Monthly Archives: April 2016

Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940) is our latest TV viewing. This is the first installment of a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan in the eponymous role. Shayne’s a bit down on his luck, as even the boys working for the repo man have little respect for his promises of solvency, but he doesn’t let that get in the way of his deductive reasoning, whether it’s to foil the police inspector’s suspicions about his latest activities, or to investigate the gunshot death of the man who he’s drugged and wiped ketchup all over.

But his powers of reasoning do not overcome the tide of random, willful activities of those all around him, whether it’s the young femmé gambler (quite the addict, she is) he’s been hired to oversee, or the delightful Aunt Olivia, an addict herself – to murder mystery stories. Good plots often feature clever plans gone awry, and Shayne, as clever as he may be, cannot depend on his plans to always work out – but a quick tongue can sometimes turn the lock on the latest problem.

And, more interesting, and unlike Bogart’s Sam Spade, Nolan’s Shayne did inspire me to wonder about the character of the private detective. Does it require a formal education? Or is this something a clever man, short in the credentials department but overly gifted in the gall section, turns to as he realizes that the habits of EveryMan are not for him?

Like many movies from this period, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, especially if you like frisky old ladies trying to teach a lesson to the younger crowd.

Continuing this thread, AL Monitor shows nuance as they cover the other end of the spectrum – Islamophobia in Turkey, as Mahmut Bozarslan reports:

In an interview with Al-Monitor, [Mehmet Yanmis, a scholar of religious sociology at Dicle University in Diyarbakir,] said the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and its slaughter of civilians had fueled Islamophobia in Muslim societies as well, a process he believes will strengthen trends toward secularization.

“In the Islamic world, young Muslim generations with a secular education or strong political or commercial bonds with the West are being estranged from Islam, especially by the killings of civilians,” he said. “I think Islamophobia or fear of fundamentalism will become a major topic of discussion in the near future for all of us in Muslim societies, from Morocco to Indonesia. … This will encourage secularization along with modernization.”

According to Yanmis, who has been researching Islamophobia for six years and is a published author on the issue, the trend is very real in Turkey, especially in the southeast, where a bloody feud between Islamist and secular nationalist Kurds dates back many years.

The Kurdistan Workers Party, which espouses a Marxist ideology, and the local Hezbollah, a Kurdish-dominated Islamist group unrelated to its Lebanese namesake, fought a vicious war in the 1990s that claimed hundreds of lives on both sides. In later years, Hezbollah’s chilling reputation reverberated across Turkey with the discovery of so-called “grave houses” where dozens of the group’s victims had been killed and buried after being tortured. Old enmities flared anew in October 2014 as Kurdish protests against the IS onslaught on Kobani in Syria degenerated into deadly street clashes between nationalist and Islamist Kurds.

So as the forces of religion push forward in Turkey, a reaction is setting in as the young, not yet set in their ways, ponder a future with or without their local religion.

According to Yanmis, Islamophobia appears in different forms in Turkey. “We keep discussing the West, but in Turkey we have Shariaphobia and reactionary-phobia. Those are the names of Islamophobia in our country. It’s all the same,” he said. “Especially in communities where religious tradition has weakened, young people, business people, and social and political elites are wary of Islam and opt for secular identities and lifestyles.”

Pointing to the different faces of Islamophobia in the West and Muslim-majority countries, Yanmis said, “In the West, we speak mostly of hatred for Islam because of fundamentalist attacks. In the Muslim world, this is manifested as an estrangement from Islam — first by shunning religious symbols and rituals and then, perhaps as an ultimate form, estrangement on the level of faith.”

A reader writes about Speaker of the House Ryan:

This kind of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with us as a nation today. The whole idea that there are no experts, and my ignorant, stupid opinion is as good as any expert’s opinion on any subject. Yeah, let’s get rid of those elites like Albert Einstein, the experts at NASA that put us on moon, the experts at CDC and NIH and myriad medical research institutions who have saved our collective bacon from everything from polio to heart attacks to cancer to Hanta virus. Elites like Nikola Tesla, Luther Burbank, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Alfred Nobel, Louis Pasteur, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, etc. etc. etc. without whom we’d still be plowing fields by hand and sending communication via horseback couriers, etc. Ryan’s not jus intellectually lazy. He’s an idiot.

Or he’s playing to his audience. I think the Trump constituency tends to be made up of those who feel disenfranchised, but not for good reasons: misogynists, supremacists. And others who, while not of any particularly repulsive group, find themselves in a position inferior to where they were perhaps two decades ago, and resent it. The entire GOP constituency is, apparently, not far different, given Trump’s primary triumphs. Rep. Ryan no doubt has some understanding of this and is attempting to be inclusive of these people by suggesting the experts are really not any better than themselves.

However, dealing in what amounts to falsehoods is quite dubious; and, of course, if he actually believes this (and I could build a case that this behavior is congruent with someone who places ideology before reality – and a politician is certainly a likely suspect to make that intellectual error), then we’re back to being just bloody lazy. Or an idiot. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two. I wish Ryan was a real leader: who gives people what they need, not what they want.

In Egypt, one of the most popular TV personalities is the puppet host of “Live From the Duplex.” Egyptians apparently like the puppet for its opinions of Parliament, as reported by AL Monitor:

Abla Fahita has often criticized the conduct of the country’s parliament, with the puppet presenter of the show describing parliamentarians as “defects” in a satirical song on the program’s April 7 episode. She maintained her criticism and attack on independent member of parliament Elhami Ajina during the show’s April 14 episode, following Ajina’s statements that he would submit an urgent motion to the government requesting that the program be halted and financial penalties imposed on Abla Fahita for denigrating members of parliament and accusing them of profiteering.

Sometimes politicians hate being entertainers. In this case, the show has received a warning and is modifying its behavior:

[The production team] has lately acquiesced to the conditions set by the management of the channel and its financiers to refrain from criticizing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, though that may not be the only measure guaranteeing its on-air survival.

Still, it’s good to see another country cares so much about its future that it’ll lampoon an institution not seen as being up to snuff.

NewScientist (16 April 2016) reports on the more outré missions NASA has given some small funding. Here’s my favorite.

A clockwork Venus rover. No lander has survived on Venus’s hostile surface for much more than 2 hours. The solution might be a fully mechanical one, with no electronics. To send messages back home, it could record data on a phonograph, then loft it on a balloon to rendezvous with a spacecraft overhead.

I’m having some difficulties imagining a balloon getting high enough, even if the spacecraft swooped down to snag it. But how about a gig like that used by Virgin Galactic, where a plane takes the spacecraft to about 50,000 ft and releases it, and then the spacecraft activates its main engine for the remainder of the ride? On Venus, the balloon lofts the payload to a respectable height, and then a rocket boosts it up where an orbiter could retrieve it up for either return to Earth (hard) or reading & relay. But how to synchronize the spacecraft with the balloon and launch? And could this be done sans electronics?

From one of the Soviet Venera spacecraft, courtesy Space Answers.

Moving right along in the Crime Doctor series is The Crime Doctor’s Diary (1949), once again with the dependable Warner Baxter (this time saddled with a suit a good size too large). Here he’s assisting a man an arsonist whose out on parole. Or was he framed? He keeps insisting he didn’t do it. He’s hardly out of prison a day before he gets himself shot, while the man who might be considered an alternative suspect in the arson is found dead. Meanwhile, the retarded psychotic won’t stop playing the music that drives everyone mad! (My Arts Editor just yelled that the song, about a man with a french horn, is “quite the ear-worm”, so prospective watchers, beware the cave of the ear worm!)

Just for fun, the arsonist has a girlfriend who’s working at a precursor to Netflix (hey, I’m just as surprised as you), and she & Steve can hardly wait to get it on, indeed even messing him up as he applies for a job. Our good Doctor has little more to do than stumble about, looking for clues, and indeed one wonders why they made this movie in this series since, in retrospect, Dr. Ordway has little to do with the solution to the crime; instead, mere chance triumphs over spite, and in a hail of bullets, all is revealed.

It’s fun and interesting, but fails to capitalize on the elements unique to the Crime Doctor. A story for a sleepy, rainy day. Like today.

http://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/2016/04/24

Which reminds me that someday I should try to take a closer look at Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. From Wikipedia:

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory in linguistics, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, proposing that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain.^[1] It is sometimes known as ‘Mental Grammar’, and stands opposed to other ‘grammars’, e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical.^[2][3] The theory suggests that linguistic ability becomes manifest without being taught (see the poverty of the stimulus argument), and that there are properties that all natural human languages share. It is a matter of observation and experimentation to determine precisely what abilities are innate and what properties are shared by all languages.

It seems to me that effective communications dictates that a grammar (a specification) must be followed in order to fulfill the functional requirement of communications, for otherwise you stray into irremediable ambiguities, and thence into nonsense; and that, if you can accept effective communications is generally a positive survival characteristic for the members of a group, once any sort of communications system comes into being, then a grammar must be followed for it to work. Naturally, it would be easier for all this to happen if the ability to accept grammar were hard-wired into the brain, but I do not see it as necessary. The general intelligence which we’ve evolved should be enough to comprehend instinctively (like I do 🙂 language grammar, simply because if we couldn’t, we’d be incommunicado and, shortly thereafter, dead. Or at least until recently.

I also mused on the way home that acceptance of the Universal Grammar implies acceptance of competing grammars. The Wikipedia page mentions them but provides no links. What would such grammars be based upon? Illogical systems? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Like I said, this would require some study.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

Sigh.

OK, as I recall from 1979, the visuals were quite good for the time.

DeForest Kelley got all the best lines. But why was he there at all?

The rest of it was awful. Unconvincing subplots with neither purpose nor beauty. Bad acting. Hopefully the customer designers and the director was never permitted to work again.

Occasionally so bad it was funny, but generally not. George Takei presence in one scene made him look like he was on drugs. And not the good kind.

In fact, the movie was about as good as this rushed review.

A dull post title, no? So let’s take it immediately into the realm of the concrete. Steve Benen @ Maddowblog provides the information on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) view of the operations of government:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) delivered a speech last week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s anniversary gala, and the Wisconsin Republican highlighted an interesting excerpt from the remarks on social media over the weekend:

“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong. […]

“Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve. We believe every person has a piece of this puzzle, and only when we work together do we get the whole picture.”

The speech as delivered was slightly different from the speech as written, and some of the changes are notable.

Regardless, I found the speech interesting because it sheds light on Ryan’s broader worldview and what he sees as the major points of contention in these divisive political times. What was challenging, however, was understanding the meaning of some of the Speaker’s labels.

For example, what exactly is an “elite” and who believes we should be governed by them? Ryan didn’t specify, though he did note that he supports the idea of crafting a health care reform plan that’s guided by consumers guided by the free market, rather than relying on guidance from health policy experts at HHS.

In other words, Paul Ryan seems to have a problem with expertise. Indeed, he explicitly rejected the idea of “experts” helping guide policy debates.

This plays into the questions of truth, predictability, democracy, free markets, and science. How? Here’s a stimulating question:

Is science a democracy?

In one superfluous, even deceitful, sense, it is. The accepted results of science are accepted because the qualified practitioners in the field have come to a substantial agreement that a given result is a reflection of the reality in question.

But in a very fundamental sense, it is not. Regardless of what a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears Ph.D.s have to say, the reality they are studying, poorly or not, remains the same¹. It takes just one insightful scientist to upset the status quo, and those so tumbled often tumble most willingly.

Here in the West we tend to make democracy a sanctified word and institution, and yet we don’t really apply it to science. What does this say about science, government, and perhaps even other institutions? To come to some sort of sensible answer, let’s employ a complete-knowledge metric, which means how complete is our knowledge in a given arena, with an additional facet of how important is it to society? Using this as a lens, let’s evaluate a few arenas and which mass-decision we employ for questions in that realm.

Criminal Justice. Defined as the application of criminal laws to the actions of individuals, we employ the police, a governmental entity, to apprehend suspects and collect evidence, prosecutors and defense attorneys to represent the two sides, and a jury to evaluate the case. In this last place comes something like democracy within criminal justice, but it is a very limited form of democracy: a small number of citizens are to direct their undivided attention upon the case at hand. They have a limited role (which varies from State to State) and are generally limited to determining whether the evidence is credible and meets some sort of standard for convicting the suspect of a crime. In terms of knowledge, we theoretically attempt to collect all the knowledge concerning an alleged crime, connect it to one or more suspects, and penalize those violating the laws. The results of not doing so could be drastic: a civil society disrupted by injustice in which doing anything constructive is endangered by those who do not believe the strictures of justice apply to them.

Readily available commodities. Shampoo, for instance. Defined as a substance used to cleanse hair, there is a basic formula and some outré approaches to producing shampoo, but it’s not a critical substance, nor is there an iconic formulation worthy of documentation. It’s supplied by a free market which works to increase profits by refining production and formulations; there is little danger in doing so since bad shampoo, unless poisonous, merely results in bad hair. In this regard, the free market bears a great resemblance to democracy as free choice is involved.

Emergency Action Teams. By which we mean organizations for controlling & extinguishing fires, rescue squads, and the like. These are managed by the government, if not actually supplied by the government. In terms of knowledge, we know the what and how of such things to some extent.  More importantly, the proper handling of emergency situations is paramount to society. Since the free market is not known for its spread of knowledge (among other reasons), its employment in this field is limited; the government retains and distributes specific knowledge about the management and resolution of emergency situations, from house fires to hurricane relief.

Military Defense. In the realm of defense, the military is a directly controlled branch of the government. In terms of knowledge, again we run up against free market limitations, so management is part of the governmental portfolio, for otherwise the nation is up at undue risk. Of course, we must acknowledge that if Defense was largely a free market activity, the ambition of men might result in the upset of the country.

Government. Here we have democracy, as frustrating and dysfunctional as it is. Why? There are many factors, including the fact that a lack of representation leads to societal instability. But in terms of knowledge, despite millenia of study and example, government is hard. Our knowledge of how to run the affairs of any particular nation, especially this one which espouses so many ideals which run counter to our evolutionary history, is relatively scant when we consider that a proper decision is rarely made on the first cut at a new problem. So therefore we employ democracy, as, ideally, it gives those who vote some sense of a stake (in order to tolerate the failures of those they elect), and to bring many possible solutions to problems. We tolerate to perhaps too great a degree the follies of the amateurs who often occupy positions of power; we worry about those who might use those powers against us, unjustly or not; we even innovate governmental design to balance the powers among many men so that corruption may be detected and abolished.  But democracy we use, because we just don’t know much.

Medicine. In the study and application of healing we see one of the most confused fields; it is instructive for its management errors, not for its achievements. An application of concrete methods and results from science to the  health of the human (or animal) body, we might expect to see its management similarly managed. Instead, under the rubric of free speech, we have marketing of a wide variety of treatments to an audience nearly completely incapable of proper evaluation, and this has had concrete negative results, as antibiotic resistance climbs due to the demands of a clientele for treatments that are inappropriate – and doctors who tire of saying “No”, or who see it as a way to increase income. Medicines are developed by the free market, which means those diseases which are seen to bring the most profit if treated, rather than those which most rationally require medicines – new or old. Worse yet, conspiracy theories arise that companies develop treatments, not cures, as being more profitable; such conspiracies lead to resentments and lack of trust for such important health remedies as vaccines. Thus, mismanagement of the field leads to the confoundment of its goals.

Rep. Ryan’s statement “… Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve,” is just so much nonsense. We are not equal in knowledge; even at a gross level, there’s inequalities between the experts and myself, and you, and you. The statement (which, God help me, sounds Marxist to me – all apologies to Rep. Ryan) is, along with being an affront to common sense, a contradiction to the above analytical suggestions – when we know something, and that knowledge suggests we should take action to protect our interests, then we bloody well should do so.

In practical terms, there will always be the experts and the rest of us. It’s not an ideal situation, as some experts really aren’t, some experts are experts at nothing in particular, even though they think their specialty matters, or even exists (consider various alternative medical therapies, such as therapeutic touch); some are simple frauds. Their collective frequency is so high that there’s no need to give references, we all know of them. The key is to design a system in which experts may be tested and removed from their positions when they are proven irremediably wrong. This is one of the goals of science: to self-correct to a more accurate view of reality through the testing of the predictions of experts.

But Rep. Ryan’s statement generates a more difficult problem. As his collective attacks some problem, it’s going to generate expertise as an inevitable by-product of the work. And he’s just denied the importance of expertise. Soon he’ll be awash in what he considers to be the irrelevant. What will he do? Discard the experts and continue on with the amateurs? The road he’s walking no longer has asphalt, but pebbles; if he continues, it’ll be dust, dirt, mud, quick-sand, and then a cliff – in that order.

Rep. Ryan’s statements are really that of a profoundly intellectually lazy person. He’s saying, “I’m not an expert, and I loathe the conclusions of the experts, so I can’t risk becoming one. Thus, I’ll discredit them as a group, and continue on with my supporters to our desired conclusion.” This is the message of many a failed revolutionary group.

¹Even at the quantum level. Schrödinger’s cat’s quantum superposition is the reality being studied; its variability with regard to the observations of the observer are merely an artifact of that reality. Or at least that’s the best I can make of it.

A reader catches me scanting my research re Prince:

As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I think Prince brought an immense amount of wealth to Minnesota over the past 35+ years. He spent a lot here; he put us on the map musically speaking. He made four movies here, not two, as far as I can tell: Purple Rain, Graffiti Bridge, SIgn ‘o’ the Times, and Under the Cherry Moon.

Wikia (“The Home of Fandom”) confirms and adds a rumor of one more:

There is also a rumor that Prince appears for a few seconds in Batman (1989). He provided the soundtrack for the film and some fans believe you can see Prince crossing in the background of a scene, wearing a dark trenchcoat. Prince did visit the London set during filming for meetings with director Tim Burton so it is possible he made a secret cameo.

NewScientist (9 April 2016, paywall) goes after the subject of migrant economic impact for the UK, as reported by Debora MacKenzie:

[Migrants] who do end up in wealthier countries are not the burden people sometimes assume. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which represents 34 of the world’s wealthiest nations, calculates that its immigrants on average pay as much in taxes as they take in benefits. Recent research shows that EU workers in the UK take less from the benefits system than native Brits do, mostly because they are younger on average. Moreover, they bring in education paid for by their native countries, and many return to their homeland before they need social security. Based on recent numbers, Britain should conservatively expect 140,000 net immigrants a year for the next 50 years. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s fiscal watchdog, calculates that if that number doubled, it would cut UK government debt by almost a third – while stopping immigration would up the debt by almost 50 per cent.

Illegal migrants make a surprising extra contribution, says Goldin. While many work “informally” without declaring income for taxes, those in formal work often have taxes automatically deducted from their pay cheques, but rarely claim benefits for fear of discovery. Social security paid by employers on behalf of such migrants, but never claimed by them, netted the US $20 billion between 1990 and 1998, says Goldin. That, plus social security contributions by young legal migrants who will not need benefits for decades, is now keeping US social security afloat, he says.

While the UK and the United States are not directly comparable, this work is based on broader work on 1st world countries accepting immigrants, and their impact, which basically boils down to an initial extra strain as the newbies settle in, and then they begin working, often with great enthusiasm.

This morning the following letter came across my virtual desk:

Subject: Silly immature Minnesota Senator Wants State Color to be Purple.

Her reason is because he nodded towards her years ago after she waited outside for three hours hoping to catch a glimpse before he drove off. That’s all it takes to influence this Minnesota lawmaker. LA TV just picked up on her suggestion.

So…what is the Minnesota state color? There is none. The state flag is blue with gold fringe, the official poem is “Minnesota Blue” and the state muffin is the blueberry, designated in 1988 at the request of a third grade class.
http://kstp.com/politics/minnesota-senator-wants-state-official-color-to-be-purple-prince-death/4115578/?cat=12681

Clearly, someone doesn’t like the idea of honoring Prince, so the idea is presented in ad hominem, denigrative terms. If you follow the link, you’ll find that state Senator Karin Housley is presented (by the AP via kstp.com) as suggesting the idea merely because she liked Prince, and he was “ours”.

So let’s remove the emotional content on both sides of the issue and ask: did Prince do anything worthy of state recognition?  (See my earlier related commentary here.)

1. He became one of the indisputable great pop stars. As part of that, he transformed the pop scene. Pop is certainly one of the largest, and perhaps the largest, music scenes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
2. He never advocated violence or any other socially repugnant activities in his music. Instead, he celebrated love and peace and understanding, with a special interest in the physical aspects. I realize some will shake their heads and claim I don’t understand love; I suggest that love always has a physical aspect, for do not the old Christian mystics speak of the physical effects of their attachment to their Savior? Even the love of our parents can bring a sense of peace, which is attended by a dropping of blood pressure.
3. He was ours. Senator Housley’s remark is stronger than it might seem at first, because Prince never left for the big-time. He brought it here. This is important because of both tangible and intangible benefits – including making the Twin Cities a music scene in its own right, which brought in dollars, contributed to our movie making (he made two movies), brightened the arts scene, with knock-on effects – and gave the residents of the state a sense of having produced a special person. Certainly, we have many of those: Humphrey, Hrbek, the Brotens, Mondale, all just in my lifetime. Prince had pride in his home state, and while I don’t know if that was a conscious part of him, it is certainly illustrated by his staying, if only in the face of our inclement weather.

Conclusion: He was a dominant part of the landscape if you lived in the Twin Cities, and certainly had impact throughout the state.

The Senator has not proposed a statue or a building, so she’s fiscally responsible. I think this is a fine idea and should be implemented at the first opportunity.

The Crime Doctor series were mostly partially eponymously named movies, but The Millerson Case (1947) was one of the exceptions, which has no particular bearing on the movie or much else. Dr. Ordway seeks to find relaxation in a long-delayed vacation, only to have the inhabitants of the small town to which he travels hate each other so much that they’re killing each other – or at least engaging in “shemale” fights. Under cover of a typhoid epidemic being mishandled by the town’s elderly, cantankerous Doctor Millerson, a murder of the town’s handsomest man occurs, and is only detected because Dr. Ordway has been drafted by the county doctors to help out with shots and blood analyses. He then proceeds, with evident reluctance, to lose his vacation to the duties of being a psychologist with insights into the doings of criminals, having been one himself, and, after the prime suspect is lured to an isolated location and shot to death, he finally establishes the identity of the killer, a man jealous of his wife’s extramarital proclivities.

The movie features the smooth Warner Baxter in the title role, a couple of excellent (almost too excellent) character actors handling the roles of Dr. Millerson and the town sheriff, and a generally interesting plot, mostly in that almost nobody in this example of small-town America really likes anyone else – sometimes spouses included.

But – in the “but” section of this review – why did the dunce identify the wrong man as shooting Dr. Millerson? What was the point?

But why does Dr. Millerson Ordway not believe in continuing education of, well, himself?

But why isn’t the town sheriff not doing anything more than being curmudgeonly?

But why the final scene? Just so Dr. Millerson can acquire a set of antlers to convince the home office that he’s a great hunter? Is there a hidden meaning in here? Has he somehow acquired the horns of a cuckold in some obscure joke? But he’s not even married!

It’s all a bit silly, with the a nice little ribbon around the package, but is not an awful choice if it’s a rainy afternoon, or if you’re a driven man who must see every installment of this series.

(4/24/2016: updated a typo)

Anyone for Cello to bring that new life into the world? NewScientist (9 April 2016) reports on the new biohacking language:

Verilog is a symbolic language that lets you specify the function of an electronic circuit in shorthand – without having to worry about the underlying hardware – and then convert it into a detailed design automatically. Voigt’s team realised they could do the same with DNA circuits.

Their system, called Cello, takes a Verilog design and converts it into a DNA wiring diagram. This is fed to a machine that generates a strand of DNA that encodes the specified function. The DNA can then be inserted into a microbe.

That sounds so cool to this old hack, but it’s necessary to realize that there’s a difference between a computer virus, and that bacteria you just hacked to be 20 times more virulent – the latter is more likely to kill you than the former.

Nature has a report:

The aim is to help people who are not skilled biologists to quickly design working biological systems, says synthetic biologist Christopher Voigt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who led the work. “This is the first example where we’ve literally created a programming language for cells,” he says.

In the new software — called Cello — a user first specifies the kind of cell they are using and what they want it to do: for example, sense metabolic conditions in the gut and produce a drug in response. They type in commands to explain how these inputs and outputs should be logically connected, using a computing language called Verilog that electrical engineers have long relied on to design silicon circuits. Finally, Cello translates this information to design a DNA sequence that, when put into a cell, will execute the demands.

Voigt says his team is writing user interfaces that would allow biologists to write a single program and be returned different DNA sequences for different organisms. Anyone can access Cello through a Web-based interface, or by downloading its open-source code from the online repository GitHub.

”This paper solves the problem of the automated design, construction and testing of logic circuits in living cells,” says bioengineer Herbert Sauro at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. The work is published in Science.¹

I haven’t actually tried it, but it sounds interesting.

NewScientist (9 April 2016, paywall) surveys the drug decriminalization/legalization landscape, checking in on various nations. I found the section on Portugal particularly fascinating:

In Portugal you can take any illicit substance without fear of jail – ecstasy, cocaine, even heroin. Critics warned this policy, introduced in 2001, would encourage more people to take drugs. Instead, drug use is slightly down by most measures.

The biggest change has been the health gains for users. Deaths related to drug use have shrunk to less than one-quarter of what they were in 2001. New HIV infections among drug injectors have shrunk to about one-twentieth.

Only the use of drugs has been decriminalised, not their sale, so criminals still profit. “But the policy was not brought in to reduce crime, it was to help people with drug dependence,” says Alex Stevens, who heads the International Society of the Study of Drug Policy, UK. “The evidence shows they have met their goals.”

Stevens says the health gains have not arisen from decriminalisation alone, but also from the services that were put in place when the law was introduced, like the provision of free needles for injectors, and methadone for those wanting to quit heroin.

A year ago Policy.mic provided a description and general history of Portuguese authority’s reaction to a drug user:

If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty.

And they provide a time-series chart, sourced from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation:

A more scholarly approach to the subject is provided by Hannah Laqueur in “Uses and Abuses of Drug Decriminalization in Portugal“, publishing in the Journal of the American Bar Foundation, where she comprehensively covers the subject, caveats and all.

Portugal did not conduct a general population survey on drug and alcohol use until 2001. The second survey was done in 2007, and the third in 2012; however, at the time of this writing, the results from 2012 were not yet available.32Researchers have frequently referenced the reports from 2001 and 2007 both in support of and cautioning against Portugal’s reforms (e.g., Greenwald 2009; White House 2010). The data are in Table 4. Recent use (within the previous year) of any drug including cannabis was virtually table
(3.4 percent in 2001 compared to 3.7 percent in 2007) and current use within the previous thirty days) was identical in the two periods (2.5 percent). Reported lifetime use of any drug increased from 7.8 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2007 (IDT 2009). As is always an issue with self-reported data, however, increases in reported drug use might be an artifact of greater willingness to report as a consequence of changes in the stigma rather than  actual changes in use. Insofar as the statistics represent real change, the increase mostly in reported lifetime use suggests the change was in short-term experimentation rather than an increase in the regularly using population.

Portugal is one small nation, and the United States is one big nation that is very tentatively moving along the spectrum – and not all at once. Consider Steve Benen’s recent coverage at Maddowblog of Governor LePage of Maine and his disparagement of the health model of drug use and addiction:

The Portland Press Herald reported yesterday, for example, on a LePage position that’s likely to literally cost lives.

Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bill Wednesday that would allow pharmacists to dispense an anti-overdose drug without a prescription, saying that allowing addicts to keep naloxone on hand “serves only to perpetuate the cycle of addiction.”

The Legislature passed the bill “under the hammer” – or unanimously without a roll call – this month as part of lawmakers’ attempts to address Maine’s growing opioid addiction epidemic.

In a statement explaining his rationale, the Republican governor argued, “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose.”

Note, this was a written statement, not an off-the-cuff comment made during a press conference or an interview. LePage actually thought about his specific position, and argued that a life-saving drug treatment that prevents overdoes “merely extends” the lives of addicts – and he’s against that.

Maine’s governor, in a rather literal sense, made the case in writing that those struggling with opioid addiction don’t have lives worth saving. If LePage is convinced these people’s lives shouldn’t be extended, practically by definition, he’s making the case that their lives should be curtailed.

Not encouraging.

There are so many variables that drawing general conclusions off-the-cuff is a dangerous business. My suspicion is that we’ll find there’ll always be a certain portion of the populace that will have an undeterrable interest in using drugs. We’ve certainly seen this conclusively with alcohol. Whether it’s a nurture or nature driver is less clear; examples and counterexamples abound just in my family history, where my maternal grandparents were alcoholics, while my mother, who was abused by them, was not interested in alcohol, while her brothers were rarely without a beer in hand; neither my sister nor I have an interest in alcohol, beyond occasionally cooking with it.

If we assume my suspicion is true, then it simply makes sense to proceed down the decriminalization and even legalization paths, and be willing to accept that a certain percentage of our citizens will use drugs. I know the anathema side of this debate will be horrified, but the simple truth is that many drug users do not qualify as addicts, they simply use as they feel the need and stop whenever they wish. And then there are those will be addicts, just as we have alcoholics, and we’ll have the hard business of taking care of them as well. The real question is whether it’s a health or a criminal problem; Portugal has chosen the former, and has not suffered horrid consequences. If we were to do the same, would our society collapse? Or could we stop endangering both citizens and law enforcement with drug busts?

Tonight I must indulge in that most fruitless of endeavours, a review of a theatrical production – on closing night.

The company? The Four Humors, a group of 5 or 6 guys who’ve been around for a while and seem to specialize in parodies.

The production? We Gotta Cheer Up Gary. Poor Gary. He seems to be down in the mouth, so, as a gift, he is being sent to be cheered up. Cheerology being more of a science than an art, the specially trained cheerologists will be working to cheer him up, checking off the boxes as they make their way through the scientifically designed procedures. Did you bring your ear-trumpet? You’re gonna need it. What’s your favorite color?

Blue-Green-Yellow-Red!

Make up your mind! Say, your blood pressure is all over the place. This will present a challenge. Did you know my kid just made it into the Rhode Island School of Design, and I don’t know how to pay for it? Oh, wait, there’s my boss – what do you mean, one of us will be fired tomorrow at 3 if we don’t cheer Gary up?

Chin up and all that, hey! Do you like magic? Here’s my colleague, who does it badly? Wait, improv! None of us have any training in it, who needs it anyways?

And so we see how it goes, to the gran’ denouement of a 20 inch long double headed dildo, which is guaranteed to awaken a smile from Gary.

And who’s Gary, you might ask?

WHY, IT’S YOU!

Susan Hennessey, the Managing Editor of Lawfare, chimes in on the discussion of Feinstein-Burr, also known as the “Compliance with Court Orders Act” (CCOA).

Relying exclusively on defining obligations to give technical assistance as a solution to Going Dark solves a fixed—and ever-diminishing—sliver of the problem. As companies move towards stronger systems, they will inevitably reach a point where they cannot meaningfully help at all or cannot do so within a time frame that is responsive the law enforcement needs. While partial solutions may have virtues, technical assistance is not a comprehensive fix now or in the future.

Recognizing this, Burr and Feinstein have apparently decided that if they are going to solve the problem, they are going to solve as much of it as they reasonably can. Thus, CCOA is a form of what Ben calls “the Full Comey“—legislation which sets a performance standard of being able to produce and decrypt information when subject to a particular type of court order. The broader performance standard is then supplemented by an alternative obligation to provide technical assistance to facilitate access to data encrypted by some other party.

It’s actually a pretty straight-forward legislative solution. Certainly some quantity of information subject to a court order will nonetheless remain inaccessible, but the bill covers as much of the terrain as is practicable. But this legislation is not technologically illiterate, as the echo chamber of criticism has convinced itself. Rather, it is rationally constructed to achieve the goals of its drafters. It may be fun to convince yourself that your opponents are illiterate and stupid, but the reason for the disconnect here is not brains; it’s values.

By values, I believe she means the divergent set of goals of the technorati and the government (the latter better characterized as responsibilities, to be honest). But, in the framework of my previous commentary, I continue to wonder if, and even believe, that the CCOA (aka “Feinstein-Burr”) should be reconsidered as a tactic, and a coherent strategy that considers the how to best use a limited set of resources in a technological landscape shaped by commercial needs, mathematical necessities, and human psychology.

I cannot help notice that, on a technical note, multiple levels of encryption and coding may be applied to messages, and if one of those are from a home-made application, or an application which is not determinable from its output, this entire bill may become moot.

For another view on the bill, here’s the CEO of Tozny, a security startup, by the name of Isaac Potoczny-Jones, referenced by Ms Hennessey:

Another amusing aspect of the bill is that it doesn’t just cover encryption. It also includes any data that’s been “encoded, modulated, or obfuscated”.

The process of turning human-readable source code into something that computers can understand often requires encoding it into a binary format. Furthermore, the definition of data includes “information stored on a device designed by a software manufacturer”, which would certainly seem to include the programs stored on that device. Does this require developers to provide source code?

During the FBI vs. Apple situation, the FBI’s had a specifically scoped warrant for a specific phone. Their request was for Apple to modify their OS’s source code to remove certain security features. The FBI could remove those features themselves, but they would more-or-less need Apple’s source code. (They would also need the signing key, but let’s leave aside the question of the signing key for now.)

My reading is that this law would give the FBI a new power to request the OS source code under the scope of a warrant to search a specific phone. They would not need a search warrant issued against Apple.

While the radio and TV blares out the news of the sudden passing of Prince, and how everyone is in shock over the death, I am surprised – nay shocked – to discover I share in that shock and grief at his sudden passing. I find this bewildering, as I’m not a music person (the dust on my stereo system is coveted by archaeology students for stratigraphy practice), even if I did enjoy 1999 and Doves and others, so I’ve been wondering what’s going on here.

First, I think, is how he became identified, if only in my mind, with the essence of the USA – a relentless drive to push the envelope, to break the taboo to see what happens, to fly high and fulfill your promise. Mythological, to be sure, but sometimes even myths come literally true – and that’s what he did, from exploring the artistic landscape in a very personal way, to demanding complete control of his music in an era when such was not normally permitted by the companies controlling the gateways to public consumption of music. Through his leadership, artistic and business, he stood for a better, more optimistic future – and helped achieve it.

Second, his apparent fearlessness was, and should be, an inspiration to everyone everywhere, not just artists, but to people who consider undertaking any task which may be beyond them. All too often, fear, doubt, taboos, expectations, bullying, and many other personal and cultural features inhibit those of us who could be our best from attempting to achieve the best. Prince performed, composed, made a couple of films which stirred up controversy and interest, and, most important, was an exuberant part of our world, right or wrong.

Third, he was still active. He performed right up until he died; he was still composing, with one of his latest being Baltimore, a reaction to the riots over the death of Freddie Gray:

It’s one thing when a retired artist, who has become a sentimental favorite but lost relevance, passes away; but Prince was none of that. His surprise appearance at a local cafe could have even sober WCCO-TV in a tizzy of excitement. Some of that was that he was the hometown boy who not only made good, but never left, thus imparting a level of glamour to a pair of cities that otherwise have a minor frisson of insecurity. But it was ever more true that he was still relevant, still creating in his trailblazing style.

At the personal level, I may have run into him once. I lived in Chanhassen for years in a townhouse complex just to the north of the Byerly’s, and I recall its construction. Shortly after it opened, at about 2AM one night, being a computer hacker I conceived I needed a snack to fuel the fires, and so I strolled over to that Byerly’s. It was empty, except for one aisle with a short, slender guy with a gal, impeccably dressed in the style he affected at the time, both of whom looked quite distressed when they saw me. Being what I was then (which is to say, fairly tall and fully bearded), I gave them a polite nod, that being the extent of my sociability, and kept on going, no doubt to their relief. I speculate perhaps he needed a snack, or was curious about the new, upscale grocery store. I misdoubt that this contributes to my current shock, though.

But, whether or not that was him, it made him a fixed part of the Minnesota landscape for me. Whether you adored 1999, or When Doves Cry brings memories of an old love, or he was your inspiration, he was there, always a possibility to say something smart, or stupid, to try out a new song, or in the end, to stir up a culture that is nowhere near perfection.  He made people think. Blessed are the people who make us better.

And that’s what we lost today.

Pursuit to Algiers (1945) is yet another in the Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce series of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson films. According to Wikipedia, this version contains some elements from Doyle’s stories, but I suspect is rightly considered to be extraneous to the Doyle canon.

As such, it is deficient in the pleasures of the purely intellectual deductive capabilities of Holmes, but also lacks the buffoonery some of the movies have inflicted on the faithful Watson when played by Bruce. That said, there’s much to enjoy in this installment. Twice we’re given enormous head fakes that had this audience going one way, only to find out the movie is fleeing down an entirely different path. As a bonus, in the first one we’re permitted to see that Mr. Bruce could move outside the acting boundaries normally imposed upon him by the strictures of these movies; glancing at his biography, I see he sustained severe injuries in World War I, took up acting after service, and mainly played characters much like his Watson. That, perhaps, was a pity, as for a brief moment I could see a set of deep emotions briefly afflict him, before events made the sequence moot and he could return to his old self.

Also of particular interest in a movie about a supremely logical detective is that he is asked to be, basically, a bodyguard for the presumptive king (of a fictional country), under the assertion that losing the king would be a blow … to democracy!

Excuse the laughter.

Whether an artifact of the speed at which these films were produced (14 films between 1939 and 1946) or the whimsy of the scriptwriter (Leonard Lee), this intellectually suspect statement has no impact on the film, so worry not. The cleverness is not in the intellectual ideas at play, but at two sets of men playing a tense game for high stakes. Add in a display or two of Holmes’ sense of extremely dry humor, and this movie, despite a couple of characters with potential that fall away, under-utilized, is worth some lazy time, especially if you have a cat needing a lap.

With regard to the computer hardware architecture mentioned in this post, it has occurred to me that writing a regression test on an architecture in which the LSBs are not predictable would be a special challenge. I suppose you’d have to implement a +/- approach to mathematical checks.

A reader comments on the bill:

Since there is already strong encryption available without backdoors, how would this legislation stop its continuing use? Make every one who owns a computer a criminal until they submit said computer to a “cleansing” agency?

Yeah. I don’t think the bill has been well thought out. Maybe those who already use strong encryption would be grandfathered in? Sounds a little ridiculous, just off-hand.

Lawfare has made available a link to a C-Span taping of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on this issue. I have not watched it, and at nearly 7 hours long, I don’t know if I’ll have time. The Lawfare link lists the witnesses.

To steal a post title from The Dish…

Thanks to my Arts Editor….

UPDATE: My Arts Editor can’t see the picture from her machine. Let me know if you can’t see it…

UPDATE 2: My Arts Editor has provided a .jpg version of the image, which was a .png. Let me know if it is still unviewable.

“This solution will work for carefully chosen values of ‘now’.”

– Paul Close

While crafting a solution to a race condition.

I’m not quite sure why I, a non-lawyer, find I must comment on an opinion on a legal matter authored by a lawyer, but I find I am so compelled.  Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare, commenting on the newly introduced Feinstein-Burr bill, suggests it’ll be un-Constitutional and uses the following analogy:

It seems to me, however, that there are a number of objections to that plan – the most notable of which is that it probably violates the US Constitution. Granted, the precedent is a bit old, and comes from the Ninth Circuit, but nonetheless, there is a good basis for thinking that such a ban would violate the First Amendment. In Bernstein v. Department of Justice, the government tried to stop Bernstein from publishing his encryption algorithm. In that case they said it violated export law (rather than a hypothetical import law). But the 9th Circuit rejected that ban and ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and any regulations preventing publication would be unconstitutional. Of course, the cases are different – the export case is about the right to publish and the import case is about the right to read what has been published outside the US – but the similarities are strong.

The government objected that Bernstein had violated ITAR regulations regarding export of weapons technology, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains here. A closer reading indicates some strong variances, despite Rosenzweig’s assertion, chief of which is the fact that Bernstein wished to publish the algorithm and supporting mathematical analysis, as well as lecture on his work. This is a far cry from the current concern of Feinstein-Burr, which is the actual use of a working product lacking any sort of backdoor or decryption approach. A better comparison would be to suggest that it is lawful to possess plans for a machine gun, while not lawful to possess a working machine gun.

OSS (Open Source Software) is, I believe, protected under the First Amendment, so assuming you’re technically competent, you could download foreign OSS encryption software, compile and use it. Then the onus is on the individual user. But not all software is OSS.

Which is not to say SCOTUS wouldn’t still invalidate this legislation, assuming it becomes law. I just don’t see this analogy as being particularly strong.

Overall, I actually agree with Rosenzweig that this legislation seems impractical. As he says,

To summarize it seems to me that:

• Encryption technology is global;

• To enforce Feinstein-Burr domestically we will either need to run a firewall to prohibit importation of non-conforming encryption technology OR prohibit (civilly or criminally) the illegal possession of such technology; and

• Success (as unlikely as it is) in that endeavor would divert determined encryptors to other means of storage and communication which would be systematically less transparent to law enforcement than the current status quo.

And, of course, a backdoor usable by the government is a backdoor usable by a hacker.

It seems to me that the government needs to consider the encryption question in a strategic rather than tactical manner. NewScientist provided some brief coverage on that particular point in the UK back in January, which I covered here. To summarize, they recommended legislation requiring all databases that are online be encrypted; that encryption be completely legal, with no backdoors. While their particular points may work or not, the real idea here is to consider the big picture and the unintended (but not unforeseeable) consequences of laws that directly address the short-term problems we face; formulation of a strategic approach which may incorporate elements deemed to be counter-intuitive to agencies such as the FBI is certainly a notion I could entertain. But approaching these issues piecemeal may result in a lack of progress, or even steps backward.