Monthly Archives: August 2016

Vincent Price stars in the surprisingly limp The Last Man on Earth (1964), a movie chronicling the travails of a scientist, Robert Morgan, who is the only unchanged survivor of an unspecified bacterial plague. There are other ‘survivors’, but they die in sunlight, are averse to garlic and mirrors, and… need I go on?

Through flashbacks we see his research attempting to cure the plague (unconvincing), his arguments with a friend over the nature of the plague, and the death of his young child (thrown into a pit and burned to prevent her from “returning”). The problem with the movie begins somewhere in this sequence, as Morgan’s argument with his friend has Morgan scoffing at reports of the dead returning to ‘life’.  It’s a rather lifeless argument, and within moments we transition to the loss of his child and the death – and return to life – of his wife. He may be horrified at these events, but we’ve lost some emotional punch that goes with Morgan realizing he was wrong about the argument.

Back in the present, the physically and intellectually weakened ‘undead’ batter at Morgan’s house during the night; during the day, he searches them out and kills them with a stake, a sad activity he performs more as a duty than a matter of survival.

And then one day a dog appears. He analyzes its blood… and kills it. I think. In any case, the dog dies. This ambiguity, unintended I’m sure, is puzzling and deflating.

And then a woman appears in the daytime.  She runs away, but he catches her and brings her back to his home to discover how she has survived. She is an emissary from another group of survivors who want to know if Morgan knows more than they.

Except it’s a lie. They want to kill Morgan. Why? It’s not clear. She claims they want to kill him because he has staked some of their undead family and friends, but that’s so unconvincing that it’s not worth discussing.

So the acting is OK, the script is inadequate but not laughable, the staging is good – I really believed it was an empty city – and the corpses of those caught in daylight are effectively underplayed. I really wanted to like this movie, but I didn’t.  While the premise was worthy of attention, the conclusion was abrupt and unsatisfactory.  I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend it.

Derek Markham @ Treehugger reports on a new dryer technology:

Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with support from the US Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office and GE Appliances, has developed a prototype of an innovative clothes drying technology that could shorten drying times down to just 20 minutes, and reduce the amount of energy used for each load by 70%. Instead of using heat to remove water from clothing, this prototype uses high-frequency vibrations – ultrasonic waves – produced by piezoelectric transducers driven by a custom amplifier.

I wonder about the gotcha – ultrasonics may need to be damped. Will this still require spinning? What about failure modes? It’s interesting since, as Mark notes, home dryers consume 4% of electricity produced today. And big efficiency increases are cool. The question will be whether this can be made consumer-tough and -safe.

The news is positively frothing with this. From CNN:

Trump was asked by host Hugh Hewitt about the comments Trump made Wednesday night in Florida, and Hewitt said he understood Trump to mean “that he (Obama) created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

On Lawfare Stephanie Leutert interviews security analyst Alejandro Hope to discover the possible reasons behind a surge in murders in Mexico:

Hypothesis #1: Ongoing Cartel Fragmentation

Since 2007, the Mexican government has more aggressively targeted cartel leadership, effectively using the so-called kingpin approach to decapitate criminal groups. Former President Calderón killed or captured 25 of his 37 most wanted narcos and current President Peña Nieto has already “neutralized” 100 of his top 122. Such blows may weaken Mexico’s criminal groups, but they don’t mean less bloodshed. Often, it’s the opposite.

Each downed kingpin means a leadership succession, frequently characterized by power vacuums, internal struggles, and splinter groups. When Calderón took office in 2007, there were five recognized cartels. Today, if you take the Attorney General’s count, there are nine cartels and forty-three fragmented cells, or if you prefer to listen to Mexico’s chief criminal prosecutor, it’s two cartels and hundreds of splinter groups.

Either way, with each additional actor on the fractured criminal landscape, there is another set of armed criminals trying to enforce its rules over a slice of land. And there are the inevitable bloody clashes when those frontiers overlap.

In another section we learn Mexico supplies about half of the heroin used in the United States. While I find it difficult to justify the legalization of cocaine, since it’s far more destructive than marijuana, it would certainly be interesting to know – or at least model – the effect of such a legalization on the gangs of Mexico.

From a real court opinion:

We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate. Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, forty years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before.

Thirty years ago, this court decided all boundary disputes between the Ute Indian Tribe, the State of Utah, and its subdivisions. The only thing that remained was for the district court to memorialize that mandate in a permanent injunction. Twenty years ago, we modified our mandate in one respect, but stressed that in all others our decision of a decade earlier remained in place. Once more, we expected this boundary dispute to march expeditiously to its end. Yet just last year the State of Utah and several of its counties sought to relitigate those same boundaries. And now one of its cities tries to do the same thing today. Over the last forty years the questions haven’t changed – and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.

(h/t Howard Bashman of the How Appealing blog)

The Republican party continues to gnaw at its intestines, as can be seen in the reactions of some of Trump’s supporters to his formal endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan. This is from RawStory:

The trio of endorsements – especially the one for Mr. Ryan – shocked some of Mr. Trump’s diehard supporters.

“He has broken our heart doing this tonight,” said Trump supporter Sue Payne, a conservative activist working to defeat Mr. Ryan.

“We finally thought we had a voice to stand up against the RINO establishment. He sold us out,” she said. “What happened tonight is the establishment got their claws in him and they are pulling the strings. What do we believe now?”

Speaker Ryan was described by Nate Silver at the time of his selection for nominee for VP, in 2012:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. (The statistic does not provide scores for governors and other vice-presidential nominees who never served in Congress.)

The deployment of the epithet RINO – Republican in Name Only – against the most conservative House Speaker in living memory, and most likely since the Civil War, as if he were working with the Democrats, either correlates with the extremist views of Ms Payne and her compatriots, or with their thirst for power. In either case, to label them as ‘conservative’ seems like a typo.

I do not recall if I’ve suggested this before, but I believe that one of the tactical moves the GOP organization must make if it is to persist as a national party is to take action whenever one GOP member deploys the term RINO against another GOP member: return their dues, kick them out of the party, and publicize it. Otherwise the party will continue its accelerating race to extremist positions with which most true conservatives cannot, as a moral matter, be associated.

Eventually, it’ll be party of two people, and one will be on probation.

This is one of those achievements I admire because it uses waste materials to do something useful. Really useful. From IT News Africa:

Using orange peels and avocado skins, [Kiara Nirghin of South Africa] has managed to create a material, that can hold hundreds of times its weight in water, in the soil. This super absorbent polymer then acts as a water reservoir in the earth.

By saving water this way, her idea could have a massive impact on how the continent manages the effects of climate change in years to come. And, because it’s made from orange and avocado skins, it won’t break the budget of local farmers, like so many other water storage devices currently do.

I do wonder how this disturbance in water movement will impact the environment. Water – potentially a lot of it – won’t go somewhere that it was going. This could have effects ranging from someone else going thirsty or hungry to impacts on weather systems.

But it’s still really cool.

The final pics from the vacation …

From my mother-in-law’s garden.

Spaceweather.com is reporting on a monstrous bit of magnetism on the sun:

This is a type of prominence commonly called a “hedgerow prominence.” Hot glowing plasma inside the structure is held aloft by unstable solar magnetic fields. NASA and Japanese space telescopes have taken high resolution images of of similar prominences and seen some amazing things such as (1) tadpole-shaped plumes that float up from the base of the prominence; (2) narrow streams of plasma that descend from the top like waterfalls; and (3) swirls and vortices that resemble van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Follow the link for an amazing picture.

Thunderbirds are Go (1966) is a puzzling movie. What are they trying to do here? Make the argument that puppet movies are the way to go? Nothing like the profane and screamingly funny Team America: World Police (2004) in tone, the show features the attempt to reach Mars. The Thunderbirds are not those going, but are the search and rescue team that must rescue the explorers after sabotage and equipment failure imperils the explorer’s lives.

But why the sabotage?

Eh, not important.

Oh, wait, there’s hostile life on Mars! Surely this is important, it must mean something!

Nope.

And that illustrates the problem with this movie – it’s all about the puppets and sets; the story is scattered and incomplete, becoming little more than trivia and rendering the movie dull. The dialog ranges from mediocre to absolutely excruciating. We see old stereotype of various types.

And perhaps the movie makers achieved their aim, for soon we were watching merely to see the sets, various vehicles, and to a lesser extent the puppets (who spent so much time in chairs that my Arts Editor began speculating that nearly everyone in the movie was a quadriplegic). The vehicles were particularly impressive, having rockets, jets, and propellers as means of mobility, they were impressively presented.

Oh, and the explosions in the ocean. Also well done.

And I never want to see this one again. This one’s so threadbare it nearly defies analysis.

Meagan Treacy on Treehugger reports on an ambitious goal of brothers Massoud and Mahmud Hassani:

The 10-pound, six-armed drone, flies over a field and identifies dangerous areas with GPS way points. The drone then gets down to 4 cm above the ground and uses a metal detector arm to detect mines. Any mines found are plotted on a map. Finally, the drone flies back over the found mines with a robotic gripping arm that places a small detonator on top of every detected mine. The detonator is on a timer so that the drone is a safe distance away before it explodes.

The team has the ultimate goal of clearing the world of landmines in just 10 years.

Maddowblog presents on their front page a YouTube of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in which John covers the precarious situation of newspapers in the country. The entire video is of interest, but what really caught my eye was 2009 opinions from David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire, as he discusses one of the results of the shrinking reach of newspapers at the Conference on the Future of Journalism and Newspapers:

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I’ll be confident that we’ve reached some sort of equilibrium. There’s no glory in that kind of journalism, but that is the bedrock of what keeps, you know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption, it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.

And in the last seven years we’ve seen political extremism & corruption creep into our political system from the conservative side of the spectrum. The shining of the light of the press has been a crucial part of the ongoing American experiment, and as that light has dimmed in the distorted glare of the Internet, we’ve seen the American political scene fragment and become less and less realistic. Between the absolutists for whom compromise is a sin, and opportunists who take advantage of the dimness (not only metaphorical, but the dimness of the extremists as well), we’re getting an object lesson in what happens when the free press is starved of funding. John Oliver makes a great point about how the Internet is critically dependent on newspapers, on journalists, and yet by its very presence it is crushing this critical source of information.

I certainly have that blood all over my hands. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in decades. (But I do subscribe to a several magazines.)

If there is a solid dependence of Internet news organizations on the dying newspapers and other traditional forms of journalism, at some point the Internet news organizations will be forced to either hire journalists themselves – or hire novelists to keep filling all those clicks.

Here’s the John Oliver video:

Local CBS affiliate WCCO reports the St. Anthony PD’s statistics on the racial composition of those they pull over indicates blacks are pulled over disproportionately:

At WCCO’s request, Orfield studied citations handed out by St. Anthony police in 2015 and 2016.

In 2015 about 15 percent were issued to black people. Roughly 60 percent went to white people. Those numbers are consistent so far in 2016.What troubles Orfield is the demographic for the area is about 6 percent black.

“It looked like they were stopping people about two and a half to three times as often as we thought what the driving population would be. It suggests that, consistent with our old studies, that there’s police profiling going on in those communities,” Orfield said.

In 2003, Orfield co-authored a report on racial profiling during traffic stops in Minnesota. It was requested by the legislature. While St. Anthony police did not participate, he says their current numbers mirror what he found in surrounding communities. That in Fridley, New Hope, Plymouth, Sauk Rapids and Savage combined, “Blacks were stopped about 310 percent more often than expected.”

I’ve been thinking about the context a little bit. I think there’s a superficial error in comparing the composition of the community to that of those pulled over because those who are pulled over, like Castile, are not necessarily members of St. Anthony, Falcon Heights, or Lauderdale (the St. Anthony PD service area). It’s probably superficial in that the composition is not too far off from the overall composition of the Twin Cities area, although I haven’t found a handy source for recent estimtaes.

Now, what does it mean? So far, I see that, statistically speaking, it increases the chance for a tragedy, which is always possible where guns are involved. Racial profiling may also be indicated. Still, the latter is an implication, not an overt (or proven) fact.

A reader is pressed for time when it comes to reading press releases:

Did that say anything of substance? Or unexpected? :-p

Sure. It said St. Anthony police spend more time on continuing training than do police in Minnesota do generally, and that its responsibilities are unique and require all that extra training.

Which leaves us with the question of why is Mr. Castile still dead?

Apparently the sheer number of hours spent in training is well beyond criticism, no? So we must cast our nets elsewhere – poor training, so they just wasted a lot of money? Poor attitudes towards blacks? They didn’t really seem to deal with those issues, especially not the first.

So it’s self-promotion dressed up in numbers, without any attempt to really drive at what went wrong, why they failed so horribly. Either the press release is a failure, or is unnecessary.

A reader comments on some discomfiting attitudes concerning government:

We’re doomed.

Or, more likely, we’re just entering a self-correction moment. Generally, a problem must be observed before it can be corrected; this may turn out to be when we finally really observe the problem and begin the process of educating the mislead.

Scott Chamberlain stares disbelievingly at yet another abyss threatening classical music – this one opening up in Fort Worth, TX.

I was a close observer for many of these battles, and I’ve been horrified that many of the same arguments that animated these disputes are being used in Ft. Worth, too.  Horrified not just because these ideas were wrong, but that they were strategically so ineffective.  For example, Michael Henson of the Minnesota Orchestra and Stanley Romanstein of the ASO tried to impose punitive labor contracts on the orchestra musicians and impose a new business model on their respective organizations, but the community ultimately rebelled against these ham-fisted negotiation techniques, and both Henson and Romanstein were forced out.  Peter Gelb of the Met nearly faced a similar fate; he still holds his job, but is clearly in a weaker position.

Given this record of failure, I’m curious that anyone else would want to try this same approach.

When it comes to voting & voting systems, Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare has an important point:

At the same time, it is critical to ensure that the voting process is explainable. It is almost a sport among academics to develop computer-only voting schemes where, thanks to cryptographic magic, a voter can verify that her vote was correctly counted. Yet such schemes invariably fail the “parent test.” I can’t understand them myself without considerable effort, so there is no hope for me to explain them to my mom and dad. Such systems may work for a board election of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, but they can’t work for a regular election.

As a consequence, this perhaps surprising conclusion is effectively universal amongst computer security practitioners: the voter must either directly mark a paper ballot or the voting machine must clearly print out a record of the vote, which the voter then puts in the ballot box. Unless a DRE machine has such a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, we must assume it can be compromised. Worse, as Dan Wallach explains, a DRE without VVPAT system can be compromised without actually being compromised: if someone, including a simply unhinged candidate, gives the losers a credible reason to believe the result is fraudulent, the voting system has failed whether it has failed in a technical sense or not.

Good to see the experts agreeing with me – computer voting systems are a fad which need to be discarded.

I recently linked to Treehugger‘s coverage of the Transit Elevated Bus. Now Treehugger‘s Lloyd Alter is pointing out that in 1969 Lester Walker came up with idea of the Landliner:

The Bos-Wash Landliner rides on nearly friction free air cushion bearings at 200 miles per hour. It is powered by turbine powered ducted fan-jets that have a regenerator cycle to consume the hot exhaust. Much like the Chinese system, it is designed to use existing roads without obstructing the traffic on them. …

Because it is traveling farther, it has more facilities than the Chinese version and sports a gymnasium, theater, restaurants, snack bars, ballrooms, conference rooms and observation decks.

There is no jarring starting and stopping at stations like there is with regular trains either, because the Landliner never stops.

Never stops? Treehugger quotes Walker:

Both bus and landliner are travelling at 60 mile per hour, their speeds locked together by computer; then a great claw descends from the landliner to “swallow” the bus. Once inside, passengers disembark and enjoy the facilities. Since the buses circle a city picking up commuters, driving the car to the station and leaving it all day will be a thing of the past.

An ambitious vision.

They probably shouldn’t smile when they sing.

Megan Treacy on Treehugger reports on a new twist – low-power batteries that self-destruct after usage:

Having a battery that is able to break down at the end of the life gets us one step closer to a device that could basically disappear when its job is done.

Researchers at Iowa State University have developed a battery that quickly destructs when dropped in water. The lithium ion battery can produce 2.5 volts and can power a desktop calculator for about 15 minutes. When submerged in water, it dissipates in just 30 minutes. The university says this is the first so-called “transient” battery to have the power, stability and shelf life needed for practical use.

“Unlike conventional electronics that are designed to last for extensive periods of time, a key and unique attribute of transient electronics is to operate over a typically short and well-defined period, and undergo fast and, ideally, complete self-deconstruction and vanish when transiency is triggered,” the scientists wrote in their paper just published in theJournal of Polymer Science, Part B: Polymer Physics.

“Vanish”? I could understand the blogger saying that, but she’s quoting the paper. Megan explains further:

When submerged, the casing swells and breaks apart the electrodes, then dissolves away. The researchers stressed that there are nanoparticles that don’t completely disappear, but they do disperse.

It’s an interesting thought. I’m trying to see how to implement it safely in a health environment, and really the only process close to fail-safe would be for it to dissolve once the energy it generates is exhausted. You can’t do it on command, because that makes you vulnerable to malicious forces; basing it on environmental factors in a body seems impractical, since the environment, at least this level, would seem to me to be relatively static – but I don’t really have any relevant expertise.

Treatment plants use a lot of energy to do their jobs, and NewScientist (30 July 2016) reports on some recent research progress:

Last month, Boston-based Cambrian Innovation began field tests of what’s known as a microbial fuel cell at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland. Called BioVolt, in one day it can convert 2250 litres of sewage into enough clean water for at least 15 people. Not only that, it generates the electricity to power itself – plus a bit left over.

This is a big deal, as conventional treatment plants guzzle energy – typically consuming 1.5 kilowatt-hours for every kilogram of pollutants removed. In the US, this amounts to a whopping 3 per cent of the total energy demand. If the plants could be self-powered, recycling our own waste water could become as commonplace as putting a solar panel on a roof.

Why are they called fuel cells?

BioVolt uses strains of Geobacter and another microbe called Shewanella oneidensis to process the sludge. Its proprietary mix of organisms has one key advantage – the bacteria liberate some electrons as they respire, effectively turning the whole set-up into a battery. This has the added benefit of slowing bacterial growth, so that at the end of the process you have electricity and no microbe cake [to be irradiated and disposed of].

While 3% is not a large number in itself, this sort of project, if it can be brought to fruition and implemented on a nationwide, commercial basis, can serve as a model for other industries – an important part of the move away from exorbitant energy use. Reducing costs and emissions – a double barreled approach to saving the country & world.

Now we see the next result in California of climate change: wildfires. NewScientist (30 July 2016) reports:

“For this time of year, it’s the most extreme fire behaviour I’ve seen in my 32-year career,” county fire chief Daryl Osby said. More than 10,000 homes had been evacuated as New Scientist went to press. A sanctuary for rescued exotic creatures also had to evacuate most of its animals, including Bengal tigers and a mountain lion.

California is going through its worst drought on record, and melting snowpack in the Sierra Nevada may mean even less water will be available in coming years. At least one study has linked the drought to climate change, and we know that global warming is expected to fuel more wildfires in the future. The heat from the wildfires could also be releasing carbon stored in permafrost, fuelling further warming.

We examined the lack of ice pack in the Sierras in this post a while back. An analysis of California wildfires 1984-2010 is here:

 In this update, we use satellite-derived estimates of fire severity from the three most widely distributed SNFPA forest types to examine the trend in percent high severity and high severity fire area for all wildfires ≥80 ha that occurred during the 1984 to 2010 period. Time-series regression modeling indicates that the percentage of total high severity per year for a combination of yellow pine (ponderosa pine [Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson] or Jeffrey pine [P. jeffreyi Balf.]) and mixed-conifer forests increased significantly over the 27-year period. The annual area of high-severity fire also increased significantly in yellow pine-mixed-conifer forests. The percentage of high severity in fires ≥400 ha burning in yellow pine-mixed-conifer forests was significantly higher than in fires <400 ha. Additionally, the number of fires ≥400 ha significantly increased over the 1950 to 2010 period. There were no significant trends in red fir (Abies magnifica A. Murray bis) forests. These results confirm and expand our earlier published results for a  shorter 21-year period.

NASA provides a satellite view of some of the fires:

Credits: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

You can see the smoke of the first on the coast.

My Arts Editor woke up with a cold this morning. The Fringe is using a new business model this year where each day you pay once ($16 weekdays, $22 weekends) and go to as many shows as you wish. The Fringe uses wooden nickels, handed out to patrons, to ensure shows are not oversold.

My A.E. says the moment she saw them, she thought Contagion!

So maybe this is psycho-syllabic.