Monthly Archives: April 2018

Jessica Hamzelou explains in NewScientist (14 April 2018) that scientists have discovered experiences change gene expression – in your brain:

The brain seems to store memories in new connections between neurons. To do this, the neurons need to make new proteins – a process that is thought to be controlled by hundreds of genes.

While investigating how this works, Ami Citri at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his colleagues discovered that particular experiences – be it an electric shock or a hit of cocaine – elicit different changes in gene activity in the brains of mice.

These mice were given a variety of positive or negative experiences, such as electric shocks to their feet, a sugar treat, a dose of a chemical that makes them feel ill or cocaine. An hour later, they were euthanised and the team looked at which genes were being expressed in seven areas of the brain that are involved in memory, including the hippocampus and amygdala.

Citri was surprised to find that all of the mice given cocaine, for example, showed the same general pattern of gene activity. The patterns were so clear that the team could guess what experience a mouse had been through with over 90 per cent accuracy just by analysing the levels of activity of different genes in their brains (eLife, doi.org/cm6w).

The whole euthanization thing is a bit of a spoiler, of course, for would-be scientific mind-readers. It’s a fascinating first glimpse into the mechanics of storing memories. The next – BIG – step is to predict how a specific experience will modify the brain, right? At the moment, it’s a matter of noting correlations a posteriori. If you can predict, without that specific correlation being available, how some arbitrary experience will affect the brains of a normal person, then you’re really cooking.

That should take, oh, several centuries to accomplish.

And then that atypical persons brain should also be fascinating. Oooops, subject’s dead. Damn, we should have developed the tricorder, first…

Here’s the Chandra X-Ray telescope view of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster from 2003:

Credit: NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.

The Chandra image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of Perseus A, seen as a white point. This image is 350 thousand light years across at the distance of the Perseus cluster. The hot cluster gas is seen as diffuse emission, and two cavities in the cluster gas are visible on either side of the black hole. Low-energy X-rays (0.3-1.5 keV) are shown in red, medium-energy X-rays are shown in green (1.5-3.5 keV), and high-energy X-rays are shown in blue (3.5-7.0 keV).

It may not be so cool as others, but it has a certain faux-retro feel to it in the graininess, as well as a slightly 3-D impression. Cool stuff.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the report that Admiral Jackson, the US VA nominee, is now being orphaned by President Trump, is the ongoing theme of this Administration – the selection of unqualified or otherwise unacceptable nominees for positions in the government, who end up stepping aside when they fail – or, in a few cases, winning confirmation to their posts, only to leave in disgrace. Think Price, or Tillerson.

These are avoidable. These are unforced and embarrassing errors. You’d think the Administration would learn.

Repeat that. You’d think the Administration would learn.

In the natural world, one of the marks of a successful creature or entity is its capability to learn, whether how to communicate better with those it hopes to win to its causes, or where to best find prey that can be slaughtered and eaten.

And the unsuccessful? Those who never learned this simple lesson. We should have perhaps realized that this Administration is doomed to failure when we first heard about this incident, which James Hohmann helpfully reminds us of on PowerPost:

When Trump fired Chris Christie as the head of his transition team on Nov. 11, after the then-New Jersey governor expressed opposition to hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Flynn and Steve Bannon, who would be White House chief strategist, celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks into the trash, according to a Politico report last year.

A disdain for careful planning and investigation marks those doomed to failure. I’m as much an off-the-cuff as the next guy – maybe more than I should be – but when we’re talking about important government matters involving the safety of the nation, throwing away material of this sort marks, for the careful observer, the people who have little more going for them than an unreasoning rage at the political opposition – hardly the mark of mature political types.

Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger notes how parenting styles really aren’t styles so much as judgments on other parents:

Maclean’s reported in its most recent issue that only about 100 kids are kidnapped each year in the U.S. in the stereotypical ‘scary stranger’ scenario, which is “a small fraction of one percent of missing kids each year.” Meanwhile, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. kids between 1 and 18, killing around 1,600 kids annually. So, when parents drive a kid from point A to point B to avoid the risk of kidnapping, they’re actually putting their child in greater danger.

While everyone is entitled to their own personal phobias and has the right to choose how to act on those fears, what is entirely unacceptable is requiring other parents to raise their kids according to those beliefs.

As ]Professor Barbara] Sarnecka puts it, “I shouldn’t be legally required to act irrationally just because a lot of other people have a particular phobia.”

This, however, is the frightening direction in which our society is headed and it needs to be counterbalanced by more public discussion about the benefits of promoting independence in kids. Sarnecka recommends that parents talk positively about their own childhood memories and avoid fear-mongering conversations. Most of all, walk the talk! Fight the busybodies by setting your kids free. The more kids are out and about unsupervised (within reason), the more normal it will become.

No kids here, but given how little my parents kept an eye on me once I reached a certain age, I think, as a parent, I would have ended up having more than one conversation with police department personnel about how I was raising any kids I had.

And I would have been quite irritated about it.

There is a certain amount of short-sightedness to the worry about your kids being kidnapped. The goal of raising children should be to raise good citizens; raising people who end up terrified of their own shadows does not for a good citizen make. Fortunately, there appears to be a counter-movement over the last year or two against the wrapping children in bubble-wrap movement, so perhaps these worries about kids will pass.

Or perhaps not. In decades past, it just wasn’t possible to keep an eye on the kids like you can today. Add in the smaller size of families, and kids are viewed with more sentimentality than, perhaps, they were in yesterday. I’m just speculating, of course, since actual measurements of sentimentality seems a dubious effort, but it does make some sense.

A reader identifies what I thought was some sort of antenna cable:

It’s heat tape to keep the downspout from clogging with ice.

Oh! I would never have guessed!

I’ve finally finished The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants To Change Your Mind (2016), delayed by life and illness. If  you are the sort that likes to look behind the curtain and see how things are done, especially those processes that most people don’t even suspect, and if they did they’d disapprove, then I can heartily recommend this book.

First, the author is James Garvey, PhD, listed as employed by the Royal Institute of Philosophy (his Wikipedia page says he’s the Secretary of that institution). In this book, he reveals how our urge, natural or not, for persuasion has been gradually circumvented by entities, usually corporate or political, seeking specific behaviors from the generic “us”, the citizens who have something of value they want, whether it be money, votes, or general inclinations.

His Preface gives his motivation for the book, a lecture he attended by an Oxford theologian in which, during Q&A, he lodged what he consider a “killer objection”. Did this bring the theologian to his knees? No. Garvey was simply ignored.

I began to suspect [argument and logical reasoning are] not even remotely how things actually go at all. I don’t want to overcook the point and suggest that arguments are entirely unpersuasive – but we might well over-estimate their hold on us. … I believe there is something newsworthy here, something worrying over and above all the obvious stuff, something just out of focus, on the corner of our collective vision. [p. xii]

Chapter 1 kicks things off with a little known story out of history: The Robin Hood Society of Butcher Lane, London. Created in the early 1700s, it consisted on members who argued, in a structured manner, the issues of the day. Some participated, others remained silent, enjoying the glory of the debate. Judging was strict and more or less objective In 1780, its activity abruptly became a fad, as the number of such societies escalated. Their endpoint, however, was detestable and worthy of loathing:

In the end, London’s flirtation with rationality did not last long. Largely in fearful reaction to the brewing French Revolution, the debating societies were violently repressed by the government — thugs were hired to break up debates, police constables blocked the doors, landlords were threatened with fines or worse, popular speakers were roughed up, and finally Parliament voted in the Seditious Meetings Act, effectively making public debate a treasonous offence. [p. 6]

An ominous comment on the nature of those on top.

From there it’s on to the current state of disputation: the goal, to win by any means necessary. Furthermore, he meditates upon the loss of the practice of reflection, referencing Bertrand Russell’s observation:

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. [GoodReads]

His final observation?

So I think we have an obligation, maybe a moral one, to understand what contemporary persuasion does to us. It bothers me, and I hope that now it bothers you, too.

Chapter 2 covers public relations, including the infamous testimony to Congress prior to the American entry into the Gulf War, from an anonymous Kuwaiti girl, that Iraqi soldiers invading a hospital, taking the incubators, and leaving the preemies to die on the floor – a lie, as it turns out, formulated by a PR firm, and delivered by a member of the Kuwaiti royal family operating under cover. An unwary Congress bit on it, backing the war. He covers the history, which he begins at World War I, hitting the turning points, end with …

While I’m all in favour of education and democratic renewal … I worry that education and legislation might never actually manage to thwart an industry worth so many billions of dollars, an industry that’s better at ‘education’ than any university system, and an industry that specializes in ensuring that laws that might harm its clients’ interests never see the light of day.

Chapter 3 concerns tweaks and nudges, something many of us are familiar with in regards to our 401Ks, where the trend has been to make contributions to our 401Ks the “default setting,” rather than forcing us to actually go through the administrative work of setting up and contributing at firms which support 401Ks. Why? Research indicates people often go with default settings, as the recent Facebook debacle has highlighted.

Garvey also introduces us to the idea that we have two thinking systems. The first is the fast one, and is the one that is employed when, on a camping trip, the bushes rustle and you take off running. There’s no active, rational thinking, but rather the instinctive consideration that a mountain lion is about to leap upon you. What should one do? Run for your life. The second is the much slower, rational system, where we try to apply logic and reasoning to a situation. The goal of the Persuaders? To activate and manipulate the first system, leaving the second quiescent, through the use of keywords.

We also think we are much less vulnerable to manipulation than we actually are. Levine found that 70 per cent of those questioned said they were more aware than average of how manipulation works. 61 per cent said they knew more about manipulation than their peers.

Reminds one of those driving statistics, doesn’t? 70% of drivers think they’re better than average. These are usually the tailgaters and people who cut you off, aren’t they? So if you think you’re good at detecting manipulation, think again.

Chapter 4 works on the concept of social proof. Coins left in buskers’ cups, long lines at nightclubs, the people standing behind a candidate at a rally, and other faux clues function to manipulate you into thinking or doing something that you might not otherwise decide. He recounts the research that has gone into focusing social proof on all of us, some representative experiments, and that sort of thing. That free food that shows up at the supermarket? It’s not to introduce you to the product. It’s to induce feelings of reciprocity, so that you’ll buy something in return for their gift. And more. And more.

Chapter 5 explores the superior use of communications by various political parties, as compared to their opponents. Following Bush’s 2004 victory,

Democratic strategists found themselves consumed by insights from cognitive science and linguistics. … Not arguments, but the careful use of resonating turns of phrase was the key – words that evoked or fit into established worldviews were better heard and more strongly believed.

Framing the debate became key, and thus the presence of Frank Luntz, Republican strategist, researcher, and resource for many Republican candidates. Luntz says 80% of life is emotion, and that’s where he works. Thus the subtle appeals not to reason, but to emotion in Republican speeches – xenophobia, racism, and that sort of thing.

Garvey comments,

But even with this limited grip on political language, I now find myself turned off by political speeches. I don’t want to hear and be affected by them. Sometimes I look away and hum to myself when a politician appears on TV to respond to the news of the day.

This chapter also includes an appalling example of buzzword usage in England, which I will desist from quoting. It was quite enlightening, though, and I suggest that media refuse to broadcast messages in which the politician ignores the question in favor of answering their preferred question, or, worse, just employs buzzwords designed to elicit emotional responses. We saw the former just last week on The Late Show, when Cynthia Nixon completely ignored host Stephen Colbert’s question concerning her lack of experience in her run for Governor of New York. I was appalled, but the audience applauded, rather than booing her as they should have.

Chapter 6 gives the history and usage of persuasion in the retail world, from the days of Pompey and Herculaneum to today, including pivotal names, research, and processes. People who view shopping as a leisure or entertainment activity should read this and then hide in their bedrooms for at least a month.

Chapter 7 concerns data collection and analysis, which has been much in the news of late due to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and includes the amusing anecdote concerning the father of a teenage daughter who receives a coupon for diapers, is outraged, and then a week or two later discovers his daughter is, indeed, pregnant. The big retailer Target knew before the prospective grandfather. The subject of retail use of data for planning the layout of a store is explored in almost tiresome detail.

The final chapter returns to the honest subject of simple argumentation. Garvey gives a history, beginning with the poet Parmenides, who he labels the first to explore formal, reasoned debate, but,”… an awful poet.” From there, he covers the big Greek three of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, knocking down the relativists in the process, but his real purpose here is to remind us that we can be rational creatures making rational choices, so long as understand that manipulation occurs all around us.

He includes a fascinating view of his day as he tries to avoid being manipulated, identifying the various tricks used to separate him from his valuables, from money to inclinations to votes. It’s an illuminating trip, and he admits sometimes it exhausts him, as the brain needs to rest after so much effort – it is an organ like any other, after all.

So there you go.

Recommended.

How about you?

While reading a WaPo analysis of the North Korean goals and motivations for the upcoming Kim-Trump meeting, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any real thought given to the other side – that is, an analysis of the United States’ negotiator, Donald J. Trump.

Consider: North Korea had a veritable cavalcade of nuclear and ICBM tests in 2017, to the point that the Western media was awash in reports and analysis, and Hawaii screwed up a drill enough to credibly frighten the state’s citizens that a missile was incoming.

Who do they face? The weakest American leader since at least Jimmy Carter, and more likely we’d have to go back to Presidents prior to World War II to identify a leader weaker than Trump. Why does this matter? Because Trump is well known to be an overconfident, insecure, foolish, bombastic, ignorant, and incurious man – and I choose each of those adjectives with care, not simply because I like those adjectives, but because each is applicable to Donald J. Trump.

The result is a leader who can be manipulated, not only by Americans and, possibly, Russians, but, I think, North Koreans.

Why did the North Koreans ask for this meeting, and schedule it for May? Why did they agree to meet with current CIA Directory Pompeo? Because they can read the tea leaves. Even if our form of government is foreign to them, even if our politics are currently more difficult to read than normal, it seems a safe bet that the next Congress, coming up in less than a year, will be far less compliant with President Trump than the current Congress.

Indeed, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that impeachment proceedings may begin soon after the next Congress convenes.

And that means that whatever North Korea wants out of the Americans has to be won soon, and that means Congressional debate before consent will be won, and that should take time.

So they hurry their twin weapons programs along and achieve a modicum of success, they successfully use that as propaganda to rattle the American President (which we can see from his frenzied Tweet-storms), and then they appeal to his vanity by giving him a chance to achieve something his predecessors did not: an accord with North Korea.

So how good is Kim Jong un? Will he be able to manipulate an elderly ignoramus who probably won’t even read the final accords?

Stay tuned.

On Lawfare Keith Whittington discusses the insignificance of an Article of the United States Constitution:

Nonetheless, faithful and conscientious constitutional actors should do more than pay mere lip service to the text. Congress is abdicating its constitutional responsibilities to determine whether the United States should make war on other nations when it makes no effort to take advantage of the ample time available to it to deliberate on how the United States should respond to the use of chemical weapons by a rogue regime and when it makes no effort to develop a collective response to presidential threats to use military force against foreign governments with which the United States is not already at war. The executive branch is indicating the irrelevance of Congress to the warmaking process when it announces that the president’s Article II authority should be understood to include the power to initiate military force against foreign nations whenever he deems American national interests to be at stake. …

At the local strip mall, as water poured down the downspouts, I noticed this:

In fact, it appeared all of the downspouts had been invaded by cabling. Sure hope this never causes any problems.

A reader comments on the pharma business  model:

I’m glad you said he mischaracterized their pricing model, because the line “These drugs are priced to recover their R&D costs based on the number of patients who are likely to use them” is just a fantasy story sold to the public and politicians to enable huge amounts of profits. How many times have corporations told us their prices for X were so high because they were forced to do expensive thing Y to make X available, and then we’ve been able to prove that true, versus the number of times we’ve been able to prove it false? I’d wager those statements have rarely been confirmed as truth, and frequently confirmed as deception. Big Pharma is big, and filthy rich. The very, very rare case where some company spends a gazillion dollars on R&D by itself and is not profitable does not prove the “rule” they sell us into believing. Recall also that we the people through our taxes paid for and continue to pay for scads of basic research to creates these drugs. No drug company invents completely novel things; it and its employees stand on the shoulders of many others, most of whom are not getting paid by those excessive profits. That a majority of modern drugs are vastly cheaper in other countries is one clear indication that it’s poppycock.

Although to some extent our over pricing permits the other countries to have lower prices, in general I agree with the reader. I wonder what would happen if the United States government simply stopped all basic research – would, as the libertarians would assert, the corporate world pick up the load?

Or would we simply not see any more true innovation, just us being locked into medicines which treat, but do not cure, life-threatening diseases?

A reader comments on the printed concrete house:

What’s wrong with concrete, as compared to extruded wood?

I suppose “extruded wood” could be sawdust mixed with some sort of binder, which would require energy to create. I have no way to estimate its impact on the environment. Concrete, on the other hand, has a measured substantial impact, as remarked upon here.

Another reader:

I could see concrete being 3D printed for load-bearing columns; then a different kind of concrete with more insulative value, being used for the walls. Print a notch in the wall so you can surface mount the utilities — wiring chases and HVAC — then cover it with a panel of some kind. Make it earthquake resistant and I’d live in it.

To which another replies:

There’s a type of concrete used for making blocks which have good insulation value, are much lighter and easier to work with, but which retains much of concrete’s strength. It’s called Aerated Autoclaved Concrete (AAC). The downside of AAC is mostly that it takes a lot of energy to produce, but maybe if that’s averaged out over its long lifespan, it wouldn’t be as bad as other materials. I haven’t seen numbers on that yet.

Given it’s software used to control the printers, it should make for easily customizable houses.

Andrew Sullivan, in the second part of his weekly tri-partite column, laments the infiltration of a flawed philosophy into college and corporate HR office that is threatening liberal democracy:

The full text and documents of James Damore’s class-action lawsuit against Google make for fascinating reading. Throughout, the company’s policies are close to indistinguishable from those of many elite colleges, and indeed of more and more of corporate America (including many media companies). It is, of course, a great idea for Google to include as many people as possible from as many diverse experiences and backgrounds as possible — in order to recruit the very best employees.

But the “social justice” movement is about much more than that. It’s about replacing and subverting what it regards as “white male dominant” culture. And how does Google define “white male dominant culture”? According to a Google HR department handout, cited by Damore, some of the nefarious qualities “[v]alued by U.S. white/male dominant culture” include: perfectionism, individual achievement, objectivity, meritocracy, and a “colorblind racial frame.” And it is important to push back against all of them. …

Where on earth will this lead us? When you can identify the enemy by sight because of the color of their skin or their gender, fighting against a system quickly becomes a fight against individuals, whether that is the intent or not. That’s why it is going to be very interesting to see the gory details of Harvard’s admissions process in the current lawsuits — both private and from the Justice Department — in defense of individual Asian-American applicants, allegedly rejected because they are of the wrong race.

Well, in the corporate arena, those corporations controlled by a flawed philosophy, in HR or or corporation wide, will be unwilling participants in a social experiment called Survival of the Fittest. No doubt my reader has heard this one before, but as Janet Factor once noted,

Evolution is a substrate-neutral algorithm. It works its magic just as well on computer programs or political soundbites as it does on DNA.

Or corporate competition. If this new philosophy is indeed more flawed than that currently underlying liberal democracy – and, given its apparent internal contradictions and general incoherency, I tend to agree with Andrew that it is flawed and inferior – then those corporations will lose the talent that makes their collective efforts successful.

I recall, many many years ago, a financially painful lesson. I was invested, if memory serves, in Lucent Technologies, a telecommunications company. One day, I read about some bizarre requirement from their HR department, of which the exact nature now escapes me, but in general it fell into the category of disrepute as engendered by my generally skeptical nature – that is, it sounded like dumb bullshit. All employees were required to cooperate with this requirement.

And, a short while later, the stock price fell sharply on news of under-performance. I eventually lost money on the investment. And I recall, even now, not realizing that the news had been a pivotal signal to me. Lucent went on to shrink from 165,000 employees to 35,000 and then merge with Alcatel, which was generally considered a failure.

Andrew wonders where this will lead us? The corporate world is not monolithic, so we can assume there will be winners and losers. I am not invested in Alphabet, the parent to Google, and given this news, I would not consider an investment in Alphabet until that philosophy is either given a better defense, a revision, or is ousted from Alphabet.

Can you imagine a world without Google? Better get started on oiling up the imagination machine, because that world may be coming faster than you think. All it would take is Google faltering in their technical expertise, and technical expertise is what leaves a company the fastest when unbelievable bullshit starts flying around the corporation. I know engineers. They’ll put up with bizarre religious beliefs, but when something labeled “progressive” but obviously idiotic comes along and is embraced by corporate, they’re gone.

Or I should say allegedly odious profession, actually. It’s Fareed Zakaria in WaPo:

One of the oft-repeated criticisms of America is that it has too many lawyers. Maybe, but one of the country’s great strengths is its legal culture. As I’ve written before, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that without a class of patriotic and selfless aristocrats, the United States could fall prey to demagogues and populists. But he took comfort in the fact that, as he put it, American aristocracy can be found “at the bar or on the bench.” Tocqueville saw that lawyers, with their sense of civic duty, created a “form of public accountability that would help preserve the blessings of democracy without allowing its untrammeled vices.”

I’ve known many lawyers, and actually I consider just about every one of them admirable people. The American Experiment is not founded on religion or military might, it’s founded on respect for the law, and the lawyers are those who implement it in all its messy details.

American contempt for lawyers is ill-founded and motivated by a few bad actors.

A reader comments on U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley recent contretemps with the White House:

I don’t agree with her very often because she’s mostly parroting the official GOP mantra, if there is such a thing nowadays. But I do like her style, directness, and efficient use of the English language.

So do I. I don’t feel like she’s pulling a fast one on me. It’s too bad she seems to be in the extremist’s camp, otherwise it’d be a bit of a kick in the teeth to the white supremacist wing of the GOP to have a Republican Presidential candidate who happens to be female and Indian. I wonder how much harassment she receives from the bigots of the party, and how much they grind their teeth in frustration at her success and influence.

While reading Greg Sargent in WaPo’s The Plum Line, I began to wonder. But first, Sargent’s summation:

To be clear, the fact that Republicans strong-armed the release of the Comey memos in the first place, and the fact that they promptly leaked, both set bad precedents when it comes to political interference in ongoing investigations. But now that it did happen, there’s no way to argue that this outcome is vindicating for Trump. The opposite is true.

And this echos other publication asserting the leaked memos absolve Trump of nothing, despite his protestations.

But will the Trump supporters ever even see analyses such as Sargent’s? I’d bet, at most, a plugged nickel Fox News will be publishing along these lines, so we can be fairly sure that your typical Trump supporter, who reads Trump’s tweets and consumes right wing media devoted to Trump, will never see this sort of analysis. Like much of the American public, they depend on their news organizations and associated opinion pieces for their world view, perhaps even moreso than your average American.

So these analyses are rather like preaching to the choir. For the punditry, it’s a shocking and stunning blow TO the Trump Administration, and in fact to the conservative movement as a whole, as it repeatedly demonstrates incompetency and third rate amateurism, or, alternatively but doubtfully, an amazing level of deception against the Trump movement.

But for Trump supporters? The only impact will be confusion for those who engage with non-Trump supporters or media, as their mother’s milk will clash with the outside world. And they’ll just shake their heads and keep on sucking.

And it continues no matter what the weather gods may decree.

Stay in tune, boys!

It’s America’s disreputable side of society, stylized and set to music. Guys And Dolls (1955) follows the machinations of two men, Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson, as they pursue their vocations and their distractions – their ladies – in New York, New York. All around them, the city’s inhabitants gyrate to the tunes and the tension as Nathan bets high rolling Sky that he cannot take a doll of Nathan’s choosing to Havana for a night of dinner and … whatever takes their fancy. $1000 is the bet, and Nathan plans to use these ill-gotten funds to run a crap-game, his vocation and income, because those who fancy themselves well are in town, ready to chuck the bones in search of unearned wealth.

Who’s Nathan’s choice? To Masterson’s dismay, it’s Sgt Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army, a woman upright and devoted to the straight and narrow, but despairing of taking the first step up the Army ladder, of dragging a soul out of the filth of the gutter and into Heaven with her. But Masterson is not the sort to collapse at the first hurdle, and soon he finds the hook that will persuade her to his cause: 12 sinners’ souls will make their appearance at the Mission Hall two nights hence, in return for her company. Reluctant, but at the end of the creek, she agrees.

Meanwhile, Nathan has his own set of troubles, as his woman of 14 years is demanding he put up in the chapel, or shut up, and does so in that most elegant of New York accents – loud and grating. His protestations of love, so elegantly voiced, still her demands – for a time. But when he proves to be a more willing singer than groom, she vows this is the last time, much to his dismay. But he must make the dough, doncha know, and with a crap game or his end imminent, and the Mission Hall fortuitously empty, the dice are in play. Sadly, at least for them, the return of the rightful occupants precipitates the scattering of the gamers like chickens before the fox, but they’re gone fast enough that the notorious Lieutenant of the police department must depart with merely a  rage in hand.

But Sarah accuses Masterson of duplicity, both specific and general, and Sky finds there’s a limit to his detachment towards her. Recalling his marker to Sarah, he finds a native guide to the floating crap game, now, appropriately, in the sewers, and on a single roll, persuades a dozen or more of the gamblers to visit the Mission Hall at the appointed hour. A room full of confessionaries, reluctant though they may be, mark success … both immediate and in the future.

Full of famous names such as Harry the Horse and Nicely-Nicely, costumed as if no one in New York is poor, and danced with abandon, this is a luxuriant, leisurely stroll as we consider the question of how to salvage the souls of those who chase lady luck for far too long and way too much audacity, and if the answers are less than convincing, who cares? This is about style and daring, not argument and counter-argument. For today they wed, and if tomorrow brings disagreement, what of it? Live for wedded bliss today, living life to the fullest.

I haven’t mentioned the circus going on down in Missouri, as I figured it’d fade away – but, instead, it’s become more of a train accident. The Governor, Eric Greitens (R-MO), was initially accused of taking a photo of a woman who was nude against her wishes. She was having an affair with him. Then he was accused of forcing her into oral sex. Now Politico notes that he’s accused of mismanaging a charity he ran in the past:

St. Louis prosecutors filed criminal charges against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on Friday over his handling of a donors list for his veterans charity, the newest controversy for the governor, who is facing separate allegations of blackmail and sexual assault and a felony charge alleging invasion of privacy.

Missouri’s attorney general, Josh Hawley, announced on Friday that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner had found probable cause to file criminal charges against the governor in the case. Prosecutors allege that Greitens improperly used the donor list for his charity organization, The Mission Continues, during his 2016 political campaign.

Adding a bit of spiciness to this stew is the news that the Attorney General bringing the charges, Josh Hawley, is not only a Republican himself, but is gunning for the Senate seat currently held by Claire McCaskill (D-MO), which is currently considered the seat most likely to be flipped from Democratic to Republican control.

Hawley is engaged in a delicate dance here. Will voters consider this the actions of an honorable prosecutor, simply doing his duty? Or, sensing that Greitens is critically injured, he’s decided to push some dubious charges in hopes of getting more publicity, but it comes off wrong and it buries him instead?

Greitens, for what it’s worth, is loudly protesting this treatment. He admits to the affair, but after that it’s all just fantasy:

In a lengthy statement issued Friday, Greitens was defiant and claimed prosecutors were unfairly targeting him:

“Two months ago, a prosecutor brought a case against me. She claimed she had evidence of a crime — but she’s produced none. She said her investigator would find the truth. Instead, her investigator lied under oath and created false evidence. And she is using thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars to do all of this. Her case is falling apart — so today, she’s brought a new one.”

It continued: “By now, everyone knows what this is: this prosecutor will use any charge she can to smear me. Thank goodness for the Constitution and our court system. In the United States of America, you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

I understand the first couple of charges were brought by someone other than Hawley. In any case, it’s a spectacle: a sitting governor under not one, but multiple serious indictments. Will this reflect poorly on the Republican brand – or just Greitens? Or even Hawley?

Turkey appears to be backing away from so-called fiat money and pushing gold as the currency of choice in international commerce – and preparing for it, of course. Mehmet Cetingulec of AL Monitor has the story:

Turkey’s central bank, in a fundamental shift in its reserve policy, is stocking gold and scaling back on foreign exchange after many years of keeping gold reserves at a fixed level and trying to boost foreign exchange. In the first week of April alone, the central bank’s gross foreign exchange reserves declined to $83 billion from $84.7 billion the previous week, while gold reserves stood at about $25.3 billion.

The unprecedented increase in gold reserves propelled Turkey to 10th place in terms of gold reserves in February. According to the World Gold Council, Turkey had 546.8 tons of gold that month, compared to 116 tons in September 2011.

The goal?

In a sign that Turkey will continue to stock up on gold, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 17 argued that international loans should be based on gold rather than dollars. Speaking at an economic gathering in Istanbul, he remarked, “Why do you have to make the loans in dollars? Let’s base the loans on gold. We need to rid states and nations of exchange rate pressure. Throughout history, gold has never been a means of pressure.” Erdogan also said that he had made the suggestion to International Monetary Fund officials at a G-20 meeting.

Ankara’s desire to boost the use of gold pertains not only to borrowing, but also to trade. This meshes with its efforts to promote interest-free banking, where lending systems are based on gold. Some, however, see more covert motives behind Turkey’s stocking on gold.

Interest free banking is a result of the Islamic prohibition on interest. And there’s more:

In an April 17 article, Hurriyet’s economy pundit Ugur Gurses reported that last year the central bank withdrew all 28.6 tons of gold it was keeping at the US Federal Reserve, moving it to the Switzerland-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England. According to the report, at the end of 2017, Turkey’s gold reserves totaled 564.7 tons, including 375.4 tons at the Bank of England, 18.7 tons at BIS, 33.7 tons at the Turkish central bank and 136.8 tons in the central bank’s account at the Istanbul stock exchange.

Some interesting moves by Turkey. I’ve never quite understood the fascination with gold myself, but it sure seems to becloud some people.

The quest for saving money ran into a blockade:

A group of cancer doctors focused on bringing down the cost of treatments by testing whether lower — and cheaper — doses are effective thought they had found a prime candidate in a blood cancer drug called Imbruvica that typically costs $148,000 a year.

The science behind Imbruvica suggested that it could work at lower doses, and early clinical evidence indicated that patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia might do just as well on one or two pills a day after completing an initial round of treatment at three pills per day.

The researchers at the Value in Cancer Care Consortium, a nonprofit focused on cutting treatment costs for some of the most expensive drugs, set out to test whether the lower dose was just as effective — and could save patients money.

Then they learned of a new pricing strategy by Janssen and Pharmacyclics, the companies that sell Imbruvica through a partnership. Within the next three months, the companies will stop making the original 140-milligram capsule, a spokeswoman confirmed. They will instead offer tablets in four strengths — each of which has the same flat price of about $400, or triple the original cost of the pill. [WaPo]

Naturally, the researchers were outraged. Kevin Drum thinks it’s unwarranted:

I can’t believe I’m defending a pharmaceutical company, but what did these oncologists expect? Everyone knows that the price of drugs like Imbruvica doesn’t depend on the cost of actually manufacturing the stuff. Whether it costs a penny a pill or $100 a pill is irrelevant. These drugs are priced to recover their R&D costs based on the number of patients who are likely to use them. If the number of pills required was any kind of factor at all, they’d manufacture them in 10-milligram sizes and make people buy 14 or 28 of them.

First, let’s note that Kevin is mis-characterizing the purpose of general pharma pricing. The purpose is to recover the R&D costs on both successful and unsuccessful drugs, and to make a profit – generally a big profit. (They also hope for lucrative “off-label” applications as well, but that’s another story.)

It’s a fascinating question, though. We’re accustomed to considering the physical properties of a tangible product to define the price of that product, but in this case it’s nearly all about the intellectual effort that went into the R&D process. And, if the pharma company was being completely honest and not just jerking these scientists around, it wouldn’t be using the price-per-pill model at all. That pricing scheme is an example of the rapidly-becoming-discredited medical services for a fee model in which medical supplies, procedures, professionals, and, most importantly, corporate entities are disconnected from the primary purpose of medicine: to correct defects in the human body^[1].

I would like to see the pharma companies cease dispensing their illness solutions in separate pills, priced-per, and instead put a price on the entire treatment, regardless of the actual number of pills involved. I recognize that this doesn’t fit perfectly, since many severe illnesses, by definition, are not yet resolvable, so you’d have to label the ‘solution’ as something else reflecting the true purpose of the treatment, whether it’s pain alleviation or life lengthening. But you get the point.

And there should be some sort of consequence if the treatment doesn’t work. Boy, the devil would live in those details, wouldn’t it?

¹Yeah, we could have a marvelous argument over that as well. Just think of the controversy within the deaf community over restoration of hearing. Or the requests from high functioning autistic folks that they be labeled neuro-atypical, vs the rest of us neurotypical sorts. It’s not a cut and dried topic.

Architect Massimiliano Locatelli wants to move into the future, which he thinks means your next house will be 3D printed. From Wallpaper*:

W*: What was your vision when designing this house?
ML: My vision was to integrate new, more organic shapes in the surrounding landscapes or urban architecture. My intention was to do the first house for a square in the centre of Milan. I wanted to show a different way of using a printing machine and explore how a concrete house could create a dialogue with our memories of interior design, made of references to archetypes of the past.

W*: What challenges and what opportunities does 3D printing present for the architect?
ML: The challenges are the project’s five key values: creativity, sustainability, flexibility, affordability and rapidity. The opportunity is to be a protagonist of a new revolution in architecture.

Pity about the concrete. How one might extrude wood from a printer is not entirely clear to me, though. I also wonder about impact on the construction trades.

Christopher Buskirk opines in WaPo that the great conservative experiment is doing just fine, but the problem is he’s a very shallow observer:

Against this butcher’s bill of failures and broken promises, look at Trump’s first year in office: Unemployment is low, the stock market is high and wages are rising. Ordinary Americans have more money in their pockets as a result of lower taxes. Illegal immigration has declined, regulations are being rolled back, Obamacare’s individual mandate is dead, and a slate of constitutionalist judges has been approved, with more on the way. Thanks to a too-timid congressional leadership, deficits remain a problem, but we’ve at least gotten major pro-growth policies. And with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s impending departure, we have a chance at a more energetic effective leadership team.

He’s railing against the Republicans of the early 2000s and those who served during Obama’s Administration, which isn’t a bad idea, but the problem is that he, like the man himself, wants to give Trump far too much credit. Let’s go through a few:

1. Unemployment and the stock market may be low and the stock market high, but they are practically unchanged since the end of the Obama Administration.
2. Wages may or may not be rising, but Trump has little control over that – that comes down to profitability and scarcity of talent. On a larger scale, Trump has done remarkably little on the economic front.
3. Lower taxes for the wealthy. But this is an assertion shorn of context. What will the effect be on the nation, particularly in the area of corporate taxes? So far, informed critics have pointed out that the lower taxes are only resulting in more money for those who have it through stock buybacks and the like. Investment in new production? Isn’t happening. Buskirk sounds dangerously like former Governor Brownback of Kansas, whose guesses on how economics work did not pan out.
4. Immigration has been declining for nearly a decade, mostly under the center-left leadership of Obama, although I’d argue there’s more to it than Obama – there’s a xenophobic nation which no longer welcomes immigrants. Taking credit for a long-term trend is a pothole waiting to break your ankle.
5. The individual mandate may be dead, but why take that as a positive? The healthier the citizenry, the more productive it’ll be. The individual mandate was a plug for the individual, for industry, and for the nation. Without it, growth will suffer.
6. The “constitutionalist judges” appear, by and large, to be fairly inferior. Some have even been rejected by a GOP that has been largely compliant to Trump’s judiciary selections, indicating these aren’t so much Constitutionalists as just big mouths that caught Trump’s attention.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to his argument. He seems to be caught up in the standard right wing fantasy of how things work – even when they don’t.

He doesn’t pass the smell test.

It’s funny how you can ignore the resources around you. Here I am, a University of Minnesota graduate (and the ‘M’ is a big, national-calibre school), I’m living barely a mile from their St. Paul campus, and only a few from the Minneapolis campus, which is where I actually went to classes, and yet have I taken advantage of that proximity?

Not that I can remember. I have resolutely ignored ‘M’ for years, especially its Alumnae Society or whatever it’s called. I should probably look back with some regret, if I were smart about such things, but I’m not a joiner and I was never academically competent. I balled up more tests than I can count. Shit, I failed a take-home final once. (Still got a B in the course. It was a CSci course, Numerical Analysis, taught by a first year professor. I think enough students complained that the school ‘adjusted’ some grades.)

The Parkes Observatory, where a number of FRBs have been observed.

But when an alumnae notice came around that mentioned a guest lecture on FRBs, it finally shook me out of my hole and made me look up at the stars, the appropriate thing to do, because FRB stands for Fast Radio Burst, an astronomical phenomenon in which radio bursts which last a few milliseconds suddenly pop up in the data of radio telescopes. The lecture was given Wednesday, April 18^th, by Professor Victoria Kaspi of McGill University, Montreal, and she pitched it at an educated but non-specialist audience, and though it was clear she’s not an expert presenter, she was spirited, has a sense of humor, and really made it a fun and educational hour and a half.

She explained not only that their origination points, which are hard to determine, are quite far out, but how they know this. We know that in a perfect vacuum, radiation, whether it be visible light, x-rays, or radio waves, travel at the same speed. But even open space is not a perfect vacuum, it has free electrons floating around. Why is this important? Because they will diffract the radiation, and what happens is that the lower frequencies will move slower. I tried to find one of her beautiful graphs of a signal coming in, but no luck, so you’ll have to imagine a graph of frequencies on the Y-axis and time on the X-Axis. An FRB will start in the high frequencies, but as a few milliseconds pass, the signal falls in a slight curve into the lower frequencies. Through independent means they have rough estimates of the densities of the free electrons in most directions, so combining the graph with the free electron densities gives them an estimate of the distance from the source to Earth.

She also explained how a microwave oven was spooking them at noon some days. That was a hoot.

The CHIME radio telescope

Finally, she mentioned the CHIME radio telescope, currently nearing completion, up in British Columbia. Originally designed and built by cosmologists, the astronomers are hitching a ride on it in the hopes that FRBs show up in the radiation band it’ll be monitoring, which I believe is in the 400 – 800 MHz. The FRBs so far measured have been around 1200 MHz – 1600 MHz, if memory serves, but they have their hopes.

And the origin of FRBs? Professor Kaspi said she was agnostic on that point. Many theories have come and gone, and I think at this juncture they’re just too short on information to have a strong guess.

But great fun!