Monthly Archives: January 2017

The Amazon Alexa personal assistant is doing well in terms of sales – and with its customers, as NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) reports, in a way that was unanticipated:

Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon’s Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to Alexa,” he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is “thank you” – which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.

It’d be fascinating to see an analysis broken down by the vocations/careers of the customers, particularly for those whose marriage propositions were serious. Does that consist mostly of non-engineers, who, not knowing the internals of software, are more accepting of other entities as possible spouses? Or are we seeing software engineers who are building their own spouses?

Or does this have something to do with autistic individuals and how the reactions of Alexa are far more acceptable than a neurotypical human?

Frederik deBoer lances the boil that is our intellectual culture:

It’s my observation that the smart kids that write our culture – not at all restricted to the media or academia, but the larger mass of people who were the high achievers in high school, the people who were in the top reading group and who got National Merit Scholarships, and who now do so much to define our shared cultural assumptions and conventional wisdom – have developed a strange and unhealthy relationship to being smart and having knowledge. Ours is a culture of cleverness, not of knowledge, one that is far more comfortable in assessing wit than in assessing evidence. It is disdainful of the idea that being an intelligent person requires spending hours reading books, slowly absorbing complex ideas, waging war on your own ignorance through attrition. It presumes that you should be well-read but is distrustful of the bookish. (It produces a micro-genre of listicles about the books “everyone” has claimed to have read but hasn’t/has started but never finished.) It places a premium on being smart but is skeptical, even contemptuous, of public displays of the work of getting smart. You want to be the kind of cultured person who knows great books intimately, but if you have Proust on your knee on the subway people will roll their eyes at you. That kind of thing: obviously smart but not, like, all tryhard about it. You are expected to work out relentlessly to train your body and to show everyone that effort, but your intelligence must be effortless, even accidental.

I dunno, maybe I’m not part of that culture – I’m certainly not smart enough. But I do wonder if that culture is slightly overwhelmed with the sheer mass of knowledge it must absorb at breakneck pace. Frederik has further thoughts on the cause of the problem:

It is an artifact of the sickness within American “meritocracy.” Though I am frequently a harsh critic of the coastal striving class, this condition is not something that they’ve done. It’s something that was done to them. This condition was inflicted on them by a socioeconomic system that harms and degrades people and then tells them it’s their fault. It’s the fault of an economy that compels large groups of people to try and climb up a narrower and narrower ladder together until they have no choice but to push others off.

Which sounds like the naturally competitive system humans appear to indulge in effortlessly, honestly speaking. Even within cooperative systems, in my experience, there is an element of competition – who can be kindest, most helpful, that sort of thing. That said, Frederik has a point – there are many more losers than winners, and our system doesn’t really work very hard at making the losers feel OK with that result.

You may have heard that triclosan has been banned from hand soaps. NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) now has some details on a potentially worse situation because of how triclosan functions in relation to bacteria – which is, by stopping them, rather than destroying them.

Now there’s reason to worry over even more serious effects. To see whether antibacterials can affect the performance of antibiotics, Petra Levin and Corey Westfall, at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, exposed Escherichia coli to common antibiotics and triclosan, and measured their survival over 20 hours.

When the bacteria were exposed to the antibiotics streptomycin or ciprofloxacin, plus triclosan, they were 10,000 times more likely to survive than those that weren’t also given triclosan. Further tests found that triclosan protects the MRSA superbug against vancomycin, a crucial antibiotic often used as a last resort in MRSA infections (bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/090829).

We don’t know why triclosan has these effects, but one explanation might lie in the different ways that antibiotics and antibacterials work. Most antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with essential steps in their life cycle, such as making cell walls. Since triclosan prevents bacteria from growing, they may not go through as many life cycle stages, becoming impervious to antibiotics as a result. “A dormant cell has not a lot of active targets, so there’s not much to corrupt,” says Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston.

One of those results which reminds me that reality is far more bizarre than I can imagine sometimes.

And I do mean when? Here’s the points that make me think that it has to be on the collective mind of the House GOP (where impeachment begins):

1. He’s not THEIR leader. Trump never came up through the GOP ranks, holding the usual jobs. He is basically alien to the entire political process, be it either the DFL, old line GOP, and radical GOP.
2. At heart he’s not a politician. Not that the current GOP is in bed with the idea of compromise, but Trump’s background as the boss of Trump, Inc., renders him yet another step beyond the idea of compromise. President Obama could reject legislation with reason, logic, and restraint. What happens the first time Congress overrides a veto? Or even just sends him a bill of which he disapproves?
3. So put 1 & 2 together to see how relations will quickly become strained between the House GOP and Trump. But initially they can do nothing, because of Trump’s popularity with the GOP base. That, and impeachment does require gross incompetence or malfeasance on the part of the President – and they didn’t even dare to ignore that with President Obama, who, for all their loathing, clearly ran a highly competent operation.
4. But if something were to break the popular support for Trump, then he’d become vulnerable. What might cause that? Failures to deliver on promises. His incessant lying. Even just his big mouth saying the wrong thing on a variety of subjects.
5. The presence of Pence, who definitely has his own opinions, both good and bad, independent from Trump, would tend to lead the House to consider impeachment, given the proper incitement.

So what would the proper incitement be? Probably not a blow job (cue an appearance by Bill Clinton.) But while the competence of many GOP House members may seem questionable to partisans of the DFL, I do not think there can be any doubt that GOP House Members take their duty to safeguard the nation seriously.

So this story from Steve Benen caught my attention:

When Rachel [Maddow] asked if the president-elect may have “an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community,” [Senator] Schumer replied, “Whether you’re a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community.”

Just 24 hours later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has some dramatic changes in mind at the agencies that have told him what he didn’t want to hear.

President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said.

The move is prompted by his belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized, these people said.

Quoting sources familiar with Trump’s plans, the Journal reported that the incoming president, who’s publicly mocked and taunted intelligence professionals, intends to “restructure” the Central Intelligence Agency.

What are Trump’s sources of information that supersedes the professionals who’ve done this as a career, often putting their lives on the line? In the absence of amazing answers (and his admiration of the National Enquirer doesn’t count), a fair observer is forced to conclude that Trump cannot tolerate answers that diverge from his view of the world – and therefore he’s going to meddle with the intelligence agencies until they parrot the answers he wishes to hear.

It makes me quite ill. This should be the story of the week. The month. The year.

Kremlin residents must be convulsing with laughter.

But not the GOP. They have one huge potential problem for as long as Trump is President – his emotional needs are apparently more important than national security. How long can they tolerate this potential catastrophe, both nationally and for the GOP, especially with Pence, a former House member with far right wing views consonant with many GOP House members, as Trump’s successor?

Maybe only so long as Trump can convince his army of marks that he can deliver on his promises.

Steve ended with, “Welcome to the Trump Era, America.” It may be a very short era. Perhaps it’s time to wonder how Pence will work out as a President.

Andrew Reynolds’ report on the North Carolina electoral system is encountering some negative feedback from Professor Gelman of Columbia University on Slate. Reviewing previous EIP reports, he thinks their methodology is dubious. His conclusion:

What went wrong here? It all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence—like this similar thing from a few years ago with the so-called Human Development Index.

NewScientist (17 December 2016) reports on a very rare form of solid material:

THERE’S more than one way to cook a quasicrystal. A third example of these weird, rule-breaking solids has been found in a Siberian meteorite – and it’s the only one not to have been first created in the lab.

Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University has doggedly hunted for quasicrystals since he predicted their existence in the early 1980s. The first synthetic one was grown in the lab in 1982, and more than 100 types have been made since.

Before then, we knew of two types of solids: crystals, in which every atom is arranged neatly in a repeating lattice, and amorphous solids, which have no such order. Quasicrystals are not quite crystals because their neat patterns never exactly repeat.

The new one is only the third type found in nature. All three have come from the Khatyrka meteorite in north-eastern Russia. The approximate composition of the first two had been created in a lab beforehand.

It almost sounds like a contaminant situation. But what are they useful for?

But as with the other quasicrystals, nobody is quite sure what it could be used for. Steinhardt has a quasicrystal-coated frying pan in a corner of his office that takes advantage of this material’s hard, slippery nature, but no other practical applications have been found yet.

Hmmmm.

The drought in Iran continues to hit hard, impacting the pistachio crop and the water table, as Maysam Bizaer reports in AL Monitor:

Climate change has caused a nationwide drought in Iran, leading to 85% of the country being classified as arid or semi-arid. The decline in annual averagerainfall and resulting shortage of surface water has forced farmers to dig more wells to pump water from underground reserves. Nearly half of the 750,000 water pumps on Iranian farms are illegal, which illustrates why the unconstrained use of underground water in agriculture is the main source of water waste in the country. …

Ali Ahmadian, a pistachio grower from Kerman, confirmed Jalalpour’s general concerns, telling the Iranian Students’ News Agency on Oct. 8, “Unfortunately, pistachio farms are drying out because of water shortages.” In addition, he identified another, related problem, stating, “The quality of the water has also suffered, because the level of underground water has been going deeper, now at 300 to 400 meters [984 to 1,312 feet].”

Finding confirmation of drought in Iran has proven difficult, perhaps because exact figures may be considered a state secret. However, there are a number of references to drought in the region, including this one from The Art Newspaper:

Nuclear deals aside, a Tehran gallery exhibition will take on one of the biggest issues now facing modern Iran: a drought dating back at least seven years, with water tables falling perilously in parched regions and fabled rivers running dry.

The curators Vida Zaim and Leila Varasteh—who also organised the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s current show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art—put out an open call last year seeking artists’ responses to a problem that has seen Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani press to improve state water management. …

“We are constantly talking about political problems in Iran, but this national catastrophe could be worse than any situation. It’s a subject that is worth focussing on,” Varasteh said. “Thank God the president is taking action, but there has to be more. Too many lakes are drying.” In Isfahan, a centre for traditional Iranian artisans, the famous Zayanderud River has mostly ceased to flow under the historic bridges of the country’s former capital.

Meanwhile, the Tehran Times from June, 2016, notes:

According to statistics, 31 percent of the country’s total land area is suffering mild drought, 29 percent is facing moderate drought, 12 percent is being plagued by severe drought, and one percent is struggling with extreme drought, Fateh told ISNA news agency.

He went on to say that 27 percent of Iran’s population is facing mild drought, 32 percent with moderate drought, 12 percent with severe drought and one percent with extreme drought.

Water stress is an issue Iran is facing for some years now and stems from various reasons ranging from old farming patterns and mismanagement of water resources and to the climate change.

A later article in the Tehran Times  indicates some recovery in the latter half of 2016.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy is scratching his head over a new law proposed by very conservative Rep. Steve King (R-IA). Keeping in mind that the Hobby Lobby exception was carved out for religious objections to abortion …

Here’s H.R. 177, introduced yesterday by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):

Under Article 3, Section 2, which allows Congress to provide exceptions and regulations for Supreme Court consideration of cases and controversies, the following cases are barred from citation for the purpose of precedence in all future cases after enactment: Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, 2573, 183 L. Ed. 2d 450 (2012) and King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2485, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2782, 189 L. Ed. 2d 675 (2014).

Bold is mine. Then he points out this is probably unconstitutional, and then just plain weird. He wonders if it’s theater.

I wonder if this is legislation intended to be overturned to create a precedent of some sort.

Washington State University archaeologists are working on climate change problems using the knowledge domain of their subjects:

Washington State University archaeologists are at the helm of new research using sophisticated computer technology to learn how past societies responded to climate change.Their work, which links ancient climate and archaeological data, could help modern communities identify new crops and other adaptive strategies when threatened by drought, extreme weather and other environmental challenges. …

[Emeritus professor of anthropology Tim] Kohler is a pioneer in the field of model-based archaeology. He developed sophisticated computer simulations, called agent-based models, of the interactions between ancestral peoples in the American Southwest and their environment. …

Agent-based modeling is also used to explore the impact humans can have on their environment during periods of climate change.

One study mentioned in the WSU review demonstrates how drought, hunting and habitat competition among growing populations in Egypt led to the extinction of many large-bodied mammals around 3,000 B.C. In addition, d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky, an adjunct faculty member in anthropology, are investigating how settlement patterns in Tibet are affecting erosion. …

Species distribution or crop-niche modeling is another sophisticated technology that archeologists use to predict where plants and other organisms grew well in the past and where they might be useful today.

Bocinsky and d’Alpoim Guedes are using the modeling technique to identify little-used or in some cases completely forgotten crops that could be useful in areas where warmer weather, drought and disease impact food supply.

One of the crops they identified is a strain of drought-tolerant corn the Hopi Indians of Arizona adapted over the centuries to prosper in poor soil.

“Our models showed Hopi corn could grow well in the Ethiopian highlands where one of their staple foods, the Ethiopian banana, has been afflicted by emerging pests, disease and blasts of intense heat,” Bocinsky said. “Cultivating Hopi corn and other traditional, drought-resistant crops could become crucial for human survival in other places impacted by climate change.”

Fascinating, but I have to wonder if their suggestion to switch to Hopi Corn in Ethiopia is really going to work out. Unless their simulations are extremely detailed and predictive of how local insects and small mammals might adapt to the new food crops brought into their habitat, I suspect these are no more than “well, it fits the broad parameters, why don’t you give it a whirl?”

A few failures like that and the locals will give you the stiff arm, I’d predict.

Just what to make of some Iranian politics is confusing for an eternal neophyte like me. For example, some exiled dissidents wrote a letter to President-elect Donald Trump,which says, in part:

During the presidential campaign, we and millions of Iranians followed your forthright objection to the nuclear agreement reached between the Obama administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We sincerely hope that with your election, the new administration and the United States Congress will have the opportunity for the first time to review the regional and international outcomes of that disastrous agreement without any reservations, as was promised to the voters. …

We ask the President-Elect to send the clear message that the United States will not tolerate the increasing threats of the Islamic Republic of Iran against its citizens and neighbors. The new administration, in collaboration with the Congress, should expand the existing sanctions and impose new ones on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Supreme Leader’s financial empire and direct the U.S. Treasury to strongly enforce them. We ask the incoming administration to develop a comprehensive regime of sanctions against those Iranian officials who have violated the human rights of the Iranian people over the last 4 decades. Iran’s ballistic missile program is a threat not only to the region but to the world; we hope the President-elect will form an international coalition to pressure the Islamic Republic of Iran and force the regime to cease its pursuit of long-range ballistic missile. We believe the United States should confront the Revolutionary Guards’ malicious behavior in the region, in all fronts, and by all available means. The Islamic regime’s Achilles’ heel is that the Iranian people do no longer support it. We ask the new administration to support the pro-democracy Iranians whose goal is to replace the Khomeinist regime of Tehran with a liberal-democratic government.

First, you have to wonder why anyone who’s paying attention would trust anything Trump would have to say. As he demonstrated throughout his campaign, he could be all sides of an issue over a span of years – and not want to admit it.

Second, if Trump were persuaded to do something on a military scale, who would end up in power? Not these dissidents. Trump would probably want to go colonial. Remember his remarks on Iraq’s oil? Don’t doubt that he’d want to suck Iran dry as well. Is this what the dissidents think is good?

AL Monitor’s Rohollah Faghihi notes that none of the major political parties in Iran is happy about the letter:

Iranian conservatives have used the letter to attack Reformists, referring to the signatories of the document as “Reformists living abroad.”

The hard-line Raja News wrote Dec. 25, “The reason behind the writing of this letter in 2016 and the behind-the-curtain pressures in 2009 [in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election] to apply more sanctions on the Iranian people by the foreign-based Reformists do not need any analysis, because doing business at the price of sanctions on the Iranian people and receiving financial aid to set up anti-Iranian media and sites are part of the projects that they have been engaged in during the past decade, and for sure, the decrease in sanctions against our country will take the bread out of their mouths.”

On Dec. 27, under the headline “30 Traitors,” conservative Sobh-e-No newspaper described the authors of the letter as “the same supporters and active directors of the 2009 protests.” Of note, the disputed presidential election that year led to widespread unrest.

Meanwhile, Reformists have in turn slammed conservatives for linking the exiled dissidents to their camp. They further argue that their hard-liner foes and the signatories to the letter are equally damaging Iran.

Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari, who served as interior minister under former Reformist President Mohammad Khatami, said Dec. 26, “The action of these 30 individuals was [designed] to help the ‘worried ones’ [hard liners opposed to the nuclear deal] current. Reformists assess the JCPOA as a diplomatic action that is supposed to help solve problems, but those abroad who seek to cause trouble for the country, and these 30 individuals’ efforts, are [carried out] in order to portray the JCPOA as ineffective, just like what the ‘worried ones’ are doing inside the country.”

I think by ‘current’ they mean momentum; but it’s apparent that the letter is grist for the Iranian political mills, making the flour for the bread for the people who vote. Question is, which bread will the voters prefer? Will they realize the dangers of dealing with someone like Trump? Or will it be forced upon them if he tries to “tear up” the nuclear deal?

Ingrid Wuerth writes on Lawfare about the Art Museum Amendment (aka The Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act (FCEJCA)), and how it may be retrograde of its intended consequence:

The Amendment means that activities associated with the loan of art works for exhibition are not “commercial activity” under this exception.

Other language provides that in order for the foreign state to be entitled to immunity under the Art Museum Amendment, it must be the owner or custodian of the art work at issue, and the President must have determined that the work is of cultural significance and that the temporary exhibition or display of such work is in the national interest pursuant to the Protection from Seizure Act (22 U.S.C. 2459(a)).

So?

Russia’s Amber Room, stolen by the Nazis.
Source: The Daily Mail

The Art Museum Amendment includes two exceptions which significantly undercut the protections afforded to foreign sovereigns, and the second of which may have ramifications beyond cases involving the loaning of art.   The first exception is for “Nazi-Era Claims.”  This exception (FCEJCA § 2(A)) to the Art Museum Amendment (which is itself an exception to the expropriation exception in FSIA), allows claims to go forward under the expropriation exception notwithstanding FCEJCA § 1 if they allege the work was taken in violation of international law by Germany (or a government of European territory occupied by German or any government that was a European ally of Germany) between 1933 and 1945.  The allegations in Malevich would not come within the Nazi-Era Claims Exception because the confiscation occurred in 1958, and thus that case would have been barred under the Art Museum Amendment. Many other potential cases could come within the Nazi-Era exception, however, because the Nazis and affiliated governments confiscated lots and lots of art.

The second exception (FCEJCA § (2)(B)) allows claims to go forward if they allege that the “work was taken in connection with the acts of a foreign government as part of a systematic campaign of coercive confiscation or misappropriation of works from members of a targeted and vulnerable group.”   This exception—not part of earlier versions of FCEJCA—is unclear in scope.

The Malevich case motivated this new law, “… which held that activity related to the loan of artwork to U.S. museums was “commercial activity” under FSIA § 1605(a)(3).” The Nazi-era Claims exception potentially covers, of course, a tremendous amount of art work, as the barbarians tried to dress themselves up in others’ good taste.

In any case, it’s hard to get worked up over the first exception, as it’s only justice to return the art work to the owners. In fact, in some ways this is easier to accept than the “cultural patrimony” problems of museums holding artifacts from other nations, which then lodge lawsuits against them for return of those artifacts, regardless of how they were acquired.

North Carolina is facing a special election for a number of the districts in North Carolina due to a court ruling that the newly drawn districts are heavily gerrymandered. State Senator Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, has a web site for coordinating and recruiting on the blue side of the equation. The site includes this interesting tidbit:

North Carolina State Senate Districts

It’s important to understand that the GOP supermajorities in our state legislature are not the result of the GOP’s popularity, but are rather the result of the extreme gerrymandering they conducted while implementing the new districts in 2011.

In short, they were in charge of drawing the districts, and they drew them to pack as many Republicans into the state legislature as possible. As one of them recently said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

The justification seems mundane, doesn’t it? I’d like to suggest otherwise. Anyone with a sense of history is well aware that our majority parties have changed positions, compositions, and entire philosophies over time. The GOP of Lincoln would not recognize the GOP of today – and ditto the Democrats. Gerrymandering ignores the possibility that tomorrow it could favor the Democrats.

Either they’re idiots or …

… they believe their party has achieved a certain static purity. Perhaps they do. Remember Goldwater’s warning¹. Consider his warning in conjunction with English Royal history. His words are prophetic and frightening. And, from the outside, there seems to be a congruency between his warning and the North Carolina GOP’s behaviors.

In either case, the assertion that gerrymandering is for the good of the country is laughable, as neither party has a lock on wisdom. That’s why compromise is the watch-word of American politics – and why such zealots as the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party tend to repulse the majority of Americans.

While the immediate challenge for the North Carolina Democrats is obvious, the long term challenge is more important. When – not if, but when, whether it’s now or ten years from now – they win power, it is important to their survival, and the well-being of North Carolina, that they govern fairly. Will they be capable of doing so?

It depends on who runs & wins seats in the North Carolina legislature, doesn’t it? If you’re a citizen of North Carolina and find this post agreeable, perhaps you should investigate Senator Jackson’s proposals at the above link.

¹For your convenience:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them. – Barry Goldwater

Daniel Byman discusses the advantages and disadvantages of fighting “radical Islam” vs named groups on Lawfare. I found this interesting:

Indeed, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are only two jihadist groups among many. Al Qaeda has affiliates throughout the Middle East that work with the mother movement, at least fitfully. Similarly, the Islamic State claims “provinces” in other countries, with some, such as the one in Libya, having close ties to the Syria-Iraq core while others, like that in Nigeria, are far more removed. In addition, there are unaffiliated groups like Ansar-e Sharia in Libya or Ahrar al-Sham in Syria, which may not be subordinate to either the Islamic State or Al Qaeda but are still violent and anti-American. Individuals from one group often flow to another depending on opportunity, circumstances, and relative prestige.

The label “Radical Islam” also brings in a range of individuals and actors that do not neatly fit one group or another and may even move back and forth among the bodies in the broader jihadist universe. In particular, this might include “lone wolves”—individuals who are not under the direct control of a terrorist group but are inspired to act by its message. Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, was not really a member of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, yet he was a jihadist terrorist. For the United States in particular, these lone wolves have proven the biggest terrorism danger to the U.S. homeland in recent years.

The problem, of course, is that the label “Radical Islam” is so big as to be confusing, meaningless, or even contradictory. Much of the issue concerns what “radical” means.

While there is an advantage to using “radical Islam” as your target, once you’ve nailed down the meaning of the term, the problem is that nail and the meaning – it’s rather like Jello. Soon everyone’s shouting that this group and that group must be radical Islam, but not that other.

So when President Obama chose to use the names of groups rather than a categorical designation, he was carefully delimiting the targets to hit, which decreased the likelihood of a “civilizational war” quite a bit, and also made it less likely that we’d hit and kill people who had not attacked us – but fell under some queasy definition of “radical Islam”. By naming groups, the discussion becomes far more concrete and easy to conclude properly.

This all comes at the expense of having to identify and name multiple targets, but the incremental cost isn’t enormous – and keeps our allies happy in the region.

Two, actually.

Analemma & Nonalemma:

If you took a picture of the sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the figure-8 shape traced out by the sun over the course of a year is called an “analemma.” Over the years, many photographers have created analemmas.  In 2016, however, Steven Riegel of Colorado Springs CO took it up a notch.  He photographed the sun 9 times a day, creating the rare nonalemma …  [SpaceWeather.com]

There’s a great pic at the link.

Response to Andrew Reynold’s research on North Carolina’s election system has been published by Andrew himself, again in The News & Observer: The salient points:

A few respondents wrote, “America is a republic, not a democracy.” A ha! They gloated, end of argument: We need not abide by democratic principles because we are a constitutional republic. Coincidentally, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest shouted this at a protester at the General Assembly on December 15. I am not sure if I am in awe of the chutzpah, or appalled at the level of ignorance. Saying the USA is not a democracy because it is a republic is like saying, ‘that’s not a dog, it’s a Labrador Retriever.’ About two thirds of the world’s full democracies are republics, the rest constitutional monarchies. They are all representative democracies, not direct ones – even accepting that the Swiss like a referendum every now and then.

The second criticism was, ‘two wrongs make a right.’ Democrats had abused their power when in office so it’s fair that Republicans abuse power now. It’s certainly true that historically both Democrats and Republicans have been culpable in democracy’s decline but it is also true that in North Carolina recently the Republicans have been most egregious in their contempt for democratic principles. The fact that both parties manipulate elections for partisan gain and wring as much power as they can from their turns in office has caused our institutions to atrophy and ugly polarization to seize the public sphere.

Ah, experts and their expertise, eh? The critics sally forth and, convinced they’ve won the battle, drag their battered bodies, limbs bedewed with that rosy substance, so critical to their existence, back to their castles, from whence they fly pennants of victory and declare It’s merely a flesh wound, and I’ve destroyed that scoundrel.

Yeah. Monty Python would not be amused, either.

So neither side has clean hands. Here’s the thing: Independents are not looking to see which side can more effectively use their advantages to secure their position, but rather Who can effectively govern in a fair manner? Don’t these guys wonder why they’re on a seesaw, rather than in an impenetrable keep? Treating the government as a prize to be ravished, rather than a responsibility to be handled with honor, leaves the ravishers with dishonor on their names and on their supporters, for the zealots who elect people who they know are corrupt or incompetent or off in a land of their own, but boy are they team players, well, they are as guilty of the high crimes and misdemeanors as are those who they supported, rabble-roused for, and elected. (My thoughts on politics as a team sport here.) I do not refer to the casual voter, but to the Party hack who places Party over State under the mistaken belief that politics is a team sport and whoever is anointed had better be your pick, too.

In the future, the names of the GOP legislators will not be venerated, but instead cursed. Does this make them happy?

For better or worse, we just had an election like that, and we’re about to learn the lesson of politics is a team sport. Let’s hope we can recover from the resultant gonorrhea.

Remember Rep. Franks, he who thinks the crime of breaking into a campaign’s computers isn’t all that important? CNN reports his backstep over the weekend:

But in an interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto on “Wolf,” Franks argued that he has been a harsh critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime and that his comment was misinterpreted.

“Those comments were completely misconstrued,” Franks told Sciutto, adding that “nobody has been harder on Russian than me.”

Franks did not elaborate further on how his comment had been misunderstood.

Which doesn’t satisfy Steve Benen, who thinks he has some uncomfortable questions for the Rep:

I’d still love to hear answers to the questions I asked last week:

1. If Mexico had broken into RNC computers and Paul Manafort’s email to steal materials, embarrass Republicans, and help put Hillary Clinton in the White House, would Trent Franks have a cavalier attitude about international espionage?

2. If Franks’ own system were targeted in a cyber-attack during his re-election campaign, and his foes published genuine materials stolen from his computer to help elect his opponent, would he be equally quick to declare that the “bottom line” is that the hackers gave voters “information that was accurate”?

But I really think, in view of this WaPo editorial that Steve cites in another post, that Steve’s missed a big, juicy bet. How about this?

If a news organization actively broke into Trump’s personal papers and the IRS computers and found incriminating evidence that Russian governmental forces subverted the elections in a way that clearly favored Trump (and Franks), with Trumps’ knowledge, would Franks still advance these arguments?

Or are they really just self-serving?

Maybe a news organization should try just to find out how honest Rep. Franks is on the subject.

At least if you’re not an American. Look at this Gallup poll:

(The Clinton column refers to Bill, not Hillary.) It’s not completely unexpected, of course, for a President who lost the popular vote by nearly 3%, to inspire a lack of confidence. But I think of particular interest is the question concerning working with Congress. Does this extraordinarily low expectation for a GOP President working with a GOP Congress reflect the average American’s recognition that Trump is hard to predict? Does it indicate that voters expect Trump to defend Medicare and possibly even the ACA against a determined assault by Speaker of the House Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell?

Collectively, these numbers amount to a measure of buyer’s remorse. If they go up, then there’s very little; if they go down, then even those who voted for Trump are regretting it. While it’s not clear if Trump is cannily playing his cards close to his vest, or if he’s dropped them on the floor and is too embarrassed to admit it, this is the sort of comparative poll results which should be a caution to Trump supporters: he may have been convincing to you, but to most Americans he’s not. And unlike most elections, where Americans evaluated positions and strategies advanced by the candidates, the latest was about a whole lot of voters buying into promises. No strategies, no positions, just promises. That’s a sea-change in how we elect Presidents. I don’t expect it to turn out well, but we shall see.

“Hey, there’s a copper. Ah, I’m not even illegal.”

“OK, so do some erratic weaving.”

“‘Sorry, officer, I was trying for a raven but it turned out to be a beaver.'”

>embarrassed silence<

Returning to this thread, MinnPost published an article by Ibrahim Hirsi on robotics in Minnesota in November of 2016. Amongst the observations was this:

[University of Minnesota robotics and AI professor Maria] Gini says that robots are mostly filling specific occupations that don’t require skills or are too dangerous for humans — positions that employers have long struggled to fill. In the car industry, for instance, robots have taken over most of the soldering and painting jobs. “These were well-paying jobs, but not really nice jobs for people,” Gini added. “But painting cars is dangerous; you’re living on fumes. So robots are replacing those kind of jobs.”

[Todd Bauernfeind, president of Summit Machine] added that companies mostly don’t bring in automation to get rid of people. Instead, they repurpose them to do other tasks. “I’m seeing it saving their jobs because the end product has become more competitive in the marketplace,” he said. “And if they didn’t do that, they risk losing the whole factory.”

Not everybody has such a rosy view of automation, of course. Matt Ehling, a Minnesota-based media producer who has written on the subject, said that many of the manufacturing jobs that have been lost in recent years have been lost to automation. “With the advent of more capable automation such as artificial intelligence software that can be trained to perform multiple, complex cognitive tasks, intellectual labor is now at risk of being automated,” Ehling said.

I find striking the contrast of the viewpoint of Ehling vs those of Gini and Bauernfeind. Ehling’s is a static view of the workplace, where jobs are replaced with little concept as to where the workers go, while the other viewpoint takes more of a resource viewpoint – the robots take over the repetitive & dangerous jobs, and the people who were filling those jobs can now move to other jobs at the same employer where they can use both their creativity and their domain knowledge to improve the company. And there’s room for both viewpoints because employers who are moving to automation will land all over the spectrum, as their wisdom and needs vary.

The latter viewpoint is what a libertarian would expect to hear, and would rejoice in, and I do find it interesting. As a knowledge worker, it doesn’t sound that bad, either – but I have to keep in mind the general anti-intellectualism gripping the United States these days. In this atmosphere, too often we hear this disdain for experts, for education, for learning in general. People get out of high school or get their college degree, and once they’re working, they don’t want to have to learn entire new subjects. Too often it’s unaffordable. (And then horror stories like these come tripping along.)

And if they’re working 40+ hour works (more likely 50+), it’s hard not to sympathize. Given the staggering amounts of entertainment available, coming home exhausted and plopping down in front of the computer or TV and enjoying some common cultural activity – being part of society, no matter how passive – is tempting for anyone who’s not on the autism spectrum.

In a previous post I mentioned the Bears Ears proposal to create a new national monument, and now Meteor Blades on The Daily Kos reports that President Obama has declared Bears Ears to be a new national monument. The proclamation is here, with this taste of it:

Source: Native News Online

Rising from the center of the southeastern Utah landscape and visible from every direction are twin buttes so distinctive that in each of the native languages of the region their name is the same: Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe, or “Bears Ears.” For hundreds of generations, native peoples lived in the surrounding deep sandstone canyons, desert mesas, and meadow mountaintops, which constitute one of the densest and most significant cultural landscapes in the United States. Abundant rock art, ancient cliff dwellings, ceremonial sites, and countless other artifacts provide an extraordinary archaeological and cultural record that is important to us all, but most notably the land is profoundly sacred to many Native American tribes, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray, Hopi Nation, and Zuni Tribe.

The area’s human history is as vibrant and diverse as the ruggedly beautiful landscape. From the earliest occupation, native peoples left traces of their presence. Clovis people hunted among the cliffs and canyons of Cedar Mesa as early as 13,000 years ago, leaving behind tools and projectile points in places like the Lime Ridge Clovis Site, one of the oldest known archaeological sites in Utah. Archaeologists believe that these early people hunted mammoths, ground sloths, and other now-extinct megafauna, a narrative echoed by native creation stories. Hunters and gatherers continued to live in this region in the Archaic Period, with sites dating as far back as 8,500 years ago.

The proclamation goes on for quite a while, describing the resources being brought under protection, and is the first such proclamation I’ve read – although I admit to not having a great deal of patience for it.

Meteor Blades is worried:

However, some foes of the designations hope to reverse them when the Trump regime takes office in January. They argue that Obama has abused the executive authority granted by the act. What they mean is they don’t like the law because it limits where and how private parties can make big bucks off public land.

No president ever has retracted a monument designated by a predecessor, and the courts have several times backed up executive authority in the matter, beginning with the case of Cameron vs. United States in 1920. But given the kind of renegade reinterpretation a Trumpian judiciary could take, there’s no certainty that stare decisis will keep an existing presidentially declared monument from being unproclaimed. …

Environmentalists—like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) that has for decades been seeking protection for Bears Ears—and the five tribal governments of the Inter-Tribal Coalition are elated by the Bears Ears decision. But there is no joy in the all-Republican Utah congressional delegation or the governor’s mansion. That’s so even though the president reduced the monument from the 1.9 million acres backers had sought. Indeed, there are Republican plans—which were in the works well before the president’s announcement—to overturn monument status for the site once Obama leaves office.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Trump tries to withdraw the proclamation. Meanwhile, I missed this article from Utah Public Radio on dissenting Navajo chapters back in May 2016:

With help from the organization Sutherland Institute, members of two chapters of the Navajo Nation have released a video in opposition to a plan that asks President Obama to use the U.S. Antiquities Act to declare 1.9 million acres of tribal area lands as a national monument.

In a YouTube video, members of the Aneth and the Olijato chapter of the Navajo Nation said turning Bears Ears into a national monument could keep them from accessing roads and resources important to their traditions.

The report also comes with recorded interviews with native people against the then-proposed national monument. For context, Wikipedia tells me the Sutherland Institute is a conservative think tank opposed to bigger government.

Native News Online does not mention any native peoples opposition in their report:

There have been over 80 years of various efforts to protect the Bears Ears region, beginning with former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in 1936 and by Members of Congress, state, local and tribal leaders, and conservation groups in recent decades. Most recently the Hopi Nation, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray, and Zuni Tribe developed a proposal to protect the area, and U.S. Representatives Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz introduced the Public Lands Initiative, legislation that included a similar protection proposal for the Bears Ears landscape. Today’s action responds to both of these recent proposals, recognizing the areas where there is broad agreement about the need for protections, tribal engagement, and allowances for historical uses such as grazing. Today’s action also establishes a process for developing a management plan that will ensure robust opportunities for all interested stakeholders to provide input about how the monument should be managed.

Indeed, this rather bland report makes it seem as if Chaffetz’ proposal is much like the final national monument designation. I wonder how he’d feel about that. I know even less about Native News Online than I do about the Sutherland Institute.

quiff:

The quiff is a hairstyle that combines the 1950s pompadour hairstyle, the 1950s flattop, and sometimes a mohawk. The hairstyle was a staple in the British ‘Teddy Boy‘ movement, but became popular again in Europe in the early 1980s and faced a resurgence in popularity during the ’90s. [Wikipedia]

Seen on The Crux during a discussion of the use of lasers for investigation of fossilized soft tissue remains:

Psittacosaurus in all its strange glory. (Credit: Vinther et al., 3D Camouflage in an Ornithischian Dinosaur, Current Biology (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.cub.2016.06.065)
Via The Crux.

We now know about the colors of fossil feathers because they contain melanin—the same pigment that colors our eyes, skin and hair. But some dinosaurs preserve the fossilized remains of skin, and an exceptional species is Psittacosaurus, a small and early ancestor of Triceratops. One specimen, housed at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, not only preserves a weird bristly tail quiff, but also the remains of its flesh.

The Crux of Discover Magazine publishes Jon Tennant’s report of the use of lasers on fossils, and how they can reveal the soft tissue chemistry of the original creature – and when a fossil has actually been assembled from several creatures:

When the team fired its laser at a Microraptor specimen, from the fossil graveyards of Liaoning, China, it lit up like a galaxy. What to the human eye appears as a rather mashed-up bird on a boring slab of rock, LSF transforms into a psychedelic horror show. Intriguingly, the skull of this particular specimen fluoresces in a way that suggests it could be a composite, with part of the skull added from another specimen.

A skull composite? The Microraptor skull under white light, top, shows subtle color differences. Under laser-light stimulation, the bone fluoresces from differences in fossil mineralogy. (Credit: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125923.g013)
(Verbatim from The Crux)

“Tom [Kaye] and I have laser-imaged thousands of dinosaur fossils and, aside from revealing soft tissue and bone details that were previously ‘invisible’ or unclear, it has helped us to identify potential composite specimens,” says [Mike] Pittman. “In these specimens, we see specific bones or slabs that have fluorescence colors that are amiss from the rest of the specimen. We can then explore further using other instruments (e.g. CT scanning) to confirm if it has been compiled from the parts of several specimens.”

In all fairness, I have used fraud in a slightly unfair manner. Not all fossils are embedded in rock, and even those that are quite often come from disarticulated skeletons; assemblage must be a bit of a guessing game if they come from a bone bed (i.e., area where more than one carcass was located). On the other hand, there have been documented cases of fraud, often by locals who find the fossils and assemble them in such a way as to intrigue fossil hunters – and induce them to pay more.

And it’s a great picture.

Going to the original article at PLOS ONE, I found this interesting discussion of one specimen:

Figure 6 from the article. “Unidentified Liaoning fossil specimen.
An unidentifiable specimen from a Liaoning rock slab containing a Microraptor specimen (LVH 0026). No diagnostic bones are visible on the specimen surface, but laser penetration into the matrix induced fluorescence in multiple teeth and scales, making the identification of a fish possible. Scale bar 1 cm. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125923.g006″

A very small specimen (Fig 6) was discovered on the same slab as a Microraptor specimen (Theropoda: Dromaeosauridae [20]) discovered in Liaoning province, China (LVH 0026). The visible bones were not sufficient to identify the specimen, so it was submitted for laser analysis as a last resort. Laser fluorescence identified the specimen as a fish within minutes. In this case the hydroxyapatite in the bones and teeth fluoresced at a higher intensity than the surrounding matrix. The higher intensity fluorescent reaction of the specimen, in comparison to the matrix, revealed teeth below the surface and transparent scales on the surface that were virtually invisible in reflected light (Fig 7). Note that the bone fragment on the right in Fig 7 actually lies under the scale. Laser fluorescence of the formerly translucent scale shows enough detail to count the scale’s growth rings.

Figure 7. From the article. ” Details enhanced with laser fluorescence.
A, White light photo. B, Fluoresced with a 457 nm blue laser. Fish scale on the surface is translucent and barely perceivable under white light. Growth rings on the scale are revealed under fluorescence and can be counted. Bone fragments are brought out in sharp detail. Arrows point to teeth in the matrix. Scale bar 0.5 mm. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125923.g007″

The article notes that the laser can penetrate slightly into the matrix, revealing buried fossils and fossil fragments. Fascinating!

The thought of repealing the ACA has excited readers:

So that’s a problem — even people who benefit from the ACA don’t know what’s in it. All doctors and hospitals are mad about the shrinking Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, but those are really important price controls for ALL of us. Yes, those controls were built into the ACA legislation, but it’s only for Medicare/Medicaid, it’s not like private insurance is using those rates. Yet.

IMO the problem is that the medical industry (doctors and hospitals) wants to deal exclusively with the wealthy and healthy, or the government funded, and maximize their per patient dollar intake. The insurance industry wants maximum rates and minimum expenditure (thus your high deductible plan, for which you pay several hundred dollars a month and have such a high deductible that you won’t go to the dr unless you think you are actually dying). We should not be surprised by this. it is exactly how a for profit system should work.

But somewhere in there we’ve lost the idea of public health, and the patient’s well being….

Right. We pay on a procedure basis, not on an outcome basis. We have lemon laws for cars, and general guarantees that merchandise does what’s advertised and doesn’t endanger the consumer’s health – why not the same for medicine? Answer: Medicine is harder. Still, we need to find ways to encourage medical activity that benefits the patient without regard to how it benefits the provider, because in a for-profit environment the two are, in the natural state, at cross-purposes. Another:

All that and more[]. I’d like to think there are a lot of doctors and nurses who actually do care about their patients and want to do good. But most of them work for for-profit businesses, clinics and hospitals, and those business folks drive the policies and bottom line.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry tries to squeeze as much money as possible out of both the patient and the doctor. Most docs have network agreements with insurers, who then provide financial incentives which are based on minimized the per-member per-month cost to the insurer. That is, the doctors get paid more when they see more patients for the same fixed costs. You can imagine where that leads.

Which sounds an awful lot like using private sector methods in another sector – with what is becoming an increasingly predictable bad outcome.

Today I chose to read, for the first time, the farewell speech of President Eisenhower. For younger readers, General Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and receives a lot of credit for the victory over the Nazis. Later, he served as President from ’53 to ’61, personally seeing to the end of the Korean conflict at the beginning of his first term, while articulating the domino theory of Communistic encroachment near the end of his second term, as Vietnam came to the forefront. While the Cold War intensified during his terms, it did not erupt into a hot war, and he made several gestures of peace.

There’s a reason the current GOP does not reference him as a former Republican President, and this is because his intra-party foes would appear to have won the Party. From Wikipedia:

As the 1954 congressional elections approached, and it became evident that the Republicans were in danger of losing their thin majority in both houses, Eisenhower was among those blaming the Old Guard for the losses, and took up the charge to stop suspected efforts by the right wing to take control of the GOP. Eisenhower then articulated his position as a moderate, progressive Republican: “I have just one purpose … and that is to build up a strong progressive Republican Party in this country. If the right wing wants a fight, they are going to get it … before I end up, either this Republican Party will reflect progressivism or I won’t be with them anymore.”

He would share little with the current GOP leaders. I suspect it would be fair to say that today’s GOP is nothing like the party of Eisenhower’s day.

Given his record of military and political service, it’s fit to see him as a man with a great deal of experience who applied it successfully, and thus his famous farewell speech is worth a review. He addresses issues important not only to his day, but to the future of the country; and he does so with brevity. For this post, as I’ve already referenced the current GOP, I’ll quote a relevant part of his speech.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

This cautionary passage reflects the awareness that our avarice, enhanced by the dominance of a free enterprise private sector, and lack of awareness of tomorrow in those who are immature, can lead to disaster when our resources are mismanaged in pursuit of instant profit. Today we see this in the clamor of the quarterly report within the private sector, as CEOs of public companies, in pursuit of their own aggrandizement, manipulate customers and markets in order to satisfy investors, who otherwise will flee at the least sign of disappointment. The stampede at a report of being 1% below the predictions of the self-appointed market watchers can be deafening, and in fact such institutions as The Motley Fool make a living advising investors to take advantage of the foolish herd.

But, and more importantly, is a literal reading of the passage and its application to today. The struggle over the importance of nature vs commercial concerns can be seen in locations as diverse as coal country, where mountains are literally beheaded in search of the poisonous stuff, to the frigid reaches of Alaska, to North Dakota, where the local American Indians are menaced in the banal name of money, to the frigid reaches of Alaska, where the right to drill for oil is tussled over, and the cries of the free market advocates ring woodenly in the ears of those who will need to clean up after them, should they win through to victory.

And then, of course, we’re lead to ask the question: would President Eisenhower have accepted the climate change hypothesis?

Eisenhower was well aware of the value of expertise. Indeed, his Cabinet selection process reflects this:

After selecting his budget director, Joseph M. Dodge, Eisenhower asked Herbert Brownell and Lucius Clay to make recommendations for his cabinet appointments. He accepted their recommendations without exception; they included John Foster Dulles and George M. Humphrey with whom he developed his closest relationships, and one woman, Oveta Culp Hobby.

In short, Eisenhower picked those who had the expertise which he didn’t have, and let them run with it. Scientists are definitionally experts in their fields, and better yet, within the domain of science, which encourages debate while pursuing the recognition of the truths of reality; Eisenhower would have accepted their judgments and begun the strategic planning necessary to bring the nation safely through this crisis.

Senator Inhofe (R-OK) disproves global climate change using his credentials as a life insurance executive.

And he wouldn’t have had the time, or any respect for, those willing to place personal avarice or ideology over the educated, experienced opinion of the experts. A man of immense experience in service, and having been born in 1890, very experienced in the immense volatility of markets, free or not, he would be well aware that the “perfection” of the free market to solve all matters is a self-serving myth, and that government, as in war, has a leading part to play in resolving a crisis. That, in fact, one of its designated roles, to foresee, forestall, and manage crises.

Not to deny them.