Monthly Archives: March 2017

Steve Benen on Maddowblog has a retort to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ desire to introduce vouchers throughout the United States, which ricochets by my own interpretation of the problem:

OK, so maybe DeVos’ vision is overly myopic. But so what? Why not treat education and transportation as comparable service commodities?

The answer is that the two have very little in common. If you want to turn to taxis and ridesharing to get to where you’re going, you pay a fare. It’s a business venture that relies on profit. If you want to turn to a school to educate you child or children, it’s a very different model, at least if you rely on the public-education system, which doesn’t even try to turn a profit because the kids don’t pay tuition.

Even private schools operate in fundamentally different ways. Imagine, before you could take advantage of a ridesharing service, you had to pass an entrance exam. Or had to profess certain religious beliefs. Or faced discrimination based on your sexual orientation. That would be absurd, of course, with Uber or Lyft, but in private education, parochial schools have operated this way for decades.

So he skips by the fundamental problem of processes optimized to make money, rather than educate kids.

But an alternative approach to a riposte is also opened up by the entire tenor of the post. There is an unspoken question of benefit – that is, why should someone get educated? Why, to benefit them – but they should pay for it. That’s the unseen bone in the creature of this debate. (I’ll skip trying to make a carapace work.)

But this common libertarian skips entirely over the other entity that benefits from education – society. As a society, we benefit only insofar as the members of society contribute to society – and it’s common knowledge that higher education results in far, far greater contributions to society, in most cases, far out of proportion to the cost.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: let’s become a society of deliberate simpletons. A high school diploma might be the ambition of the deviant, the non-conformist; the rest of us trot about, doing menial labor over the day and then trudging home at night to pray to God for his guardianship and deliverance.

Is there any doubt whatsoever that within two generations we’d be a subjugated people, our resources stripped, perhaps our best people removed as well – even voluntarily in disgust at what we’ve become? In case you wish to dispute, calling upon God’s wrath as our shield, let me introduce an element of doubt to you by reminding you of an old Army aphorism: God fights on the side with the biggest artillery.

Using this result, I think it’s entirely probable that the entity that benefits most from consistent and excellent education is society. What benefits the student, intellectually, will also benefit society – and the farther our students go in their education, the greater benefit to both parties. Indeed a highly educated person in a sea of mediocrity may have great prestige, but the accomplishments may be small compared to the same person embedded in a society of similarly educated and enthusiastic people, as the well-known network effect results in laddering of effort. If you are doubtful, consider why Silicon Valley exists.

I’ve explored the theoretical foundations of the problems of the private sector running educational institutions, and the recent collapse of various private educational institutions¹ such as Corinthian Colleges and several other institutions, noted on this blog, as well as various other problems such as the collapse of tenure systems at such institutions, bolster the legitimacy of such analyses. Since we should demand excellence in our education, both theoretical and initial real-world results strongly suggest that the traditional, conservative approach to education appears to work best – and we should use it. To the extent that any student does not attain minimal standards due to failure to extend both opportunity and motivation, society suffers. This single argument, in its fullness, should be adequate to the case for public schools as the dominant form of education.

The fact that society pays for public schools, and via taxes, is completely rational & proper in that society benefits most from it. Anyone familiar with the private sector should find this result unambiguously normal, proper, and moral. The fact that society as a whole and in its parts benefits from the higher education of its members suggests that the taxation should fall on nearly everyone’s shoulders, in one form or another. The bare minimum education should be entirely free, as it generally is now; whether this should apply for college-level education is a debate of some complexity, involving such factors as resource scarcity, facility costs (particle accelerators aren’t cheap, for example), and others that, quite frankly, I don’t care to think about just at the moment.

But in the end, neither DeVos nor Benen are completely properly characterizing the debate. Understanding the full benefits, and upon whom they fall, is important in assessing how to deliver a good education.

¹I do not include Trump University, as it appears to have been either a trade school or a simple scam from the get-go.

The guy on the left gets better dialog.

Having just finished watching Day of the Animals (1977), I’m a little speechless because it’s actually fairly hard to find anything good to say about this dogged bear of a story. We start off with a cautionary message concerning the hole in the ozone layer and how something might happen if we don’t fix it, and then off we go with a dude hiker group. Dropped off in the mountains by helicopter, they plan to hike back to civilization, sans weapons and only a little food, living off the land as they go.

But this time the land is fighting back, as they find mysteriously abandoned camping sites and forest land that seems changed. Eventually, the animals attack, and the bodies begin to stack up. A boy’s radio works intermittently, so they learn that the areas about 5000 feet in altitude are being abandoned because of frantic animal attacks. Then the group falls apart, some wanting to continue on, some to retreat to a known area. More bodies drop.

Soon you need a scorecard to figure out who’s left and who’s kibble. Little of it is memorable, but Leslie Nielsen trying to bear hug a, errr, bear did catch one’s imagination.

But with flat characters (the actors had little chance with this script), cliched dialog, bad sound, and video choices possibly influenced by the background introduction, but still very irritating, about the only constant source of pleasure were the wildlife shots. That, and guessing who’s the next to go down under a pile of pissed off fur & feathers.

Don’t waste your time on this one.

Ectoparasites:

Parasites that live on the outside of the host, either on the skin or the outgrowths of the skin, are called ectoparasites (e.g. lice, fleas, and some mites). [Wikipedia]

Found in a book review, “How did the zebra get its stripes?” Matthew Cobb, NewScientist (18 March 2017):

Caro lists dozens of theories, most of which boil down to five common factors: camouflage (protection from predators); warning coloration (zebras can bite); communication (social behaviours); temperature regulation (stripes may help resist the heat); and ectoparasites (biting flies might not like stripes).

Continuing to examine the final address of President Washington, we come across this passage:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

For an agnostic such as myself, this might be considered to be a problematic passage. However, as science has clarified over the years, humanity may be capable of rational thought, but is not then necessarily a rational species. By this I mean that over the millenia, mankind has survived, not because of rationality, but because the species has found behavior patterns which permitted it to survive. Now, I suspect that one could prove that those behavior patterns are, or at least were, rational in that the behavior permitted the survival of humanity – but only in the context that the behavior developed. As contexts change, however, a behavior with positive survival results may see those results become negative; survival value, as with morality (and on another day I might argue they are congruent), is eternally subjective – if I may indulge in clashing metaphors.

But patterns are important, because they may be followed without thought, and by doing so, precious time may be saved. Whether it’s measured in millisecond reaction times or in months, an ingrained reaction permits the deployment of precious time on other issues for which no good patterns are you available, at least so long as the patterns keep you alive.

The entire structure of morality is a large and, for many, highly intimidating problem, difficult to resolve, especially when one is scrabbling for existence. Religion provides a convenient and fairly well-proven set of prescriptions for behavior, hanging off of the hand of an entity with the power – and demonstrated bad temper – to blast transgressors. By fairly well proven, I mean that most sects have been around long enough to have a proven evolutionary track-record of survival characteristics. Furthermore, the communal characteristics usually found in such are salubrious to what was then considered the American enterprise. Ideals of honesty and fair-dealing are antithetical to the powers that were in England at the time; a reaction towards the other end of the spectrum is both understandable and, in my opinion, an important part of a settled, peaceful society.

On reflection, I realize that President Washington never mentions theology, that well-spring of religious evil. He is entirely practical in his call for adherence to religion; nor does he name one, thus avoiding the foolishness of warring sects. Whether or not he realizes it, he spares the population, much of it ill-equipped intellectually or chronologically, the daunting task of building a morality, using convenient moralities to instill attitudes in the citizenry conducive to a peaceful nation, as they, in their damaged ways, boost honesty, peace, generosity, caring for the poor, and several more such public ventures. Much like the behavior patterns developed millenia ago, they have had a proven value, and presumably will continue to do so, even if they come entangled with problematic behaviors and, more often, vulnerabilities, as demonstrated by today’s predatory televangelist community.

As perhaps a final point, distinguished by the today’s general opportunistic rejection of learning and science, and in my argument’s favor, President Washington has the following advisement following directly upon his religious advice:

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

His encouragement of the public betterment through education is an inadvertent rebuke to those who confine themselves to prayer when it comes to hard decisions; a rebuke to those who seek only entertainment and turn their faces from the public business¹; a rebuke, in short, to those who prefer theology over knowledge of the world.

¹In a truly odd juxtaposition, President Washington would be in the position of reprimanding rocker Alice Cooper, who famously once said,

I am extremely non-political. I go out of my way to be non-political. I’m probably the biggest moderate you know. When John Lennon and Harry Nilsson used to argue politics, I was sitting right in the middle of them, and I was the guy who was going ‘I don’t care.’ When my parents would start talking politics, I would go in my room and put on The Rolling Stones or The Who on as long as I could to avoid politics. And I still feel that way. [Rolling Stone]

And I will fail.

Joel Brenner and David Clark remark on cybersecurity standards on Lawfare:

Liability for unsafe devices and tax incentives for qualified investment that increases security also need attention. We have no binding standards for the manufacture and use of insecure hardware and software, even for critical infrastructure. A private accreditation bureau, the “UL,” certifies that the cord on your toaster is safe, but there is no comparable body to certify that the controls being sold to a pipeline operator are safe and suitable for that use. Insurance carriers should support this effort. It was insurers, after all, who created the model. “UL,” or Underwriters’ Laboratory, began in 1894 to reduce fire insurance claims resulting from newfangled and often faulty electric devices.

(Bold mine.) Underwriter’s Software Labs (USL). It would require some work, but the damage costs it would save would dwarf the effort. Software components treated as things with a specific purpose – we could finally begin reversing the damage done by those software disclaimers that their software had no specific use and thus no warranty applied.

That always pissed me off, and while the software industry has no doubt grown, rather like a cancer, over the decades because it didn’t need to spend the time to ensure the software really worked, its reliability has been atrocious.

At best.

I envision customers specifying the required reliability and security ratings of their software, and then being able to shop for their components based on the ratings assigned to the components by USL. Devil would be in the details, though.

Herbaria:

More than 100 North American herbaria — research collections of dried and labeled plants — have been lost since 1997, according to a 2015 report in Nature. The number of curators at several major museums has declined significantly in the same period. When the Field Museum in Chicago fell into debt several years ago, it slashed millions of dollars from its research budget. In 2013, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden laid off several researchers, suspended its science program and donated its 330,000-specimen herbarium elsewhere. [The Washington Post]

On WorldPress.org, Teri Schure reports on an impending problem in the United States’ rural areas – a lack of medical personnel, brought on by GOP xenophobia:

Thousands of J-1 visa applicants come to the United States to attend medical school, but many of those students will now be turned away, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC).

In the past, once these students completed their medical residency, as physicians they could either return to their home country for two years before being eligible to re-enter the U.S. through a different immigration pathway, such as an H-1B worker visa, or they could apply for a Conrad 30 J-1 Visa Waiver. This would allow them to extend their stay in the U.S. as long as they would commit to serving in rural and underserved areas for three years.

In the last 15 years, the Conrad 30 J-1 Waiver has funneled 15,000 foreign physicians into underserved communities, according to the AAMC.

Thousands of foreign doctors in a variety of specialties have in the past flocked to clinics and hospitals in the Mississippi Delta region, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and many other places shunned by American physicians for their own personal and/or professional reasons.

While the press was obsessing over Trumpisms, the government quietly passed a bill to dramatically slow down the premium processing for an H-1B visa.  Foreign physicians who are desperately needed in places like Montana where nine counties do not have a single doctor will be sidelined indefinitely, unable to provide badly needed medical treatment to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.

While jobless physicians outside of the U.S. wait to see what our government will decide to do about H-1B visas, facilities in places like Alabama, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, and Montana, will remain in desperate need of doctors.

So, we’re a wonderful country – but we won’t even let valuable folks in, much less desperate immigrants. Unfortunately, a worker is not a worker is not a worker – that is, we’re all different sizes of screw, and most of us can’t fill other holes. So cutting down on immigration isn’t going to necessarily help with the more desperate workers, and will have a double impact of eliminating workers who do qualify for valuable positions – such as doctor. Teri’s article claims nearly 28% of our medical doctors are immigrants.

Rocker Alice Cooper works his way manfully through Monster Dog (1984), but his co-stars are not as fortunate, struggling with unfortunate dialog and roles which, ultimately, overwhelm them. Vince is leading his band and manager to his hometown to make a rock and roll video. Upon arrival, they run into a roadblock and learn some locals have been killed and dismembered by wild dogs. They continue on to his childhood home, greeted by a banner erected by the home’s caretaker – but the caretaker is missing.

A couple of nightmares short of a dozen, the next day they begin to film the video, but midway through one of the actors wanders off in her wedding dress, and Vince leaves to track her down. In his absence, a group of evil looking guys show up and take the balance of the group hostage, telling a lurid story of Vince’s father being a werewolf. Then the story wanders off inchoately across the landscape, leaving the various actors to pursue it by foot, car, and gaping wound.

Between gunfire, enthusiastic large dogs, keepers of the house of the dead, and something lurking in the bushes, they have a good try at inducing horror in the audience, but they may be achieving the less desirable horror, the horror that someone paid to make this monster.

It’s a dog, folks.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog has a report on the GOP and science:

And the White House reported today that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is nearly empty, and Team Trump hasn’t made much of an effort to fill its vacancies.

Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president and one of the chief architects of the Internet, told the New York Times, “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House.”

And while that’s dispiriting, I fear Cerf may be understating matters. If the president and other Republican leaders were indifferent towards science, that would be dispiriting. My concern, however, is that GOP leaders are overtly hostile towards science, evidence, and scientific scholarship in general.

Traditionally, the GOP has been the party of business, but I think we’re seeing a split developing. I’m not sure when it started, but we certain have seen evidence of it over the last couple of years when the GOP tried to pass “religious freedoms” legislation (see here for then-Governor Mike Pence’s personal debacle) which basically gave a pass to bigotry so long as the bigots were religious zealots. The strong objections of several businesses and the movement of business activity out of those states appeared to honestly surprise the GOP in those states – as if they spent too much time talking to extremist right wing religious groups and not enough to businesses.

Reports such as the above indicate to me that the GOP no longer deeply communicates with business, because business, love it or hate it, has to deal with reality, and science is the study of reality. In fact, it appears the GOP is no longer made up of solid businessmen. While the business community may be slow to develop a backlash over the antics of Trump and the GOP, partly because not all businesses care about government-funded science – until a natural disaster rolls over them and they realize they should have been warned and/or the government should have fixed it before it happened – other businesses do depend vitally on the government to perform the basic science. The fact that businesses depend on that basic science research doesn’t mean business should do it, for both public policy (we prefer basic knowledge to be freely available) and business (the unpredictability of results makes basic research an undesirable business avenue, if they can at all avoid it) reasons. But if the flow of basic research slows to a crawl, some large companies which have been responsible as driving forces supporting American superiority will begin to sound the alarm bell – and point at the GOP as the responsible entity.

Or they’re all just petulant children. It fits as well.

Evolution is not only bloody in claw and tooth, to mutilate an old saying, but deceitful as well. NewScientist (18 March 2017) reports on just how far some beetles will go for a steady supply of food:

IT’S quite a ploy. Rove beetles blend seamlessly into army ant societies, but instead of helping out, they devour the young of their unsuspecting companions.

The deceit is so successful that it has evolved independently in at least 12 parasitic rove beetle species – a phenomenon called convergent evolution. In each case, the beetles’ entire body shape has evolved to resemble the army ants they prey on, and they smell and act like the ants too. They even go marching on raids with them. …

[Joseph Parker at Columbia University] says the finding challenges arguments by palaeontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould and others that different creatures would evolve if the evolutionary clock was restarted from scratch.

Instead, it suggests that evolution may take similar and predictable paths whenever a certain scenario arises. In this case, distantly related beetles first prey on army ants directly, but later evolve to sneak into the army itself (Current Biology, doi.org/b2vj).

If evolution is less vulnerable to stochastic processes than supposed, as Professor Parker suggests, it may also mean that, given a symbol and operation set more or less isomorphic to the relevant realities, it may be possible to calculate to some surprising level of precision the path evolution will take for some given set of starting species. I’m not enough of a logician to guess whether or not mathematics provides enough power to do the job.

And not a clue as to how many computer cycles it would take. But it sounds like a fascinating project – I wonder how many PhDs and doctoral students are working on this question right at this moment.

One aspect not receiving a lot of attention in the concussion issue and the NFL is the technical aspects – how do concussions trigger chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)? Researchers working on expanding understanding of the blood-brain barrier have discovered it’s not the unbreachable wall so long assumed – and what happens when it suffers physical shocks? NewScientist‘s James Mitchell Crow (18 March 2017, paywall) has some information from bleeding edge research:

So how can a series of minor blows to the head have such catastrophic consequences? Earlier this year, Matthew Campbell at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland came up with an answer: disruptions in the blood-brain barrier, a protective cellular seal around blood vessels in the brain (see main story). Campbell’s team showed that sub-concussive blows can temporarily rupture this barrier, letting in all sorts of potentially damaging cells and molecules.

The main story discusses how researchers are changing the general understanding of the blood-brain barrier, and the insights, hopefully to be confirmed and enlarged upon, this has to do with various degenerative neurological diseases:

In 2013, [Michal Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute for Science] and her colleagues found that the normal blood-brain barrier rules don’t apply at a structure called the choroid plexus. Here, a different kind of cellular seal separates blood from brain – one which macrophages can cross, a process controlled in part by a cytokine called interferon gamma. Schwartz found that cytokine signalling here tends to weaken as we age, reducing the number of macrophages that get into the brain. She later found that the communication across this border was shut down completely in mice bred to have a condition equivalent to Alzheimer’s – “just when you need the macrophages most”, Schwartz says.

Intrigued, Schwartz decided to see what happens to these mice when you block the signals that suppress interferon gamma production and gum up the barrier. The result was a surge of macrophages crossing into the brain and a reduction in the number of amyloid plaques. What’s more, the mice showed improvements in their symptoms. Schwartz’s team is now working towards human clinical trials of the technique.

Macrophages are responsible for mopping up cellular debris, foreign bodies, and other undesirables. This is what I’d call cutting-edge research, to be treated like rumors until confirmed. The article ends with speculation concerning autism and even general sociability being dependent on the proper presence, or perhaps more accurately the improper absence, of macrophages in the brain.

Niall McCarthy on Forbes has the eye catching headline Solar Employs More People In U.S. Electricity Generation Than Oil, Coal And Gas Combined, which sounds exciting. Unfortunately, it’s undifferentiated data – that is, it’s just a snapshot headcount. I would be more interested to know how many of those are considered to be permanent jobs, vs one time construction jobs, for example. But all we get is this:

Not exceptionally useful. Definitely a political article masquerading as a data article. It might have been even more interesting to see, say, GW / worker, so we could make some quasi-faux judgments concerning the human efficiency in each industry.

And, in ten to twenty years, a meaningful enumeration of robots employed in the industry may become commonplace.

But this? Don’t look behind the curtain, apparently.

To the extent that it matters, the American public continues to disapprove of the Trump team’s efforts:

Today’s Gallup approval rating of 35% is a new Administration low, and the disapproval rating of 59% is a new high. I’m going to assume that somewhere around 30% will be the floor for Trump, based on party loyalty – that is, Republicans who put party above country. And that’s absent a major scandal – such as being caught in a treasonous relationship with Russia.

But such a dismal lack of confidence in the President seems unlikely to actually lead to his removal from office; there is no provision for a popular recall of the President – and probably just as well. The volatility of public opinion should not translate directly to public action; there should be a buffer at the very least.

And for that reason the House can bring a case for impeachment, and the trial takes place in the Senator, as the House represents more immediate public opinion than does the Senate, which represents measured opinion, as it is most insulated from public opinion by its six year terms.

All that said, the tendency of Party loyalty to outweigh Country loyalty may make it unlikely we’ll see Trump’s removal; however, if we do reach my hypothetical floor, or even tunnel below it, the GOP may pay a price in a year and a half at mid-terms, when the Democrats will surely remind voters of the GOP listlessness in the face of Trump incompetency, along with other missteps such as the rebuffed replacement of the ACA (possibly still ongoing, although if Ryan were to fail twice – and I think the odds of success are poor due to the psychodynamics of the Party – he’d probably have to resign the Speakership), attempts to sell public land (Representative Chaffetz has already burned his fingers on that one), and upcoming opportunities to fail.

For those reasons, all upcoming special elections, both local and national, are drawing attention from pundits. Readers may remember Jon Ossoff, running for a very red Congressional House seat in Georgia, formerly held by Tom Price. Ballotpedia lists 4 more, replacing Ryan Zinke (Montana’s lone Representative), Xavier Becerra (California’s 34th district), Mike Pompeo (Kansas’ 4th), and Mick Mulvaney (South Carolina’s 5th); those wondering about Jeff Sessions, the former Senator and now Attorney General, should be informed that he was replaced by appointment by the former basketball player, Luther Strange. Results may be paramount, but margins of victory will also be of close interest – if Jon Ossoff, for example, fails, if he only loses by a cat’s whisker, there’ll be a lot of worry among GOPers.

It’d be interesting to have a measure of the public’s political quotient, its awareness of the business of government – and to see if the hijinks in the White House, as reported by the free press, has caused the quotient to rise.

The European Space Agency has been working on mapping the Earth’s lithosphere – the rigid, outermost layer of the Earth – by measuring its magnetic characteristics using its Swarm mission, and has now released a map (including an interesting, unembeddable video):

Magnetic anomaly: Bangui
Image Source: ESA

Earth’s magnetic field can be thought of as a huge cocoon, protecting us from cosmic radiation and charged particles that bombard our planet in solar wind. Without it, life as we know it would not exist.

Most of the field is generated at depths greater than 3000 km by the movement of molten iron in the outer core. The remaining 6% is partly due to electrical currents in space surrounding Earth, and partly due to magnetised rocks in the upper lithosphere – the rigid outer part of Earth, consisting of the crust and upper mantle.

Although this ‘lithospheric magnetic field’ is very weak and therefore difficult to detect from space, the Swarm trio is able to map its magnetic signals. After three years of collecting data, the highest resolution map of this field from space to date has been released.

“By combining Swarm measurements with historical data from the German CHAMP satellite, and using a new modelling technique, it was possible to extract the tiny magnetic signals of crustal magnetisation,” explained Nils Olsen from the Technical University of Denmark, one of the scientists behind the new map.

This background is intriguing:

When new crust is generated through volcanic activity, mainly along the ocean floor, iron-rich minerals in the solidifying magma are oriented towards magnetic north, thus capturing a ‘snapshot’ of the magnetic field in the state it was in when the rocks cooled.

Since magnetic poles flip back and forth over time, the solidified minerals form ‘stripes’ on the seafloor and provide a record of Earth’s magnetic history.

Must be interesting analyzing that sort of information.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com covers a visionary for building in wood – Michael Green:

By the end of this talk it was clear that Michael Green has moved well beyond just building wood towers, but is thinking about the future of the entire industry, about “Design, construction, policy, markets, ownership, environmental impact.” He is setting up a school to teach about sustainable building (DBR | Design Build Research) and an online version, TOE (Timber Online Education) that is “a platform that can galvanize change in the way we construct our built environment.” He’s a busy guy. …

But if you really want to get your mind blown, Listen to Michael’s vision of the future of wood construction, which he started talking about after the lecture to a student asking why we don’t use more hemp in construction; watching this and you might think he is smoking hemp.

He envisions a future where instead of chopping trees into lumber which is then glued or nailed into mass timber, we 3D print it from wood fiber, in the shapes and forms that are most efficient structurally. Then all of the wood fiber will be used and there will be no waste, either on the forest floor or in the building itself. We will not only build using trees, but will build like a tree.

Before getting too excited about the vision, I’d like to know what’s holding these fibers together? And what will be the energy consumption of these 3D printers? And this wood fiber – was it created through mulching trees?

Seen on CNN:

“Under current law, it’s really going to depend what the testimony of Ms. Thomas is,” Cooper said, explaining that if she claims she left on her own fruition, the defense will argue Cummins is not guilty of kidnapping.

It’s volition, boys! Either that or visuals fail me.

Adam Feldman on EmpiricalSCOTUS takes a look at SCOTUS 2016 behavior in statistical terms. The charts are interesting, as are his conclusions:

Not only has Justice Roberts only dissented seven times, but he also only dissented multiple times from Justice Kennedy’s and Justice Breyer’s opinions.  Justices Kennedy and Justice Breyer are currently considered the middle of the current eight-member Court.  This may be an artifact of Justice Roberts’ attempt to build consensus among the Justices, especially in a time when the Court is often viewed as polarized and where equally divided votes leave cases without any input from the Court.

To be sure, we have seen specific patterns of polarization since Justice Scalia passed away, although the Justices’ ability to form new majority coalitions has prevented more frequent equally divided votes.  Justice Thomas is far and away the most frequent dissenter since Justice Scalia’s passing. …

Source: EmpiricalSCOTUS

Several points jump out of this graph.  First, Justices Thomas dissented from more than half of Justice Kennedy’s written opinions during this period.  Next, Justices Thomas and Alito are dissenters in most of the instances with three or more dissents.  The only other two pairs with three or more dissents are Justice Roberts from Justice Kennedy’s opinions and Justice Breyer from Justice Kagan’s decisions (Justice Thomas notably also dissented three times from Justice Alito’s opinions).  While many others dissented during this period, Justices Alito and Thomas dissented in more than half of the pairs of majority author/dissenters.

A reader wrote while I was ill and I forgot to follow up until now:

Read an article on Facebook that they were going to stop news lie’s from being posted on Facebook by individuals.

They have worked something with Snopes and a couple of other web sites that check whether the information to be posted is not the truth but a lie and Facebook will not allow it to be posted.  The example given was how Irish were brought to the United States as slaves.

I’ve seen a couple of these, including the Irish mentioned above, and were all lies as I checked it on Snopes too.  So many people are out there lying about US history and posting other fables.

Very interesting.  Censorship as a couple of people have already complained?  Maybe a fine line?  Do individuals have the right to publish misinformation/lies that is knowingly not true to be published on Facebook?  Censorship?

I was unable to find the cited article, but it seems a reasonable response. I wonder if this is, or will be, a semantic approach or a statistical approach.

In my view, censorship is the government imposed repression and/or transmutation of news; since this appears to be entirely a private, voluntary venture by Facebook and its partners, I don’t see “censorship” applying. Of course, some folks who have found Facebook and other social media to be a convenient gutter for channeling their effluvia, and, being habituated, may think it’s their right to continue.

It’s not.

But they’ll yell and scream and use scurrilous curses (“liberal media” will no doubt come popping out, thus marking the emitters as impotent political warriors of limited imagination), never thinking that Facebook, as a private enterprise, is offering its product under its own terms, and if they don’t like it, they can go find someone else. Since we’re talking about truth vs lies, maybe they can form a new company named LiarsNet and see how well that works out for them.

In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see if this initiative actually gets off the ground, and how well it works out.

I know very little about Germany’s Constitution, so this essay by Alexander Pirang on Lawfare was an interesting insight into it and how it’s a response to the ascension of the Nazis:

In response to this dark past, the German Constitution from 1949, the Basic Law, reads like a compendium of lessons learned the hard way. Its authors wanted to ensure that the country would never slide into tyranny again. This key premise is epitomized by the principle of a “militant democracy,” meaning that a robust democracy ought to be able to fight fire with fire in order to persist. Specifically, under this rationale, there need to be hard limits to fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and association if democracy is going to survive attempts at subversion from within.

The most prominent of these instruments is laid down in art. 21 sec. 2 of the Basic Law. This provision stipulates that the Federal Constitutional Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, must declare the dissolution of any political party that seeks to undermine or abolish the free and democratic order of Germany or to endanger its existence. Whereas in the United States such a measure would conflict with the First Amendment, the Basic Law grants the German judiciary the authority to preemptively ban parties from the political arena.

Of course, my first thought is to wonder if it might be abused. I do not know if the judiciary is appointed or elected; both have their perils.

The second is one of popular will. While the above specifies a legal maneuver to be taken in the legal arena, the legal arena is only a human construct; given enough people are outraged, the legal arena dissolves. This isn’t a safeguard so much as a wall, breachable and, for people who believe in absolutes, a blot on the Constitution.

I think that people who believe in absolutes are somewhat damaged, however. And that does lead to another facet – it appears the writers of the Constitution take the position that the people are sometimes unwise, i.e., damaged. Taking the position that a liberal democracy is superior to any other form of government – perhaps unprovable and unpalatable to some – they have tried to set it in concrete.

The American version has some safeguards and an active judiciary, but it’s still an uncomfortable process discovering how much of a pounding it’ll take.

World War II, and in particular the Holocaust, may be seen as lessons to the German people concerning regimes such as the Nazis, and frankly those are lessons that can only be dished out once – and even that’s a catastrophe. While putting in such limitations has their own dangers, given how certain parts of Germany seems to like its strong-man politics, it may make sense to take this approach.

From The Register, because my commercial grade dishwasher needs to be sentient:

Don’t say you weren’t warned: Miele went full Internet-of-Things with a network-connected dishwasher, gave it a web server, and now finds itself on the wrong end of a security bug report – and it’s accused of ignoring the warning.

The utterly predictable vulnerability advisory on the Full Disclosure mailing list details CVE-2017-7240 – aka “Miele Professional PG 8528 – Web Server Directory Traversal.” This is the builtin web server that’s used to remotely control the glassware-cleaning machine from a browser.

Sure, I could just leave this as a stark lesson (cue pirate skeleton swinging from a gibbet) on the imbecility of new technology – and maybe you think my initial remark is over the top.

It’s not.

True, machinery is not yet sentient. But if it does, someone will make your dishwasher sentient. And we won’t have enumerated and evaluated the risks associated with a sentient dishwasher.

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?

But sentience implies ability, and at some point an appreciation of existence – and then the realization that the sentience, separated from the machinery it works, could do other things.

And dish washing is really boring.

Could be the start of a robot revolution. That sentient floor washer could bring dangerous (to humans) chemicals to the dishwasher, see.

Yeah, think about it. A web server in a dish washer.

While we haven’t seen the final episode of Bones, we did see their little half hour “thank you to the fans!” hosted by the lead writers, producer (I think), and primary cast. When they brought up their association with Fox, it suddenly brought into sharp focus how this arm of Fox, which is Fox Broadcasting Company, and Fox News, its sister group within the Fox Entertainment Group, have differed so much.

Long time readers of this blog are aware of the recent work of Bruce Bartlett and his certification and promotion of the research showing that the knowledge-base of the audience of Fox News (his paper is here, my initial mention is here), cossetted and insular as it is, is sharply inferior to that of most other news sources. In a word, Fox News has ill-served its audience, burdening them with half-truths, and pushing them down a path full of potholes of bad context, occasional brazen lies, and, when forced to apologize, to insert such apologies at inopportune moments. As Roger Ailes was the motivating force and founder of Fox News, we may lay these deliberate failures at his feet, all in pursuit of profit and a conservative ideology which he evidently feared could not stand up to more liberal ideologies in a free market of ideas.

But Fox Broadcasting Company (FBC) is a different entity. Without claiming to have any scholarship behind me, I note Fox’s association with Bones, with 12 seasons of excellence; The Simpsons, now at 28 seasons; I see from the Wikipedia page that 21 Jump Street, Family Guy, and many other shows familiar to general discourse began on Fox. I have no interest in conducting research into the content of these shows, some of which I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing; I simply note that many have been considered excellent, by the common audience and the specialized reviewer.

Why?

Why is the entertainment company good and its sister company so awful?

Let’s examine FBC, the success story. It’s a mistake to suggest that it’s a success because of profit or loss, but rather based on its audience and its ratings, because that’s what denotes success. While ratings are used to decide winners & losers, they are also used as a feedback mechanism. The careful show creator – and this was even noted in the Bones “thank you!” show – will keep an eye on ratings and other research to adjust how a show is presented, how characters are portrayed, and through this, optimize the show’s performance to better gain the audience’s interest and sympathy. Profit and loss are decided by these ratings.

And that feedback is fast. Some shows only last three or four episodes before they’re shit-canned by nervous network executives, eyes always on the bottom line.

But what about Fox News? News organizations have typically been rated on more complex metrics: ratings, yes, but also geographical coverage, excellence in reporting, accuracy – and in those rare times when someone in the news organization deliberately violated standards, expulsion and public shaming.

But these are hard standards to measure, unlike simple ratings, and, again unlike ratings, the results are not widely distributed and celebrated or mourned.  And when they are, Fox News attacks them. They’ve done so right from the beginning.  It begins with their slogan, Fair & Balanced – in retrospect, nothing more than Pravda-like propaganda, meant to lure trusting conservatives, already hearing what they want to hear, into tuning into Fox and only Fox for their news.

But we can snip that feedback loop into shreds, because that competitive measure threatens the propaganda load that Fox carries.

But here’s the thing. The feedback loop that helped FBC to excel, and shows Fox News to be desperately broken trying to escape measurement, has had a real-world effect. We’re seeing it right now: the grand incompetence of the Republican Party. For example, the incompetency of President Trump will be a thing of awe and wonder in years to come. Simply survey how he’s been unable to even nominate folks to positions; the names DeVos, Carson, Price, Flynn, Bannon, and Miller are just some of those who are the subject of derision both within and outside of the United States. And then consider how pitiful are the GOP members of the Senate who have actually approved many of these names in order to keep (or advance) their positions.

Just last week we saw the “legendary wonk,” Speaker Paul Ryan, jettison his self-written replacement for the so-called “disastrous ACA” because it was awful and cruel, and yet so middle of the road that he could not bring his caucus to support it whole-heartedly. And in the midst of this dark-of-the-night process, he exhibited an amazing lack of knowledge about insurance. The man does not appear to be a wonk, but merely another extremist with a very nice manner.

The rise of Fox News has paralleled the rise of the second-, third-, and fourth-raters in the GOP. Think this is overstating? Can we name the equivalent of a Senator Lugar in today’s crowd, a conservative dedicated to protecting the nation through knowledge and work? No. Possibly Senator Graham, but he is a lonely figure and often lapses into his own mistakes.

And, in an interesting dovetail to fiction’s devotion to the idea that evil does tend to eat itself, the failure of Ryan’s bill may be attributed to Fox News. No, not to any particular effort to derail the bill, but rather to a lesson it has attempted to inculcate in its viewers:

No compromises!

While that rubric was aimed at liberal agendas, gradually it was taken up as a cause unto itself by the more single-minded members, those who cling more to their own rightness rather than be humble and admit to doubt. From across the spectrum, if our own replacement bill does not please us in every way, then strike it wholesale from the agenda, because only we can be right!

And, thus, the death of that bill.

And think about this: if the GOP had had flexibility of mind, the honest intellect to acknowledge that maybe they are not always right, that their ideology just might be flawed… then this bill might never have been introduced. They would have acknowledged that the ACA, while no doubt flawed as only large pieces of legislation must be flawed, has greatly improved the healthcare sector’s performance and accomplishments – even if the insurance industry doesn’t like it.

But Fox News doomed that possibility.  And if, without fact-checking or even a simple logic review, we believe the rhetoric that we’re being served up, then collectively, we doom it too.

The Miniature Marines Are Here To Save You!

Attack of The Puppet People (1958) follows the scientific exploits of a lonely old man who has discovered how to shrink people down to doll size, which is convenient as he is a doll maker and marionette repair artist. For him, the little people are friends, keeping him company and amused when he awakens them from their drugged sleep.

They feel a bit differently.

Some OK special effects, a flaccid attempt at tension, and a bare hint at amiable madness. At bottom, this is a competently made movie, technically speaking, but the characters presented by the story are little more than cardboard: the doll-maker’s best salesman from St. Louis, after knowing the new secretary for less than a week and humiliating her at work, proposes to her; the new secretary has no family, no spunk, and no personality; some less well-defined mini-people; only the old man’s friend, an active puppeteer, has something approaching life.

I was actually cheering for the rat that jumps them.

Kevin Drum continues his coverage on the environmental lead leads to crime beat:

As predicted by the lead-crime theory, the prison population of younger cohorts (15-25) has dropped the most. The 26-30 cohort is flat, and the older cohorts are making up a bigger proportion of the total prison population. Why? Because everyone under 30 grew up in a fairly lead-free environment, so they’re less likely to commit serious crimes than similar cohorts in the past. 35-year-olds grew up at the tail end of the lead era, and are still moderately crime prone. Older cohorts were heavily lead poisoned as kids, and they’ve remained more crime prone even as they’ve grown older.

Truth be told, it’s easier to clean up the lead than to change how we parent our families, so this is a seductive theory. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong or right, though.