Monthly Archives: April 2017

One is giving birth to the other. Except it’s about to explode in fire! In space! Oh, the humanity!

Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (aka Starflight One or Airport 85; 1985) is a limp noodle of a movie. Thematically, a story concerning the tension between free enterprise and good engineering, it’s about a hypersonic jet on its maiden commercial voyage. A simulator seems to suggest it may have problems at its operational altitude of 100,000 ft, but the mean old boss of the manufacturer refuses to be cautious.

And then a rocket is recklessly launched in Australia on the orders of a businessman set to make or lose a lot of money, without coordinating with NASA, against the better judgment of the flight manager. When the jet is reaching the pinnacle of its flight (we never actually see the takeoff, at least in this TV version of the movie – oh, wait, this is a made-for-TV movie!), the rocket malfunctions and must be destroyed, spraying debris in the flight path of the jet.

Yep, it gets hit.

And we don’t care. No story succeeds when we don’t care. Look, you don’t have to like anyone – after all, care doesn’t mean rooting for, it can also mean having a hate-on. But when a movie, a story, has characters who elicit nothing more than a shrug and a sickly joke about who’s sleeping with whom?, then your story has a problem.

A big problem.

It’s a fucking black hole of a problem.

So never mind that the science had us laughing out loud at points. Never mind the continuity problem when they call the second spaceship coming to their rescue by the name of the first one. Never mind that at one point they say they don’t have enough oxygen to make it to re-entry, and then do so anyways. Never mind that the children are not the first ones to be saved. Never mind that the journalist / volunteers who stay behind to face certain death, just on the off chance that the pics could be great if they survive, are never seen snapping a single pic.

We have no idea why we should care about anyone. Well, except hating a couple of type-A businessmen, and that just isn’t enough.

Sure, there’s interpersonal relationships – or so we’re told. Hell, it’s a little like watching a bunch of Swedes on Valium, for all the emotion we get out of this bunch.

Anyways. Deep breath. Stay away from the Bold and Italic buttons.

Just Don’t Watch This Film.

electrek has more news on Tesla’s solar power installations:

This weekend, Tesla updated the ‘Energy’ section of its website to unveil new pictures – see above and below – of a new exclusive solar panel made by Panasonic. Electrek has also learned some details about this new product that will apparently shape the future of the company’s offering in the residential solar industry.

The new panels are part of Tesla’s deal with Panasonic at the ‘Gigafactory 2’ in Buffalo. They will be manufactured by Panasonic at Tesla’s factory for Tesla’s exclusive use. They don’t plan to make them available to third-party installers or individuals. …

Like the solar roof, the move is part of Elon Musk’s plan to offer solar products with better aesthetics in order to create a distinctive brand that can be differentiated from other installers on a product basis. He said when first announcing that they were working on such solar products:

“I think this is really a fundamental part of achieving differentiated product strategy.

For the solar panels, that means a ‘sleek and low-profile’ look for all residential installation.

Sounds like a strong move into residential is well underway.

Trump continues to sow confusion throughout the Mideast, as Uri Savir notes in AL Monitor:

The PLO official told Al-Monitor that Greenblatt explicitly spoke about the possibility of a two-state solution. What encouraged the Palestinians most was the time element that was emphasized by the envoy when he told his interlocutors that Trump believes the time is ripe for a “dealmaking” process. …

This is a paradoxical development. After the US elections, the Trump administration was viewed by the Israeli right as a redemption of all anti-settlement and pro-two-state positions of the Obama era. The Palestinians, for their part, saw Trump’s victory as “the end of the world.” Today, positions have changed. The main sense one gets from talking with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials is one of confusion. Despite some similar positions, Trump is not Barack Obama, and he is therefore totally unpredictable. Initial signs indicate that a dealmaking attempt is not out of the question.

The Israeli leadership’s distaste for President Obama is no secret; they may develop a similar distaste for President Trump, as he is failing to fulfill their expectations of supporting rampant expansionism.

I expect Prime Minister Netanyahu to, once again, stall for time. Or stall for Pence.

Gotta love oddball objects – they’re the poles holding up the tent of common phenomenon. This one, from NewScientist (1 April 2017), caught my eye:

When small stars perish, they expand and create glowing shells of ionised gas, called planetary nebulae. But when astronomers observed the Boomerang Nebula in 1995, they saw something quite odd. It’s the only known object in the universe to absorb light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the afterglow of the big bang that keeps the universe 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. That means the nebula must be even colder.

Expanding gases will cool, but no one knew how Boomerang’s central star could eject enough gas to cool it to the temperature we see now in so short a time. …

[Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array,] we have the first detailed map of the Boomerang. On large scales, at least 3.3 times as much mass as the sun contains is being swept away from the central star at 170 kilometres per second within a spherical shell of gas. Could a single star produce such an outburst? [Raghvendra Sahai of JPL] didn’t think so.

ALMA’s high resolution let the team probe the frigid heart of the system as well. It turns out that within the shell of gas two smaller bubbles are expanding outward from the central star.

The team suggests that the single star was actually two, with one much larger than the other. When the massive star died and started to swell, it swallowed the smaller one. The companion continued to orbit the primary star’s core within the shell of gas. Eventually, it spiralled into the core roughly 1000 years ago in a violent merger that disgorged the two smaller lobes of gas (arxiv.org/abs/1703.06929).

Fascinating – you think of cosmic explosions as a location of heat, not cold. Elsewhere, they state that temperature appears to be 0.1 kelvin.

Boomerang Nebula. Image: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

A couple of years ago, SciNews published early results concerning the Nebula’s shape:

[Sahai’s] group discovered a dense lane of millimeter-sized dust grains surrounding the nebula’s central star, which explains why the outer cloud has an hourglass shape in visible light. The dust grains have created a mask that shades a portion of the central star and allows its light to leak out only in narrow but opposite directions into the cloud, giving it an hourglass appearance.

Free! I feel so free!

A starkly told tale, Countess Dracula (1971) is a lurid, gamey story of a noblewoman, deprived of her husband and her beauty, who accidentally discovers the blood of virgins will restore her beauty.

For a short period.

And then she’s uglier.

Whether it’s the movie, or the editing for television, I cannot tell, but its sketchiness detracts from the story. Segues are abrupt and confusing. The main characters do get relatively full treatments, but the supporting characters, who are often performing important tasks, such as kidnapping the noblewoman’s daughter so that she may impersonate her to win the affections of a young man with whom she’s become infatuated, exist purely for the purposes of the story; I cannot imagine them doing anything but evaporating to dust once the story has passed their neighborhood.

Resentful of old age?

Because of this lack of empathy, there is little feeling of horror here, only of pity for her victims, virgins or not, who suffer her hatpin in the throat, as well as the audience, who is left wondering why the noblewoman could possibly think she can do this more than two or three times.

Here’s the thing: this is based, however loosely, on a real person, Elizabeth Báthory. From Wikipedia, Elizabeth was …

… a Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer from the Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been labelled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer,^[3] though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1585 and 1609.^[4] The highest number of victims cited during Báthory’s trial was 650. However, this number comes from the claim by a serving girl named Susannah that Jakab Szilvássy, Countess Báthory’s court official, had seen the figure in one of Báthory’s private books. The book was never revealed, and Szilvássy never mentioned it in his testimony.^[5] Despite the evidence against Elizabeth, her family’s influence kept her from facing trial. She was imprisoned in December 1609 within Csetje Castle, Upper Hungary (now in Slovakia), and held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up where she remained imprisoned until her death five years later.

Countess Dracula, however sloppily made, shocks in this unexpected manner: the criminal activities, if not the miraculous transformations, may have actually occurred, and involved far more victims. It’s a pity the movie deviates from the historical story, for the Countess never stood trial. Instead, she was imprisoned in a walled room, where, isolated, she survived for several years. The swift punishment implied in the movie may have not been nearly as exacting as the non-judicial punishment ordained for her, presumably by the royal court.

But the movie, on its own terms, is less than affecting.

Off we go now:

We’re a little slow, I’m afraid, as we lack proper facilities. These are in place on the pool table in the cool, cool downstairs.

Back in mid-March, Nathaniel Scharping on D-brief remarked on the release of films of atmospheric nuclear tests – and their posting to YouTube:

The films all stem from the 210 atmospheric nuclear tests undertaken by the U.S. between 1945 and 1962. There are an estimated 10,000 films from these tests, capturing multiple angles and data points. The project has so far tracked down 6,500 of them, and converted 4,200 to a digital format—750 have so far been declassified, and this week’s batch is the first to be released.

Here’s one. Please note it’s a bit shocking:

More on D-brief.

NewScientist (1 April 2017) notes that WhatsApp is once again under attack in the UK:

THE debate over encryption has been reignited in the UK after the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said that end-to-end encryption in apps such as WhatsApp was “completely unacceptable”.

Rudd spoke following the revelation that British extremist Khalid Masood used WhatsApp a few minutes before launching his attack on Westminster last week. But security experts say any attempt to clamp down on encryption is unworkable. “My impression was that primarily she doesn’t know what she is talking about,” says Paul Bernal at the University of East Anglia, UK.

An Encryption Formula. Source: Popular Science

If Secretary Rudd is to be entirely fair about the matter, she should also be calling for banning motor vehicles of all sorts, in view of last year’s French massacre by truck, and the more recent Swedish incident, or for that matter kitchen knives.

These are all candidates to be members of the same category, though: things that are too useful to live without. Of course, end-to-end encryption is the newest, intangible candidate to the category, and its usefulness is not as obvious as a motor vehicle.

It seems to me that the Secretary is shamefully attempting to ride a tragic incident to implement a policy without properly assessing the situation – indeed, how the WhatsApp message figures into the incident is not at all clear, at least in this very brief report.

The proper approach should be a measured estimate of the positives end-to-end encryption brings to society, and the compare that to an estimate of the negatives the same encryption can bring to society. Right now it appears to be nothing more than opportunistically pursuing the passing of a law without understanding anything at all about the realities on the ground – or in the theory.

Bruce Riedel on AL Monitor opines on how the recent United States missile strike on Syria affects the spirits of the Saudis:

The cruise missile strikes should give the Saudis more confidence that the Trump administration is competent, capable and even decisive. But it will also raise expectations. The royal family will expect an American strategy to get rid of Assad sooner rather than later. More military strikes against Syrian regime targets and the Iranians are what the Saudis want to see. The Russian presence is a complicating factor, but in Riyadh’s eyes it should not give Moscow a veto over steadily more aggressive attacks on Assad’s forces, the Iranians and Hezbollah. More arms for the opposition is a priority for the Saudis. …

If the cruise missile attack is a one-off and not followed by more aggressive American military action, Riyadh will be bitterly disappointed. It will still cooperate on confronting Iran in the Gulf and in Yemen, but its high hopes that someday, somehow, America will rid Syria of Assad will be again crushed. If the administration is loose in its rhetoric about how far it is prepared to go in Syria in getting Assad out, its words will come home to haunt the relationship with the kingdom.

The Saudis will have to actively encourage the Trump Administration if they want the Administration to continue their aggressive strategy, because the Bannon/Trump approach to staffing the government is fatal to a conventional diplomatic approach to pressuring an American administration to take some action. Let’s face it – when we say Obama did this, or Trump did that, or Bush did this other thing, what we really mean is that the President sets a policy, a direction, and then his appointees, using the powers inherent in their various positions, try to carry it out.

Trump’s appointees, by and large, are non-existent or incompetent. The main driver of an effort like this would be the Secretary of State, but by all accounts the current occupant of the position, Rex Tillerson, is ignorant of the powers of his position, and really quite somnolent.

If the Saudis want Trump to do more about Syria’s current government, they had better be prepared to ride him. To buy air-time on Fox News, perhaps, filled with stories about the machinations of Syria’s leader Assad. Get Trump’s attention on Twitter, perhaps.

Buy Nordstrom‘s and reinstall Ivanka’s retail line.

Because Trump is really ADD, I think. Whatever has his attention at the moment will receive action. And if it’s out of his visual range, chances are no one in his Administration will pay attention, either. They’re too busy engaging in factionalism.

And that won’t serve the Saudis’ interests.

Metamer:

In colorimetry, metamerism is a perceived matching of the colors that, based on differences in spectral power distribution, do not actually match. Colors that match this way are called metamers.

A spectral power distribution describes the proportion of total light given off (emitted, transmitted, or reflected) by a color sample at each visible wavelength; it defines the complete information about the light coming from the sample. However, the human eye contains only three color receptors (three types of cone cells), which means that all colors are reduced to three sensory quantities, called the tristimulus values. Metamerism occurs because each type of cone responds to the cumulative energy from a broad range of wavelengths, so that different combinations of light across all wavelengths can produce an equivalent receptor response and the same tristimulus values or color sensation. In color science, such sensations are numerically represented by color matching functions. [Wikipedia]

Which helps me make sense of where I saw it in use, which is “Special glasses give people superhuman colour vision,” Chris Baraniuk, NewScientist (25 March 2017):

IT’S sometimes practically impossible to tell similar hues apart, even placed side by side. Special glasses could improve our ability to do so, and could one day help to spot counterfeits.

Devised by a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the glasses basically enhance the user’s colour vision. They allow us to see metamers – colours that look the same but give off different wavelengths of light – as recognisably distinct hues.

Human colour vision relies on three types of cone cells that react to short (blue), medium (green) and long (red) wavelengths. While brushing up on his knowledge of the eye before teaching a photonics class, physicist Mikhail Kats had a brainwave. Could the eye be tricked into effectively having another type of cone cell?

To make the glasses, Kats and his colleagues designed two colour filters, one for each eye, that strip out specific parts of the blue light spectrum. The team hypothesised that giving each eye slightly different information about blue things would simulate a new set of blue cones, making any subtle colour differences more pronounced. They were right (arxiv.org/abs/1703.04392).

They tested the effect using blocks of colour, displayed on a computer and smartphone screen, that people see as metamers. “They look exactly the same, and you look through the spectacles and… holy crap, they’re two different things,” says Kats.

Although I still think the summary of metamer in here is still clumsy and confusing. I would have said, colours that look the same but are composed of different wavelengths of light.

A great clown.

Kong: Skull Island (2017) is an inferior remake of the original King Kong (1933). True, the action and computer-generated special effects are superior to the original’s stop-action monsters, so those who crave more faux-realism in their movies may disagree with this assessment.

The original wasn’t really that large. Nor was she.

But for those who found the original compelling, it’s mostly about the story. True, the idea of monsters on a faraway island has its charm, but it was really about our interactions with the big ape, and how they contrast. The first is the businessman who makes it his business to capture the great ape for exhibition to the civilized world, a scheme he’s determined to achieved even at the cost of the lives of his men. And then there’s the leading lady, Ann Darrow, who shows gentleness and concern for Kong, and presently becomes Kong’s charm and prize, dragged to the top of a building before Kong suffers his fatal wound and falls to his doom below. Integrated with Kong’s animal rage at his enemies, and then his captors, this combination becomes a roaring commentary of the free enterprise system, where nothing is sacred, not even the biggest ape ever, and everything is reduced to money.

In this latest rendition, the action takes place just as America’s war with Vietnam is coming to an end. Researchers are convinced something is happening on Skull Island, and tell the government that it’s better if they learn first, rather than unnamed enemies. A company of hardened combat veterans are assigned to get the scientists to the island for further investigation.

Penetrating a perpetual storm in their combat helicopters, they soon run into Kong, which makes mince out of their meat. Then it turns into a vengeance and escape tale, as the leader of the Army detachment vows revenge on Kong, while others find the village of natives and a handy World War II survivor, who can translate the story of Kong: the protector of the village against other monsters from yester-era. This second group makes plans to arrive at the pickup point without being picked off by the various dangers stalking the forest.

Although picking does occur.

Naturally, Kong is almost destroyed, which nearly leads to the destruction of the survivors; but it’s really a muddled lesson, depending on the idea that the Army leader is so conditioned by his time in Vietnam that he can no longer exercise good judgment. It’s a reasonable thought.

But we had to reason it out after the movie was over.

And that was the problem. The motivations of the characters are not, for the most part, truly well done. One of the researchers is a Navy vet who saw his ship ripped apart by something, and wants to prove he didn’t make it up. But I’m nearly quoting the movie – it’s just him saying it. It’s not compelling.

Similarly, the leader of the Army detachment projects the excessive testosterone which is de rigeur for that sort of role – but, really, nothing more. No evidence of, say, PTSD, which might explain poor judgment or excessive. Basically, the motivation must be taken on faith – not demonstrated. We’re told, not shown.

And so the movie comes up short. Various elements from the original movie are brought in, but it’s more a game of recognizing them than they being used in an effective manner. Characterization is sketched in, with the exception of Kong himself, who manages some emotion. And I should mention the villagers, who are painted, stone faced people who do little more than menace the survivors once – and, yet, somehow effectively convey their stoic stubbornness in the face of monster attacks which would send most of us off into hysterics. So that’s a point in favor of the movie. Also in the favor of the villagers was a pictorial history they present, cleverly painted on stalagmites, as I recall, and far too short a scene. My Arts Editor was fascinated. So was I.

But, in general, the story is mundane, at least so mundane as being killed by giant spiders can be. There’s a snarky little scene with the World War II survivor, who hasn’t had anyone to really talk to for years and discovers what he has to say is not as effective as he might like, but in general, this doesn’t work nearly as well as the original King Kong.

Which is a reference to the classic Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze. Similarly, Julian Ku on Lawfare is wondering why the Chinese aren’t barking about our missile attack on Syria:

For the Chinese government, no principle of international law is more sacrosanct than non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states. Originating in its own sad history of being interfered with by foreign powers, China has made its defense of this principle a cornerstone of its foreign policy and one of its Five Principles for Peaceful Co-existence.  During the Kosovo war in 1999, China did not shy from calling the NATO action a “violation of the UN Charter and the universally recognized norms guiding international relations” and causing “serious damage on the authority of the UN Security Council.”

So when the official spokesperson for that government dodges a clear invitation for it to reaffirm this basic principle, the rest of us should pay attention.  I am not saying China no longer cares about the non-interference principle, but it is remarkable that it is going out of its way not to talk about it.

Julian only has speculation, no answers. It’ll be interesting to see if this represents a shift in Chinese thinking, or if Syria did something to piss off the Chinese.

Carnery:

Then there’s “clean” meat grown from muscle tissue in labs, or “carneries”, which also has big environmental advantages over conventional meat (see diagram). Four years since we saw the first lab-grown burger (cost: $330,000), the technology is gathering pace. Last year, an Israeli start-up announced that it is developing clean chicken. Meanwhile, a US company has already done tastings of “steak chips” – a cross between a potato chip and beef jerky – and says they could be on supermarket shelves within a few years. [“Tomorrow’s menu: Termites, grass and synthetic milk,” Marta Zaraska, NewScientist (25 March 2017, paywall)]

Fallacy Man indulges in a bit of venting on The Logic Of Science:

Let’s begin with climate change arguments. There are many that I could choose from here, but let’s start with the argument that the current warming is just a natural cycle because the climate has changed naturally in the past. If you like to use this argument, then I have several questions for you. Do you honestly think that climatologists never thought of this? Do you really think that the people who spend their lives collecting those data on past climates never even bothered to check and see if the current warming was part of a natural trend? I realize that I probably sound flippant here, but I’m actually asking these questions sincerely. Do you truly think that the entire scientific community is so hopelessly incompetent and stupid that they never even bothered to check the natural drivers of climate change? If you do, then I have news for you: they aren’t. Scientists have looked at past climate changes (Lorius et al. 1990; Tripati et al. 2009; Shakun et al. 2012), and they have very carefully looked at the natural drivers of climate change, and they have consistently found that the current warming does not match natural cycles and can only be explained by including our greenhouse gasses in the analyses (Stott et al. 2001; Meehl, et al. 2004; Allen et al. 2006; Wild et al. 2007; Lockwood and Frohlich 2007, 2008; Lean and Rind 2008; Foster and Rahmstorf 2011; Imbers et al. 2014).

And so on, as he^[1] briefly counters the climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and Creationists. Here’s the thing – he’s repetitious. In each case, he points out that the arguments against the theory du jour, while superficially convincing, are actually those of the ignorant. He then presents the current factual case against a few of the more popular opposing arguments.

And this is not necessarily wrong (I’ll defer to his greater experience concerning the nature of most arguments), but they’re suggestive of a deeper current which I wish he would have explored. Sometimes the folks at Skeptical Inquirer dip a toe, even a foot, into that current, but it’s really the hard nut they must crack, and, you know, it’s really out of scientists’ line of research.

So, briefly, consider the very fact that we can say Creationists, or the anti-vaxxers, or climate deniers. These are not merely terms to characterize a bunch of unconnected actors in the debate; oh, no. We designate them that way, they even self-designate that way, because they are organized communities. And what do communities do? They communicate among themselves. And that means they discuss their own alternative theories, building in their own biases.

In fact, this characterizes the scientific community which FM defends, complete with bias. Here’s the key difference, though – the built-in bias of the scientific community is towards truth and reality^[2]. That’s the end-point of the science community, to discover true knowledge concerning the nature of the Universe, whether it be static fact (how many quarks in a proton) or dynamic process (how species change over time in response to changes in the environment).

By contrast, understand that the entire point of Creationists is to create a theory that supports their preferred interpretation of the Bible, and then thrust it upon society in their evangelical rapture.

Communities exist to support their members, but a nearly inevitable integral part of any community is the power structure. There’s usually a pecking order which exists to direct the community in terms of behavior and ideology, which in turn translates to survival of the community. This is what dispenses the ammunition of those who go out to defend the community – whether it’s with guns overseas, or with intellectual arguments against critics.

And this difficult target must be attacked. What FM does is important, but it’s passive and, at least in this one post (I haven’t read the rest of what appears to be a large blog), appears to assume the members of the opposing communities share the general scientists’ reverence for facts.

Their facts are not your facts, unfortunately. The belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, for example, is one facet separating most scientists from most Creationists.

I think that simply presenting countervailing facts and explanations is not enough. You have to take a look at the coordinating ideology and find arguments which will separate the person from their ideology. In a sense, it’ll recapitulate the history of science. Take some outdated scientific paradigm, and ask why it became outdated. Well, there were some observations, some questions, which it could not adequately answer. I think the same must be done in these arguments, and beyond what FM is doing. And all this done while keeping in mind that the power structure of the opposing community will violently object to its very base of existence being attacked. That, in itself, may prove useful. Always remain a step ahead of your opponent.

¹“He” is the pronoun I’ll use to refer to Fallacy Man, apologies if FM answers to “She” or a more outrê pronoun.

²And thus the importance of repeating experiments, modification of publications, and Retraction Watch.

(h/t Chris J)

The replacement title for The Lego Batman Movie (2017) should be The AD – Oh, Look, A Squirrel! – HD Movie. A frenetic flick about the selfish motivations of the legendary Batman, this is a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of narcissism. How narcissistic is Batman?

He’s more self-centered than his legendary nemesis, The Joker.

And he only begins to awaken to this fact when he discovers that he wasn’t invited to the Anniversary Party of the Justice League.

A movie that benefits when the audience is familiar with the DC Comics Universe from whence Batman comes, for the parental crowd there’s also the problem that the plot is fairly hackneyed. A hero with a flaw, the consequences of that flaw, his aching efforts to overcome the flaw, and a happy ending tacked on for good measure.

But a good story would have asked about the cost of overcoming that flaw. The answer might be greater emotional vulnerability, but this is merely theoretical in this context, and will the target audience comprehend it? Even as an adult, I had to think about it. A better story would have inflicted the cost immediately and then examined whether the remedy is worth the cost.

Or, the thoughtful viewer might ask about Batman’s investment portfolio. I mean, the psychological implications of someone accumulating this much cash, as evidenced by all his wonderful toys, are somewhat staggering. Does he pay his workers peanuts?

But these concerns are transitory. This is a very conventional story, dressed up in a riff on the potential silliness we’ve seen in the various incarnations of Batman. And that’s OK. The voices are good, the graphics are fun (although my Arts Editor didn’t care for the look), and it’s a professional presentation.

But it won’t stick to your ribs.

Neuroskeptic complains about the long distance analyses of President Trump’s behavior:

We don’t need these kinds of quasi-scientific analyses of Trump’s (or anyone’s) character. We should stick to describing and commenting on the behaviour that we can directly observe. If Trump is rash, then that’s it: he’s rash. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in his brain to make him that way. If he’s egotistic and selfish, then just say so – it adds nothing to the discussion to speculate about whether he meets criteria for ‘narcissistic personality disorder’, not to mention that such a diagnosis-at-a-distance is ethically questionable.

More broadly, as I’ve argued previously, neuroscience can answer questions about the brain but most political and social questions are about behaviour. Now, while all behaviour is the product of brain activity, it’s rarely useful to try to understand a behaviour in neuroscientific terms. If you’re thirsty, then you could make me understand your situation by saying “I’m thirsty”, and the solution would be a glass of water. A neuroscientific analysis of activity in your brain’s subfornical organ wouldn’t help anyone.

I see his point – but I can’t help but note that a damaged Executive can be removed from office. Without a proper medical extended examination, of course, it’s quite silly to speculate on it – but there it is, like a steaming pile of shit, the possibility that our President is filling an office while burdened with a disqualifying condition.

For that matter, how many folks would have voted for him if he was known to have a biologically based mental condition? Indeed, it’s a serious question – which conditions are disqualifying? For example, Minnesota Governor Dayton is an admitted alcoholic, the voters knew it when he was elected, as I recall.

And then we can dive into the question of illness vs neuro-atypical, which begins to question the very definition of a properly functioning brain (à la the late Dr. Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, which I found somewhat disingenuous – although I read that maybe twenty years ago, and honestly don’t recall much about it).

Gemma Tarlach on Dead Things discusses a recently resolved mystery:

Published recently in American Museum Novitates, a new high-tech reinvestigation of a well-preserved fossil first described in 2003 revealed the animal was more than an Early Devonian sharklike fish.

Though its swimming days ended about 400 million years ago, this fossilized fella — with the great name of Doliodus problematicus — has found its place as a missing link in the deep backstory of some of today’s most intriguing and iconic animals. …

Now that we’ve got all the big words out of the way, what does the new research tell us? Well, it’s pretty exciting: thanks to CT scanning, researchers now consider Doliodus to be a truly transitional animal, an acanthodian on its way to becoming a chondrichthyan — a snapshot of the evolutionary process.

In some ways, Doliodus is the shark equivalent of our own famous distant kin Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia: We can see primitive traits hanging on in a species while derived, or more evolved features, arise.

… Neil Gorsuch, IJ (Illegitimate Justice).

Poor guy. He’ll be known as asterisk-man, because of the controversy of the process.

I haven’t seen any polls yet, and it’s a bit early anyways, but I think we’ll see Trump’s approval rating improve. Some children died, and everyone’s protective instincts kick in – as they should. So when someone does something about it, there will be a surge of approval.

But it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do in a world with enough firepower to render it uninhabitable to the human species. Especially when the closest thing to superpower #2 considers Syria to be an ally.

Kevin Drum:

The pretextual argument against this view is that a single airstrike isn’t “war,” and anyway, the War Powers Act gives the president the authority to do this kind of thing. The real argument is simper: presidents have done this stuff forever, and Congress has never worked up the gumption to stop them.

Actually, it’s worse than that: as near as I can tell, Congress actively doesn’t want to exercise its warmaking authority. It’s too politically risky. They’d rather have the president do it unilaterally, and then kibitz from the sideline. This is why I don’t really blame presidents from authorizing attacks like this. Congress could stop it anytime they want via the power of the purse, and they never have.

Kevin points me on to David French:

Assad has been engaged in one long war crime since the onset of the Syrian Civil War, and his gas attacks are hardly his deadliest. There has been a casus belli for war against Syria on a continuous basis since the onset of Assad’s genocide, but the existence of a legal and moral justification for war does not always render war wise or just. Nor does it remove the need for congressional approval. There is no reason to forego congressional debate now, just as there was no reason to forego congressional debate when Obama considered taking the nation to war against Syria in 2013.

Congressional approval is not only constitutional, it serves the public purpose of requiring a president to clearly outline the justifications for war and his goals for the conflict. It also helps secure public support for war, and in this instance it strikes me as reckless that we would not only go to war against a sovereign nation, we’d also court a possible military encounter with a great power like Russia without congressional approval. The nation needs to be ready for (and consider) all the grim possibilities and consequences. If Trump wants to go to war, he should take his case to Congress.

Very reasonable. Fareed Zakaria:

.@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” last night

Steve Benen:

If we’re going to take Trump’s words at face value, and assume that he was so affected by images out of Idlib this week that he changed his mind about U.S. policy towards Syria, fine. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder about the scope of Trump’s change of heart, and ask whether his new assessments may include a fresh perspective on refugees, too.

Matthew Yglesias:

President Trump’s official rationale for initiating the first American airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria struck humanitarian notes, complete with reference to the “beautiful babies” who “were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.” Mark Landler of the New York Times reports that “Trump’s heart came first” in ordering the attack. On its face, that’s a striking turnaround from a campaign season track record that was not only generally supportive of Bashar al-Assad but much more broadly dismissive of humanitarian considerations in general.

This is the Trump who once mocked the very notion of international concern about poison gas attacks. “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas,” he said at a December 2015 rally, “everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” …

Still, the overall pattern is unmistakable and represents critical context with which to understand Trump’s turn against Assad. Embracing the Gulf states’ worldview would dramatically improve Washington’s relationship with some of its closest regional allies. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it risks drawing the United States deeper into a series of conflicts around the region.

Jeff Stein on Vox provides some coverage of Trump’s allies’ reactions, which are mostly negative, and sums it up:

But Republican Party officials are ecstatic with Trump’s intervention. Fox News, which is closely associated with the Republican Party establishment, has not openly turned against the intervention the way personalities like Cernovich and Watson have.

But other Trump supporters, including the alt-right — which has its roots in the deeply anti-interventionist paleoconservative movement — thought Trump was the kind of Republican who opposed military intervention. Not everyone thought this was a correct assumption.

So perhaps Trump is trading public far-far-right support for Congressional far-right support? It may be a fruitful trade in that it might actually delay various investigations. And the rest of the public? Some independents will like it because it’s vengeance for the children, the rest will wait with a sense of foreboding. Put me in the latter camp with a large dose of doubt and wondering which of his statements are lies – or if any at all are truthful.

I would have preferred the possibly apocryphal Israeli approach to these problems – a Mossad agent with a pistol.

Ed Yong talks about eyes and fish evolution on The Atlantic:

Eyes are expensive organs: it takes a lot of energy to maintain them, and even more so if they’re big. If a fish is paying those costs, the eyes must provide some kind of benefit. It seems intuitive that bigger eyes let you see better or further, but MacIver’s team found otherwise. By simulating the kinds of shallow freshwater environments where their fossil species lived—day to night, clear to murky—they showed that bigger eyes make precious little difference underwater. But once those animals started peeking out above the waterline, everything changed. In the air, a bigger eye can see 10 times further than it could underwater, and scan an area that’s 5 million times bigger.

In the air, it’s also easier for a big eye to pay for itself. A predator with short-range vision has to constantly move about to search the zone immediately in front of its face. But bigger-eyes species could spot prey at a distance, and recoup the energy they would otherwise have spent on foraging. “Long-range vision gives you a free lunch,” says MacIver. “You can just look around, instead of moving to inspect somewhere else.”

Eyes are fascinating organs. My Arts Editor and I once wrote a novel which depended, in part, on the the weird eyes of trilobites. Those weird eyes, dozens of images – must have take some brainpower to integrate them.

Or did they? Maybe the integration wasn’t all that good – a sort of vague idea of the food target, open wide and hope to get it.

Sort of like a baleen whale, now that I think about it.

Tendentious:

marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view :  biased [Merriam-Webster]

Sounds like a synonym for partisan to me. Noted on Lawfare:

The political strategy here is laid out candidly in this generally tendentious essay yesterday by Andrew Klavan, entitled “Obama Spied, Media Lied,” which makes clear the ambition to change the subject from Russia’s intervention to one of the political misuse of the intelligence apparatus.

Another community that may see its existence in its current configuration at risk is the intelligence community, as explained by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare:

The U.S. intelligence community is on the verge of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy it has not experienced since the 1970s. Back then, the crisis was one of the community’s own behavior. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the intelligence community used its secret powers of surveillance and other forms of government coercion—often but not always at the behest of its political superiors—to spy on and engage in operations against Americans for political ends. At that time, politicians really did use executive branch intelligence tools to seek to monitor and harm political enemies, and exposure of that reality nearly destroyed the intelligence community. The problem was Hoover’s illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins, and his attempts to annihilate Martin Luther King and others; it was NSA’s and CIA’s domestic espionage and propaganda operations; it was Richard Nixon’s many dirty tricks.

The community survived because it entered a “grand bargain” with Congress and the American people in the 1970s. And it is that very grand bargain that today’s crisis now threatens.

Today’s crisis is sparked by allegations, both by President Trump and by some House Republicans, of political misuse of the intelligence community by the Obama administration. Whether the allegations are entirely false or turn out to have elements of truth, they put the intelligence community in the cross-hairs, since some of the institutions that are supposed to be key legitimators are now functioning as delegitimators. After all, entirely appropriate investigations of counterintelligence can easily look like inappropriate political meddling, and if the President and the House Intelligence Committee chairman are not merely not defending the intelligence community but are actively raising questions about its integrity, the bargain itself risks unraveling.

In a sense, we’re seeing the effects of small variable changes on a non-linear system. A couple of politicians shouting that the intelligence system is being used for political purposes doesn’t seem like much, does it? But the power of the intelligence systems – and its past abuses by Hoover and, later, Nixon – is such that it makes folks sensibly nervous.

And that makes sense when solid evidence is presented. And that’s the problem here, isn’t it?

There’s no evidence. More from Ben and Jack:

This basic system survived even the Snowden revelations. Many people found Snowden’s disclosures of vast intelligence collection shocking. But though Snowden disclosed many technical legal problems with this surveillance, as well as some controversial legal judgments signed off on by the executive oversight apparatus, it also showed that the the problem of politically motivated surveillance simply didn’t exist. None of the thousands of pages of NSA revelations pointed to anything like the venal activities of the 1970s and before.

But, as we know, all it takes is a baseless accusation that happens to play to folks’ preconceptions in order to generate doubt, or even certainty; many will not follow up with an objective review of the matter, whether it be through partisanship, lack of time, or lack of tools. This is heaven for the unscrupulous power-seeker – which is the best category for anyone on the Trump team, from Trump on downwards.

Ben & Jack pin their hopes on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and indeed the Founders designated the Senate as the home of the great defense of the Constitution – home to politicians who should take the long, wise view (Senator McConnell doesn’t seem to understand that, but there are more Senators than McConnell, fortunately). They also note that the Senators in charge are Republicans – an important political step. If Republicans find their own President is in cahoots with the Russians, it’s hard to call it a political lynching by the Democrats. The final word from Ben & Jack:

Don’t underestimate what’s at stake here, which is not just the fate of the Trump presidency. What’s at stake is the entire structure of legitimacy we have built for the intelligence community in the post-Watergate era. Because if the President and the House Intelligence Committee Chairman can discredit an investigation of foreign interference in an American election and collusion with that effort by the president’s campaign by alleging improper political misuse of the intelligence authorities by the prior administration, if leaking FISA intercepts is an accepted way to go after a political opponent, and if nobody can credibly say who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, then the grand bargain has truly failed, with consequences that are hard to fathom.

Here’s the thing. Suppose Trump succeeds in his claims that the intelligence systems are politically tainted. Think about it.

The current systems would have to be dismantled.

Now we’re operating blind in a very dangerous world.

Then they’d have to be reassembled. Because we’d need intelligence. But you can bet that the new designers would not be highly principled men, concerned about their country. Because the GOP has already proven that it puts party above country.

Who would be the new Hoover? And who would he persecute?

Hated minorities?

Lesbians?

Your brother?

Yourself?

Hatred is not rational. Don’t sit their nodding in approval at these thoughts, because you might be the one in front of the Select Committee on un-American Activities. It may take a generation or two before the right people come together to remake an intelligence system into a the non-political force it should be – and apparently already is.

Stephen Wolf on The Daily Kos rather gleefully notes another North Carolina gerrymandering case won by the Democrats:

On Monday, a federal district court struck down a map that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature had imposed on the city of Greensboro, the state’s third-largest city. In a remarkable affront to local rule, Republican lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that replaced the city council districts that the city itself had drawn and replaced them with gerrymandered lines intended to hurt Democratic and black voters.

Democrats quickly brought a challenge to this new map, and the judges hearing the case have now put a stop to this usurpation of power. The court concluded that the legislature’s map was an impermissible racial gerrymander; that it violated the principle of “one person, one vote”; and that it unfairly singled out Greensboro. The city-drawn map had remained in place for the 2015 elections while litigation was ongoing, and it will now stay in effect for elections in fall.

Which is all well and good. But then he seems to engage in a bit of confirmation bias:

In fact, these gerrymanders are so effective that Greensboro, which typically votes for Democratic presidential candidates by a two-to-one ratio, is represented in the House by zero Democrats. And Guilford County, which is home to Greensboro and roughly half a million people, likewise supported Hillary Clinton by a 58-38 margin, but Republicans have maintained a majority on the county commission ever since 2012—when, of course, they got to draw the map for it.

The real problem is that his case is difficult to assert without supporting evidence; that is, we can find other reasonable reasons for the observed behavior. For example, perhaps the Greensboro Democrats are a mendacious, despicable bunch who have repulsed voters so badly that they’d prefer local Republicans – and perhaps those running for county commissioner are not as bad as those running for the legislature. The victory in the gerrymandering case is, of course, a point in his favor; but his brush is too large. I fear that he misleads himself and his audience through this presentation.

And I remember how confident the diarists on The Daily Kos were that Clinton would be victorious, that Senator Johnson of Wisconsin would fall, that there’d be a general Democratic victory in the Senate and possibly even one in the House.

Technically, you can say Clinton won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College because of a quirk and Russian interference, and that some ground was made up in both chambers of Congress.

But, honestly, it was still a disaster for the Democrats and their Progressive wing, and I put it down to the Progressives having their own little echo chamber. They talk to themselves too much. I think Stephen’s post would benefit from some self-criticism. The victory in the court case is encouraging, I do agree – but precision in observation and argument will lead to better results down the road.