rancher Casey Murph. “American ranchers are more than ready to compete with the rest of the world’s beef with their lax standards.”

Mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) would require meatpackers to label beef products with the country they came from, giving American producers a market edge. Ranchers have called for this legislation for years to no avail.

Burke warned that flooding the market with cheap foreign beef could turn ranchers against a president who has historically enjoyed enormous popularity in cowboy country.

Pepsi paid millions to paint a Concorde in its iconic blue livery. But the passengers who paid first class fares to fly the iconic jet got a much slower and shortened ride as the blue paint heated the jet so much it was allowed to fly at Mach 2 speed for a mere 10 minutes. //

In the spring of 1996, one of the most ambitious and unusual marketing projects in aviation history took to the skies. Air France’s Concorde F-BTSD, known as “Sierra Delta,” was temporarily repainted in a vivid cobalt-blue Pepsi livery as part of Pepsi’s global “Project Blue” rebrand. The aircraft, instantly recognizable for its sleek, needle-like shape, now carried the bold Pepsi logo across its fuselage and tail. For several weeks, it toured major cities in Europe and the Middle East, hosting media and VIP flights. It was a spectacular sight and a daring collaboration between engineering prestige and consumer branding. Yet behind the beauty of the blue jet lay a technical limitation that few outside the project knew: this Concorde could not safely reach its full Mach 2 cruising speed. //

Dark colors absorb far more heat than they reflect, and when tested on Concorde’s aluminum skin, this quickly became a problem. The engineers at Air France Industries and Aérospatiale calculated that sustained flight at Mach 2 with the blue paint would raise surface temperatures dangerously close to the structural tolerance of the fuselage, as pointed out by Avions Legendaires. https://www.avionslegendaires.net/2025/10/actu/quand-le-concorde-se-muait-en-avion-sandwich-pour-pepsi/ //

To further protect the aircraft, a clever compromise was made. Only the fuselage received the dark blue finish, while the wings remained white. This was not a matter of design balance but thermal management, as the wings housed fuel tanks that acted as heat sinks during high-speed flight. Even with this precaution, engineers observed that the blue-painted panels heated up faster and cooled down more slowly than expected. The short-lived experiment confirmed once again that Concorde’s reflective white finish was essential for safe operation at its top speed. ///

So why did the SR-71 work better with black paint, but the Concorde had to have white paint to avoid overheating? Is it the difference between the titanium skin vs the aluminum skin and at the higher temperature of the SR-71, black paint is more effective at radiating heat and the white paint of the Concorde is more effective at reflecting heat at the lower temps?

KW64
3 hours ago edited
OTH, I came from farm country. I remember reading that in 1900 80% of the workforce worked in the agriculture chain. Now it is 4% yet we produce even more food. Those people who left that business found other jobs as unemployment there is low. Also, I keep hearing that we are not having enough babies. Perhaps some of these 600K workers can fill the vacancies in Fire Departments or Police Departments or even, become agricultural workers to prevent our food supply from "rotting in the fields!" unpicked. As non-citizens who choose not to work depart, some social workers may also get surplused and can fill these vacancies as well. Free markets reallocate resources to where they are most useful. Labor is not exempt from that. //

MeanDeb
2 hours ago
Why is this surprising? Machines replaced hand weaving. Automobiles & trains replaced horse drawn carriages. Telephone operators are a thing of the past. On & on as tech advances. Automated container on docks run by a few people w multiple computer screens are unbelievable. US longshoremen unions fighting like crazy to get them banned in US.

Starlink not allowed in Myanmar, but scammers reportedly use it “on a huge scale.”. //

Octavus Ars Scholae Palatinae
19y
1,200

For those that don't know the details of the technology, both the space vehicle and ground terminal must know and accurately report their information in order for both sides to properly compensate for the Doppler effect.

This isn't fully true, the terminal needs to know the satellite's position and velocity but the satellite does not need to know the terminal's location. All the Doppler and time delay compensation happens on the ground side. The terminals transmitter compensates for Doppler and time delay so the signal at the satellite is at the correct frequency, otherwise different terminals would interfere with each other as they will not be frequency and time aligned at the satellite.
From the down link prospective the satellite broadcast to a spot/cell which corresponds to a location on Earth. The satellite does not compensation as even terminals within the same cell will require slightly different frequency shifts and time delay shifts, which the user terminal compensates for.
Now I don't work for Starlink but do work for one of their largest competitors and having the user terminal do all the compensation is by far the easiest method. Our terminals report to a server their GPS XYZ position so we still know where they are located, but for receiving a signal from them the terminals only need the satellite's positional information and the satellite only needs to know the spot ID.

From humble beginnings just after the second World War to the largest airline in Africa, Ethiopian Airlines now connects more people with more aircraft throughout Africa and beyond than ever before. //

On December 21st, 1945, almost 80 years ago, Ethiopian Air Lines (EAL) was founded, beginning operations on April 8th, 1946, with its first flight Addis Ababa – Asmara (Eritrea) – Cairo (Egypt) and vice versa provided by Douglas C-47 Skytrains. During its early days, this was its only route, performed on a weekly basis.

Ethiopian Air Lines, managed by the Ethiopian government and Trans World Airlines (TWA), expanded its operations in Northeast Africa and Central Africa, launching its first long-haul routes in the 1950s. With the arrival of the first jet aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, Ethiopian further developed its network, adding new services to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

It would be somewhat understandable that Autopilot stops working because Eight Sleep’s backend is down but not being able to even adjust the temperature locally is ridiculous and completely unacceptable for such a high-end (and expensive) product.

A person on X wrote: “Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now.” //

Eight Sleep users will be relieved to hear that the company is working to make their products usable during Internet outages. But many are also questioning why Eight Sleep didn’t implement local control sooner. This isn’t Eight Sleep’s first outage, and users can also experience personal Wi-Fi problems. And there’s an obvious user benefit to being able to control their bed’s elevation and temperature without the Internet or if Eight Sleep ever goes out of business.

For Eight Sleep, though, making flagship features available without its app while still making enough money isn’t easy. Without forcing people to put their Eight Sleep devices online, it would be harder for Eight Sleep to convince people that Autopilot subscriptions should be mandatory. //

mygeek911 Ars Scholae Palatinae
14y
858
Subscriptor++
“AWS ate my sleep” wasn’t on my Bingo card.

From the opening pages, Navarro makes it clear he didn’t enter federal prison as a criminal, but as a patriot defending the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. His “crime”? Upholding executive privilege on behalf of President Donald J. Trump — the same principle dating back to George Washington. Yet under Joe Biden’s Justice Department, that once-sacred doctrine became grounds for shackles and a cell. Navarro’s prosecution, as he points out, was the first of its kind in American history — the first time a senior White House adviser has ever been imprisoned for contempt of Congress after asserting executive privilege. //

By the end, Navarro’s book becomes more than a memoir — it’s a warning. It shows how easily justice can be weaponized, how quickly America’s legal institutions can morph into tools of political retribution. His ordeal mirrors Trump’s: biased juries, radical Democrat judges, and media-driven show trials masquerading as due process. The parallel is unmistakable and chilling. When Navarro writes, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference now between the courts in Communist China and the good ole U.S. of A.,” it’s hard to disagree. //

His message to America is simple: stand up, or lose your country. His story is a mirror held up to a nation on the brink — and a reminder that freedom requires more than words; it demands courage.

"I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To" is a must-read for anyone who still believes that justice should be blind and that loyalty to the Constitution should never be a crime. It is a love letter to freedom, a eulogy for due process, and a siren warning about what happens when Democrats weaponize the courts to destroy political opponents. //

His book stands as both testimony and prophecy — a call to action ahead of the coming election. Because as Navarro’s ordeal proves, when the government can jail a man for serving his president, the republic itself hangs in the balance. //

Laocoön of Troy
3 hours ago
This reads like a replay of Émile Zola and "J'Accuse".

Good! America needs to look deeply into the face of bureaucratic injustice and vicious political perversion of it. Tyranny.

In May 2025, the European Parliament changed the status of wolves in the EU from “strictly protected” to “protected,” which opened the way for its member states to allow hunting under certain conditions, such as protecting livestock. One of the arguments behind this change was that the “tolerance of modern society towards wolves” led to the emergence of “fearless wolves” that are no longer afraid of people.

“Regulators made it clear, though, that there is no scientific evidence to back this up,” says Michael Clinchy, a zoologist at Western University in London, Canada. “So we did the first-of-its-kind study to find out if wolves have really lost their fear of humans. We proved there is no such thing as a fearless wolf.” //

To figure out if wolves really were no longer afraid of humans, Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues set up 24 camera traps in the Tuchola Forest. //

When sensors in the traps detected an animal nearby, the system took a photo and played one of three sounds, chosen at random.

The first sound was chirping birds, which the team used as a control. “We chose birds because this is a typical part of forest soundscape and we assumed wolves would not find this threatening,” Clinchy says. The next sound was barking dogs. The team picked this one because a dog is another large carnivore living in the same ecosystem, so it was expected to scare wolves. The third sound was just people talking calmly in Polish. Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues quantified the level of fear each sound caused in wolves by measuring how quickly they vacated the area upon hearing it. //

Compared to the control sound of birds, hearing people was twice as likely to make wolves run, and it made them run twice as fast. Comparison to dogs also ended up in our favor: The wolves found humans roughly 20 percent more threatening. The same pattern held true for deer and wild boars, typical prey of wolves, which also got caught in the camera traps.

“These results track with basically the same experiment we did in Africa, where we tested the entire savannah mammal community,” Clinchy says. In that work, Clinchy and Zanette found that leopards, hyenas, and many other animals feared humans more than lions. //

The question, though, is whether we really have reasons to fear such encounters just as much as wolves fear them. “There have been no fatal wolf attacks in Europe in the last 40 years or so,” Clinchy says. In Poland, a wolf bit an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy playing outside in 2018, and a pack of wolves circled two forest workers for about 20 minutes in 2021 without attacking them. That’s about all there is in the Polish big bad wolf files. //

nooneofconsequence Smack-Fu Master, in training
11y
66
Subscriptor
It's 10 year old data but USDA says vultures kill more calves than wolves do. Purdue data says over 2% die in feedlots before slaughter. Last year in Colorado lightning killed more cattle than wolves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/colorado-cattle-death-lightning-jackson-county-b2552447.html //

rhavenn Ars Tribunus Militum
23y
1,721
Subscriptor++
Moose kill more people yearly, but because they're "delicious", not "scary", and don't predate on farm animals no one gives a shit. Bears and wolves want nothing to do with you, the human. 90%+ of the time you won't even know they're there unless they want you to if you're out hiking or they don't care.

take a deep butt breath….

Ig Nobel-winning research could one day be used to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs.

Last year, a group of researchers won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. But as with many Ig Nobel awards, there is a serious side to the seeming silliness. The same group has conducted a new study on the feasibility of adapting this method to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs, with promising results that bring rectal oxygen delivery one step closer to medical reality.

, thanks to having lots of capillary vessels in its intestine. The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).

Would such a novel breathing method work in mammals? The team thought it might be possible and undertook experiments with mice and micro-pigs to test that hypothesis. They drew upon earlier research by Leland Clark, also of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who invented a perfluorocarbon liquid called Oxycyte as a possible form of artificial blood. That vision never materialized, although it did provide a handy plot point for the 1989 film The Abyss, in which a rat is able to “breathe” in a similar liquid.

And Oxycyte was ideal for the group’s 2021 Ig Nobel-winning efforts. The experiments involved intra-anally administering oxygen gas or a liquid oxygenated perfluorocarbon to the unfortunate rodents and porcines. Yes, they gave the animals enemas. They then induced respiratory failure and evaluated the effectiveness of the intra-anal treatment. The result: Both treatments were pretty darned effective at staving off respiratory failure with no major complications.

One company, a California-based startup named Muon Space, is partnering with SpaceX to bring Starlink connectivity to low-Earth orbit. Muon announced Tuesday it will soon install Starlink terminals on its satellites, becoming the first commercial user, other than SpaceX itself, to use Starlink for in-flight connectivity in low-Earth orbit. //

Putting a single Starlink mini-laser terminal on a satellite would keep the spacecraft connected 70 to 80 percent of the time, according to Greg Smirin, Muon’s president. There would still be some downtime as the laser reconnects to different Starlink satellites, but Smirin said a pair of laser terminals would allow a satellite to reach 100 percent coverage. //

SpaceX’s mini-lasers are designed to achieve link speeds of 25Gbps at distances up to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers). These speeds will “open new business models” for satellite operators who can now rely on the same “Internet speed and responsiveness as cloud providers and telecom networks on the ground,” Muon said in a statement. //

Live video from space has historically been limited to human spaceflight missions or rocket-mounted cameras that operate for a short time.

One example of that is the dazzling live video beamed back to Earth, through Starlink, from SpaceX’s Starship rockets. The laser terminals on Starship operate through the extreme heat of reentry, returning streaming video as plasma envelops the vehicle. This environment routinely causes radio blackouts for other spacecraft as they reenter the atmosphere. With optical links, that’s no longer a problem.

“This starts to enable a whole new category of capabilities, much the same way as when terrestrial computers went from dial-up to broadband,” Smirin said. “You knew what it could do, but we blew through bulletin boards very quickly to many different applications.”

Two Falcon 9 rockets lifted off from spaceports in Florida and California on Sunday afternoon, adding 56 more satellites to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.

The second of these two launches—originating from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California—propelled SpaceX’s Starlink program past a notable milestone. With the satellites added to the constellation Sunday, the company has delivered more than 10,000 mass-produced Starlink spacecraft to low-Earth orbit.

The exact figure stands at 10,006 satellites, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, //

The Starlink network surpassed 7 million global subscribers in August, primarily beaming Internet connectivity to homes and businesses. SpaceX is now aggressively pushing to broaden its service direct to smartphones. //

SpaceX is decommissioning aging and obsolete Starlink satellites as the company adds to the fleet. The retired satellites reenter the atmosphere, where they’re designed to burn up without any debris reaching the ground. Taking into account all the reentries, here are McDowell’s numbers for the Starlink fleet as it stands Monday, October 20:

8,680 total Starlink satellites in orbit
8,664 functioning Starlink satellites in orbit (including newly launched satellites not yet operational)
7,448 Starlink satellites in operational orbit //

Sunday’s SpaceX launches weren’t just noteworthy for Starlink. The first of the two missions, departing from Florida’s Space Coast, marked the 31st launch of the company’s most-flown Falcon 9 booster. The rocket landed on SpaceX’s recovery ship in the Atlantic Ocean to be returned to Florida for a 32nd flight. //

SpaceX engineers are now certifying the Falcon 9 boosters for up to 40 flights apiece.

The season of records isn’t over. SpaceX is expected to set another one later this week. The company’s launch log for 2025 currently stands at 132 Falcon 9 missions, tying the total number of Falcon 9 flights last year. SpaceX also launched two flights of the more powerful Falcon Heavy in 2024, bringing the 2024 mark to 134 missions by the Falcon rocket family.

The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.

However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.

“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

WindBorne is a six-year old company that seeks to both collect weather observations with its fleet of small, affordable weather balloons as well as use that atmospheric data for its proprietary artificial intelligence weather models.