Monthly Archives: March 2017

At least it wouldn’t be if the press was more aggressive about doing its job. A recent remark from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has brought into sharp relief, at least for me, that the role of the President is not temporary King or truth master or even much of a decision maker. What did he say? From the MSNBC Twitter account:

Spicer quotes President Trump on jobs report: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now”

I.e., candidate Trump proclaimed that unemployment stood at 40% during the campaign, but now President Trump accepts that it’s 4.7% … with some jubilation, even.

Look, for all the noise out there, our society operates best on truth. Thus we have the judiciary, fact checkers, and multiple checks and balances, all there to expose the truth.

And so when Trump, as a candidate, claimed the unemployment rate was 40%, that was a scandal – and he should have been told to put up or shut up. And some tried, but he ignored them and was permitted to get away with it by his core group of supporters. The same goes for his violent crime statistics, his accusations against the FBI, and other such claims.

We keep our sources of facts and truth, if you will, separate from the politicians who stand to benefit, or suffer, from them, because politicians, just like the rest of us, are fallible folks who should not be tempted. Then we staff them with dedicated, non-partisan experts, because whoever is in charge – and the rest of us! – needs the best information possible.

When the truth is not held sacred, buildings fall down and your family members die ghastly deaths. Think not? Remember the Soviet Union, where ideology was more important than truth.
Source: Wikipedia

So how does this tie in with the role of the President? It defines the role for what it is not: a truth-giver. The person occupying that is not here to make up numbers and tell them to us. In fact, those numbers are independent of that role because we can, because we should, use those numbers to evaluate the President’s performance. When Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) suggested that the citizens of the United States should get their information directly from President Trump, he displayed his complete ignorance of the structure of the government, not to mention the foibles of mankind, and he should be censured and removed from his position for such a failure.

In recognizing that removal from the President’s role (which, to be accurate, occurred in the time of Washington, et al), the recognition of the independence of these critical agencies, we also recognize that the role of the President in making Executive decisions is narrowly demarcated; the President can make some regulations, but Congress makes the law, and the Judiciary executes the law – or not, as it sees fit under its responsibilities. The President is constrained because of the potential power – and influence – the President can possess.

So when Spicer made that hideous remark, the press corps shouldn’t have chuckled, as reported. They should have given him the finger and walked out in a fury, announcing it to the world via their front pages. Because the behavior of President Trump is worthy of impeachment. As Americans, we should be hiring the best to be President, but here we’ve hired someone who’s working on being the worst.

And that’s simply not acceptable.

And for those of us interested, here’s one of those independent fact agencies which Trump denigrated when he was a candidate: The Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yeah, you decide. No riots in the streets. Some quiet desperation in the some towns. Work to be done. Or did Trump’s magic wand fix everything.

A reader reacts to the review of The Killing:

Next up, Kubrick’s “Lolita.” As to the religious undercurrents in “The Killing,” well, it was a genre picture, and noir is ultimately a religious film genre. The bad guys always pay in noir. Kubrick himself was raised as a secular Jew, and when the subject of religion came up (mostly in regard to 2001’s “spirituality,”) he gave many different and somewhat conflicting answers. According to Stephen King, Kubrick hung up on him when King said he believed in God.

I do not see film noir as necessarily religious genre, as I’ve never restricted the concept of evil to the religious realm. I see noir as morality tales (itself a religious genre, but I’m busy ripping out these things by the roots, might as well get all of them), illustrative examples of how bad decisions can doom people – or bad circumstance (so it becomes a lesson to the powers-that-be to fix the circumstance). Incidentally, most of the noir I’ve seen doesn’t have any religious elements, and even in The Killing I had to stretch a little bit, although otherwise it was mere caprice that did the bad guy in.

Insofar as Lolita goes, I may be terminally ruined in that regard. Having seen it on stage, by The Four Humors, wherein the lead female role was played by a 6 ft, 280 lb guy with no makeup, not shaved in three days, and in a shirt a size too small …. well.

Source: City Pages

And thanks for the historical note on Kubrick.

Gotta say I like this idea. NewScientist (25 February 2017) reports on the idea of Paula Jofré of the University of Cambridge for tracking the evolution of stars over generations using ideas from biological evolution:

This post is just an excuse to put this gorgeous image on the blog.

Stars move around the galaxy’s spiral arms and disc, making it difficult to figure out where they came from. But if they were born in the same cluster, stars should have similar chemical signatures.

Astronomers use chemical tagging to try to identify stellar siblings even if they have drifted apart. But Jofré and her colleagues thought they could take this a step further by taking a page from evolutionary biology.

“This is an invitation for astronomers to think in a new way about the history of stars and interpret their past,” Jofré says. “A lot more information could be extracted.”

Combining traces of 17 chemical elements as stellar “DNA”, the team categorised 22 stars in our galactic neighbourhood.

Using this approach, the team assembled a tree with three branches associated with stars of different origins. They tentatively argue that the thicker part of the galaxy’s disk forms new stars more rapidly than elsewhere in the Milky Way, which is consistent with other research. They also found that some stars may have even originated from another galaxy that collided with the Milky Way long ago.

Of course, DNA is relatively stable during the lifetime of an organism, while stars actively consume & transform their constituents. However, I see in the academic paper arXiv:1611.02575 this statement:

In astrophysics the chemical pattern obtained from spectral analysis of FGK type stars [stars belonging in the classifications of F, G, or K] can be interpreted as stellar DNA , as it remains intact for the majority of their lives (Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn 2002). The mechanisms for change in chemical abundances can also be identified. There is enrichment of the ISM [interstellar medium], which is relatively well understood due to advances in nucleosynthesis and SNe yield calculations (McWilliam & Rauch 2004 ; Matteucci 2012 ; Kobayashi & Nakasato 2011). Differences in chemical abundances of stars can also be the result of environmental processes bringing gas and stars from extragalactic systems and dynamical processes. Dynamical processes are a result of perturbations from nearby non-axisymmetric features such as the bar, spiral arms, molecular clouds, or merger activity. This can lead to radial migration, which is a change in the angular momentum that conserves the orbit’s eccentricity or heating, which is a change in the eccentricity that conserves the angular momentum (Sellwood & Binney 2002 ; Minchev & Famaey 2010).

So being able to trace where a star was born vs where it’s located now could be quite interesting. Seems academic? Some theories of mass extinction events involve the solar system crossing the plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Paul Gilster discussed it on Centauri Dreams back in 2007:

Muller and Rohde used a huge fossil database of marine organisms developed by the late John Sepkoski Jr. (University of Chicago), one whose data extend back to the time of the ‘Cambrian Explosion,’ the period when so many forms of multicellular life emerged. But while Muller and Rohde pondered alternative explanations for the cycle, two University of Kansas professors have come up with a theory involving the Sun’s position in the Milky Way, one that has gone on to win Muller’s approval.

The Solar System moves up and down as it orbits the galactic core (see image at left). Mikhail Medvedev and Adrian Melott, taking that motion into account, factor in the motion of the Milky Way itself, hypothesizing that its leading, north side generates a shock wave that exposes the Earth to high-energy radiation every 64 million years or so. Here’s Melott on the matter:

“I did notice that not only did these time scales appear to be almost the same, but the drops in biodiversity coincide with the times when the sun is on the north side of the galactic disc. I already knew the north side of the galactic disc was the direction toward which the galaxy is falling.”

Here‘s a 2015 article from The Atlantic on the subject as well. So you can see that what may first appear to be ridiculously useless academic research may actually have useful results. If in a few million years. And maybe sooner.

As Lawfare notes, the judge is sensitive to meta:

Documents the FBI creates when it processes a FOIA request can be withheld from future FOIA requests in certain sensitive cases, D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled on Monday. …
After he received the “no records” responses, [Ryan] Shapiro FOIA’d his own FOIA, seeking the search slips and processing notes the FBI created in response to his earlier requests.

The court said the FBI could legally withhold those documents on a case-by-case basis. In this instance, the court decided the documents could be withheld because Shapiro had filed so many FOIA requests that he might have been able to use the processing documents to piece together protected information.

“The search slips at issue,” Judge Moss wrote, “are part of a complex mosaic relating to ongoing FBI operations, involving one of the FBI’s domestic terrorism priorities, which has been the subject of a staggering number of FOIA requests seeking information about many specific individuals and organizations.”

So if you’re OK with the FBI concealing information about ongoing investigations, this ruling makes sense. And I’m OK with it.

It’s also interesting to see there’s a “… staggering number of FOIA requests …” connected with terrorism topics. Sometimes you have to stop and think about all the responsibilities of a good government like ours should be. I suppose you can guess there’s a lot of bad governments that don’t bother with rights like this.

I recently ran across some unknown terminology in connection with buildings, that being embodied energy. From an Australian Government publication:

Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of a building, from the mining and processing of natural resources to manufacturing, transport and product delivery. Embodied energy does not include the operation and disposal of the building material, which would be considered in a life cycle approach. Embodied energy is the ‘upstream’ or ‘front-end’ component of the life cycle impact of a home.

Apparently the importance of embodied energy is somewhat controversial, which surprises me as it seems to be a measurable quantity that can be characterized as to source and impact on the environment, although in some cases the characterization will change over time or location. Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com presents some thoughts on the subject:
Embodied energy, the energy “baked in” to materials, is a controversial subject. Some experts do not think it very important, since adding a little embodied energy in the form of insulation will save many times as much energy over the life of the building. Others believe that a long life cycle is far more important, so if more durable materials have a little more embodied energy, so be it. Most don’t even bother thinking about it at all. (More explaining on TreeHugger here) …

In Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, the embodied energy and carbon from making bricks and tile is “responsible for 58% of the capital city’s air pollution — much more than cars, power generation and other industries combined.”

Brick kilns are a major source of air pollution not just in Bangladesh but across South Asia and China, together accounting for 75% of the global consumption of clay bricks. More than one trillion bricks are produced annually in these countries, resulting in 1.4% of global GHG emissions. To avoid the continued compulsive use of such resource-intensive building materials, actionable change must occur. [Prashant Kapoor]

He also explains why the more efficient the building is, the bigger the problem becomes. “The reality is that as energy consumption is driven down, the relative importance of embodied energy increases.”

And it is important, because as the human population continues to increase, more buildings will be constructed, and thus embodied energy needs to be carefully analyzed as to its character (i.e., source) and how its use will improve the building.

Sometimes it’s necessary to make a point by going outside the box, as Judge Owens does here in a dissent on the 4th Circuit:

I agree with the Fifth Circuit in Asadi v. G.E. Energy (USA), L.L.C., 720 F.3d 620, 621 (5th Cir. 2013), and Judge Jacobs’ dissent in Berman v. Neo@Ogilvy LLC, 801 F.3d 145, 155-60 (2d Cir. 2015), and therefore respectfully dissent. Both the majority here and the Second Circuit in Berman rely in part on King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480 (2015), to read the relevant statutes in favor of the government’s position. In my view, we should quarantine King and its potentially dangerous shapeshifting nature to the specific facts of that case to avoid jurisprudential disruption on a cellular level. Cf. John Carpenter’s The Thing (Universal Pictures 1982).

My bold.

Adam Feldman analyzes SCOTUS statistics on Empirical SCOTUS, and notes a slow-down:

The Supreme Court tackles fewer cases by the year. SCOTUSBlog’s statistics as reported by First Mondays Podcast show that the Court has also been slower in writing signed opinions this term than in recent terms. What is leading to these changes? One clear anomaly from the Court’s norm is the length of time the Court has been without a ninth Justice. While this vacancy is the longest in recent memory it is not the longest historically. Still the Court’s workload seems to be declining over time and without other clear rationale aside from the Court’s composition to explain the downward trend.

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

The Federal Judiciary Center provides statistics on the number of cert petitions and cert grants every term. As the following figure shows petitions to Court have risen over time but recently declined a bit from their height in 2006.

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

At the same time the number of granted petitions has dropped from 159 in 1981 to as few as 63 in 2011.

Adam proposes no particular reason, and in truth it’s hard to do so. We could speculate that there are fewer cases worth taking a look at; a related view would be to suggest that the Roberts court (which he joined and began leading in 2005) wishes to examine only cases with true national significance. The graph doesn’t necessarily support or falsify such a proposition.

But I suppose only the Justices really know.

Sometimes when you’re looking for something, you find something else. In my case, I was looking for information on yellow peas, and Wikipedia handed me this:

Split peas were used for an unusual non-culinary purpose during the Second World War. Great efforts were made to optimise the manufacture of the British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft, speeding and cheapening manufacture while maintaining or enhancing performance. Flush-headed rivets were used on a prototype for the smoothest possible surfaces, but this made it more difficult, expensive, and slower to produce than using the usual dome-headed rivets. Rather than the cumbersome alternative of comparing actual rivets, split peas were glued over all the flush rivets to simulate dome heads. This reduced the speed by 22 mph (35 km/h), which was unacceptable. Split peas were then progressively removed to determine which rivets really needed to be flush; the results were applied to production aeroplanes.

Don’t tell your kids about this until they’re firmly hooked on the green stuff.

Last night around 11:30 an almighty clatter came from the computer room, and I rushed in and shut my primary development and composition system down. This morning the repair guys said it’s the power supply. While I have other options for composing material for UMB, I find them less convenient than my development system, so there may be a slowdown in production.

In other news, my right hand is no longer experiencing numbness – all hail the wrist supports. I’m still being cautious, of course.

I’ll try to just treat this as a chance to catch up on my reading. Only 10 books on the stack…

On Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver notes the release by WikiLeaks of a collection of CIA documents obtained through a breach. This caught my eye:

As has been widely reported, this morning Wikileaks released a trove of documents, the first installation (Year Zero) of a series of planned releases it is calling “Vault 7.” According to Wikileaks,

the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

Several hundred million lines of code? That’s … a lot. I work on a very large system, and I’m told it’s not more than 40 million. Maybe they use really bad programmers, which seems doubtful. Nicholas warns that Wikileaks does tend to exaggerate, so perhaps that’s all this might be. But it is breathtaking.

Unless it’s assembly code. Yeah, that’s it – the CIA does its thing in a very inefficient manner.

Nyah.

Cheongsam:

The cheongsam (from Cantonese Chinese: 長衫; Jyutping: coeng4saam1;/ˈtʃiːɒŋˈsæm/,^[1] /ˈtʃɒŋˈsæm/ or /ˈtʃɒŋˈsɑːm/) is a body-hugging one-piece Chinese dress for women, also known as qipao (from Mandarin Chinese: 旗袍; pinyin: qípáo; Wade–Giles: ch’i-p’ao; IPA: [t͡ɕʰǐ pʰɑ̌ʊ̯] ( listen)), and Mandarin gown. The stylish and often tight-fitting cheongsam or qipao (chipao) that is best known today was created in the 1920s in Shanghai and made fashionable by socialites and upper class women. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the comic 9 Chickweed Lane.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog reports on an interesting phenomenon seen on the far right over the last few years – the revival of a Senator Joe McCarthy cult:

In 2016, a Cruz national security adviser said McCarthy was “spot on” about communists infiltrating the United States government in the 1950s.

There’s been a lot of this kind of thinking. In 2008, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) made a memorable appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” telling Chris Matthews that she wanted an investigation into members of Congress to “find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.” Two years later, one of Bachmann’s closest allies, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voiced support for the revival of the House Internal Security Committee, the 1960’s-era successor to the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee. Missouri’s Todd Akin compared himself to McCarthy two years ago, and he meant it in a good way.

Last year, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) endorsed the idea of a new HUAC for a new era.

What I’m finding fascinating about the phenomenon is the so-far successful eliding, by the far right, of the moral argument which eventually brought Senator McCarthy’s crusade, and influence, to an end. They’re accomplishing this by the deeply flawed argument of the ends justify the means – one every child should be taught is wrong.

McCarthy was not brought to a halt by any failure to find Communists throughout government and, indeed, throughout America. Such a failure might have left him a little dusty footnote in the history books, but not thoroughly besmirched as he is today.

No, he failed because he used his position as Senator to bully and spread fear throughout America in search of those who might have even merely investigated the Communist ideology. His methods, at their heart shockingly un-American (sure, there’s a pun, but I’m not even stretching to get there), threatening to “smear” family and friends of his targets, his potential sources for lists of Communists, were the real reason Senator McCarthy has become an example of how American politicians – Americans in general – should NOT ever act. If you look at the histories of the period, we don’t hear about vast expellings of citizens, or the stripping of citizenships, or even executions of legions of leering Communists.

No. We hear about fear. Fear of a snitch falsely accusing us of being Communists. Of being put on lists which would keep us from ever advancing in our careers, of losing friendships.

For those who are doubtful concerning Joe McCarthy’s essential un-Americanism, I put forward two reasons for this conclusion.

1. It’s an attack on our social fabric. His methods turned friend against friend, lover against lover – family member against family member. Imagine trying to turn your beloved Mother in because she told stories about attending one Communist Party meeting 20 years ago.
2. This attack on two of our pillars of civil society – the right to think and speak what one wants, and not to be falsely accused and maligned by government actors – are not to be set aside at the paranoid ravings of anyone. I recently ran across a quote of President Trump’s from 1989: “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” While I’m aware this can be read in more than one way, I’ll choose the most negative and reply, “No, Mr. President, our Civil Liberties give us a critical bulwark in our quest for safety, and he who advocates for their removal or neutering is nothing more than a traitor to the United States.” Think about it – our civil liberties are not luxuries, not privileges, but instead they are what safeguard us from the deprivations of tyrants, foreign and domestic. So long as we safeguard them, we’ll stand a better chance of survival in freedom, than we would without.

There’s little doubt, it seems, that Senator McCarthy was looking to advance his influence. Fortunately, the bravery of a few politicians slowed him, and every time he was exposed to the general American populace, his popularity waned. I believe that those who see in him a role model, a positive role model, are simply those who seek to convert a discredited methodology into a ladder for their own advancement.

And for them, the United States be damned. It’s power even in chaos, from Bannon (a known McCarthy sympathizer) on down.

While writing this post I ran across a blog devoted to the problem of McCarthyism, exposing its flea-bitten underside to the light. I haven’t read much of it, but I thought I’d point at it. It’s called … McCarthyism.

This interesting video concerning a warbird from World War II, the Catalina PBY amphibious plane, had, of all things, a kitchen.

Source: National Naval Aviation Museum

Readers react to the mystery of water on Mars:

Colder water runs to the top of the glass?

I tried to find anything on that but failed. I’d love to know what that’s about. Another:

Maybe its canels like the early astronomers thought? 🙂

Heh. Now this one makes a lot of sense:

Hmm. They seem fixated on the idea of water. Maybe it was another liquid altogether.

And, being too silly for words, I’ve read about LAKES on Titan, the largest moon of Mars, but this never occurred to me. From NASA:

Radar images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveal many lakes on Titan’s surface, some filled with liquid, and some appearing as empty depressions.
Credits: Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/USGS

Apart from Earth, Titan is the only body in the solar system known to possess surface lakes and seas, which have been observed by the Cassini spacecraft. But at Titan’s frigid surface temperatures — roughly minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 180 degrees Celsius) — liquid methane and ethane, rather than water, dominate Titan’s hydrocarbon equivalent of Earth’s water.

Mars ranges from 0 to -129 degrees Celsius, so perhaps methane and ethane would not be the replacements. I am not a chemist specializing in liquid forms of matter, so I have no idea how the low atmospheric pressure and ambient temperatures of Mars affects the possibility of other chemicals existing in liquid form. And do other liquids undergo an evaporation / precipitation cycle as we witness with H₂O? I recall reading about iron evaporating and precipitating in a theoretical scenario. From Space.com:

Violent storm clouds and molten-iron rain may be common occurrences on the failed stars known as brown dwarfs, new research suggests.

Astronomers used NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to observe brown dwarfs, finding changes in brightness that they believe signify the presence of storm clouds. These storms appear to last at least several hours, and may be as tempestuous as the famous Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

“A large fraction of brown dwarfs show cyclical variability in brightness, suggesting clouds or storms,” study researcher Aren Heinze of Stony Brook University said …

Perhaps the comparison is inappropriate, though.

I like the idea, but have no way to evaluate it.

Omar al-Jaffal reports in AL Monitor that Iraq is imitating the United States – and, for that matter, France just before the beginning of the Great War – by building a barrier to keep out the dangerous. However, they’re going for a trench:

Compared with other Iraqi provinces, Najaf is relatively safe. Yet five suicide bombers carried out an attack near a security checkpoint in the province’s locality of Qadisiya on Jan. 1, killing five security officers and two civilians.

Consequently, Najaf Gov. Luay al-Yassiri met with Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), and decided to increase protection measures in the Najaf desert and speed up the work on the trenches that stretch from the western side of the province to the province of Diwaniyah.

On Jan. 15, the council of Najaf announced the trench will be 50-70 kilometers (31-43 miles) long, and the Shiite Endowment claims to have covered about a third of its cost. However, its implementation is directly supervised by the Imam Ali Brigades, the armed faction affiliated with Imam Ali Mosque, fighting under the umbrella of the PMU.

The trench will be four meters (13 feet) deep, surrounded by surveillance towers and thermal security cameras. In addition, monitoring posts will be erected and drones will fly around the clock to detect any movement on the borders of Najaf.

Yassiri, who is a member of the State of Law Coalition led by Nouri al-Maliki, told Ayn al-Iraq News that the security trench “holds a major strategic military importance,” noting that it will have “extremely high standards that are very difficult to breach.”

He said, “The trench will protect four provinces — Najaf, Karbala, Diwaniyah and Muthanna — against any terrorist attack from the western desert.” He added that the trench will have economic benefits as well since it will put an end to smuggling.

An interesting assumption – smuggling is its own form of economic activity and contributes to the economy – but without paying taxes. While I sympathize with the inclination to do something, I have to wonder if this will have positive benefits – or merely turn out to be a drain on the treasury which their opponents might celebrate.

Helen Klein Murillo on Lawfare notes another approach may be in development by the Trump Administration for restricting immigration:

In late January, just after the initial refugee order, The Washington Post reported on a draft executive order entitled “Executive Order on Protecting Taxpayer Resources by Ensuring Our Immigration Laws Promote Accountability and Responsibility.” The document, apparently authored by Andrew Bremberg, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council, proposed revamping the so-called “public charge” law.

I.e., if someone would be a burden, we reject them. This is already a law. Continuing:

Yesterday may have seen movement toward that policy—a policy that could threaten national security by discouraging immigrants from seeking health care—through a subtle but significant development in the shadow of the refugee order. Section 3 of yesterday’s presidential memorandum is titled “Enforcement of All Laws for Entry Into the United States.” That section directs agencies “to rigorously enforce all existing grounds of inadmissibility and to ensure subsequent compliance with related laws after admission.” Furthermore, the memorandum directs agencies to “issue new rules, regulations, or guidance . . . to enforce laws relating to such grounds of inadmissibility and subsequent compliance,” rules which are to “supersede any previous rules to the extent of any conflict.”

It’s hard to read that and not see the connection to the proposed public charge order—a potentially far-reaching law that could severely limit lawful immigration, but which long-standing regulatory guidance has limited in application. Although yesterday’s big news was the executive order, this seemingly small piece of the presidential memorandum might significantly impact another immigration policy sphere that implicates national security. This is another area to watch.

As Helen says, something to watch so long as the Trump Administration remains in power.

It’s always good when a scientist is scratching their head, and Chelsea Whyte describes a fascinating one in NewScientist (18 February 2017, paywall):

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

SOMETHING doesn’t add up. Mars has ice caps, and there is evidence in the terrain that water flowed in rivers and lakes there billions of years ago. We have a decent understanding of how water behaves on Earth, and there’s no reason to think the laws of physics are different on Mars. And yet, we can’t figure out how water could have existed in liquid form on young Mars.

Every time we try to replicate the conditions under which the liquid water could have existed, a new complication throws a wrench into our models. Last week, yet another paper tried to chip away at the mystery (PNAS, doi.org/bzjh). And like so many before it, instead of resolving the problem, it introduced another.

This 40-year-old mystery is known as the Mars paradox. If and when we resolve it, we might need to throw away a lot of textbooks.

Some folks might point at Venus and its thick atmosphere and ask what’s going on, on the assumption that Mars and Venus are similar, but they’re not. From Windows to the Universe I find that, as a handy way to express their masses, Venus is roughly .82 of Earth’s mass, while Mars is .11 of Earth’s mass, so that’s not a comparable, and that explains why Mars’ atmospheric pressure is light relative to Earth’s – and will remain so without a large addition of mass. Perhaps this also explains why the suggestion to replace the atmosphere with hot house gasses such as CO₂ leads nowhere.

This disparity in mass opens the question of the possibility of a catastrophic removal of mass at some point after water had time to leave its mark on the surface of Mars. Beyond me. But it smells like von Däniken – blech.

So what did old fictional Holmes used to say? Chelsea walks down that path:

So is there some planetary mechanism we still don’t understand? A mixture of greenhouse gases we haven’t yet hit on? Perhaps the real trouble is our understanding of water itself. We already know it can bedevil a few laws of physics, like when colder water flows to the top of a glass. Whatever the answer, we’re running out of obvious solutions. We’re going to be in truly alien territory when the mystery is solved.

Sounds subtle and, if found, both fascinating and possibly useful.

Totalizator:

A tote board is a large numeric or alphanumeric display used to convey information, typically at a race track (to display the odds or payoffs for each horse) or at a telethon (to display the total amount donated to the charitable organization sponsoring the event).

The term “tote board” comes from the colloquialism for “totalizator” (or “totalisator”), the name for the automated system which runs parimutuel betting, calculating payoff odds, displaying them, and producing tickets based on incoming bets. Parimutuel systems had used totalisator boards since the 1860s and they were often housed in substantial buildings. However the manual systems often resulted in substantial delays in calculations of better payouts. [Wikipedia]

Heard on the movie The Killing (1956).

What happens when two psychopaths marry, and one of them is …. earnest?

The noir of The Killing (1956) lies not in the detailed plans to rob a horse track of its cash, but in the character of the men & women involved in the crime. Director Kubrick makes it clear that the ultimate fate of each man and woman of note in this film comes from the defects which also direct them to seek riches outside of the strictures of law, and those fates are sobering, especially in one spate of mad gunfire which ruins the lives of so many.

I am not a particular Kubrick fan. I couldn’t tell you what I’ve seen of his output. But this movie does leave me wondering, quite soberly, as to his religious leanings. Why? Because as we neared the conclusion of this movie, the plan itself still seemed to be nearing a successful, if deeply flawed termination. And then Kubrick, in the great tradition of Greek theater, introduces a messenger of the Gods, a messenger who wreaks final vengeance upon the very Planner himself, who threatened to profit grossly from the efforts and failures of his partners in crime.

And that messenger delivers the final blow, stripping the Planner of his riches, his dreams, and, finally, his spirit. Drooping, he stops and waits for the cops to move in. And so does Kubrick’s fine story end.

This is a quietly good movie. A fine, if not spectacular, story; acting quietly excellent (especially by character actor Elisha Cook, Jr., who turns in his finest performance that I’ve seen); casting top-notch (I particularly appreciated Kola Kwariani as a wrestler and chess shark); excellent cinematography and good audio.

This movie grabbed us and we didn’t even discuss stopping halfway through, as we often do.

Strongly Recommended.

My correspondent elaborates on high tech materials:

I was thinking more along these lines: http://news.mit.edu/2016/hot-new-solar-cell-0523

Ah! Interesting!

The basic principle is simple: Instead of dissipating unusable solar energy as heat in the solar cell, all of the energy and heat is first absorbed by an intermediate component, to temperatures that would allow that component to emit thermal radiation. By tuning the materials and configuration of these added layers, it’s possible to emit that radiation in the form of just the right wavelengths of light for the solar cell to capture. This improves the efficiency and reduces the heat generated in the solar cell.

I forget the name of the principle, but I ran across it in The Climate Fix, I think. Basically, the reason CO₂ is a hot house gas is this: Sun light (radiation) at the most energetic frequencies reaching the earth is not absorbed by CO₂, but it is absorbed by the Earth. By some well-understood principle, which of course I’ve forgotten, all objects emit the energy they absorb, but at a different wavelength. So when the Earth emits the energy it’s absorbed from the Sun, the emission is at a different wavelength – one (more likely a small range) to which the CO₂ is not transparent! Thus, by increasing the percentage of CO₂ in the atmosphere, we increase the energy retained by the atmosphere – and, thus, we become hotter.

This sounds like the same principle – converting the energy from difficult to harvest wavelengths to easier to harvest  wavelengths. I like it. I wonder if any energy is lost in the conversion…

A recent email directed me to this article on KSL.com concerning a World War II vet, Bruce Heilman, riding his motorcycle across America in honor of fallen vets. One statement of his jarred my sense of right and wrong:

“Memorial Day is more than hot dogs and marshmallows, and we all should recognize, in everything we do, that our freedom comes from our military,” Heilman said.

I can’t help but notice that, as an example, for North Koreans, their freedom comes from their military.

Or lack of freedom.

The military is a complex institution. You can’t just say it’s a tool, even though it appears to be one, because if it’s members decide it’s being used improperly, it can disband and dissolve through disobedience. However, the North Korean military protects its society – and its controlling elite – from external threats as well, but freedom isn’t part of that equation.

Our freedoms are protected by the military, but do not come from the military. Those traditional freedoms come from all of us, making the decision to put those freedoms ahead of our instinctive desires for control and security and homogeniety and many other things. Paradoxically, by putting our traditional freedoms ahead of those other desires, we, in large part, guarantee those desires – although perhaps not in the form we’d like to see. We are a heterogenuous society, which means finding compromises and following rules of justice blind to sectarian and commercial cries of certitude.

So, I admire Bruce’s spirit, but I cannot embrace his comment. I also didn’t much care for the other half of his quoted comment, “… in everything we do …” but it’s also a little vague, so I shan’t venture further on that path. The implied militarism just makes me jumpy.

Regarding the question of leaks, on BloombergView Noah Feldman discusses the nature of leaks and gives a useful overview of how SCOTUS has dealt with the question. Noah’s summary of the issue:

From The Healing Of Schiller Park blog.
Love it!

Although some critics have compared the career bureaucrats suspected of doing the leaking to the “deep state” that has bedeviled reformers in Egypt and Turkey, the First Amendment hasn’t been brought into the conversation.

It should be. As it turns out, there are competing constitutional views about bureaucrats’ engagement with public affairs. A liberal current going back to Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan sees public employees as full public citizens, protected by the First Amendment so long as they are speaking about matters of public concern. A rival conservative current treats government workers as private employees, and allows them to be sanctioned for any speech that comes within the scope of their employment. These two perspectives, locked in a longtime doctrinal struggle, offer starkly different consequences for whether leakers are free-speech heroes or deep-state backbiters.

From this it appears the conservative thought-pattern is confined to the practices of the private sector – a belief that the rules of the private sector cover all aspects of society.

But this cannot be so. Each sector has its own purposes, concerns, and worries – and its own rules, developed over the centuries, for managing and correcting those worries. Free speech by those closest to the issue in the private sector may result in the release of critical data for a corporation, and it makes sense that this be restricted and punishable. In certain cases, exceptions should be made, but only for those that have far-reaching public impacts, such as pollution releases.

The same in the educational sector, on the other hand, constitutes the testimony of experts on a public issue and should be treated as invaluable input – not a reason to fire an educator. This was the basis of the Pickering case, as Noah explains:

The touchstone of the liberal take on employee speech is a 1968 case, Pickering v. Board of Education. A schoolteacher had been dismissed for writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper that criticized the school board’s budget (too much athletics, not enough learning). Justice Marshall insisted “unequivocally” that teachers cannot “constitutionally be compelled to relinquish the First Amendment rights they would otherwise enjoy as citizens to comment on matters of public interest in connection with the operation of the public schools in which they work.” To underscore the point, Marshall cited the judicial decisions of the 1950s and ’60s that rejected loyalty oaths as conditions of employment.

Most important, Marshall wrote that because teachers were “the members of a community most likely to have informed and definite opinions” about the schools, “it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.”

In general, imposition of foreign sector practices in other sectors will warp and de-optimize the performance of the sector – in other words, the teacher’s letter in Pickering, if considered illegimate, will result in the loss of a valuable input, simply because a private sector rule was applied in the education sector. This is simple common sense.

I continue to move in my opinions away from questioning the general legitimacy of leakers to considering the leaks, and those who generate those leaks, to be potentially legitimate. Certainly, leaks for vulgar personal gain remain illegitimate, as are those which compromise national security – but I distinguish between those which actually do compromise national security, and those that illuminate a war crime or other illegal activity in the government sector.

From News of the Weird (link unavailable):

Despite California’s 2015 law aimed at improving the fairness of its red-light cameras, the city of Fremont (pop. 214,000, just north of San Jose) reported earning an additional $190,000 more each month last year by shortening the yellow light by two-thirds of a second at just two intersections. Tickets went up 445 percent at one and 883 percent at the other. (In November 2016, for “undisclosed reasons,” the city raised the speed limit on the street slightly, “allowing” it to reinstate the old 0.7-second-longer yellow light.)

I thought red light cameras had been discouraged by the courts. Guess not. Certainly a lesson in math and driver responses.

They look a little like a musical score.

I was fortunate to see The Usual Suspects (1995) at the theater when it first came out. And I saw it cold – I didn’t read any reviews, I’d just call the theater to see if I recognized the show and, if not, I’d go. That made seeing it quite a revelation. And now I’ve had the pleasure of introducing my Arts Editor to it, albeit in a slightly neutered edited-for-TV version. (It leads me to wonder what TV will do to the “… gleefully profane …” Deadpool (2016), but that’s a subject for another day.)

This is a noir movie at its best, with a lot of sunlight to contrast with the dark lives the helpless characters are leading. Five ex-convicts are rounded up by the cops for a crime and interrogated, to little direct effect – but they know each other, more or less, and begin to form a team that can perform sophisticated robberies, even kill.

But they’re being setup, by the greatest criminal of them all, Keyser Soze. He wants them to assassinate the man who can identify him and lead the world’s cops to him. But they don’t know it – all they know is that there’s an Argentinean drug gang that Soze wants put out of business, and they will deal a deadly blow in that war – for a great deal of money.

So where are the drugs?

This movie has a daring, confusing plot, excellent performances by all the actors, and a director more than willing to play with time, space, and the audience’s perceptions of what has, may, and may not have happened

Recommended. But don’t see the TV version.