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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Friday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the lower 60s. East winds 5 to 10 mph.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. (Listen to today’s Reality Check on Mayor Mike Norris’s choice here.) Today’s guests: Palm Coast City Council member Theresa Pontieri, the two city manager candidates in Palm Coast– Paul Trombino and Richard Hough–and Rep. Sam Greco. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
A visit by U.S. Rep. Randy Fine with Palm Coast City Council officials scheduled for today was cancelled. The Congressman was said to have had a conflict. It is likelier that he cancelled due to revelations from an investigation about Mike Norris‘s charter violations and his bizarre conduct since. Fine, a city official said, was to reschedule for a later date.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Notably: There’s something immensely bracing and beautiful about our search for life in the universe, and just as tragic, when you push the idea of the search to certain logical conclusions. It is just about impossible that there would not be some kind of life in the universe, in trillions of variations in trillions of places. It seems to be just math, even if life on earth was a fluke. There’s so much space, so much stuff, that flukes are like dark matter. They’re everywhere. Bill Bryson pointed this out in his Short History of Nearly Everything: “Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally—yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.” Just in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is one, just one, of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Billions. Keep trying to grasp the notion and you’ll go mad. That’s why thinking too much about eternity is a recipe for insanity, actual, clinical insanity. It is worse than looking into the abyss. It is the abyss. Of course I’ve digressed from what started me down this wormhole: the discovery, reported on April 16, of possible life on another planet, the planet so poetically called K2-18b (must be a progenitorial relative of R2-D2). Based on a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the New York Times reported: “A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.” And how did they figure that out? First astronomers discovered the planet thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, then the James Webb Space Telescope, which went up in December 2021 as Hubble’s newest progeny. (A sad aside, this headline from an obscure publication: “Trump Trying to Cancel NASA’s Successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, Even Though It’s Already Built.”) Yes, but how did they know that there was algae on the planet? “As an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, its atmosphere, if it has one, is illuminated. Its gases change the color of the starlight that reaches the Webb telescope. By analyzing these changing wavelengths, scientists can infer the chemical composition of the atmosphere.” I don’t know how anyone reading that explanation can help not falling to the ground in wonder at what we are capable of. The planet is 120 light years from the 7-Eleven on A1A. 120 light years. In other words, Teddy Roosevelt was president when the light astronomers are seeing from that planet left K2-18b to make its way here. The tragedy in all this is that even if the astronomers are correct, then what? it’s not as if K2-18b is within reach. It’s not as if any communication is possible, even if its life was more than algae. It’s not as if traveling there, traveling anywhere close to there, is possible. It would only be a confirming discovery of the inevitable: that yes, there is life in the universe, though knowing it for sure makes our lonely nowhereness, or isolation, that much more painful, and of course cherishable. K2-18b is an anthem to our existentialism in the Camus sense of the term. Maybe somewhere out there a telescope is peering back at us and figuring that, from the shimmers of our atmosphere as our earth passes in front of our sun, there’s a whole lot of methane going on here, which can only mean one thing. Incidentally, on this very day (April 25) in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope, that Magellan of the universe, launched from Florida.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
May 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
For the full calendar, go here.
What makes man valuable is not the truth which he possesses, or which he believes he possesses; it is the sincere effort he made to conquer truth. For it is not by possession, but by the search for truth that man grows his strength and perfects himself. If God held the entire Truth in his right hand, and in his left hand the eternal aspiration towards the Truth, even with the condition of always being wrong, and if he said to me: “Choose!” I would humbly grasp his left hand, and I would say: “Give, my Father; for the pure Truth is made only for you.
–Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), quoted in André Gide’s Journal, 1887-1925.
Timo says
Your events calendar is all screwed up. At least to me it’s not printing correctly.
FlaglerLive says
Yes we are very sorry about that; we’re working with the company that writes the calendar program to resolve the issue.
Local says
Your political cartoon should show Elon musk burning down a government waste building. But that wouldn’t serve the purpose now would it?
Pierre Tristam says
No, because it would be false, misleading, propagandistic, etc.
Ray W, says
The Wall Street Journal reported on BYD’s recently released first quarter financial report.
Here are a few bullet points from the article:
– BYD’s net profit nearly doubled from last year’s first quarter sum of $630 million to $1.26 billion.
– Revenue rose 36% year over year to $23.37 billion for the quarter.
– Total EV sales rose by 60% year over year to 1.0 million units.
– First-quarter research and development costs rose by 34% to $1.95 billion.
– During a Citi analyst meeting with BYD management, BYD anticipates hitting its export market target of 800,000 units, with growth taking place in Europe and South America.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
I have repeatedly commented about Ford Motor Company creating what it’s CEO calls an ultra-secret “skunk works” in the company’s effort to catch up with Chinese battery makers.
The director of Ford’s 135-member electrified propulsion engineering team based at Ford’s Battery Center of Excellence, Charles Poon, just released news of Ford’s version of a lithium-based EV battery, which utilizes a “Lithium Manganese Rich” (LMR) battery chemistry.
Ford’s original EV battery technology relied on a form of liquid-state lithium-ion chemistry known as nickel cobalt manganese (NCM). Its second battery chemistry, lithium-ferrous-phosphate (LFR), debuted in 2023. Neither battery technology proved more than marginally successful in the rapidly changing EV battery industry.
Ford’s LMR chemistry promises a far higher energy density, which will provide greater range on a single charge. But the major breakthrough is in manufacturing cost. Ford’s new chemistry eliminates the need for expensive cobalt, which permits for a “significant cost reduction” during manufacture, with the bonus of “environmental friendliness.”
Mr. Poon emphasized in his press release that Ford’s LMR battery is already beyond the research phase; it is being built on a pilot assembly line as part of Ford’s plan to ramp up production to scale, with full capacity coming to fruition before the end of the decade.
I looked up a technological article to learn more about LMR batteries. These types of battery use lithium manganese oxide as a cathode material. The chemistry “creates a three-dimensional structure that improves ion flow, reduces internal resistance, and increases current handling while improving thermal stability and safety.”
This type of battery “charge[s] quickly and offers high specific power” at a relatively high current. They can operate comparatively well under high load conditions.
The main drawback to LMR batteries, according to the 2022 article, is a relatively short lifespan of 300-700 charge cycles, which is little better than a lead acid battery.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Ford has to have solved the lifespan problem. Traditionally, manganese cathode batteries slowly build up a film on the cathode during recharge cycles, which shortens lifespan, as the battery eventually will no longer accept a charge. And oxygen is a by-product of charging, which blocks ions from adhering to the cathode. Maybe, the term “rich” in the LMR battery explains how Ford solved these two issues.
The battery industry is rapidly evolving. Other companies have made lithium-manganese-oxide (LMO) batteries, but the technology has not yet caught on. Perhaps, Ford has solved the problem. If so, the battery chemistry will leave current lithium-based batteries in the dust, as the amount of power per kilogram (energy density) that can be stored in LMR batteries when fully charged is comparatively far greater and at a higher voltage per cell than can be stored in other types of lithium-based batteries. An inexpensive, energy dense, rapidly rechargeable LMR battery with a longer lifespan could leap Ford ahead of other battery manufacturers. One can only hope.