Monthly Archives: June 2019

Funny, I thought I hid her on the right side, not the left.

I learned something tonight (or last night, depending on when this is published): that it’s not impossible to enjoy the romantic farces made in the 1940s and 50s.

I thought I’d hate Tell It To The Judge (1949) as soon as I saw the first gag, but they were smoothly done and organic to the plot. Oh, the plot? The former Mrs. Peter Webb, now Miss Meredith, is up for a seat on the Federal judiciary – in fact, the first woman to be nominated. Her problem? Her recent divorce from her philandering husband has placed her nomination at risk of rejection by the stodgy, conservative, and patronizing members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And she’s furious.

Mr. Peter Webb’s problem? He’s not a philanderer. The pretty blonde he was seen with, a material witness in an important case, keeps following him about, begging for protection against mobsters. Which is sort of like how he follows his former wife about, begging for her affections again. Throw in an opposed grandfather, a lighthouse keeper, and a grifter, not to mention the most adorable St. Bernard ever, balanced by some annoying high society types, and he’s in for a rough time.

The details are not important, except as to whether they seem organic or imposed, and, for the most part, they are organic. Are they funny? My Arts Editor burst out laughing at points where I thought we’d be squirming, so this observation suggests that, yes, they are funny. She can be a harsh audience.

Will this make you think for the next few days? I don’t think so. It’s light and fluffy and disappears like smoke. But it was fun while it lasted.

Seems like you can’t have a restaurant without a TV as a distraction.

This one, incidentally, is located within Zait & Za’atar, near the western corner of Snelling and Selby in St. Paul, MN. We’ve eaten here a couple of times now and note they seem unafraid of smoke and garlic, resulting in strongly flavored dishes. If you value ambiance and decor over food, then perhaps this won’t be your gig as it’s rather primitive in those respects, but otherwise we’ve enjoyed the food and relative quiet. If Lebanese food appeals to you, give it a visit!

The pink peony seems to have suffered a let down.

Recently, SCOTUS brought forth their view on the judiciary and political gerrymandering cases through their ruling on Rucho v. Common Cause, the North Carolina case, and Lamone v. Benisek, the Maryland case. This 5-4 decision, decided along ideological lines within the court, left the liberal wing with another loss – and a sense of outrage. Here’s Justice Kagan’s dissent:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to  advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require—indeed, they do not permit—courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.

Justice Kagan’s dissent is heartfelt, powerfully written – and symptomatic of her, and my, generation’s sins.

First of all, it’s characteristic of the Instant Gratification Generation. Fix this problem now, she cries! This failure to consider how the future may render this problem moot, how the festering of this manifest injustice may be more advantageous, in the long run, than its immediate cauterization, is characteristic of those I’ve grown up with in my generation.

But that leads to the second: is there a judicial solution? Hey, I’ve hardly paid attention, while Justice Kagan is one of the top professionals in her field. Who am I to comment? Maybe I’m just someone with too many opinions.

But I can’t help but notice that all the suggested approaches to the political gerrymandering problem are inevitably encumbered with one problem that they haven’t addressed, and that renders any analogies with race-based gerrymandering solutions invalid: voters can change their political spots. A voter cannot change their ethnic heritage, but when it comes to politics, they can change their vote.

This means that today’s solution is potentially tomorrow’s problem. Sure, voters of important ethnicities can change their geographical location, thus invalidating redrawn political maps to the befuddlement of the judiciary line-drawers, but it’s more likely that voters will change their electoral choice than move to a new home. I say this not just because it’s convenient to my argument, but because there’s a real difference between the two activities. It’s quite rare that a group, en masse, chooses to move. Sure, a river changing its course, or a shattering earthquake can cause a group to move, but those motivations are are exceedingly rare. The key realization is that, generally, people move for reasons particular to them. Sure, statistically, you can group them and study them – but look at a city of people selling their homes and moving and you’ll find a multitude of reasons, and most of them are non-political.

But politics and voting doesn’t require changing residence or even party registration. All you have to do is register to vote, and then do it – with a secret ballot, no less. Today’s Republican town could become tomorrow’s Democratic town – especially since the wildcard, the independents, change their spots quite easily.

But my reader may complain that most seats are safe, despite the swings we’ve seen in voter preferences in recently years. I would point at those recent oscillations, though, and notice that the key realization here is that the political activities of those in charge will impact those who live in that area, and while the impacts will be disparate in magnitude and in whether they are positive or negative, that is only two variables, unlike those who are changing residence. The probability that a mass of voters might change their votes due to the activities of those in political power is far higher than for those of a given ethnicity moving en masse.

Given a political organization of sufficient repugnance, whether it be from incompetence, abuse, or ideological zealotry, those living in that area can, as a group, uncoordinated or not, change their vote at the next election from favoring to disfavoring that political organization.

This brings me to my final point. Many people, if they have any concerns, interests, or agendas in which government can be involved, keep an eye on the political leaders. Even those considered reliable members of a party’s base keep an eye out, usually for ideological blasphemy by their leaders. These signals may be interpreted as indicative of a particular person, but, of course, they can also be taken as a whole to act as intelligence about the entire organization. This is simply how we’re put together; it’s a social survival mechanism, akin to Is that lion too full to chase me, or had I better take off running now?

But what if SCOTUS had instead found for the plaintiffs?

Here’s what happens: this signal, a signal of arrogance, pride, disdain for the voter, and perhaps worse, is lost to that key audience, the voter. Sure, it’s damaging the polity that their activities continue unabated, but those activities are also a signal of the attitudes of that organization towards the voter: that of treating them as cattle, their votes as commodities, as a group to be led about by their noses or excluded. But at least we know and can do something about it sooner rather than later. Even for a relatively high-profile cause such as gerrymandering, SCOTUS decisions are often obscure and unknown; if they had found for the plaintiffs, the lines would have been redrawn, and even with great fanfare, the resultant public consciousness of it would have dissipated within a week.

But finding for the defendants means this signal continues to impact the voters, and it also encourages that political organization to continue activities which are reprehensible. That makes their unworthiness even more obvious.

We may find that this decision by the conservative wing of the Court will actually damage the Republicans, in the end, as the independents and moderate Republicans vote out the hard-line Republicans who’ll do anything to win. They’ll be voted out because doing anything to win is not the American thing to do.

So don’t entirely despair at this decision. If they had found for the plaintiffs, they may have embraced a deeply flawed solution with little input from the public, and little chance for improvement. Now the problem returns, not to the political sphere, but to the public sphere, either formally, or motivated by the misdeeds of the miscreants, regardless of their political stripe.

When I heard that the city elections for Istanbul, Turkey, had resulted in a narrow victory for the opposition’s candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, but then the national government had nullified the elections on some obscure grounds or another, I got that bad feeling in my gut. Surely Erdogan’s national government wouldn’t let the rascally opposition gain a lick of power, much less the position of mayor of the largest city, would they?

Sometimes the gut is wrong:

The opposition’s stunning landslide victory in yesterday’s controversial redo of the Istanbul municipal polls has reignited hopes that Turkey’s democracy, which seemed to be in its death throes, has some fight in it still.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the once obscure former Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Beylikduzu, an ugly urban sprawl on the edge of Istanbul, defeated his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) rival Binali Yildirim by a whopping 800,000 votes compared with the measly 13,000 ballots in the first run. The result is widely seen as the biggest setback faced by the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who pressured electoral authorities to invalidate the March 31 results in Istanbul in the hope of winning this time.

Western diplomats cynically intoned that Erdogan would do so, cheating his way to victory if need be. But few counted on the apocalypse that was in store. Cheating was apparently not an option: AKP strongholds like Fatih and Uskudar, where Erdogan maintains his private residence, fell to the opposition, a resounding signal that his oversize sense of entitlement coupled with a poorly managed and polarizing campaign had backfired spectacularly.  Rising inflation and joblessness are however among the AKP’s biggest woes. [AL-Monitor]

Overconfidence and the belief that they deserved it appears to have been the undoing of the ruling party. That the AKP is basically a religious party – of the Muslims, but it doesn’t really matter – suggests they probably felt they had the imprimatur of their deity and thus they couldn’t lose.

It’s a common failing. We’ve seen that with the Republicans.

I don’t have much more to add, except don’t despair, there’s always a chance your opponents will become overconfident when they are ascendant – and then they become descendant.

Formal Methods in computer science are well summarized in Wikipedia:

In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically based technique for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems.^[1] The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.

I’ve commented on a number of occasions, usually to colleagues, that some day the profession has to find a way to apply Formal Methods in order to produce better products, even if I haven’t the faintest idea of how to do it myself^[1]. It’s good to see that some folks have been pursuing this objective, as noted in this pop-sci report on TLA+, which appears to be based on that notion:

TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy (say, if you were programming an ATM, a constraint might be that you can never withdraw the same money twice from your checking account). TLA+ then exhaustively checks that your logic does, in fact, satisfy those constraints. If not, it will show you exactly how they could be violated. [Pocket / The Atlantic]

The title reminds me of a chapter in FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING: Theory and Practice (MacLennan), in which the passage of time had to be accounted for by the functional programmer. Apparently functional theory didn’t account for the passage of time, and the author found this to be a problem that had to be treated. I fear I missed the point of that chapter.

I must say, though, that one of the arguments the driving force behind TLA+, Leslie Lamport of Microsoft, employs falls with a thud to the ground:

For Lamport, a major reason today’s software is so full of bugs is that programmers jump straight into writing code. “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.” Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code.

The problem is that it’s a rare person who has the resources to build a skyscraper on a whim. Programming, though, all you need is the compiler for the language of choice, and a computer. Anyone with a little intellectual gumption – or gall – can sail right into writing a program. And once someone gets the taste of success in their mouth, it can take years to wash it out. The analogy is broken.

The ease of writing code tends to obliterate the importance of the entire enterprise, truth be told. I recall way back when I was just starting to write code, I ran across a guy – I can’t remember his name – who didn’t consider it science, nor engineering. For him, it was an art form. This is not to say that all software engineers go to that extreme, but given how easy it is to indulge in writing software – programs, apps, code – compared to building even a shack, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of undisciplined writing of code out there, me included.

But code is written everyday for critical, life-involved applications. Forget “mission-critical,” I’m talking embedded software in medical devices, the software that controls various energy sources, all things that can cause death if they fail. The use of tools such as TLA+ should continue and grow, otherwise the promise of computers will be blighted.

But it’ll probably be after my time.

¹ I know I’ve mentioned related topics on this blog, specifically having to do with software dis-warranties and the general use of the customer as a beta-release mechanism.

I’ve talked about the decline of the moral standing of the American Evangelical before, but it appears their leading members are still intent on going over the cliff of hypocrisy and lying, as Steve Benen discusses the behavior of Vice President Pence (R-IN):

We have mushrooms, now. One giant organism? Or many? Beats me, I’m not a mycologist.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has come up before, as he’s under indictment for campaign fund theft. What was he doing with them? Talking Points Memo reports:

Justice Department prosecutors alleged on Monday that Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) used campaign contributions to have multiple extramarital affairs, including a $1,000 ski vacation with a female lobbyist.

According to the court filing, Hunter started using the campaign funds to “carry out a series of intimate relationships” with five women soon after he first entered office in 2009.

The first woman (“Individual 14”) was a lobbyist. For about three years, Hunter dipped into his campaign contributions to pay for a couple’s ski getaway (which cost more than $1,000), a road trip to Virginia Beach, and hotel stays, according to prosecutors.

And all I can think? ONLY $1,000 for a ski vacation?!

What sort of cheap asshole is this guy, anyways?

But this may not be an electoral disaster for him. After all, his TrumpScore as of this writing is 96% – and 100% in the current Congress. Just so long as he’s firmly humping President Trump’s leg, he’ll beat any primary challengers and probably any Democratic nominees as well.

Even if it’s with a monitor on his ankle.

Because, well, the Republican base has little enough self-respect nowadays.

You stick out your thumb and you never know what’ll pick you up.

Some stories are complete in and of themselves. Some stories are deficient in some way, but still worthy of a view for reasons peculiar to each: quirky characters, special-effects, philosophical underpinnings, whatever it might be.

And then there’s those stories that require the audience to bring something to the party in order to rise above the muck. In all likelihood, that addition, augmentation, whatever you want to call it, is going to involve alcohol and a finely tuned sense of snark.

That’s the category Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) falls into. This is the sort of movie the viewer must charge into with a desire to critique, preferably loudly, with the remote in hand. That sense of the aesthete, the critic, will be all that saves the sanity of the viewer.

Shall we begin? Since this claims to sail from the science fiction harbor, we’ll have to say the science is execrable, as they appear to be making the trip from Earth to Venus in the matter of a couple of hours, and while they may get props for actually having a space station to stop at, the space station appears to be defying the laws of physics: it spins as one might expect, but the people do not go flying off as they should.

This guy’s even worse when dead! And don’t try to eat him, he tastes like … rubber!

The special effects are spotty, although I must admit I had to stop the movie to exclaim in delight over the forty tentacled plant that tried to eat a handy astronaut. Like many movies of this sort, more money is spent on the special effects than on the story or actors, and it can show. But other special effects, such as the dead pterosaur, were little more than unconvincing rubber.

But, really, the worst were the actors and script. The script sends these actors wandering all over the landscape, as the rescue mission stops off at convenient locations to explore various ruins, and despite all this moseying about, somehow these sometimes horny astronauts never meet up with the half-naked native ladies. There’s no conflict, none of that stuff that makes stories like this compelling, interesting, or even vaguely worthwhile. Frankly, the astronauts are more or less repellent and wooden, although we didn’t cheer for them to actually die. Our incredulity may have been interfering with a full snark display. And this script employs narration, presumably to cover up a host of sins. It made my eyes water, figuratively speaking.

And the color palette! We speculated it was an artifact of age interacting with the film, but perhaps not: maybe everyone’s hair was supposed to be green on Venus.

Mom always said I should find something nice to say, so I’ll say that John, the Robot, undoubtedly a distant cousin of the better-known Robbie the Robot, is really sort of cool. We think the best art student intern working on this project did John. Too bad John’s “self-preservation unit” ultimately did him, excuse me it, in.

And, finally, what’s this bit about “fighting mathematics?” Why is it important to fight mathematics? Or so captioning claimed it said; it’s a little garbled in this Internet version that I found, and for that matter the original on Amazon. Oh, I’m not recommending you see this piece of trash, but if you do watch it, the mathematics remark is at 31 minutes in, more or less.

And that can be physical, mental, even emotional. Pressure, that is. We often hear, quite properly, Use it or lose it. This refers to physical capabilities, in most cases. But Michelle Singletary of WaPo has brought up the important topic of inheritance:

Some super-rich parents — Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — have said they do not plan to leave their adult children a great percentage of the wealth they’ve accumulated.

Of course, it’s a bit relative if you’re still getting millions of dollars from mom and pop.

“Intergenerational transfers are a widespread phenomenon, with an average of roughly 2 million households receiving either an inheritance or a substantial gift each year,” according to a 2018 Federal Reserve report.

But stories that wealthy business people such as Gloria Vanderbilt, who died last week at 95, do not want to pass on their considerable fortune to their heirs made me wonder: Should you leave an inheritance to your children? …

While interviewing Cooper in 2014, radio host Howard Stern asked: “Your mother inherited money. Why shouldn’t you inherit money?”

“I think it’s an initiative sucker,” Cooper said. “I think it’s a curse. Who’s inherited a lot of money that has gone on to do things in their own life? From the time I was growing up, if I felt like there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don’t know that I would have been so motivated.”

I’ve remarked on inheritance before, in the context of a meritocracy, and I must admit that I find the question of inheritance to be problematic. There are many cases of inheritances wasted by the recipients, although I have no idea if anyone’s sat down and actually examined the problem.

But I think of it this way: a species isolated from evolutionary pressures have little reason to change. After all, another way of thinking of this isolation is to say that they’re doing so well that there’s no reason to change. Apply this thinking to the human organism who receives an inheritance, and you realize there’s a predisposition for that organism to, well, sit on his or her hands.

This is not a deterministic statement, of course, because we are not all economic beings. Some of us are driven by other and numerous impulses, ranging from art to politics (think of the Roosevelt family, both Teddy and Franklin, who were cousins). But the easy availability of the trappings of life are, in the main, not likely to encourage someone to explore the extremities of life that can lead to an outsized results.

If that matters to you, restriction of inheritance to your children, or the cultivation of interests other than economic in your children may be of importance.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare may feel like he has a chicken bone stuck in his throat:

I want to say a few words in defense of Donald Trump’s tweets and statements today on the abortive military operation against Iran. This is admittedly contrarian. It is an argument I have never made before and frankly don’t expect to make again. It is also an almost comical example of damning with faint praise. …

… [but even] collegiate-level argumentation is a dramatic breakthrough for a president whose more typical behavior has given rise to Dan Drezner’s famous Toddler-in-Chief thread. The president’s comments on the Iranian situation reflect thinking that is genuinely unusual for Trump, who normally articulates a kind of government by magic in which one can have it all and without costs. Here, by contrast, Trump is overtly acknowledging costs, nuance and complexity. The man who campaigned for president promising to commit war crimes is now acknowledging that brutality isn’t an objective but a negative and that restraint may be valuable. I cannot think of any previous set of statements in which Trump’s thinking seems so coherent and linear and logical—and also so complicated.

The point of difference between a committed independent and a relatively useless zealot is their willingness to step forward and admit that someone they loathe has done something good. How many Republicans could do that for Obama, or Democrats for Trump or Bush II? And how much less valuable are their thought processes once we realize that they start from an assumption that the leader of the other side is inherently evil or an idiot?

This is the danger of political cults.

OK, all that said, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Trump was deliberately speaking to a different audience. To a great extent, Trump speaks to his base, a group committed to the idea that liberals are, well, evil or idiots. But, in this case, Trump may have been speaking to everyone and felt that a more nuanced approach was necessary. Why this would be, I’m not certain – but it’s worth considering during analysis of his behavior.

We were quite pleased when the Minnesota Museum of American Pattern Glass, a recent museum review, appeared on local news WCCO as a local place of interest. Congratulations!

If you haven’t been yet, put it on your list of things to see.

Hypogeum:

While excavating hundreds of graves dating from the third century B.C. through the third century A.D. in a Roman necropolis on the island’s eastern side, archaeologists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) found stairs descending to a long corridor and a hypogeum—a rock-cut underground burial chamber normally reserved for high-status individuals—predating the Roman burials. More than 100 tombs of this type were excavated in the 1970s and 1980s at Casabianda, another Etruscan cemetery just to the south. [“A Funeral Fit for Etruscans,” Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology (July/August 2019)]

Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum
Source: Wikipedia

Last weekend was the Back To The ’50s show at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, but I was not much in the mood for picture taking. However, I couldn’t resist these two, both parked convenient to my camera.

That impressive hood ornament was internally lit, which made it even more fun. And then there’s this little cutie:

We don’t often see a Studebaker going down the road.

The pinkies are a little behind the other peonies, but they at least as cute.

Someone’s measuring the cost of training a computer via machine learning, as reported by NewScientist (15 June 2019):

Training artificial intelligence is an energy intensive process. New estimates suggest that the carbon footprint of training a single AI is as much as 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – five times the lifetime emissions of an average car.

Emma Strubell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and colleagues have assessed the energy consumption required to train four large neural networks, a type of AI used for processing language.

Language-processing AIs underpin the algorithms that power Google Translate as well as OpenAI’s GPT-2 text generator, which can convincingly pen fake news articles when given a few lines of text.

These AIs are trained via deep learning, which involves processing vasts amounts of data. “In order to learn something as complex as language, the models have to be large,” says Strubell.

Well, that’s lovely to know, but why pick the car as your comparison? The point of comparisons is to compare like things, which is to say things that belong to the same functional category.

So compare to a human being. How much does it cost to bring a human from birth to the same level of capability as the computer, discounted for the fact that the human is, in most cases, multi-capable, unlike the computer. Another factor is the ease of replicating that ability from computer to computer, without the learning portion, while each human lacks that all important USB port in their head.

I have no idea how to answer the question. I just keep in mind that using computers to resolve problems within the manual capability of humans would seem to be a waste of energy and climate.

And, yet, who laments the disappearance of the great thundering herds of filing clerks? The entire question of which class of problems deserves the application of computers is a little nuanced than one might think.

From an age when they wore taco bowls on their heads.

The essence of Rhythm in the Clouds (1937) is light-hearted whimsical farce. Failing song-writer Judy bluffs her way into the apartment of acclaimed song-writer Phil Hale, and, finding him away on vacation, appropriates his name as co-writer on songs she has written. On the strength of that faux-collaboration, her songs are taken up by a radio station and one of its sponsors, the Duchess de Lovely. Yeah, no kidding. From there it becomes a farce of missed connections, misunderstandings, fumbled words, and, of course, a happy ending.

However, the pacing is far too placid to really emphasize the important parts, and the whole story feels very artificial. An artifact from another era, it took me roughly a month to watch, and it only lasts an hour. Don’t waste your time on this unless you have an historical reason to see it.

Our rose bush, always doubtful, has bloomed again.

I must admit that I laughed, and then frowned, when I heard that Facebook is planning to offer, operate, and support a cryptocurrency named Libra. I laughed because it seems like Facebook is a couple of years behind the times. Then I frowned, because we’re talking wealth transfer and we’re talking Facebook, which, given Facebook’s record so far, makes me fairly uncomfortable. And then I thought about recent reports on the energy costs, and therefore climatic impact, of current cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, and began to wonder.

The Verge has some information on the latter point:

Libra, Facebook’s new cryptocurrency, is expected to have a smaller environmental footprint compared to some of its more notorious blockchain brethren, including bitcoin, according to experts. Its energy demands are projected to be more like those of existing data centers — which, while still demanding, aren’t quite as energy-hungry as mining bitcoins.

The currency hasn’t launched yet, so it’s hard to know how those claims will stack up against reality. But its design — more centralized than most cryptocurrencies — means that Libra will likely draw less energy. Unlike its more decentralized peers, only a few trusted members of the Libra Association, the centralized hub for the currency, can create Libra.

“This is an order of magnitude more efficient than bitcoin will ever be,” says Ulrich Gallersdörfer, a researcher at Technical University of Munich focused on blockchain research. Gallersdörfer was the co-author on a recent paper in Joulefinding that bitcoin operations emit more climate-warming gas than the country of Jordan. …

… Libra is designed so that an algorithm issues units of the cryptocurrency in proportion to the size of a company’s initial deposit into the system. That’s still a lot to keep track of, but it’s nowhere near as complicated as a mining operation. Instead, it’s more like… normal data centers. Now, data centers draw power, too. In fact, data centers accounted for 2 percent of the total US energy usage in 2014, a 2016 study published by the DOE found. And they’re also responsible for about as many carbon dioxide emissions as the airline industry. But despite those drawbacks, these specially designed warehouses of servers are the rocks on which tech giants like Facebook continue to build and expand their digital empire.

I’m not particularly reassured just because they won’t be emitting as much as bitcoin does. I’m also not convinced that this extra consumption of energy, and its impact on the climate, is in service of some social good; it strikes me more as just another attempt to Make More Money.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare is also uneasy. Well, more than uneasy:

[Libra] is not live yet, giving governments the opportunity to kill this project before it actually gets off the ground and gives rise to cybercriminals that couldn’t capitalize on existing cryptocurrencies. In particular, the IRS and FinCEN should take action now. …

What currently limits how criminals can use cryptocurrencies is the cost of currency exchange and the inherent volatility of the currency’s value. Reduce or eliminate these constraints, and there’s likely to be an inundation of new ransomware, extortion and online drug trade. Libra intends to reduce (but doesn’t eliminate) volatility, and the only way Facebook can get widespread adoption is through making easy onramps and offramps. A Libra “success” would represent a huge policy failure. It is better to kill this now than let it even get a chance to succeed.

Much like Al Capone, this may founder on the rocks of the tax agents:

A true cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Libra is considered property by the Internal Revenue Service. That means a gain of $1 due to volatility between when the cryptocurrency is acquired and when it is transferred to someone else is a $1 taxable event. And since any integration into Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp is under the control of Facebook, Facebook should probably file income tax documents and keep track of the otherwise difficult cost-basis math on behalf of Facebook’s customers, like other investment brokerages do. The IRS needs to remind both Facebook and the public of these implications and requirements. Of course this would make Libra completely useless in the U.S. by increasing the cost of using it beyond any utility.

A similar problem exists for all validator nodes. Even non-U.S. companies need to respect U.S. KYC/AML restrictions if transactions end up involving U.S. persons. The founders of Liberty Reserve learned this lesson when they pleaded guilty to money laundering and received 20-year sentences. But how can firms do KYC/AML on pseudonymous transactions?

I’ve already decided not to participate, given Facebook’s spotty record. But I may not have to implement it. This project may go nowhere once the dust settles.

Our ninebark bush turned red this year.

Long time readers will remember my preoccupation with North Carolina, particularly in regards to its educational community. A reader points at the latest on that troubled relationship via The Progressive Pulse:

On May 1, thousands of educators and public education advocates flooded the streets of Raleigh to demand additional resources for North Carolina’s public schools. Organizers from the North Carolina Association of Educators outlined five policy priorities:

1. Provide enough school librarians, psychologists, social workers, counselors, nurses, and other health professionals to meet national standards.
2. Provide $15 minimum wage for all school personnel, 5% raise for all public school personnel, and a 5% cost of living adjustment for retirees.
3. Expand Medicaid to improve the health of our students and families.
4. Reinstate state retiree health benefits eliminated by the General Assembly in 2017.
5. Restore advanced degree compensation stripped by the General Assembly in 2013.

And did the Legislature begin working on passing bills to satisfy those demands? Not so much. Looks to me like the educational community is maneuvering to strike.

Along with the rest of the world, I had a chuckle at the petition directed at Netflix by an organization named Christian Return to Order, concerning the show Good Omens, signed by 20,000+ people demanding the show be taken off of Netflix. As Netflix doesn’t produce nor carry Good Omens, it’s a bit of a no-op; it’s an offering from Amazon Prime.

And we’ve actually seen it. Good Omens is, first and foremost, about the friendship between the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley (aka Crawley, aka the Snake in the Garden), and how that relationship compels both to seek to stop, or at least circumvent, the final war.

I’m not sure what these petition-signers find objectionable. Perhaps it’s simply the modern notion that war, destruction, death, and that whole thing is not an event to be awaited with bated breath, but rather avoided through the intelligent and careful application of diplomacy and, dare I say it, good faith.

But that probably leads to the big, underlying objection: the portrayal of the angels. Aziraphale is certainly a bit foggy and naive, but angels superior to him in the hierarchy appear to have been stripped of moral stricture. They hunger for war, glory, and all the supposed good things that go with battle and conquest. The question of how creatures not considered to be moral agents has been addressed before, such as in Constantine (2005), in which an angel complains that humanity is the only creatures worthy of some sort of glory, all while committing treachery of his or her own – a very moral choice indeed. But I’m not sure how angels, some of which followed Satan into Hell and continue to indulge in morally unhealthy choices millennia later can be considered to be outside of the moral arena.

So, in that respect, we’re once again following the thematic path I mentioned in my review of Ghostbusters (1984): the exploration of the ongoing obsolescence of the concept of divinity for mankind. Why do believers become outraged when their gods are mocked? If the divine lead an independent existence, then, hey, THEY’RE GODS. They can deal with a bit of mockery. But that inner doubt of the frantic believer knows that the mockery threatens to extinguish something taken definitionally on faith, something that cannot be proven – and therefore might just not actually exist.

Good Omens, by suggesting there’s a fly in the ointment of divinity, is that mockery, and so the faithful, yet doubtful, are called to reject it. From the article, I glean that the faithful worry about immorality being portrayed:

“This series presents devils and Satanists as normal and even good, where they merely have a different way of being, and mocks God’s wisdom,” the petition reads.

And yet, having watched all the episodes quite carefully, it’s difficult to reconcile this criticism with the themes of the series. Without a doubt, the demon Crowley is dragged from a position of evil, if you will, to a system of thought which implicitly acknowledges the wrongs he (it?) committed yesterday through his efforts to avert a war. His story arc is from the archetype of evil to another sinner, trying to do good in a world of tears. The theme of redemption is a popular theme, popular because it acknowledges the stresses of everyday life, whether it be today or thousands of years ago.

If Aziraphale, the angel, had met Crowley half way, morally speaking, in their effort to avert a divine war, if he’d even agreed to maliciously step on an ant, our petitioners might have something, but Aziraphale does not, in the arena of morality, truly change. Not in the least. However, he does rebel – against the plans and directives of the angels above him in the hierarchy. The petitioners may consider this rebellion to be dreadfully immoral, but the immorality of superiors has come to be understood to not be a defense for immorality of the underlings. We are all expected to behave as moral agents, with no option to hand that responsibility to others. If this is their basis for concern, then I should direct them back to their Bibles, because their faith in hierarchy is flawed.

Good Omens is otherwise good fun, with entertaining special effects, although I must admit I found the two leads to be a little repetitive. If you have some hours and want something that’s a little reminiscent of a toned down Monty Python, this might be your cup of tea.

Not exactly the sort of thing I expected to run across in WaPo:

Mobile technology has transformed the way we live — how we read, work, communicate, shop and date.

But we already know this.

What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit.

New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.

I realize that the academic journal in which this is reported, Scientific Reports, is part of the Nature group and so is respectable, but I still squired a little when I read the read the lead author is a chiropractor working on a biomechanics PhD.

Still, you can’t help but wonder if it’s the beginning of the revenge of the dinosaurs.

Your child’s future.
(Source: Wikipedia)