Monthly Archives: October 2015

I’m tellin’ ya, the GMO thing is getting out of control.

Hand them a pocket gopher and they hand you a burrowing ELK!

I’ve been reading the Discover Blogs (associated with pop-sci Discover Magazine) recently & fitfully, and it finally occurred to me that most of the entries don’t really read like blog entries, but more like commercial column pieces: an interesting bit of science with the requisite journalism research behind it.  But opinion?  I don’t see it.

Granted, blogs are not precisely defined.  Andrew Sullivan’s entries often consisted of simply a toothsome quote from an entry on someone else’s blog (or more likely several, as he was trying to cover the entire blogosphere, juxtaposing various opinions on a topic); Andrew didn’t always comment.  I’m less likely to cover other blogs, but rather treat this as a way to blow off steam, to share my delight in the world (usually of science), to stop muttering to my wife, and to occasionally indulge in a bit of meta-irrationalism.  (Don’t ask.)

But I think I’m looking for blogs to be used creatively, much like the BBSes of old were used.  To me, the Discover Blogs are just another way to deliver news to the consumer, to entice them into subscribing to the primary product.  Call it NewsBytes, or something else, but I’d sure like to see a whiff of opinion, of creativity, of something – not just news under another label.  I suppose it’s not harmful, but it’s a mite irritating.

A reader asks about those new solar panels:

Is it possible to predict where this will work, i.e. in areas with lots of sunlight. Everywhere in the world? It depends?

It depends.

Let’s start with the ultraviolet side of things.  UV consists of two bands, UVA (wavelength of 315–400 nm) and UVB (280–315), courtesy Wikipedia.  This division is important because UVA is not absorbed by the ozone layer, while UVB is mildly to mostly absorbed by the ozone layer (there’s also a UVC layer, which is completely absorbed and also carries some energy).  From the Windows to the Universe solar emission chart,

we can see that UVA, which is closer to the visible spectrum than UVB, also carries more energy than does UVB.  Since UVA isn’t absorbed by the ozone layer, the depth of the ozone layer at the location of interest (or the altitude of the site, for that matter) isn’t as important as it might be.  It’s not irrelevant, since UVB is carrying some of the energy we’re interested in harvesting, but it’s not paramount.  My quick research suggests the ozone layer becomes thinner at altitude (thus pilots’ concerns about cataracts caused by solar rays and sunburn) as well as at the higher latitudes, i.e., near the poles.  So at higher altitudes and latitudes you may receive a little more harvestable energy.

What about infrared?  Turns out it, too, has problems reaching the Earth’s surface.  Windows to the World has another handy chart:

What is absorbing the radiation?  According to the Climate Science Investigations site, CO₂ is highly absorbent:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is also an important greenhouse gas. It has a long lifetime in Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs energy with a wavelength of 15 μm (micrometers). This makes carbon dioxide a good absorber of wavelengths falling in the infrared radiation region of the spectrum.

This explains why CO₂ is classed as a climate change gas – by absorption, the gas warms.  And there’s lots of CO₂.  More or less evenly distributed, so siting your installation based on infrared considerations doesn’t appear to be an effective strategy, insofar as this amateur (me!) can tell.

There are other factors as well.  The tilt of the Earth relative to its orbital plane (the source of our seasons, basically) means differing levels of solar radiation reaching a given location on Earth varies with the season.  The location itself defines the angle of incidence, as moderated by the season.  Yet, interestingly enough, a location directly on the equator may not be as effective as a location at 20 degrees latitude, because wet tropical forests will screen out the rays, while at 20 degrees there are a number of dry deserts.

So, yeah, it depends.  Having gone through all this, I have to wonder if these are going to be a gimmick, or part of a larger array where the visible spectrum is also harvested.  The diagram from Windows to the World certainly  clarifies just how much radiation the Earth’s atmosphere (and magnetic belts) screen out, and what is the best part of the spectrum to harvest – the visible spectrum.

Tonight’s surprising fare was The Man in the Net (1959), starring Alan Ladd and Carolyn Jones as a couple under strain as Alan pursues his poverty-stricken painting muse, and her muse, being wealth and all it can bring in meaningless chit chat, is rapidly breaking up in inchoate pieces.  The actor behind the painter, Ladd, evidently played the entire movie from his hospital bed in the local ICU, for nothing else explains his wooden delivery and a face stricken of all expression, even boredom; I shiver even now to contemplate how little his mouth could move.

But when Carolyn’s body is dug out from beneath a woodpile, his character is assisted in his subsequent straits by a local pack of children, and they bolster a show we nearly turned off in the first five minutes, as, innocent as they first seem, they soon provide hollow echoes of the deceit bedeviling the little town of Stoneville, manipulative and deceitful, if in an innocent, forthright way.  The town’s very curtains of bucolic happiness slowly slide away to show us the murderous vigilantes lurking in every country store corner, even including those representatives of law enforcement who merely use the mob to fulfill their official duties; moral remonstrances are quite beyond the pale for these creatures of (I hope to titter not) the law.¹

As I commented to our Arts Editor, if the youngster named Angel is not convicted of the crime alleged in this drama, surely she will be convicted in the next; she has all the grace and subtley of Nero at his worst. Yet, with some seriousnes, we speculated as to the power behind the throne: was it her older sister, Emily?  Or her doll who saw all, Louise?

Coincidentally, Angel was played by a St. Paul actress by the name of Susan Gordon, who was aged ten at the time.

All in all, for all of its wobbly start, it held our attention from commercial abyss to commercial abyss, and we watched it in its entirety in a single evening, a rare feat for us.

¹I will refrain from superfluous comparisons to certain political parties.

Phone rings.  Heavy Indian accent, slow enunciation: “Sir, your computer has been sending mail to Microsoft Services indicating it is having problems.  Are you sitting in front of your computer, sir?”

Sigh.

“Yes.”

“Is it on?”

“It’s always on.  By the way, it’s not Windows.  This is Linux.  Does your mother know what you’re doing.”

Wait for the huh? from the other end of the world.

“Sir … I know what I am doing is bad.  I have no choice.”

What!

“Er, ah, surely can find another job.”

“No, sir, I must do this, there is no other jobs.”

We went on from there, but my evil plan to induce shame was foiled.

Lloyd Alter @ Treehugger.com continues to beat the drum for tall wood buildings as he reports that the University of British Columbia is planning to build a new student residence to be 18 stories tall:

No doubt the steel and concrete people will be out in force calling this a firetrap (thats what all the commenters are saying in the Vancouver Sun) However it is not. The architects note that “The conservative approach used for the design of the project is equally as safe as that for high rise buildings using a concrete or steel structure. ”

The building is comprised of a series of repetitive, highly compartmentalized small rooms so that in the event that a fire originates in one suite it is extremely likely the fire would be contained in the compartment in which it originated. To enhance compartmentalization, the typical one-hour fire separation required by the building code has been increased to two hours. Studies have shown that automatic sprinkler systems are effective in controlling over 90% of fire incidents. For this project an automatic sprinkler system with a back-up water supply offers additional protection for occupants, as well as for firefighters, for events that might originate during an earthquake, as the sprinkler system would remain operational.

The architect, Acton Ostry Architects, gives a description:

53m tall mass timber structure comprised of two-way CLT floor slabs, glulam columns and steel connectors; concrete, gypsum board, prefab building envelope with metal cladding

So it’s a hybrid.  Nothing wrong with that as more is learned about how to properly build tall wooden buildings.

Makes me wonder about the construction of most new homes in Minnesota.  Vinyl siding (which I detest, as it’s harder to paint than wood – which makes it harder to customize your house – and not particularly good for the environment)?  What else?

A reader remarks on this thread,

It’ll work, but only in places where there’s an optimal relationship between typical electrical use per person, household or building, available surface for these panels, and cost. That can be neatly encapsulated in an algorithm. Plug the variables in a spreadsheet – panel efficiency levels, local energy alternatives, power use levels, land costs, borrowing costs, etc. That would identify where the solar panels are economically viable now and point to where trends are converging to make them viable soon. I’d be shocked if it hasn’t been done a dozen times over already.

With no remarks about aesthetics.  I was going to say I don’t think aesthetics have formulas, but of course I’d be wrong.  There’s the Golden Ratio, courtesy Wikipedia,

Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,

Some twentieth-century artists and architects, including Le Corbusier and Dalí, have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and other plant parts.

And then there’s the chaps claiming they know how to make the perfect movie sequel:

Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel.

But that’s rather beside the point.  If homeowners hate the idea of draping their house in this stuff then the formula won’t be used.

NewScientist‘s Joshua Howgego investigates how the variety of soils on Earth is changing in response to human farming habits:

FIND the places where farms give way to the California wilderness and you’re sure to encounter an endangered species. It is not aggressive, but it is omnivorous, devouring anything that happens to fall dead within its reach. And like most rare beasts, the extinction of Abruptic durixeralfs would have cascading impacts on the ecosystem around it.

Don’t be misled by the name. This is neither animal nor plant nor microbe, but a subgroup of soils. Its members nonetheless slot into a classification system every bit as elaborate as that we use to categorise life forms. In the US alone, more than 20,000 soils have been catalogued. Many are facing extinction.

Soil Taxonomies are summarized by Wikipedia and covered academically by this lesson from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

The nature and properties of soils can vary widely from one location to the next, even within distances of a few meters. These same soil properties can also be found to exhibit similar characteristics over broad regional areas of like climate and vegetation. The soil forming factors of parent material, climate, vegetation (biota), topography, and time (Principles Lesson 3.2) tend to produce a soil that describes the environment in which it is formed. By surveying properties of soil color, texture, and structure; thickness of horizons; parent materials; drainage characteristics; and landscape position, soil scientists have mapped and classified nearly the entire contiguous United States and much of the rest of the world.

So what’s the problem?  From Joshua:

Agriculture is by far and away soil’s biggest problem. In the wild, nutrients removed by plants are returned to the soil when they die and decay to form rich humus. Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops to replenish those nutrients.

We realised this long ago and developed strategies to get around the problem. We left fields fallow, or rotated crops that required different nutrients, thereby keeping the soil in balance. Growing peas and beans can even add nitrogen, a vital nutrient, to the ground: nodules in their roots host rhizobia bacteria, which grab atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into nitrates.

But over the past few decades, it has become clear this wasn’t such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the next rain. This leaches nitrogen into rivers, damaging algal blooms. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate fertiliser use hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty. It also suppresses symbiotic relationships between fungi and plant roots, and can even turn beneficial bacteria against each other.

And current status?

… we are losing soil at a rate of 30 soccer fields a minute. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil [world-wide] could be gone in 60 years.

The International Soil Reference and Information Centre has released a map of currently known soils throughout the world.

Aviva Rutkin reports for NewScientist (10 October 2015, paywall) on the creation of a marine robot with a sense of curiosity:

At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, computer scientist Yogesh Girdhar is figuring out how to imbue bots with a sense of curiosity. He wants them to be able to filter out the more common features, and focus on the remarkable.

The curiosity software starts running the minute the robot is dropped into a new place. It has little information about what the world looks like initially, but slowly begins making sense of what it sees by searching for patterns in the data. In the ocean, those patterns represent things like sand, kelp or fish. …

Underwater, AQUA looked “like a puppy”, Girdhar says, racing and eagerly sniffing at new or unusual sights. In one set of tests, it successfully wandered over to check out nearby sea plants and corals, spending less time on bare patches of sand.

While Yogesh talks about curiosity, it’s not much different from purpose.  This collides with a latent sense of collective purpose I occasionally muse upon: the old question of what are we doing here?  For millenia, the answer was simply to survive long enough to multiply.

Then we began to seek understanding, once it became clear that understanding enhanced the chances to survive.  Sometimes, understanding took to the creation of the notion of Gods; it was simply too hard to come up with anything more realistic.

Then we moved on to nationalism.  I’m reminded of an entry in T. E. Lawrence’s Selected Letters, which I shall not dig out as I read it many years ago and can only hope my copy is upstairs (and it’s quite large), in which, upon learning that he’s lost a brother (or was it two?) in the fighting in the trenches of France, he laments that they have had the honor of dying for their country; by implicit contrast, he has not.  So their purpose was to serve the nation.

Nowadays?  Sometimes it seems like we are in a knowledge acquisition mode, frantically building and tearing down models of the world at various scales, confident in … what?  What is the purpose of the acquisition of all this knowledge?

The fly in my soup, I suspect, is attributing singletary purposes to a group of people.  We are individuals.  We, at least in the United States, are taught to follow our own interests – at least to some extent.  And, yet, I cannot help noticing how much the Millenials’ constant use of smartphones resembles a distributed computing project, frantically calculating … what?

Are we really just an arm of some otherworldly octopus, mere neurons in its exploratory arm?  Or a computer simulation?

Which brings us back to the robot’s curiosity.  While I’m fascinated by the thought of a robot flicking from new experience, or pattern, to another, I keep in mind that it didn’t develop that curiosity, but was programmed to do it; it’s not a survival urge, but just another knowledge acquisition strategy developed by its builders.  And what does that mean?

Kirk Douglas stars in Detective Story (1951), a sordid, even noirish slice-of-life story centered on a day at the 21st police precinct of New York City.  Various petty and not-so-petty characters wander on and off the stage, exhibiting motivations obscure and troubling, while Douglas struggles with a rigid, unforgiving, and ultimately unrealistic moral code which drives him and his wife to the edge of destruction, and then tumbles them over the railing in a welter of awkward knees and elbows.  Well-acted, well-paced, with a denouement ultimately depressing and accepting, it brings to mind questions of purpose vs fufillment, contrasting character motivations which leaves one wondering.

Concealed within a lament concerning the unjustified biases of her debate opponents, C. Christine Fair of LawFare gives an update on the costs and benefits of drone strikes in Pakistan:

With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald. A few years ago, a Pakistan-based journalist sent a Waziri stringer into Waziristan to interview locals about who died in the drone strikes in their villages. According to the report from that six-month-long study, villagers claimed that “at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent–at least 138–were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.

Her disdain for Glenn Greenwald, one of her opponents (she also classes the debate host as an opponent), is rather clear:

In contrast to the curated quotes of prominent personalities which Mr. Greenwald gathers and describes as a “mountain of evidence” about the dangers of drones, there is actually a robust body of scholarly work that addresses the effects of leadership decapitation on a wide array of militant groups operating in diverse countries and their ability to produce violence. In general, the scholarship produces mixed results, with some work showing the efficacy of leadership decapitation (e.g. Johnston 2012; Price 2012) while other studies find that it is sometimes effective (e.g., Jordan 2009) or even counterproductive (Hafez and Hatfield 2005).

It makes for interesting reading.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog reports on a budget deal reached between President Obama and Congressional leaders:

The Obama White House and congressional Republican leaders have a tentative budget deal, which is already drawing fierce fire from GOP lawmakers in both chambers. It’s safe bet that we’ll quickly see a “hope yes, vote no” dynamic emerge, in which Republicans want the bipartisan agreement to pass, even if they don’t want to alienate right-wing activists by voting for it.

So perhaps we’ll avoid the drama of another near-shutdown, with a little kick in the face of the hardline conservative faction.  The last paragraph of the deal is

The first floor of the area of the House of Representatives wing of the United States Capitol known as the small House rotunda is designated the ‘‘Freedom Foyer’’.

The quintessential irrelevant topic?  A quick search of the web seems to indicate this has been on the wish list of some groups for years.  For example, Freedom’s Lighthouse, when reporting on the installation of a Churchill bust in the small House rotunda, stated in 2013,

A bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been dedicated at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. The bust of the great friend of the United States will reside on the first floor of the Capitol, in what will now be called, “Freedom Foyer.” The video above shows opening remarks by House Speaker John Boehner. The video below is the entire dedication program.

The Speaker of the House’s website itself referred to the rotunda as the Freedom Foyer in 2014:

Just in time for the 25th anniversary of his election as the first president of a newly free Czechoslovakia, a bust of Vaclav Havel has reached its permanent place of honor in Freedom Foyer of the United States Capitol.  The late poet and playwright, who endured constant harassment and three stays in prison for speaking out against the communist regime, joins Winston Churchill, Lajos Kossuth, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.

But apparently an unofficial reference.  The conservative undercurrents roil strangely.

Right Wing Watch reports on the fantasies of Bryan Fischer:

… repeating his frequent assertion that the First Amendment applies only to Christians.

Fischer’s excuse?  His assertion – with no citations, no backing – that the word “religion” was synonymous with “Christianity” in the days of the Founders.  Once you accept this equality, then it’s easy to make the Founder’s intention argument if you’re willing to not skate below the surface of the argument.  For that leg of this topic, see my discussion of the Founder’s environment here.

If we stipulate the assertion, then he’s faced with such questions as “Is the LDS Christian?”  Methodists?  Baptists?  Which of the Christian sects are really Christian, and which will you make war on?  The assertion leads to disaster.

But, in the end, the assertion has no basis in fact.  We’ll go with a leading name: Benjamin Franklin, on the subject of religion:

Every person, of whatever religious denomination he may be, is a DEIST in the first article of his Creed. Deism, from the Latin word Deus, God, is the belief of a God, and this belief is the first article of every man’s creed.

It is on this article, universally consented to by all mankind, that the Deist builds his church, and here he rests. Whenever we step aside from this article, by mixing it with articles of human invention, we wander into a labyrinth of uncertainty and fable, and become exposed to every kind of imposition by pretenders to revelation.

The Persian shows the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster, the lawgiver of Persia, and calls it the divine law; the Bramin shows the Shaster, revealed, he says, by God to Brama, and given to him out of a cloud; the Jew shows what he calls the law of Moses, given, he says, by God, on the Mount Sinai; the Christian shows a collection of books and epistles, written by nobody knows who, and called the New Testament; and the Mahometan shows the Koran, given, he says, by God to Mahomet: each of these calls itself revealed religion, and the only true Word of God, and this the followers of each profess to believe from the habit of education, and each believes the others are imposed upon.

(Courtesy barefootsworld.net, but no doubt available in other venues)

If Fischer wishes to continue this ridiculous assertion, he must contend with the likes of Franklin.

Do his listeners know this?

Steve Benen notes the passing of a scandal, although the GOP won’t let a trivial detail such as an official finding of no criminal activity stand in their way.

In a letter (pdf) to the House Judiciary Committee’s leadership, the DOJ official explained, “Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime, We found no evidence that any IRS official acted on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

When your ideology is that the other side is evil, this is what we see – like dogs worrying at a 20 pound lump of chocolate.

In the world of solar panels, the general approach has been to improve the efficiency of conversion from the electromagnetic flux to electricity.  This is generally attempted in the visible part of the flux spectrum.  However, some Michigan State University researchers have decided on a different approach: harvesting from the ultraviolet and infrared parts of the spectrum.  What’s the result?

A Michigan State University research team has finally created a truly transparent solar panel — a breakthrough that could soon usher in a world where windows, panes of glass, and even entire buildings could be used to generate solar energy. Until now, solar cells of this kind have been only partially transparent and usually a bit tinted, but these new ones are so clear that they’re practically indistinguishable from a normal pane of glass. …

Versions of previous semi-transparent solar cells that cast light in colored shadows can usually achieve efficiency of around seven percent, but Michigan State’s TLSC is expected to reach a top efficiency of five percent with further testing (currently, the prototype’s efficiency reaches a mere one percent). While numbers like seven and five percent efficiency seem low, houses featuring fully solar windows or buildings created from the organic material could compound that electricity and bring it to a more useful level.

The strategy is to cover everything in this material and beat the efficiency challenge by going around the barrier – put up enough of this glass and you don’t have to worry about the efficiency.  You may wonder how efficiency is defined, so I asked Wikipedia:

Solar cell efficiency is the ratio of the electrical output of a solar cell to the incident energy in the form of sunlight. …

By convention, solar cell efficiencies are measured under standard test conditions (STC) unless stated otherwise. STC specifies a temperature of 25 °C and an irradiance (G) of 1000 W/m² with an air mass 1.5 (AM1.5) spectrum. These conditions correspond to a clear day with sunlight incident upon a sun-facing 37°-tilted surface with the sun at an angle of 41.81° above the horizon.^[2][3] This represents solar noon near the spring and autumn equinoxes in the continental United States with surface of the cell aimed directly at the sun. Under these test conditions a solar cell of 20% efficiency with a 100 cm² ( (10 cm)² ) surface area would produce 2.0 W.

Incident energy is the amount of energy at all wavelengths encountered at the specific geographic location.  If the solar cell is transparent, this implies that the visible wavelengths are not harvested – i.e., that energy is lost.  So how much energy is carried on those wavelengths?  Windows to the Universe provides an explanation aimed at science teachers, and a nifty chart:

The peak of the Sun’s energy output is actually in the visible light range. This may seem surprising at first, since the visible region of the spectrum spans a fairly narrow range. And what a coincidence, that sunlight should be brightest in the range our eyes are capable of seeing! Coincidence? Perhaps not! Imagine that our species had “grown up” on a planet orbiting a star that gave off most of its energy in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. Presumably, we would have evolved eyes that could see UV “light”, for light of that sort is what would be most brightly illuminating our planet’s landscapes. The same sort of reasoning would apply to species that evolved on planets orbiting stars that emit most of their energy in the infrared; they would most likely evolve to have IR sensitive eyes. So it seems that our eyes are tuned to the radiation that our star most abundantly emits.

The graph below shows a simplified representation of the energy emissions of the Sun versus the wavelengths of those emissions. The y-axis shows the relative amount of energy emitted at a given wavelength (as compared to a value of “1” for visible light). The x-axis represents different wavelengths of EM radiation. Note that the scale of the y-axis is logarithmic; each tick mark represents a hundred-fold increase in amount of energy as you move upward.

So now we can understand why 5% is their efficiency goal.  With most of the energy unharvested, they have to go for lots of coverage rather than concentrated collection.

This raises two questions for me:

1. How will the removal of UV and infrared energy affect the environment?  If we install these everywhere, are we going to regret it?
2. How will this play with the nascent move towards building with wood?  Coating a wood building in this stuff may not be an optimal strategy, technologically nor aesthetically.  I have to wonder if this will be anything more than a niche product as the monster concrete (environmentally unsafe) and glass buildings become passé.  Or will burgeoning population force the creation of more such buildings, and since this energy collection material can be designed in from the ground up, it’ll become popular?

(h/t Sydney Sweitzer)

A sense for scale.

An update on the Mythryl XML SAX parser project: the validation step of elements is going quite well. The specification called for following the regular expression spelled out by the DTD for each element (see production 39). So I whipped out my recursive descent parser and built a nearly trivial function to translate the DTD specification for each element (beginning at production 46) into a parser structure usable by the recursive descent parser. Then I had to put together a List of the content of each element (nothing more than a summary, released as soon as it’s used) of the XML file and added the validation step in the etag production (the aforementioned production 39).

This all turned out to be quite simple and takes advantage of a mechanism in place and proven. The only question will be how to handle error reporting in a usable manner.

Previous work continues to support the direct use of the BNF as a start for getting the syntax handling rock solid with near-zero effort, allowing concentration on semantics.

In other matters, as I mentioned on Facebook, Cynbe has been diagnosed with lung cancer, as he announced here, and is looking for assistance with the Mythryl project. Please let me know if you’re interested and happen to understand that functional programming is not a reference to C, C++, or Pascal.

While we wait to see if Professor Clarkson will gain access to Kansas voting records, Wired notes that the state of voting machines in general is wretched:

Nearly every state is using electronic touchscreen and optical-scan voting systems that are at least a decade old, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law (.pdf). Beyond the fact the machines are technologically antiquated, after years of wear and tear, states are reporting increasing problems with degrading touchscreens, worn-out modems for transmitting election results, and failing motherboards and memory cards.

States using machines that are at least 15 years old include Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, which means they are far behind even a casual tech user in keeping pace with technological advancements. …

In addition to this problem, a number of voting machine vendors have gone out of business, making it difficult for states to find parts to service their machines. Forty-three states use systems that are no longer manufactured. Some election officials have resorted to scouring eBay for decommissioned equipment they can cannibalize to extend the life of their machines. Georgia was in such dire straits over the lack of parts for its voting machines that it hired a consultant to build customized hardware that could run its Windows 2000-based election system software.

After tallying up problems with old hardware, flawed software & voting standards, decertification, etc, comes the subject of money:

Officials in nearly three dozen states told the Brennan Center they’re interested in replacing their antiquated voting machines but don’t have money to do so. Most states have used up the Help America Vote Act funds allocated to them in 2002 to purchase the flawed machines they now have. The issue with aging voting machines cuts across class lines: wealthier election districts in some states have already found the money to buy new machines, while the poorer districts around them remain stuck with failing machines.

The Brennan Center estimates that the cost of replacing systems would run more than $1 billion. Virginia spent about $12,000 per precinct to replace its voting machines this year, and last year New Mexico replaced its aging voting equipment at a cost of $12 million across the state.

It would be interesting to see a comparison on the costs of replacing and maintaining the machines vs returning to the manual counting style.  Which is more accurate?  Which can sustain an audit which inspires confidence?  I deliberately do not include speed in the list, as I do not consider that a critical component of the election process.

It’s also interesting to contemplate how the loss of election machines may damage attempts to commit widespread voting fraud.  Of course, it depends on the point of corruption – if the voting machines themselves are taking incorrect votes, then their loss damages the causes of the corrupters, while if the corruption takes place at more central servers, then the replacement of the voting machines may not matter.  But if they’re not replaced at all, then do the manually counted votes eventually get entered into the server?  Or do we just see the Secretary of State, on a television show, toting up county reports two weeks later?

As an aside, I recall, from many, many years ago, a former election official telling me that her precinct’s ballots had become inadvertently drenched.  They ended up tossing them into an oven for a gentle drying before driving them to the collection point for the ballots.

I’ll leave the jokes to you folks.

(Meteor Blades @ The Daily Kos also covered the issue of old election machines)

ExtremeTech reported a year ago on the anticipated flip of Earth’s magnetic field:

But the Earth’s magnetic field is shifting. New satellite data from the ESA shows that the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than we previously thought — an indicator that scientists believe is a precursor to a geomagnetic reversal. At the time, there was nothing to worry about — previous geological records suggested that a geomagnetic reversal occurs over thousands of years. Now, however, a new study has analyzed rocks from the previous flip — the Matuyama-Brunhes magnetic reversal of 786,000 years ago — and found that the process completed in under 100 years. [doi: 10.1093/gji/ggu287]

Now archaeology has data to contribute.  Samir S. Patel in Archaeology Magazine (Sept/October, 2015) reports on a byproduct of the research:

During the Iron Age, people [in southern Africa] would, perhaps because of a bad harvest, ritually “cleanse” their villages by burning them down. The fires burned hot enough to melt magnetic materials in the clay. When those materials cooled and solidified, they were remagnetized by the magnetic field, recording its intensity and direction at that moment.

Southern Africa lies within the South Atlantic Anomaly, a particularly weak patch in the magnetic field, larger than the United States. If it grows large enough, according to University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno, it could trigger a reversal of the poles. Understanding how the magnetic field, especially in southern Africa, has changed over time might help scientists better comprehend these processes, since there has not been much good historical data on the southern magnetic field. Because of Iron Age superstition, Tarduno and his colleagues now have a record of the anomaly for between 1,600 and 1,000 years ago.

The findings show that during the Iron Age, the magnetic field was as it is today: weakening, with a big southern dent.

A reader laments concerning Egypt’s use of saltwater against the Palestinians:

Typical short-sighted behavior of so many members of the human species. Sure, destroy more precious arable land.

I’d say this is an example of the problems inherent in specialization.  No doubt the Egyptian military is quite pleased with its solution, as it solves the problem set before them (by the politicians).  Their focus is confined entirely to rendering the tunnels unusable.  The problem of farmland?

Not their bailiwick.

Anastylosis:

an archaeological term for a reconstruction technique whereby a ruined building or monument is restored using the original architectural elements to the greatest degree possible. It is also sometimes used to refer to a similar technique for restoring broken pottery and other small objects.

Found in the Archaeology Magazine article “The Acropolis of Athens“.

Egypt is using water even as it thirsts after it – because it’s using saltwater as a weapon.  AL Monitor‘s Mohammed Othman reports on Egypt’s destruction of Palestinian-dug tunnels – and how it’s doubly hitting the Palestinians:

The Egyptian army has been pumping large volumes of Mediterranean Sea waters since Sept. 17 into the buffer zone that it began building two years ago, along 14 kilometers of the Palestinian-Egyptian border. The move is the latest attempt to destroy the tunnels dug by Palestinians under the city of Rafah over the years of the Israeli blockade.

The operation is causing concern for the Rafah border area inhabitants, who say that it will affect their lives there. Farmer Nayef Abu Shallouf, who owns three acres of land less than 300 meters from the Egyptian border, said all the salt water will leave his land briny and destroy his crops. He told Al-Monitor, “In addition to damaging the soil, sinkholes will appear wherever tunnels were dug, with collapses occurring sooner or later.”

As Mohammed explains, this will destroy precious farmland, forcing the farmers off their land – and into cities already short of space for new inhabitants.

Middle East Eye expands on the driving force of this strategy:

But the story goes deeper: the Egyptian government is trying to economically crush Hamas, an ally of the Muslim brotherhood.

Gaza, and its 1.8 million population, has been surviving under an Israeli economic and military blockade for 9 years, suffering increasing poverty and military attacks, leading the UN to announce, in a new report, that Gaza will be made uninhabitable by 2020.

Local police sources in Rafah told MEE on condition of anonymity that Egypt has destroyed 95 percent of supply tunnels connecting Gaza Strip and Egypt. The tunnels were first constructed immediately after Israel’s disengagement from the Sinai Peninsula, as part of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. But digging got more intense after Israel declared a blockade on Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections.

Sadly, this has consequences for the Egyptians as well:

Over the past months Egyptian military bulldozers have also destroyed many Egyptian homes to create a buffer zone of at between 500 and 1,000 metres on the Egyptian side, and 1,000 metres. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened being gutted.

Or is it political?

… pro-Sisi Egyptian newspaper Al-Bawaba reported that the aim of this project is to control the area by creating a canal of seawater, turning it into a “development” resource by establishing fish farms.

Assuming they are viable, who benefits?  The Egyptian farmers, or the Egyptian military – or some politicians with some pull?  It sounds like the farmers are the last in line for a benefit.

As it probably must in order to keep its hardliners in line, Iran test fired a new ballistic missile, according to AL Monitor‘s Abbas Qaidaari:

Last week, Iran’s Ministry of Defense managed to successfully test-fire its Emad medium-range ballistic missile. According to Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, “This is the first ballistic missile developed by Iran that can be precision-guided until it reaches its target.”  …

The Emad launch was Iran’s first ballistic missile test since the nuclear agreement was concluded. According to the JCPOA, Iran is not allowed to improve and test medium-range ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. Iranian officials do not, however, interpret the rule as a restriction on its missile arsenal, arguing that the weapons are not designed to carry an atomic payload. …

So Iran begins pressing the boundaries.  A nation ancient in prestige and pride vs the Great Satan.  Both sides had best be careful.

Kimberly Mok @ TreeHugger.com waxes ecstatic over the latest work of Vo Trong Nghia:

© Vo Trong Nghia Architects

It’s a gorgeous space, especially when strategically lit up at night to emphasize its bamboo construction. Designed to hold up to 300 people, the conference hall is intended to serve a variety of functions — hosting concerts, meetings, lectures and the like. Though the floor plan is in a simple, rectangular footprint, the space itself is elevated by the use of bamboo members that are bent and shaped into spectacular vaulted forms, which hold up the asymmetrically pitched and thatched roof.

A visual treat – more pictures are provided by Kimberly.  But the practical questions abound – what are the upkeep requirements?  What is the expected lifetime?