Monthly Archives: October 2017

Helioseismologists:

It’s not easy to figure out what’s inside the sun. “We can’t go and take a sample,” says [Sarbani] Basu. There are two main ways to investigate. Helioseismologists such as Basu look at sound vibrations on the sun’s surface, which give outward evidence of the vast quantities of energy being unleashed within. That energy depends on the sun’s internal structure, as well as its ingredients, which Basu can identify by working backwards from observations beamed from her space-based probes. [“Hiding in plain sight: The mystery of the sun’s missing matter,” Shannon Palus, NewScientist (21 October 2017, print title “What’s wrong with the sun?”, paywall)]

What a doozy! Although if the Sun is wholly plasma, how can it have a seismology?

A little different view of the transition on this one, brought on by a ray of sunshine above some shadows.

While reading about an Executive Order permitting the recall of retired military personnel to active duty on Lawfare, I ran across this uncomfortable reminder:

Last month, as Presidents Bush and Obama did annually after 2001, President Trump renewed the national emergency.

I have to wonder if it’s occurred to any of the Executives that the continuance of the National Emergency may not be because of foreign aggression, but because of our own poor behaviors.

Although I suspect that, for demographers, the real reason is simply overpopulation.

Most plots revolve around the driving needs of a character – sex, money, revenge, and several other goals are the pivot point of many plots. So I was baffled by Lucky (2017), the story of a 90 year old man named Lucky who is riding out the end of his life in a small town.

But it does gradually come into focus, and explains why a movie that seems to be plot-free is cohesive and makes sense. The driver is a basic urge we rarely encounter in cinema: the fear of the true final frontier, death, as faced by a man who either has discarded religion, or never wore it. As death inevitably approaches, Lucky undergoes the transformation of realizing that life, in all its form, is precious, from people of other races, other moralities, and, as he rescues a box of crickets meant to be food for reptilian pets, other species.

This is a movie of uncommonly subtle touches, where a mere sentence concerning Liberace reveals a bigotry he has since discarded, or a friend’s grief over the disappearance of his pet tortoise, but recognition that the tortoise has primal urges which it, too, must obey, comes along as an apparent comedic side-trip, and yet may be the central message of the movie – a plea to consider our fellow creatures as being something other than our playthings.

A movie rich in professionals, executed with a crisp, relaxed competency, and a fine ear for dialog, this is a movie which will repay the audience’s patience and attention.

Strongly Recommended.

It’s been three days since the announcement of indictments, and the Gallup Presidential Approval Poll does show an impact:

I suppose the cynical might say this means smoke is as good as fire for some folks. And, to be honest, when we’re talking about our government, this is not an inappropriate attitude to take – our governments should exemplify ethical behavior, not sleaze under the bar. But it’s also indicative of how much time people are willing to put into their evaluation of the government, and this may be a trifle too precipitous for some observer’s taste. And then we could also interpret this as the indictment pushing voters who were doubtful but not certain right off the edge of the cliff.

But it’s worth stepping back and considering just how this is working out for the GOP. After all, they spent 8 years trying to pin scandals on President Obama, and yet most dispassionate observers rate the Obama Administration as one of the cleanest ever run, an accomplishment I put down to the considered temperament of President Obama. He is, after all, a Constitutional scholar who appeared to have a very methodical approach to government, handing out nominations to people who seemed to be the best qualified, and often being right in these difficult matters. It’s said that if you want to be a successful leader, hire people smarter than yourself, and I think he hired experts who he could manage, but not manipulate.

On the other hand, President Trump has … gah, I don’t even know how to state it. Ah, got it – he’s off on the other end of the spectrum. I’ve used words and phrases such amateurish and incurious, and they remain keywords in this trainwreck of a Presidency. With the exception of Secretary Mattis and perhaps Secretary Shulkin, his Cabinet is of dubious quality, with several apparently teetering on the edge of being chased out.

But even worse, it’s not the Democrats who’ve been instrumental in chasing after Trump’s indiscretions, but honorable, if former, Republicans themselves. Oh, not those in Congress responsible for Presidential oversight. I don’t think anyone merits any admiration, although I’m not privy to all the relevant meetings. But former FBI Director James Comey was a Republican before he was an Independent, and he kicked off the entire investigation; his successor, Christopher Wray, is currently a Republican. Finally, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who, for those living under a rock, brought the indictments and news of a guilty please, is a Republican.

All Republicans.

President Trump can squeal about fake news and Democratic intransigence and witch hunts and all that rot, but the plain fact of the matter is that patriotic Republicans are the ones digging up the dirt on President Trump.

Now, given recent Republican Presidential approval ratings of 81%, this doesn’t mean the GOP is turning on Trump. They don’t seem to understand that chronic lying is not an isolated phenomenon, but is indicative of a systemic problem in the Administration. Then again, tribalism makes it easy for an incompetent leader to remain popular and in power. That’s one of the reasons I reject team politics for either party, although I’d give an exemption to the Democrats for the next election, because the Republicans badly need a spanking.

I don’t know if a thorough spanking would remove the blindfolds they seem to favor these days, but it might help jostle them a little. I suppose it would depend on how much the base continues to believe those who continue to feed them their feel-good news, and how many of them are willing to lap it up. The attempt to discredit the mainstream media remains a very disturbing phenomenon, as it seems to have had some impact – but I can’t find the link.

But tomorrow, and the rest of this week, should prove interesting.

Professor Ilya Somin has an appealing analysis of the behavior of consumers of the Internet with regards to scams, commercial and political, on The Volokh Conspiracy:

By contrast, we do a much worse job of minimizing the risk posed by political deception and disinformation. If you get an e-mail from a wealthy heiress who offers to pay you a million dollars, or see a website that promises to increase your sexual potency at a bargain-basement price, you are likely to be highly skeptical. By contrast, many people don’t apply anything like the same degree of common-sense scrutiny to political snake oil – especially when it conforms to their preexisting views. Politicians and activists who peddle dubious conspiracy theories, promise to give you something for nothing, and otherwise spread disinformation, often gain a wide following. Donald Trump’s large-scale use of lies and deception is just an extreme case of a far more widespread tactic, also successfully used by more conventional candidates and political movements.

The problem here has less to do with the specifics of the internet and more with the way we process political information. In most private-sector contexts, we have strong incentives to guard against deception and keep wishful thinking under control. If you believe the promises of the self-proclaimed Saudi prince who e-mails to say he will send you a million dollars tomorrow if only you will forward him a much smaller sum today, you will probably lose your money. That leads most people to be duly skeptical of such offers, even if they badly want to believe in the possibility of getting rick quickly with little effort.

By contrast, if you find a website or Twitter feed that promises we can promote social justice or make America great again by supporting some dubious candidate or public policy, incentives for skepticism are much weaker. If you get taken in and end up with false political beliefs that lead you to vote for the “wrong” candidate on election day, the chance that your vote will make a difference to the outcome is infinitesimally small. And even if your mistaken vote does somehow end up being decisive, most of the cost of the error will fall on the rest of society, not you or your family.

As a result, most voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” about politics, often remaining unaware of even very basic information. They also tend to a poor job of evaluating what they do learn – including believing extremely dubious claims that reinforce their preexisting views, while ignoring strong evidence that cuts the other way.

In most nonpolitical transactions online, we stand to pay a high price for ignorance and credulity. That does not mean we completely avoid bias and error. But it does greatly reduce it. When it comes to politics, by contrast, we can indulge our prejudices at little personal cost.

I like it because it explains the tenacity with which horrible political positions are retained by otherwise bright people – when you’re one of just a few holding an outré political position, you’re unlikely to be hurt by it because it never achieves dominance. And, for many, learning comes only from mistakes that bloody your nose.

But this Administration is the actualization of those odd-ball political beliefs. My suspicion is that, as horrific as it might have been, we will lose the opportunity to learn from this mistake, because Trump will be impeached, resign, or will flee the country and try to govern from afar, out of reach of law enforcement.

I give that last one a 1% chance of occurring.

However, if Trump does ride out the storm that seems to have been unleashed this morning, we may have the opportunity to discover just how bad Trump and GOP governance can be. Sadly, that will be much to our regret, in my opinion.

Lawfare‘s Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes present their analysis of this morning’s big reveal. Their conclusion?

We offer no prediction as to how this will play politically or whether such antics will carry any water with Republicans who must be feeling a little uneasy today.

We will say this: Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished this morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.

For those who’ve been waiting for Trump to grow into the job, it must feel like a spike is coming right up out of their chair. This may take longer than I expected, but, unlike Andrew Sullivan, I expect Trump will be leaving office before the end of this term, one way or another.

A little fun with a discarded petal.

Yeah, that’s about as unimpressive as it can get – out of focus on a pathetic subject. OK, just to make it up to you, here’s some out of focus night photos.

I had to use them somehow.

The oddly named Mr. Sardonicus (1961) is a cautionary tale for the modern religious zealot. In (fictional) Gorslava, the superstitious young peasant, Marek, has a shrill young woman, hungry for improvement, for a wife.  She rejects the gift of Marek’s father, a lottery ticket, one of the hundreds the old man has bought over the years, foolishly in her eyes. The next night, the old man is dead of a heart attack, and Marek buries him in his favorite coat.

Months later, the lottery winners are announced, and the gift ticket is a winner! Lo, let the celebrations begin – once Marek has dug up Dad in order to retrieve the ticket from the pocket of his favorite coat. But during the night time operation, Marek suffers a terrible affliction from, he supposes, God on high.  It is punishment for being a ghoul, a creature that digs up and consumes the dead. His wife is terrified, and soon takes her own life.

Years later, Marek is now Baron Sardonicus. He bought the title and land using his lottery winnings, and now stalks about with a mask to conceal the horror that is his face.  His sole occupation is now a desperate search for a medical cure for God’s affliction. Remarried to a woman who cannot stand his appearance, he & she contact her former boyfriend, Doctor Sir Robert Cargrave, who is now a successful researcher into various conditions, in hopes that he may be able to affect a cure.

He comes to visit, and discovers there are medical experiments underway, managed by the one eyed man-servant, Krull (love that name!). The subjects are vulnerable young women, and an appalled Cargrave orders Krull to discontinue the experiments.  Krull is grumpy about the matter, but wary of dominant men, for we soon learn Sardonicus is responsible for Krull’s missing eye. Meanwhile, Cargrave soon meets his former love, Maude, and then his host, the Baron. After some exploratory conversation over a repast, the Baron retires to secretly take his pleasure with a local innocent peasant woman.

The next day, the Baron reveals his affliction to Cargrave: the punishment meted out by an angry god is that the Baron’s face is to model that of his own father.

No so bad, you think? But context is all, and in this case, the face he displays is that of his father in the grave, dead and decayed. Sardonicus is stricken with the rictus of death.  He admits that he could not speak for years after being so afflicted, and only achieved speech through careful retraining. Sardonicus wishes Cargrave to bring his successful heat and massage techniques to bear on this curse from God, and Cargrave agrees.

His technique fails, however, and Sardonicus demands he try experimental treatments, or he’ll torture his own wife. Cargrave reluctantly agrees and engages in months of research on a cure involving South American poisons which will relax the muscles causing the rictus. At the moment of an announcement of success on a dog, Sardonicus requests an instant treatment. Despite Cargrave’s demurral, Sardonicus demands and manipulates until Cargrave agrees.

As it happens, Sardonicus’ father’s corpse is resident in the house, and it is to this room they repair for the treatment, at Cargrave’s insistence. Sardonicus is strapped down, facing his father, the drug injected, and the others leave the room. As the candle goes out, Sardonicus loses his nerve and begins screaming, inducing his man-servant, Krull, to open the door, which throws some light on the corpse, inducing more terror in Sardonicus.

And the muscles in his face relax, and once again he is normal, except now he cannot open his mouth. Cargrave announces this to be a temporary condition, a matter of a few hours. Sardonicus releases his wife, Maude from their marriage, and soon Cargrave and Maude are at the train station. This is where Krull catches up with him and begs their return, as Sardonicus still cannot open his mouth.

And now we get another reveal: there was no drug. Sardonicus was injected with distilled water. This cure was a reluctant psychological experiment, inducing Sardonicus to relax his own muscles through terror, just as initially the terror paralyzed his muscles. It’s all in his mind, Cargrave says, that’s all Krull must tell the Baron, and he’ll cure himself. Krull returns to the castle to inform the Baron.

Except …

This story is bookended by an anonymous, omniscient narrator. Flippant, he treats the camera as a theatrical audience, and at this juncture, he calls for a democratic vote: Should Sardonicus be rewarded, or punished? And Krull will the carry out the result of that final vote, now won’t he?

So, you must be wondering how this applies to the religious zealot. I see it this way: The submission of reason to emotion, which begins Sardonicus’ descent into hell, is strongly reminiscent of the true religious zealot’s experience of life: the attempts to explain the vagaries of existence through the exigency of a supernatural creature. Once experiencing a supposed incident of supernatural nature, every counter-action becomes supremely a matter of certainty for the believer – a fatalistic belief that the activity, regardless of its morality, is sanctioned by the divine, or, worse, will be forgiven by the divine.

So it is with Sardonicus, a superstitious peasant, transformed through his self-inflicted horrific incident.  He becomes a man, elevated to dominance, who has suppressed all communal, positive impulses in favor of his egocentric requirement to find a cure for a condition which, frankly, is merely repulsive, but not a danger to the Baron’s life. Utterly certain of the rightness of his position, there is no compromise, nor any hurdle upon which he balks. Krull is brutalized, and then required to brutalize other test subjects. Cargrave can find no traction in his protests against those demands, and Sardonicus is willing, even eager, to sacrifice his wife to gain his goal.

This is not unlike most religious movements, where the belief that since the divine favors the believers’ movement, the absolute goodness of any action taken by the movement is assured, and is analogous to the old horse-before-the-cart position. The phantom foundation shifting under their weight, of course, is the belief in the supernatural, whether it be ghouls, vampires, or gods.

And one may see in Krull those members now on the edge of disbelief, who have faced too many harsh realities to believe in the fairy tale. To be fair, Krull hasn’t espoused the fairy tale; he labors without rest in the service of the Baron. But as Sardonicus is revealed as having never been punished, but, instead, being a foolish victim of his own beliefs, Krull becomes the disillusioned members of the sect, leaving with bitterness in their hearts.

Heck, even the GOP could learn from this movie.

Technically speaking, this is a competent movie in all respects. The cinematography of this B&W effort is especially well done.

All that said, I can’t say I found this to be a compelling movie. It is interesting, trying to understand where it would go next, and what appeared to be the ending was almost appalling, until we learned how the finale would really play out.  And the necessary tensions were just not as vibratory as I might have hoped.

But it was fun.

My Arts Editor has caught the flavor of the transition as well.

A mere salamander is becoming a celebrity millennia after its death. From “Exceptional soft tissues preservation in a mummified frog-eating Eocene salamander,” Jérémy Tissier, Jean-Claude Rage, Michel Laurin, PeerJ:

The ‘Phosphorites du Quercy’, in southwestern France, include numerous karstic fissures in-filled by phosphatic sediments rich in vertebrate remains (Legendre et al., 1997; Pélissié & Sigé, 2006). Almost all remains appear as classical disarticulated fossil bones, but a few of them (a salamander, anurans and snakes) are spectacular cases of exceptional preservation; the animals are entirely mineralized, including the skin, in three dimensions. Unfortunately, these ‘mummies’ were collected in the 19th century and their precise provenance and geological age are unknown. However, it is suspected that they come from the late middle or late Eocene (Laloy et al., 2013; Tissier et al., 2016).

Until recently, only the external morphology of the ‘mummies’ was known. However, recent tomographic studies showed that the skeleton is preserved within the ‘mummies’ of the frog Thaumastosaurus gezei (Laloy et al., 2013) and of the salamander Phosphotriton sigei) (Tissier et al., 2016). The specimen of P. sigei includes a large part of the trunk (preserved posterior to the shoulder girdle), the anterior portion of the tail and the proximal portions of the hind limbs (Fig. 1A). The right side of the trunk is crushed. Diagnostic external features include the absence of scales, the presence of costal grooves visible on the left side, and the presence of a longitudinally slit-shaped cloaca.

And from the abstract:

Indeed, the digestive tract contains remains of a frog, which represents the only known case of an extinct salamander that fed on a frog, an extremely rare type of predation in extant salamanders.

I suppose that makes the frog a bit of a celebrity as well. Cool stuff.

If you’ve been wondering about the sudden blather about Secretary Clinton and uranium mines, Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare covers the issue at length. Perhaps of most interest, though, is his reference to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review of the matter, and his reaction to it:

NRC’s review of the transfer of control request determined that the U.S. subsidiaries will remain the licensees, will remain qualified to conduct the uranium recovery operations, and will continue to have the equipment, facilities, and procedures necessary to protect public health and safety and to minimize danger to life or property. The review also determined that the licensees will maintain adequate financial surety for eventual decommissioning of the sites. Neither Uranium One nor ARMZ holds an NRC export license, so no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.

…

• Uranium One’s licenses are for mining and extraction, not for export. This makes the claim that we “gave away” 20% of America’s uranium fairly hyperbolic. The expectation, in light of the NRC’s assessment, would have been that the uranium mined would be marketed in America (with the profits going to Russia).
• It is, however, true, that the mining rights to 20% of American uranium are now held by a Russian state agency. That is troubling (and had it been me, I would have tried to generate opposition to the sale). It isn’t a “give away,” but it is the case that Rusatom has de jure and de facto legal rights that can be exercised to limit production if it wishes to do so.

Along with with this note that the purchasing entity, Rosatom, “… is reported to have promised to retain the Uranium One corporate management and corporate structure, not breaking up the company,” it’s really hard to see the current GOP-generated uproar as anything more than a frantic distraction tactic for its own base. The Uranium One corporate structure will be Canadian, or perhaps even American, so it seems unlikely there’ll be illegal export or sabotage. More likely, this is simply seen as a way to take advantage of American nuclear needs by siphoning off some profits. It’s even possible that some Russian nuclear know-how made its way into Uranium One and is being applied to the extraction of the uranium.

And will the GOP base be smart enough to do some independent research? Maybe even read Lawfare, a hard-nosed legal blog that doesn’t put up with bullshit from either political party? Probably not, but I can keep up my hopes that my fellow citizens will return to thinking for themselves.

Concerning the latest foolishness in North Carolina, a reader predicts:

If this kind of nonsense continues and grows, I predict the USA will cease to exist as a 50 state country by the end of the century.

Much sooner, I should think – perhaps twenty years. We’ll break apart into chunks, several of which would become theocracies, or some variation of a democracy with only one permitted religion. Soon enough, the latter would fall to fighting among themselves over theological differences.

But I suspect none of our adversaries would bother to actually invade. They’d just keep us stirred up in our foolishness.

Bloviating:

Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous political speech particularly associated with Ohio due to the term’s popularization by United States President Warren G. Harding, who, himself a master of the technique, described it as “the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing”.^[1] The verb “to bloviate” is the act of creating bloviation. In terms of its etymology, according to one source, the word is a “compound of blow, in its sense of ‘to boast’ (also in another typical Americanism, blowhard), with a mock-Latin ending to give it the self-important stature implicit in its meaning.” [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Trump increasingly frustrated his greatness isn’t being recognized,” Kerry Eleveld, The Daily Kos:

Apparently, that display of braggadocio went over so well, he reprised it again this week, which suggests we’re likely to be treated to a lot more incoherent bloviating from the guy who really believes the world owes him a standing ovation.

Yeah, the tone of Kerry’s post is awful, but I liked the word, and it’s particularly cool to see its connection with a previous President. It’s been one of those words I’d sort of taken for granted.

This report in WaPo is distressing. It concerns the mandatory introductory Humanities course taught at Reed College:

This academic year, the first lecture was to be a panel introduction of the course: Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the course, the study of the humanities and the importance of students’ knowing the history of the education they were beginning.

We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.

Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.

It seems to me that if they don’t like what is being taught, then don’t attend that college.

But I suppose that probably doesn’t fit in with the ideology of the students, since racism – or what they would like to label racism – must be stamped out wherever it may be exist.

Sadly, it appears that their definition of racism is the only one that matters, and they will enforce their decision by force, if necessary.

Which just makes them another in a long line of authoritarians, or fascists, if you will.

I suspect in ten years the movement will have broken its back on one of the many contradictions which tend to cling to the hides of such movements, and be merely an academic subject in and of itself, of interest mainly as a question as to how to prevent it from occurring again.

Which, in itself, is a bit of a contradiction in a free society. Freedom doesn’t mean we always get things right, now do we? So we have to endure stupidity, we have to consider how children are brought up so poorly, or how political predators, if you will, are allowed to take advantage of them.

But it doesn’t make this moment, for the author of the above piece, “… an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD …”, any more palatable. The force and violence merely leads to more violence.

And the worst of it is that the academic institutions are those most likely to sympathize with the issues at the heart of the protest movement, most likely to favor changing society. It’s large segments of society which are most likely at fault.

If this isn’t just some bullshit infused into the gullible.

A rare, for me, posed set of pictures. First, the simple informational snap.

Next, some views of the dogwoods, entering their grumpy winter sleep, waiting uneasily to discover how Deb has trimmed them while they were sleeping.

Finally, we add in the patina of the flower buckets and the dejected ornamental grass.

I suppose, if I were a completist, I would have also snapped and posted pictures of the gutters I cleaned out today. They were so full of leaves and decomposition that the water could not follow the dictates of gravity.

I’m not a completist.

In regards to my commentary on the individual investor and the stock market, a reader remarks:

Oh, I suspect it’s a game — the market is constantly gamed by those in a position to do so, to the detriment of most individual investors. It’s much more like pari-mutuel betting where it’s really your knowledge or guess against the rest of the people investing. Real company fundamentals have far less effect on their stock price these days than they did 30 to 50 years ago. And there’s still a ton of emotion involved.

Short term, yes, there’s pumping and manipulation and a great deal of emotion, and those who think they can become rich overnight are often left shirtless and bewildered. But none of these can carry, or suppress, a stock of a company over the long term.

Nascent:

coming or having recently come into existence • a nascent middle class • her nascent singing career [Merriam-Webster]

I find it odd that this particular word lacked a clear definition in my brain. Noted in “Beyond the Obituaries,” Nancy Knowlton & Jeremy Jackson, The Solutions Journal:

Politically, the implications are clear: success stories rarely just happen–unless a convenient political accident intervenes, such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequent reduction of pollution in the Black Sea. Large-scale solutions may be obvious in principle but they don’t get enacted if people don’t care about solving the problem. In some cases, single individuals work tirelessly for a cause and eventually succeed in inspiring others to take action. In other cases, the environments or organisms—for example, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or whales—are so culturally important that nascent political consensus already exists. For these exceptions to become the norm, global adoption of policies that provide large-scale protection of coastal waters and the open ocean is needed. Only then will overharvested species be able to rebound and coastal ecosystems suffocating in polluted and anoxic waters be able to breathe deeply again.

Beyond The Obituaries:

Fortunately, many students today take a different attitude. Like medical doctors, they want to save their patients, not write their obituaries. Even the media dictum of “if it bleeds, it leads” seems to be losing its grip as the public tires of reading stories of doom and gloom. But is there any good news to report? When we started organizing our “Beyond the Obituaries” symposium at the Smithsonian Institute in 2009, several of our colleagues wondered if we could even fill a program. Yet there is good news—reasons for hope and evidence of positive change—to be found if you hunt for it.

First, all is not lost. Relatively few extinctions have occurred in the sea, so most pieces of marine ecosystems remain. Yes, we have lost the giant auk, the sea mink, and the Caribbean monk seal, but bluefin tunas are still with us, at least for now. Moreover, in some remote places too far from human settlements to be worth exploiting, quasi-pristine marine ecosystems remain. The remarkable trophic structures of the Northern Line Islands and northwestern Hawaiian Islands, dominated by top predators in a way once thought to be energetically impossible, show us what ecosystems look like when people don’t eat everything big. Second, many once-dire situations have substantially improved. Sea otters and some seabirds, whales, turtles, and fishes like the striped bass have increased in numbers, in some cases markedly so. Shellfish beds, also, are coming back in many places, and even a few coral populations are showing signs of rebounding.

Cool name. And a necessary organization.

The Editorial Board of the Charlotte Observer reacts with the appropriate horror at the latest travesty to appear in the North Carolina legislature:

Sen. Bill Rabon, a Republican from Southport, last week filed Senate Bill 698. The bill proposes a constitutional amendment that would cut all regular judges’ terms – from the N.C. Supreme Court to district court judges – to two years. Currently all judges and justices serve eight-year terms, except district court judges, who serve four-year terms. The amendment would also end all 400-plus current judges’ terms in 2018, including those who were elected to eight-year terms less than a year ago. …

This might be legislators’ worst idea yet in their campaign to remake North Carolina’s court system, and that’s saying something. Few moves undercut the reality and the appearance of fair and impartial judges like having them run for office every two years. That would make them permanent campaigners – and year-round fundraisers – much like legislators are now.

Judges are not meant to be politicians. They are not meant to have their decisions influenced by the whim of the voters. They serve the Constitution and the rule of law, and must be insulated just enough to do so.

Any excuse for this execrable proposal?

Rep. David Lewis told North Carolina Public Radio that the thinking behind the bill was, “if you’re going to act like a legislator, perhaps you should run like one.”

Which is to say, I don’t like your latest ruling, so I’m going to screw you over. It’s a little like watching a 4 year old screeching about not getting a treat at the store – you just want to slap them. But you can’t.

We’ve discussed the role of the judiciary before, and I’m not sure I want to repeat myself, especially as the Charlotte Observer’s editorial covers the ground quite respectably. It might be more fun to speculate on the mindset of those who are for this proposal, but I suppose that would be childish.

However, I would like to add a point that the Observer did not explicitly state. By necessity, there are at least two sides interested in every decision a judge is asked to make, and most of the time, one of them is going to be disappointed in the decision. The proposal doesn’t address the question of competency of candidates for judgeships, and how that competency will change as judges and potential judges realize that each decision is potentially a political decision which could cost them their job.

How many really competent potential judges will wish to put up with that extra pressure?

This appears to be a recipe to put second-raters and the power-hungry in the judiciary. The legislature would do well to reject this on its face; and, if black fate should convey this to the Governor’s desk, he should veto it as fast as he can get his fingers on the rejection stamp.

It’s occurred to me that Idle Musings is probably a poor phrase; better would have been Jumping Jacks For The Mind. I’m just following some odd thoughts percolating through my brain concerning prime numbers; I have no expertise in them nor, for that matter, mathematics in general, and I’ve done no research. I’m just messing around here. I’m stretching the brain in unaccustomed ways, and by all accounts this is good for the brain.

Just to be straight.

Perhaps I should email this off to SCOTUS, given the recent dismaying accounts of their mathphobia.

Last time I introduced the idea of using the underlying indexes in P in the calculation of P_n and suggested that a collection of equations would be necessary; this, in popular jargon, is an algorithm. I’m no theoretician, of course, so I will proceed via inspection to explore the creation of an algorithm.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve thought about this a little but my personal memory scratch space is too small for me to push the ideas out beyond the first seven members of P; I’m writing this down as a substitute for paper, as my handwriting is awful. I shan’t even publish this until a tentative conclusion is reached.

In order to discover and refine the algorithm, the first few known members of the infinite set P will be useful. From the Internet:

P_{1,2, …} = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113, 127, 131, 137, 139, 149, 151, 157, 163, 167, 173, 179, 181, 191, 193, 197, 199 … }

We assume P₁ = 2 with no justification. Immediately, we can see

P₂ = P₁ + 1 = 2 + 1 = 3

so we place

P_n+1 = P_n + n      (Eq. 1)

in our contingent list of equations; it will be withdrawn soon enough. Let’s see how far this takes us:

P₃ = P₂ + 2 = 3 + 2 = 5    (Eq. 1)   (So far, so good)

P₄ = P₃ + 3 = 5 + 3 = 8   (Eq. 1)   (wrong!)

which is not only wrong, but also indicative of a longer term problem, which is that whenever n is odd, Eq. 1 will be wrong, because, with the exception of P₁, all prime numbers are odd, and adding an odd number n to an odd number P_n will result in an even number. We withdraw Eq. 1 in favor of this:

P_n+1 = P_n + n   when n is even or n = 1  (Eq. 2)

which then leaves us with the question of how to handle odd subscripts. We observe that the wrong answer is an overshoot of 1, so perhaps we can start with that:

P_n+1 = P_n + (n-1)   when n is odd   (Eq. 3)

Continuing to apply our algorithm:

P₄ = P₃ + (3 – 1) = P₃ + 2 = 5 + 2 = 7   (Eq. 3) (that works)

P₅ = P₄ + 4 = 7 + 4 = 11  (Eq. 2)  (that works)

P₆ = P₅ + (5 – 1) = 11 + 4 = 15 (Eq. 3) (fails!)

And Eq. 3 fails in two different ways this time.

First, of course, 15 is not a prime number; however, 17 is a prime number. Let’s make the assumption that there is another algorithm for generating the non-prime members of N (the natural numbers greater than 1). Then we can withdraw Eq. 3 in favor of a slightly modified version of same:

P_n+1 = P_n + (n ± 1)   when n is odd   (Eq. 4)

Where the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ is selected on the basis of whether or not P_n + (n – 1) generates an already generated non-prime number; if it does, then we move to the + 1 variant. Perhaps we’ll discern a better rule later.

But more importantly, the failure case cited above refers, at best, to 17; P₆ is actually 13! Before discussing how to handle this mistake, let’s get the mechanics out of the way, which is to say, replacing Eq. 2 & 4:

P_n + n => P_x  when n is even or n = 1  (Eq. 5, replacing Eq. 2)

P_n + (n ± 1) => P_x  when n is odd   (Eq. 6, replacing Eq. 4)

I write P_x because we no longer know the value of the subscript, I write => to indicate the loss of connection between n and x.

Back to the precipitating matter, it appears clear that we need a generating function for calculating all prime numbers between P_n and P_x. Its behavior should eventually work for P₁ … P₅, of course. As a very contingent first hack, it’s clear that for n = 5,

P_n+1 = P_n + (n / 2)   (Eq. 7)

where the division results in a whole number, rounded down, should suffice. To be clear, we should have a way to know when to apply it, and we don’t. For the nonce, let us say that we first apply Eq. 5 or Eq. 6, as appropriate, and then test apply Eq. 7, and if 7 generates a number larger than the one previously generated, discard the result from Eq. 7. Applied to n = 5,

P₆ = P₅ + (5 / 2) = 11 + 2 = 13 (Eq. 3)

Since we now have P₆ calculated properly, let’s use it.

P6 + 6 => P_x, (Eq. 5)
13 + 6 = 19 => P_x

Which works and we can assign to P₈, as we have already calculated P₇ to be 17. More exploration, keeping in mind that we have not yet ascertained a solid rule for employing Eq. 7.

P₇ + 7 = 17 + 7 – 1 = 23  (Eq. 6, variant ‘-‘)  (correct!)

and using P₈,

P₈ + 8 = 19 + 8 = 27. (Eq. 5)  (Waa-waa!)

So we see the approach beginning to fail, as a core equation yields a wrong value – 27 is not a prime, and the next prime is 29, so we’re off by -2. Modifying Eq. 5 to produce the proper solution seems unlikely, as it must also apply to all previous primes with an even index.

But what’s catching my eye is that, unlike many failing solutions in programming, this one is trying to hang on. Have some patience …

P₉ + 9 – 1 = 23 + 8 = 31   (Eq. 5)  (correct, P₁₁)

P₁₀ + 10 = 29 + 10 = 39   (Eq. 6) (off by +2 instead of -2, P₁₂ is 37)

P₁₁ + 11 – 1 = 31 + 11 – 1 = 41 (Eq. 5)  (correct, P₁₃)

P₁₁ + (11 / 2) = 31 + 5 = 36  (Eq. 7)  (wrong, 37 is correct)

Are we slowly diverging? P₁₂ is off by two by Eq. 5, but generates a prime for Eq. 7, P₁₃ generates a prime properly by Eq. 6. There may be a pattern in the failures, but that would take more calculation, and other duties call.

So this is a mind stretch, which, like jumping jacks, really doesn’t take you anywhere – but does focus the attention on one of those mysteries of mathematics, the prime numbers. Perhaps a slightly more sophisticated set of equations would suffice… the mind does wander down that path sometimes. Even for non-mathematicians like myself.

Steve Benen reports on GOP anger at Senators who honor their duty:

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) reportedly appeared on NPR this morning and said Republican senators who are worried about Trump’s fitness should keep their fears “private,” and discuss their concerns “within the family.”

In other words, if the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has reason to believe the president is dangerously unfit, the important thing is that the public not find out.

In case this isn’t obvious, what policymakers in both parties should be worried about is Trump’s ability to do the job, not public awareness about concerns that the president can’t do the job.

Assuming Senator Thune really did say that (I’ve yet to find the interview on the NPR website), I’d say Senator Thune has disqualified himself from re-election, because the nation needs to know when the President is incompetent for the job – it’s basically a public emergency.

But it’s not that President Trump has become unfit to be President, but that he was never fit to begin with, and that’s the problem Senator Thune has, because it’s really an indictment of the GOP as a valid political party. It has proven vulnerable to a con-man, and the fact that the GOP has voted more or less in lock-step with the incompetent-in-chief, as this partial list from today’s FiveThirtyEight’s TrumpScore Senator page on the right indicates, leaves each of them individually guilty of suppressing their individual judgments in favor of that of the Party, and the latter has proven disastrous.

Such are the fruits of team politics.

So when Senator Thune speaks of keeping it in the family, he’s really trying to put the Party above the country. And that’s really not an acceptable attitude.

Estuary:

Estuaries and their surrounding wetlands are bodies of water usually found where rivers meet the sea. Estuaries are home to unique plant and animal communities that have adapted to brackish water—a mixture of fresh water draining from the land and salty seawater.

However, there are also several types of entirely freshwater ecosystems that have many similar characteristics to the traditional brackish estuaries. For example, along the Great Lakes, river water with very different chemical and physical characteristics mixes with lake water in coastal wetlands that are affected by tides and storms just like estuaries along the oceanic coasts. These freshwater estuaries also provide many of the ecosystem services and functions that brackish estuaries do, such as serving as natural filters for runoff and providing nursery grounds for many species of birds, fish, and other animals.

Estuaries are among the most productive ecosystems in the world. Many animals rely on estuaries for food, places to breed, and migration stopovers.

Estuaries are delicate ecosystems. Congress created the National Estuarine Research Reserve System to protect more than one million acres of estuarine land and water. These estuarine reserves provide essential habitat for wildlife, offer educational opportunities for students, and serve as living laboratories for scientists. [NOAA]

Mentioned by Colbert in reference to the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program this week.

I found myself grunting and muttering in dismay while reading “The stock market is run by wild robots we don’t fully control,” (print: The Money Machine) by Sally Adee, NewScientist (14 October 2017, paywall), which had some poorly articulated concerns about the stock market. For instance, this:

To understand why machines are taking over, it helps to look at how perceptions of the stock market have changed following the financial crisis of 2007-08. It is increasingly clear that for the average person, investing is a mug’s game. Individuals have little hope of picking successful firms to back, while giving your money to investment managers who aim to beat the market often sees any gains being eaten away by a laundry list of opaque fees.

While the mutual fund game is indeed beset by a tide of hurdles to find effective actively managed funds, it’s not impossible to find them. But let’s address the other side, the individual investing in individual stocks.

First of immediate concern is the investment philosophy. The machine algorithms, by and large, are concerned with extreme short-term investing wherein microseconds or even smaller quanta of time are of critical importance and stocks may only be owned for a few seconds. The individual attempting to compete with the machines at this level are indeed mugs, or even madmen.

But while you may think the madness lies in attempting to compete with high speed machinery, that is not my point, even though you’d be right. My point lies in returning to the purpose of stock ownership and the stock market.

Owning stocks is all about having a partial ownership of a company. The stock serves several purposes: it permits the raising of funds for corporate purposes that might otherwise have to be borrowed from lenders at unattractive rates; it dilutes the risk to the owners; etc. The stock market is a way to estimate the future of companies by pricing the companies via their stocks, resulting in a market capitalization. The differences in knowledge and opinion form the basis for the pricing differentials that allow stocks to be traded at all.

But let’s pause here and reflect on a facet that seems to receive short shrift in most stock market summations, and that’s social utility. That is, what activities within the market have social utility, are advantageous to society? Those explicit purposes I mentioned are mutually believed to have social utility.

But what social utility do the algorithms have, stipulating their purposes is high speed trading with low-duration ownership? Answer: I don’t see any. My observation suggests they merely seek to profit from the gaps in information gathering by competitors, buying or selling stocks nano-seconds before prices shift.

In essence, profiting from the long-term success (or failure, for those who short a stock) of firms is not the purpose of the trading firms using these algorithms, and because they’ve discarded these goals, their social utility appears to be approaching zero.

I would be interested to see a discussion of requiring all stocks traded on the American-based exchanges be held for a minimum of a day.

All that said, let me follow the rule of playwrights and mention the name of our lead character for a third time: algorithms are used for short term trading. So what does an individual investor do?

First of all, don’t compete with them. Long-term investment still appears to be not only a viable strategy, but one which is far more successful for the average investor than short term investing. Or so they were saying twenty years ago on The Motley Fool, and I believe they will still tell you the same thing, with the requisite academic references. Algorithms, from what I’ve read, do not compete in the 5 year minimum holding horizon game. The successful investor will buy and hold for the long term, and will choose firms that have a demonstrated view of the future with proven management. Adee’s view is, with all due respect, a pessimist’s view.

Second, this isn’t a game. If you don’t “beat the market” one year, does that make you a miserable failure as an investor? No, of course not. Like any good student, you evaluate what happened, try to decide if you made mistakes, were caught up in some irresistible wave of history, or if this year was just a normal part of the up and down all investors experience. I’ve had a number of investments in which I was “under water” for years, but when the company and its stock caught fire, it really went up and erased my “paper losses” in a matter of months. I’ve acquired the patience to hold on through bad times; my continuing problem is when to sell.

Third, the status of your portfolio at any particular time is meaningless. Many folks invest with their emotions on the line, and that’s disaster. They look at their portfolio, down 30% on the year, and all they can think of is all that money they could have spent on booze and cigs. But portfolios are rarely liquidated en masse, but rather one stock at a time as needs arise. The simple fact of the matter is that a majority of the years of investment could look awful, but because most of the stocks are liquidated as winners, the end result is a successful portfolio over its lifetime.

So the article continues on to a comparison with ecology, suggesting that passively managed funds (i.e., index trackers) are analogous to monocultures, and may have the same vulnerabilities. It’s an interesting thought, I must say, although opposing views are presented, and not being an expert, I’m content to ride along in their wake.

But this whole thing reminds me of the early days of hedge funds, and the near-failure of Long-Term Capital Management. From Investopedia:

The most famous hedge fund collapse involved Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The fund was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether (of Salomon Brothers fame) and its principal players included two Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economists and a bevy of renowned financial services wizards. LTCM began trading with more than $1 billion of investor capital, attracting investors with the promise of an arbitrage strategy that could take advantage of temporary changes in market behavior and, theoretically, reduce the risk level to zero.

The strategy was quite successful from 1994 to 1998, but when the Russian financial markets entered a period of turmoil, LTCM made a big bet that the situation would quickly revert back to normal. LTCM was so sure this would happen that it used derivatives to take large, unhedged positions in the market, betting with money that it didn’t actually have available if the markets moved against it.

When Russia defaulted on its debt in August 1998, LTCM was holding a significant position in Russian government bonds (known by the acronym GKO). Despite the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars per day, LTCM’s computer models recommended that it hold its positions. When the losses approached $4 billion, the federal government of the United States feared that the imminent collapse of LTCM would precipitate a larger financial crisis and orchestrated a bailout to calm the markets. A $3.65-billion loan fund was created, which enabled LTCM to survive the market volatility and liquidate in an orderly manner in early 2000.

Since this occurred during the Clinton years, I must assume the Clinton Administration was responsible for the mistake of saving LTCM from tasting the bitter ale of failure, one of the earlier examples (for the current generation of government haters) of government interfering to save the rich from their mistakes. Of course, the article suggests this was done for the greater good, but I’d argue that this action was a great mistake in that we only learn from the backlash of our mistakes. If LTCM had been permitted to crater, the subsequent market quivers would have acted as vivid reminders of why permitting firms to become too large is a danger not only to the members of the firm, but to the market as well. I do not know if that was of the factors in embittering the small investor and non-investor towards government, but I would not be surprised if it did.