Yearly Archives: 2018

Maine is the first state in the Union to employ rank-choice voting (RCV) for a Congressional office, in this case Maine’s Representative from the 2nd District. The end result was a close race in which the incumbent, Bruce Poliquin (R) had a lead, but not a definitive lead, and as the process of RCV unfolded, his lead disappeared and ultimately his opponent, Jared Golden (D) was declared the victor.

Poliquin has cried foul, and along with filing suit against the use of RCV (approved twice by the Maine electorate), he’s also asking for a recount, citing some interesting reasons, as reported by the Press-Herald:

“We have heard from countless Maine voters who were confused and even frightened their votes did not count due to computer-engineered rank voting,” said Brendan Conley, a spokesman for the Poliquin campaign.

Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this group of voters, if they even exist. The process is simple to use, and I assume this change in voting has been well-advertised. The informed citizen should have shown up at the polling place with choices made and ready to fill in boxes.

“Furthermore, we have become aware that the computer software and ‘black-box’ voting system utilized by the secretary of state is secret. No one is able to review the software or computer algorithm used by a computer to determine elections,” Conley said. “This artificial intelligence is not transparent. Therefore, today, we are proceeding with a traditional ballot recount conducted by real people.”

This is where things get interesting, and a bit disingenuous. Why? Because the voting machines supplied for the traditional “1 person, 1 vote” style of elections come from private manufacturers, and, at least last I heard, the software was also a private, uninspectable affair. The resulting suspicions I discuss in the thread starting here.

Frankly, the good Representative may not want to stray into the swamp of voting machine politics, where revelations concerning the nature of voting machine software might lead to vast embarrassments for the GOP brand.

But there’s more to unwrap here.

This spokesman mentions ‘artificial intelligence’, and at this juncture I’d like to say that I’m becoming more and more convinced that this term should not be applied to any entity which lacks volition, or at least is intended to have volition, failed or not. That is, if your software entity is only intended to do is, say, detect whether or not someone has cancer by examining an X-Ray after having been trained on a collection of X-Rays, then I find it difficult to classify this as AI. Really, this is Machine Learning (ML), in which the entity has learned a set of rules and applies them.

Off of my rant stool and back to the story, the incumbent Representative and his spokesman have cleverly attempted to slip something by the reporters. When they mention that artificial intelligence [or ML] is not transparent, this is not a lie. Much of ML is opaque to everyone, from us common folks to the designers who designed the system and the programmers who wrote it. Let me defer the why of that for a moment, because it plays into my objection to their statement.

And that objection is that neither AI nor ML should be involved in this operation (and, if it is, someone needs a good smack upside the head)!

RCV is not a difficult problem to solve, at its core. The real problems are in security and transparency (see links above).

But let’s briefly discuss why I’m asserting this with such certainty, despite no real relevant experience in ML.

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

And this is not RCV at all. It has well-understood steps that lead to the final result. There’s no secret to it. In fact, the recount will be by humans, not by computer, so that proves the point.

So when the losing side complains about AI and it not being transparent, don’t be fooled. They may have legitimate worries about security and hacking by malicious entities, or even bugs (sigh), but the core algorithm should not be of an ML or AI nature. They may not realize it, but that’s how this really all plays out.

WaPo has a look at a senior care brand that was bought up and wrung out by the Carlyle Group, and how that seems to have affected the level of care:

Under the ownership of the Carlyle Group, one of the richest private-equity firms in the world, the ManorCare nursing-home chain struggled financially until it filed for bankruptcy in March. During the five years preceding the bankruptcy, the second-largest nursing-home chain in the United States exposed its roughly 25,000 patients to increasing health risks, according to inspection records analyzed by The Washington Post.

The number of health-code violations found at the chain each year rose 26 percent between 2013 and 2017, according to a Post review of 230 of the chain’s retirement homes. Over that period, the yearly number of health-code violations at company nursing homes rose from 1,584 to almost 2,000. The number of citations increased for, among other things, neither preventing nor treating bed sores; medication errors; not providing proper care for people who need special services such as injections, colostomies and prostheses; and not assisting patients with eating and personal hygiene.

It’s always suspicious to me when a private sector group intrudes into medicine – which happens all the time – but it appears that others are catching on. Long time readers will find this to be a familiar sentiment:

Ludovic Phalippou, a professor at Oxford who wrote the textbook “Private Equity Laid Bare,” says it is a question of whether private-equity methods are appropriate in all fields.

He has praised the ability of private equity to streamline companies but he has also described the firms’ approach as “capitalism on steroids.”

He said, for example, that while private-equity ownership of nursing homes is accepted in the United States, people in some other countries would be “aghast” at the idea.

If this doesn’t ring any bells, click here to see my previous meditations on moving the processes of one societal sector into another.

Naturally, private sector folk think they’re doing good:

One of the founders of Carlyle, David Rubenstein, explained to Freakonomics Radio last year the role of private equity: “You spend three to five years improving the company, incenting the managers to work harder, do more efficient things, and ultimately, after three or five years, you sell or otherwise liquefy the investment.”

He sees private-equity firms as a force for good.

“Private-equity people think that, while we’re not perhaps guardian angels, we are providing a social service, and that social service is making companies more efficient,” he said.

Unfortunately, the processes developed for the private sector are optimized for enhancing revenue and profit, not for stabilizing and enhancing care to seniors. I don’t dispute that it sounds good to make companies more efficient, but that’s not the whole story – a better description is that they make companies more efficient in terms of financial results as their first priority, which is an inevitable result of importing processes optimized for financial results; the care delivered to the seniors, or more generally the patients, turns out to be secondary.

Hey, it followed me home from school!

One of the sad things about cinema is when it tries and utterly fails to translate a good book into a movie. I don’t know how many folks realized that happened with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (Jackson, it was all about temptation, not killing orcs!), but I think anyone familiar with the source material knows it happened with Starship Troopers (1997) as compared to the eponymous book by Robert Heinlein. True, there are characters by the same name in book & movie, and most of those that die in the book also die in the movie – albeit in differing ways.

Hey, they even briefly touched on the primary theme of the book, which had to do with the idea of making service, be it military or otherwise, be a necessary condition of receiving the right to vote.

But that’s really the heart of the book, the reason Heinlein wrote it. The movie? Not so much. The movie’s really all about anger and killing orcs monstrous bugs and all the nasty ways bugs can kill humans.

Oh, and sex. And getting brains sucked out.

I understand, the book was written in the 1950s, and certainly some of the cultural mores in the book are jarring to modern audiences. Sort of like The Odyssey, ya know? But add in the erratic characters and scant characterizations, and in the end this was really a disappointment.

But the special effects are great on the big screen.

While looking for a picture, I see some folks laud it as a great anti-militarism movie, a satire. It may, in fact, be such a thing. But it doesn’t help the cause of this particular sect of critics that the movie essentially ignores the intellectual subject that Heinlein was deftly introducing to the 12 year old boys who probably made up the initial fandom for this book, and substitution is hardly a valid intellectual approach. If you’re gonna satirize something, please don’t steal someone else’s intellectual property in order to do so.

I still see it as a splashy, poorly done mess. If I want well done satire, gimme Buckaroo Banzai!

And yet it’s sundown.

Sigh.

I must admit I was a little intrigued by this article on the re-use of bread that would otherwise be tossed, as pioneered by The Bread Factory in London. From The Guardian:

But what makes this particular sourdough a first in the UK is the intriguing ingredient also being added to the dough mix. Bado calls this “bread porridge” – a brownish, flecked mush of fresh breadcrumbs from leftover loaves which have been blitzed into tiny pieces.

It is a tasty solution to the shocking daily waste of bread, with more than 24m slices thrown away in Britain every day.

On Thursday the first 100 loaves of”waste bread” – baked in the early hours – will go on sale in 10 selected branches of Gail’s Bakery, before being rolled out across the rest of its 43-strong chain in London and the south-east. Roughly one-third of each baked 750g loaf consists of leftover bread and the chain calculates that the 100 loaves being baked daily will save approximately 10kg of bread being wasted per day.

“We’re calling it Waste Bread which some people think might sound a bit odd but we think this is being honest and clear with our customers” says Roy Levy, Gail’s head baker and head of development. “It’s re-using leftover but edible bread from our own supply chain which means we know exactly what is in it and where it has come from.”

I suppose this is a cousin to the Ugly Food movement, in which edible but unattractive food still makes its way to consumers’ stomachs.

If you’re still keeping score, the Democrats officially lost the Georgia 7th district race. Feeling bad that the Republicans haven’t been jolted hard enough to get their attention? Don’t.

Incumbent Rob Woodall (R) has a margin of victory of 433 votes, or roughly .2 percentage points. Yep, that’s two tenths.

And in the past? Representative Woodall typically wins this district by 20 percentage points. If I’m doing my math properly, that’s something like a 99% drop in the winning margin.

While some of this drop is attributable to changing demographics, this should catch and hold the attention of Republicans. The GOP brand is leaking oil all over the place. They need a new gasket, or more likely better ideology. At the moment, I’d sell them short on the stock market.

Came from nowhere, going nowhere.

While the North Korean epic Pulgasari (1985) is sometimes mentioned as a monster movie, this is actually a straightforward fable concerning the tradeoffs necessary for survival in times when men are ambitious and food may be scarce. It is also a condemnation of the hard, exploitative feudal system from which Korea transitioned following the Japanese invasions of World War II.

An unnamed village, supposedly under the protection of the local King, is instead preyed upon by its appointed Governor, who has stripped the village of food and men. Now he needs weapons, as the locals are in revolt.  He travels to visit the village blacksmith and demands immediate service. When the blacksmith points out he lacks the iron to make the requested weapons, the blacksmith’s village is stripped of the farming implements necessary to grow the food for the village.

The  confiscated tools are then stolen and once the governor learns of it, he blames the blacksmith and imprisons him without food. Scraps of rice are surreptitiously thrown to him by his children, and he shapes the rice into a toy creature.  With his last noble breath, imbues the figure with life. His daughter later finds it and accidentally cuts herself.  A drop of her blood completes the process of animating the figure. She names the tiny black figurine Pulgasari.

But this is not a monster that magically grows big. No, in order to grow, Pulgasari, which might be called an Eastern Minotaur, must consume iron. Any handy sword or tool will do, and these are presented in plenty when the governor’s troops come to destroy him.  Munching his way through swords, spears and pitchforks, he’s soon standing 40 feet tall.

There is quite the sophisticated war, as the King, now involved, has no intention of giving up his possessions or position, while the farmers, emboldened by Pulgasari, are loathe to give up the gains made possible by their pet monster. But as the war continues, iron continues to disappear into the maw of Pulgasari, and the farmers find it harder and harder to find the tools to grow food.  In the end, Pulgasari may have helped free them from the tyranny of the King, but now they face starvation. What will they do with their ally?

Technically speaking, I was expecting far worse from a North Korean movie. True, the visuals and audio are somewhat blotchy, but the acting wasn’t awful; more along the lines of some of the better Asian karate movies of the period. Pulgasari himself could have been better constructed, but as rubber-suit monsters go, he was far from the worst I’ve seen. I appreciated the attention given to the symbols of war and farming as forces in a dynamic tension that, ill-managed, can result in excess suffering. The director and writers of the movie may be reaching for even more symbolism, which I, as an American, may have missed.

Another political observation: this is a tug-of-war of the extreme narcissism and greed of the upper classes vs. the collectivism of the village. Neither is a happy situation, as the former exploit the villages, but the collectivist mentality inevitably morphs into self-preservation for the collectivist entity as a whole that, sadly, grinds the villagers into dust.  None of the original leading members of the villagers actually survives to the end of the movie, having sacrificed themselves for the greater good. The message, even if unintended, lends quite the noir atmosphere to the movie.

I don’t recommend it unless you have some interest in a movie that was made by a pair of hostages under the guidance of their kidnapper, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who is listed as the film’s producer.

But in case you’re intrigued, here it is in its entirety:

Exosome:

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles first described as such 30 years ago and since implicated in cell–cell communication and the transmission of disease states, and explored as a means of drug discovery. Yet fundamental questions about their biology remain unanswered. [James Edgar, BMC Biology]

Noted in “We’ve discovered a whole new defence system against germs in our noses, Michael Le Page, NewScientist (17 November 2018):

[Surgeon Benjamin] Bleier’s team and other researchers have recently found that, as well as secreting mucus, the cells of the nasal cavity release billions of tiny sacs called exosomes. Once in the mucus, these sacs can go on to fuse with other cells, delivering cargo such as proteins or RNA.

This made Bleier and his colleagues suspect that exosomes are part of a previously unknown defence system. Now, after studying tissue in the lab and people undergoing nasal surgery, the researchers have strong evidence for this idea.

They found that when cells at the front of the nose are exposed to a potentially dangerous bacterium, the number of exosomes released into the mucus doubles within 5 minutes.

Maybe turn that into a single paragraph, Michael. It’s quite herky-jerky.

Anna-Lisa Vollmer, et al, may have discovered an interesting learning opportunity while researching child-robot interactions. Here’s the abstract in Science Robotics:

I don’t know if readers had noticed the recent story about the Christian missionary who decided to visit the Andaman Islands, which are under the authority of India, but I doubt the villagers know that, as they tend to attack and even kill anyone who comes nearby.

Yep, he’s dead.

Now India is going to try to retrieve the body:

Authorities have started the arduous task of trying to retrieve a US missionary feared killed on a remote Indian island, careful not to trigger conflict with the islanders.

John Allen Chau was last seen last week when he traveled to the forbidden North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal to try to convert the island’s residents to Christianity. The Sentinelese, as they are known, have a decades-long history of repelling outsiders, a fact that is near certain to make the journey to find Chau a treacherous one.

Indian authorities along with the fishermen who reported seeing Chau’s body last week, went near the island on Friday and Saturday in an effort to figure out how to recover the body. [CNN]

I have one message for India: Don’t Bother.

Chau irresponsibly endangered the villagers by potentially introducing deadly pathogens to the villagers. It’s unethical to continue to do so. Since Chau elected to go of his own free will, leave his damn body there, and if anyone else tries to go there, slam them into the pokey and charge them with attempted genocide.

That’s right. That’s what it is. I don’t care how great a family guy this Chau dude might have been, his behavior earned him this end, and there’s no reason to retrieve his body unless it’s a hazard to these villagers.

Octopodes:

One octopus, two octopi? That spelling is actually incorrect because it’s based on Latin grammar. The word octopus is derived from ancient Greek, so the proper plural is octopodes. If that’s a bit too formal, octopuses is also acceptable. [Nathaniel Scharping, Discover]

I’ve never heard of quantum radar before, and I fear this simple explanation in NewScientist (17 November 2018, paywall) may still be too far above my head:

In theory, a quantum radar can overcome this by using two streams of entangled photons. These are pairs of photons that have a weird connection so a change to one affects the other, even if they are miles apart.

The first photon stream is sent out, like a standard radar beam, and bounces off objects in the sky. The second stream remains inside the system.

Because the photons are entangled, the returning photons can be matched with those in the stay-at-home stream, so all background noise can be filtered out. This includes deliberate interference, such as radar jamming or spoofing signals put out to confuse radar. What is left is a clear image of the target, with no extraneous signal.

Maybe if I was a physicist, or an electrical engineer. And, yes, a Chinese defense firm claims to have developed just such a thing.

I’m sure everyone’s seen this one already, but it made me laugh and then think.

I ran across Michael Roggo’s work in NewScientist. I’ve always enjoyed the wonder of icebergs, and the one below looks like a ship underway. It’s the double impression which gets me here.

It’s some beautiful stuff.

Yeah, I have no idea of the nature of the reflective surface shown above. Just one more:

Sure, it’s a pattern in rocks – but it reminds me of an abstract spider. Enjoy!

I see CNN has done some digging and found more dirt on Mississippi Senate candidate Hyde-Smith (R):

Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith once promoted a measure that praised a Confederate soldier’s effort to “defend his homeland” and pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War.

Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces Mike Espy, a Democratic former congressman and agriculture secretary, in Tuesday’s runoff in Mississippi — the final Senate race to be decided in 2018. The measure, which was unearthed by CNN’s KFile during a review of Hyde-Smith’s legislative history, is the latest in a series of issues that have surfaced during her campaign, many of which have evoked Mississippi’s dark history of racism and slavery.

As a state senator in 2007, Hyde-Smith cosponsored a resolution that honored then-92-year-old Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, calling her “the last known living ‘Real Daughter’ of the Confederacy living in Mississippi.” Pharr’s father had been a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee’s army in the Civil War.

The resolution refers to the Civil War as “The War Between the States.” It says her father “fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country.” It says that with “great pride,” Mississippi lawmakers “join the Sons of Confederate Veterans” to honor Pharr.

The measure “rests on an odd combination of perpetuating both the Confederate legacy and the idea that this was not really in conflict with being a good citizen of the nation,” said Nina Silber, the president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a Boston University history professor.

“I also think it’s curious that this resolution — which ostensibly is about honoring the ‘daughter’ — really seems to be an excuse to glorify the Confederate cause,” Silber said.

I have no idea how this is going to play in Mississippi (I do have a relative in Ham Lake, MS, but he’s not responding to e-mails). But my initial real question is this: Are they applying the same zeal to investigations of Hyde-Smith’s opponent, Mr. Espy (D)? That’s sort of the problem for news sources that wish to be seen as neutral – how do you prove a negative? Or, to borrow the conundrum for atheists, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. How to look busy when there’s nothing to find, but the boss is watching?

SETI Institute scientist Oliver White, et al, are working out why Pluto has ridges in an article (paywall) for Nature Astronomy. Here’s the abstract:

Image Source: Phys.org

A long time ago I noted the results of a study on computers and education, and somehow this connects with an article a friend pointed out a few weeks ago in The New York Times. The article concerns the practice of high level executives at places like Facebook in connection with … computers:

Over the last few days I’ve been noting there are quiet yet pronounced high expectations for the final, runoff segment of the race to replace Senator Cochrane (R-MS) in the Hyde-Smith (R) / Espy (D) race in Mississippi on the Democratic side of things. This has been strengthened by interesting media reports, such as this from WaPo:

Espy remains the underdog in the conservative state, but Republicans with access to private polling say Hyde-Smith’s lead has narrowed significantly in recent days. Republicans need only to look to next-door Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones pulled out a surprise win last year, to stoke concern.

For Republicans, the Nov. 27 runoff is a chance for a slight expansion of their majority in the Senate, their one bright spot in this year’s midterm elections. If Hyde-Smith wins and Gov. Rick Scott keeps his lead in the Senate race in Florida, Republicans would have a senate majority of 53 to 47. A loss in Mississippi would give the GOP a 52-to-48 majority, only one up from the current razor-thin margin.

From The Resurgent, the home of Erick Erickson, which I class as right-wing extremist yet never-Trump organization, comes an unsigned editorial:

As Sam Hall, executive editor of Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, put it on Twitter today, the way the “Hyde-Smith only five points up” poll makes sense is if McDaniel voters aren’t planning to show up to vote for her. In Hall’s words, “McDaniel backers are the wildcard voting bloc. A lot of people are asking, ‘How many of them will sit at home?’” Of course, as Hall notes, that might not be the right question to ask—there might not even be enough hardcore McDaniel types out there to deprive Hyde-Smith of a win if they stay home on election day. Still, if Hyde-Smith is in jeopardy, this is very likely the reason why—not the other stuff the national media has been focusing on. And to be fair, some Mississippi political insiders have been worried about this proving to be the case for a long time.

For the uninitiated, a lot of McDaniel fans feel they got screwed in former Sen. Thad Cochran’s re-election, when the Cochran-Barbour machine in Mississippi worked every conceivable angle to deprive McDaniel—who is regarded as a stauncher conservative but also was accused of racism and may even have appealed to some Mississippi voters as a result of it—of a win.

Subsequently, that same machine let a short time pass, Cochran exited the US Senate, and Hyde-Smith—a former Democrat who also has the backing of the same Mississippi GOP establishment—took his place.

McDaniel, in case my reader has forgotten or missed it, is “Trumpier than Trump,” to paraphrase his own description, which makes “staunch conservative” seem to be a misnomer. But the analysis, if true, may make this race exceedingly close.

The Republicans are in an awful pickle, for even victory really isn’t good enough – in one of the most conservative states in the Union, winning by a sliver is a measure of their dying brand. The Republicans will need to win big, or it’s going to start looking like death by a million tick bites, and those are the ticks that carry Lyme Disease^[1]. Worse yet, the length of service for this seat is only until 2020, as former Senator Cochrane resigned midway through his term due to health reasons.

The metric here is the magnitude of victory for the Republican candidate. A quick glance at recent Senate contests in Mississippi suggest that a triumphant GOP would expect a 20 point victory in Mississippi, so I’d say that if Hyde-Smith wins by more than 15 points, the GOP has little to worry about.

If she wins by 10-15 points, the Republicans should be frowning a bit, and worse if it’s 5-10.

The real danger is winning by less than 5 points, because the party activists won’t take it seriously. They’re entrenched and feeding off what makes them feel good, and the fact that they’re the ones poisoning the water will not be accepted by them. Then the GOP in Mississippi will be in danger of becoming irrelevant until they eject the extremists who cling to white supremacist artifacts, such as those clutched by Hyde-Smith.

And if they lose? The Mississippi Republicans will shatter but not die, at least not for a few years. Denial is a strong psychological urge, especially for those who’ve rejected justice in favor of economic advantage.

The election is Tuesday. Everyone will be watching, including President Trump, who supposedly is campaigning for Hyde-Smith. If she fails, it’ll be egg on his face as well as her’s. Not that he’ll admit it.

¹ Which I’ve had, and is exceedingly unpleasant.

Nummy Nummy In The Tummy!

Plot holes are rife in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), one of those mildly meaningless horror thrillers of the period. A science team arrives on an island that has been exposed to nuclear radiation in order to search for their predecessors, who have disappeared body and soul, as well as continue their research. The first body is produced immediately as one of the sailors falls off their little landing boat and is missing his head when his fellows pull him out.

Why no immediate investigation takes place, not to mention a rapid abandonment of the island, is unclear and left us with feelings of ennui and disinterest. Even the unexplained explosion of their seaplane as it attempts to leave with the body aboard did little to heighten the tension.

One more example of a plot hole: in the middle of the night, a hole opens up in the land. Never mind that it has vegetation growing on its side, never noted by the biologists – the team geologist immediately decides he needs to make the 50 ft descent using nothing more than a rope. His plunge, triggered by monstrous explosions that draw curiously little interest from the team, draws more tsking than anything from the audience.

It’s possible to justify his actions using the antagonists’ capabilities noted below, but at the time, and given the reputation of Director Roger Corman, I just wrote it off as another silly blooper that definitely deflates the credibility of the story.

And as the plot holes and illogical character actions pile up, there was a certain sense of regret, because the central plot mechanism is the idea that the monster crabs, upon consuming their victims, actually acquire their victims’ personalities and at least some of their knowledge, and that makes for a creepy effect. The tendency of the crabs to bait the humans, both literally and in wordplay, has its virtues. The two sides engage in the inevitable tug of war between predators and prey, and, taken in isolation, it’s not a bad little struggle, as each sides’ plans encounter the others, fail, change, and fail again, until the final engagement near the radio tower, which I suppose could be taken as symbolic of, well, something to do with the telepathy of the crabs. Don’t ask me what, though. That there was enough juice in the transmitter (that I thought didn’t work) and the radio tower to produce crab fricassee was surprising enough.

But the final straw is the wretched special effects. While Corman is smart enough to hold off on a full monty of his critters from hell initially, he eventually does give in to the urge to show off his crabs in full detail, and this doesn’t work out well for Corman or his audience. They’re simply too amateurish.

If you are one of those individuals afflicted with the need to see all the work of Mr. Corman, this is not the worst of his output. You may enjoy it. But I’d recommend just a wee dram of the good stuff to help this porcupine of a movie slide down the old gullet.

A note from the arts editor:

While the movie itself is fairly ho-hum, it had one of the best movie posters in the genre:

The overall design is very cool, and the color is spectacular.  It is, of course, pure schlock, which holds much of its charm.

Also fun to note:  the blonde bimbo in the poster does not appear anywhere in the movie, and the brunette female lead in the film was never in a scene similar to this.

But the poster does make a great visual.

A reader reacts to my review of Maria By Callas:

Hue: I haven’t seen the film so it’s difficult to know what to say. Callas is regarded by many as the greatest opera star of all time; she wasn’t by my estimation: That title goes to Joan Sutherland. But Callas was so much more than a singer; she was a “personality,” a diva, a woman of great controversy, intelligence and strong opinion. Driven and temperamental, she was loved by many and hated by others. Her career was cut short because she ruined her voice singing parts that damaged her vocal chords but appealed to her soul. There was and is no one like her, which is why she’s so revered. When it comes to singing, however, there was no one who could touch Sutherland for beauty of tone, technical mastery, and sheer brilliance of sound, all of which she possessed without any of Callas’ airs. It’s the legend of Callas people remember.

Ah. And there was nary a mention of Sutherland in Maria By Callas.

Hercules thinks he could be a display model, too.

Hercules In New York (1969) lacks good dialog, acting skills (OK, Arnold Stang was good), a believable plot, a useful theme, a good soundtrack (it alternated between dated synthesizer and frenetic Italian/Greek strumming), or anything else to make this interesting.

Except, for those with a specialist’s interest, Schwarzenegger’s pecs. A very young Schwarzenegger.

Avoid, avoid, avoid, unless you’re the completist type. Then heavy drinking might be in order, and a notary public to certify you really did watch this bit of tripe.

The annual edition of American Fencing showed up in the mail last week, and during Turkey Day I read it. Most of it was ho-hum, but I was shocked when I read the article by noted fencer and referee Jeff Bukantz, Can Referees Determine Intent? As it is print-only, apparently, I’ll summarize: he polled several high level referees, most with high level fencing experience, as to whether or not referees should pay attention to what they think is on the fencer’s mind, or simply interpret the actions. He found several referees who not only think divining the intent of a fencer is important, someone actually said, “Basically a referee needs to have historical knowledge of a fencer’s catalogue of actions.”

I’ll stop here to mention what some may think is important, but is really incidental – my experience as a referee. In short, I’m not in the same league as these refs. I’ve refereed, in order of difficulty, at Youth Enrichment League, high school (and, to be clear, this is Midwest high school, not Coastal high schools, which are considered much better than Midwest), and MN DIV events (and, for the latter, not in several years). I attended a referee seminar 20 or so years ago, but I declined taking the academic tests or the practicum, because, quite frankly, while I’m part of the fencing community because I enjoy ruining someone else’s day, I far prefer to do it on the strip with a saber in hand, rather than on the side of a strip screwing up a call.

I’m also, at best, a mediocre foil & sabre. (Recent illness hasn’t helped matters.)

But all this doesn’t matter.

To continue my thought, keeping a catalogue on the fencers you are going to referee is NUTS!

Look, the human brain is a weird and wonderful organ, but it’s nowhere near perfect. Among its many faults (or, perhaps, advantages, depending on how different functioning might impact the survival potential of the human organism) is the fact that information it picks up from the environment and from other sectors of the brain, even that which is not consciously detected and may or may not be true, can influence the judgment of that brain. We know this is true and even quite strong through the undeniable existence of the placebo and nocebo effects, and the fact that study participants in pharmaceutical tests will actually pick up on whether or not they’re getting the authentic drugs or the sugar pills when the administrators happen to know what is being handed out, without being told, resulting in the gold standard for such tests being double-blinded tests, wherein the administrators interacting with the patients also don’t know who is getting which.

Is a referee supposed to be using their prior knowledge of the two fencers on the strip before them? I suppose that depends on your definition of a referee. My definition is fairly basic – a referee is an entity, acting in a non-biased manner, that evaluates the actions of the fencers in the context of the rules of engagement for the bout in order to determine who has scored a valid touch on the valid target area of their opponents. This is a good first hack at a definition.

The key is not being biased. If I have a referee who studies the fencers they’ll referee, keeps a book on them, there’s an inevitable bias built into that study. Not that of friendship or teammates, but that of expectation. The observation that Fencer A has a propensity for inviting an attack, parrying, and flicking to the shoulder, while Fencer B prefers simple single feint attacks that he occasionally chokes on^[1] will easily be read as an implicit bias that Fencer A should win all of her bouts with Fencer B. Our referee may loudly proclaim that he won’t let that knowledge bias his calls. Our referee will truly believe it.

Don’t trust him, though. Studies of the brain and how knowledge of this sort can influence judgment have been executed in the field of psychology, and show that unconscious bias can occur. In my early days of referee, I had to fight with that influence, and no doubt I compromised a touch or two as I learned to ignore who was fencing while trying to interpret the actions.

And that’s the sad thing here: we’re talking about the actions that actually take place on the strip. Divining intent, while critical for a coach who’s evaluating the tactical decisions made by their fencer vs their implementation, shouldn’t be needed by the referee. Why?

Historically, fencing, be it Olympic style or the more informal and heavy duty styles such as broadsword, doesn’t derive from an abstract game of some sort in which intent plays a part of a final score. It’s practice for life and death on the dueling grounds and in pre-modern gun warfare. That’s how it started out, and that history continues to influence and justify the existence of fencing as a sport, so evaluating our refereeing needs to take that into account, because otherwise the sport continues to mutate away from its original forms. Frankly, intent in the mind of a fencer doesn’t count for shit if they don’t execute on that intent properly. If I initiate an attack, hesitate, withdraw my arm, and get smacked in the chest, then that’s my opponent’s touch – or me on the ground with a sword through me, if we were on a battleground. My intent to use a double feint isn’t important if I don’t execute it.

To complete the argument, the rule book covers all this as a simple perceptual matter. Is the point threatening target? Is the elbow straightening? Has the attack finished without a touch? Was the parry truly effective? There are various amounts of interpretation of the rules, but divining intent is merely a complicating factor which throws a fog over the real problem the referee faces with each engagement:

Who executed a valid attack on the valid target?

But there’s a bit more reality, as discovered by science, that I need to throw in here, and it’s this: human perception is mostly a myth. It’s a fallacy to say that humans see reality! The truth is that we see and hear little bits, and then our brain constructs a narrative with which to interpret what is happening. This is a survival characteristic that evolved to tell us to run like the wind when the bushes seem to rustle, because if we had to process every element of reality in order to decide if that’s a lion or just the wind behind the bush, well, we’d be a meal long before we reproduced. Our brains, for all their fantastic capabilities, are too slow when faced with that much information.

But this shortcut doesn’t guarantee that narrative is right. Better to expend energy needlessly than to get eaten up, no?

When I go out to referee, I consciously try to remove these filters from my eyes and my brain. I try to just see what’s really going on and take the time to process that raw data from reality. I don’t want my filters making up a story for me based on minimal information.

Additionally, as a referee I have no interest in who’s on the strip. I’d have names removed from uniforms, if I could. This should be a disinterested exercise in evaluation of the actions of two fencers, at that moment, regardless of their histories, their state of minds, or much else, in the context of the rules.

Intent? That’s communicated through their attack implementations and results. Keeping some sort of book in order to have an educated guess on intent just seems like an invitation to biased refereeing to me.

¹ That would be me.

Nostrum:

1. A medicine prepared by an unqualified person, especially one that is not considered effective.
   ‘a charlatan who sells nostrums’
2. A scheme or remedy for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement.
   ‘right-wing nostrums such as a wage freeze and cutting public spending’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “Democracy is in crisis around the world. Why?” Max Boot, WaPo:

These trends are driven mainly by automation, but it is easy for demagogues to put the blame on supposedly disloyal elites such as international bankers, trade partners that are supposedly ripping us off, and immigrants who are supposedly stealing jobs and bringing crime. Conveniently enough, the nostrums pushed by autocratic populists exacerbate the very problems they claim to be addressing, deepening the crisis that gives them the excuse to rule. (Trump-supporting counties have done worse under Trump than counties where the majority voted for Hillary Clinton.)

I guess I wasn’t in on this secret, even though NewScientist (10 November 2018) claims everyone knows it:

IT IS no secret that Elon Musk wants to build a space internet. His company, SpaceX, has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set up a vast network of thousands of low Earth orbit communication satellites. But the company has been tight-lipped about the project, known as Starlink.

Now Mark Handley at University College London has created a detailed simulation of what Starlink might look like, which he will present at a conference next week.

Although Musk has said he wants more than half of all internet traffic to go through Starlink – Handley’s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to high-frequency traders at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.

But there’s a couple of things wrong here.

First of all, the Internet was designed, and is successful, not because it has a centralized design, but because it has a decentralized design. Routes can change dynamically as computers go offline and come online, as network link availability fluctuates. Routing half of Internet traffic to go through a single entity, even dispersed, is an invitation to sudden hiccup and even downtime if that entity suddenly disappears – and I suspect Musk would run that as a monoculture, meaning that any problems that a particular node of that entity possesses will be a problem for all those nodes.

Secondly, as long time readers know, high frequency traders get little sympathy from me. Their economic activity does not appear to improve society in general that I can find, and in fact probably amplifies the movements of the stock market to a degree unwarranted. That can be damaging to investors, experienced or not.

But Musk will do what Musk will do, and we’ll all be blown about in the aftermath. Hell, I’m scheduled to test drive one of this Tesla 3 models tomorrow. I do not expect to buy one, but perhaps the salesman will be extra-persuasive.