Monthly Archives: March 2020

I see Trump cannot stand rejection, as he’s renominated Rep John Ratcliffe (R-TX), whose initial nomination was withdrawn after Senators from both parties expressed skepticism – and news organizations examined his campaign materials and found them to be, at best, containing dubious claims – at worse, fallacious. I think NBC News‘ report gets it about right:

In what amounts to a direct challenge to Senate Republicans, President Donald Trump announced Friday that his pick to head the intelligence community is the same Republican congressman whose previous bid for the job collapsed amid revelations he misrepresented his background.

Trump tweeted that he was nominating Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas to be the director of national intelligence, calling the former federal prosecutor “an outstanding man of great talent.”

However, I wouldn’t be nearly so polite about. Trump, who cannot stand to be frustrated in any little thing, is out to demonstrate his dominance. Lift the leg and pee on everyone who rejected his choice, that’s all it comes down to.

But it’s worth wondering how Party discipline, aka toxic team politics, is going to play into this. There’s not really been anyone beyond Trump himself who has endorsed Ratcliffe for the position, and in fact studied legal opinion is that he does not, under the law, qualify for the position.

Given that Ratcliffe has been a vociferous defender of Trump, it’s hard not to see this as nothing more than handing a plum job to a loyal supporter, a supporter who has promised to “reform” a key segment of US Government that has not cooperated with President Trump. The fact that most parts of US Government should be securely and permanently non-partisan matters not a whit to this President.

How will Republican Senators break on this nomination? Given their frantic confirmations of conservative, sometimes ill-prepared individuals, the suspicion is that party loyalty will win out over the requirements of their jobs, and they’ll confirm.

And what if they don’t confirm? Will Trump refuse to endorse them? Endorse primary opponents? That’s the whip, and that may make all the little dogs fall into line.

Bark-bark-bark, all you little Senators. Here’s the result of toxic team politics.

I liked this report from a few months back on improving students’ grades:

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.

That’s what NYU’s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled “Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement” that looks at the surprising consequences of the Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015.

The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted. [Vox]

I shouldn’t think this is surprising, since we didn’t evolve for polluted atmospheres – by definition – but it does appear that some are surprised. Or perhaps at our sensitivity.

And I do recall reading, somewhere, about 40 years ago, about how the passengers on steam engines actually liked the fact that their clothes were covered in soot, because that was symbolic of their separation from Nature, that Nature that took lives suddenly and randomly through disease and wild animal attacks.

But mostly, I think, we just think we’re too damn special to be afflicted by minor air pollution.

I understand that some physicists are trying to understand reality not as the traditional particles and fields, but as information, and even had some success where more traditional approaches have not yet found solutions. I will not pretend to understand the approach.

But perhaps they’re not quite on the right track, I suggest perhaps a trifle facetiously. Whatever, I found this post on Slate Star Codex by Scott Alexander vastly amusing, as he asks Gwern Branwen to take a text prediction program named GPT-2 into other realms, such as writing poetry, writing music, and now …

Last month, I asked him if he thought GPT-2 could play chess. I wondered if he could train it on a corpus of chess games written in standard notation (where, for example, e2e4 means “move the pawn at square e2 to square e4”). There are literally millions of games written up like this. GPT-2 would learn to predict the next string of text, which would correspond to the next move in the chess game. Then you would prompt it with a chessboard up to a certain point, and it would predict how the chess masters who had produced its training data would continue the game – ie make its next move using the same heuristics they would.

Gwern handed the idea to his collaborator Shawn Presser, who had a working GPT-2 chess engine running within a week …

It’s always fascinating to use the wrong tool to solve a problem and have it work. It suggests a misapprehension of reality, and misapprehensions are where new knowledge hides, along with the occasional Nobel prize. Naturally, this isn’t perfect:

GPT2 Chess update: I wrote some code to calculate the probability of all valid chess moves. It can reach endgame now. https://t.co/QQzhZJmgQ9

It starts to blunder every game at around move 13. We suspect it’s losing track of board state. (It’s trained solely on PGN notation.)

— Shawn Presser (@theshawwn) January 4, 2020

Here’s Alexander’s last word:

State flag of South Carolina.

Former VP Joe Biden’s overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primary isn’t so important for its delegate count as for its signal concerning who important Democratic communities prefer in the upcoming general election. Ever wondered why Iowa and New Hampshire garner so much attention? It’s not that they’re diverse, because both are fairly homogenuous states; it’s that the homogeneity exists and can be read using the primaries and caucuses.

That’s why I tend to disregard concerns about diversity in these early states. This is all about signaling.

Through the first three contests, I read the results as the white and Latinos like the idea of a progressive going into the general election.

South Carolina, the fourth, is a bastion of the black community, and here the progressives ran into a wall, with the results showing Sanders falling just short of 20% of the primary vote (and rival progressive Warren only came up with 7.1%), while Biden won 48.4%, easily outpolling the progressives in total by nearly 2:1. Surveys seemed to indicate roughly 60% of black primary voters preferred Biden.

I have no special insights into the results, but will only note that reporting indicates the black community seems to feel that, in order to beat an old white guy, an old white guy will be required – and preferably one with experience. While I think a woman could win, the voice of the black community – a potentially significant force in the upcoming election which the Democrats will need to win – suggests I could be wrong. If Warren or Klobuchar took the nomination, despite their individual poor showings in South Carolina, would the black community stay home?

That’s a significant question, and that’s why I don’t actually give a lot of credence to Greg Fallis’ notion that primary voters should vote their hearts. Voting is an activity with an ethical dimension; if one really believes Trump is antithetical to the nation, unlike, say, McCain or Romney, who merely had political visions competing with the Democrats, then selecting the candidate you believe is best able to beat him becomes incumbent on you, ethically speaking.

As I’ve said before, I like Biden. But if he’s going to take the next step, he needs to clean up his act. No more bloopers, they’re not endearing, they are worrisome. He needs to stress his experience, and he needs to stress the Ukraine scandal as an indicator that Trump, whose admitted guilt^[1] in the matter is indicative of Trump’s worries about beating Biden in the general.

And, no doubt causing the Republicans to scream foul!, politicize Covid-19 (the Wuhan coronavirus). Trump is incompetent as a governmental leader, and his mismanagement of the government responsibility for handling public health should be put front and center as to why independents should never, ever vote for Trump again. Don’t bother to appeal to Republican voters, because they’re the ones who brought vast incompetency and amateurism upon us just when we needed professionals in government – and still overwhelmingly think Trump is a great President. They have to find their own way to redemption on this matter, but they won’t listen to Biden because of his association with Obama.

But independents, slapped upside the head in the right way, will listen. They might even think.

But clean up your act, Biden. You do the right thing when you apologize and correct your behavior, but I’d like to see less of that and more forward looking policies, an acknowledgement that the Republican Party is a toxic slag heap, and a pointer to a future that doesn’t include governmental incompetence and sliding into international second-bananahood.

We need better out of you.

¹ I can hear the attentive reader muttering, Wait, Trump claimed his call was “perfect!” Let me explain: It was Trump’s actions which led to the call summary being released (we have never seen the actual transcript, as I understand it, which may be even more incriminating). It was from this summary, along with the testimony of witnesses and whistleblowers, that the House decided to bring Articles of Impeachment; thus, through his release of this material, Trump admits his guilt. Still doubtful? A number of Senate Republicans, at the end of the trial, admitted that the evidence showed Trump had committed a corrupt act. However, with the distinctive and honorable exception of Senator Romney (R-UT), they felt, using convoluted and dubious reasoning, that the corruption was unworthy of conviction.

I haven’t seen much about Comet Borisov since the announcement of its entry into the Solar System, but I did recently run across this orbital mechanics site dedicated to it. I have not messed with it much.