Monthly Archives: February 2021

Here is a suitably dull tableau. I wonder what Rogers thought of being cheek to jowl with this dude, played by Dennis Morgan.

I have to confess that I could not finish Kitty Foyle (1940), a Ginger Rogers vehicle which won her the only Academy Award of her career. It’s the story of impetuous Irish-American Kitty Foyle, young, beautiful, and charming. Told through an interesting extended flashback mechanism, it chronicles her lack of interest in the mores of the day, and her chronic poor decision-making when it comes to the man in her life, Wyn Stafford, the spawn of a high society family. He cannot break free from his family’s privileged hold, despite his belief that a man should run his own business, and when the Great Depression closes his magazine down, he folds as well – after charming Kitty, who is inevitably from a lower class, into accepting a marriage proposal.

At this point, disappointed in her poor decisions and the languid pace of the movie, I gave up, but my Arts Editor, with time on her hands from an injury, continued. She reports the poor decisions keep on coming: their marriage, the rejection of the marriage by his family, the consequences of his lack of spine, Kitty’s clinging to a rosey past. Only in the end does Kitty, after promising Wyn that she’ll sail to South America to start a new life with him, come to her senses. Does she stick around to tell Wyn she’s changed her mind? No. That’s disappointing, too. But maybe she’ll marry the right man in the end.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an awful movie. I’ll stick around for an awful movie, just out of morbid curiosity. Even long time readers may not realize that it’s a rare movie I won’t finish, but I didn’t finish this one. Rogers really is charming, and I can see how she had the potential to win the Academy Award. Although I must admit there’s something odd about her left eye, or perhaps eye socket.

Mr. Speakeasy Owner is the guy with the sassy bow-tie. Although I’ll admit Rogers is competitive, sporting that hat.

But I was bored, bored, bored! Sure, Wyn is handsome and charming, but was he smart and clever? There was little to go on, and I didn’t get a feeling for him. Kitty exhibits some amusing symptoms of … what? Mental illness? A coping mechanism? Unlike vampires, mirrors are, for her, too reflective, and I’ll let it go at that. You know who I’d like to know more about? The speakeasy owner! A speakeasy is jargon for an illicit bar, and all bars were illicit when this movie is at least partially set: the end of the Prohibition Era. This owner, oozing with character, is serving customers while listening to the election returns of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) first run for President, hoping against hope that FDR would lose, because FDR was a “wet” – someone in favor of ending Prohibition, and this would diminish, if not end, his speakeasy. His hysterics are quite the little drama as more and more returns come in on that fateful night.

But I couldn’t go on at some point. Maybe I lacked the insulin for it. Maybe there had to be more support for Foyle making the decisions she was making. Maybe her father’s shrieking of Judas Priest! in every other line of his dialog just irritated me.

But my Arts Editor suggests I missed nothing. And you, my reader, get this hybrid review for my troubles.

This article in NewScientist (23 January 2021) is more noteworthy for where it doesn’t go than where it does:

Artificial intelligence could train your dog while you are out at work. A prototype device can issue basic dog commands, recognise if they are carried out and provide a treat if they are.

Uh huh. And?

“It is a step forward and an exciting area,” says Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at Aalto University, Finland, who has a PhD in dog-computer interaction. “Yet it is also ethically precarious as computers are not able to recognise the welfare of dogs as effectively as humans.”

Dirk van der Linden at Northumbria University in the UK also praises the tech while having some qualms. “It’s the automating of the human-dog relationship that I think is increasingly problematic, because it is using a technological fix for a very valuable interspecies relationship that caregivers ought to keep working on,” he says.

No, no, no! These folks are worrying about ethics towards dogs when they should be asking this: Is the dog smarter than the AI? Look: somewhere, I have no link, but somewhere I’ve read of experiments where little robots are left around college campuses with big eyes, and students carefully treat them with respect, imputing human intelligence to what are just dumb chunks of slightly animated machinery. (I’ve promised myself to carefully step on any such that I might stumble across.)

Will these dogs accept the AI as being on par with a human? Or are they perspicacious enough to realize these AIs are not really AIs, just some ML in a body, with no self-agency, and certainly not intrinsically considerate of their welfare.

That’s what I want to know!

The latest in high fidelity flat maps of globes by some guys at Princeton:

More here.

David Neiwert’s summary of the status of the erstwhile Insurrectionists is salutary:

The movement’s true believers who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege and are now facing federal charges are similarly perplexed and outraged by the large numbers of fellow MAGA “patriots” who are now claiming that the insurrection actually was the work of violent “antifa” leftists. This fraudulent claim—promulgated not just by conspiracy theorists and fringe partisans, but by elected Republican officials, including members of Congress—has spread so widely that one poll found that a full half of all Republicans believe it.

This infuriates the people who participated and now face charges, because they all are ardent Trump supporters who believed then that they were participating in a nation-saving act of patriotism—and many still believe it now. They can’t fathom how quickly their fellow “patriots” have thrown them under the bus and are now depicting them as actually acting on behalf of their hated enemies.

“Don’t you dare try to tell me that people are blaming this on antifa and [Black Lives Matter],” wrote insurgent Jonathan Mellis on Facebook days after the event., prior to being charged with multiple crimes. “We proudly take responsibility for storming the Castle. Antifa and BLM or [sic] too pussy … We are fighting for election integrity. They heard us.”

“It was not Antifa at the Capitol,” wrote “Stop the Steal” organizer Brandon Straka, who has ties to Trump. “It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not.”

When a political movement doesn’t value honesty, truth, and facts, it’s no longer a movement, but a machine that pitilessly grinds its adherents into dust. What we see above is the screams of those being dusted. Neither they nor their fellow Trumpists had taken the subject of group epistemology, the study of how groups ascertain truth in an uncertain and difficult world, as seriously as it must be taken.

Instead, they took the five-year old approach to politics – they didn’t like the outcome, so they screamed like a five year old kid denied their treat, just like their leader.

And now they’re paying for it – in many cases with years and years to be spent in jail.

Metastable:

If we can understand the structure and the mechanics of how high pressures might create a Cooper-pair interaction, we may be able to start doing it at lower pressure. One hope is that the material is “metastable” and won’t fall apart when the pressure is released. Diamond is an example of a metastable material: it is created when carbon atoms are subjected to extremely high pressures, but once it has formed you can remove the pressure and it doesn’t revert to its previous form. [“The superconductor breakthrough that could mean an energy revolution,” Michael Brooks, NewScientist (16 January 2021)]

Yay! Go Perseverance! From NASA:

And now I’m just like all the other space geeks!

I can’t wait for its helicopter to take off!

I have to wonder if Fox News is beginning to separate itself from President Trump, because they’re using a forbidden phrase in their news releases:

The former president is “relieved” that he no longer has his finger on the Twitter trigger, the adviser says. Maybe it’s not a bad thing, Trump has told others, for him not to have to respond to every story and swipe.

Over the last two or three weeks the pundits has been buzzing over the former President and his minions’ refusal to admit that he’s, well, a former. “45th President” is the favored label.

If Fox News is violating this precept, does it mean that the President has accepted reality? Or is Fox News deciding that hewing a little closer to the truth is prudent in this new era of existential lawsuits? They may even see the former President as a lost cause and are casting about for their next Republican to whom to tie their sailboat.

The problem with that latter idea is that the very nature of narcissists like Trump is to drive out competitors; thus, the Party leadership is really quite drab. Sure, Hawley and Cruz will have their adherents, but in terms of candidates who can appeal to most or all of the Republican factions, there’s not really anyone.

The former President may find himself without any real allies in the news network category.

The aftermath of the Gamestop incident in the market may not be shortlived, if this WaPo/Bloomberg article is to be believed. I found this particularly interesting, even if I don’t pretend to do short-selling:

Short sellers — funds that borrow a stock and sell it, betting that the price will have gone down by the time they have to buy it to give it back — have become the target. Such firms usually would unveil a new position to great fanfare, expecting to cast a cloud over the company’s shares. The scrum this year over GameStop — in which retail traders went head-to-head with short-selling firm Citron Research — suggests that could become a thing of the past, and in fact, Citron’s Andrew Left announced on Jan. 29 that the firm will no longer publish short selling research. A hedge fund or short-seller advertising a bet against a stock might now be the equivalent of waving a red flag to r/wallstreetbets’ herd of bulls: a signal to charge in with call options and force a move higher. The predators have turned prey.

What catches my eye and my thought is false advertising by firms that they’re taking short positions, when their position is actually long. It could be as simple as a whisper campaign, nothing official but definitely there. Wave the red flag, ride the share price up, then get off. It’s a bit of a reverse of the old pump ‘n dump, but only executable by reputable, but perhaps disliked, firms.

And now I’m seeing a market niche for marketeers striving to make your investment firm just a little bit disliked…

Or, rather, plural:

A week ago, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed she opened a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.

A day later, a group of Georgia Senate Republicans sought to make future investigations of election fraud a statewide affair.

Senate Resolution 100 calls for a constitutional amendment that would require a statewide grand jury for “any crime involving voting, elections, or a violation of the election laws of this state and all related crimes.”

That would mean that Willis or other local prosecutors would have to empanel a grand jury from beyond their territories, drawing in more residents from rural, conservative corners of the state.

The legislation, which boasts 25 GOP co-sponsors, is unlikely to pass. It would require a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly and a majority vote on next year’s ballot. [AJC]

Because Dear Leader should never be subjected to the normal consequences of his actions.

Steve Benen notes a delicate conundrum that appears to be afflicting a few Republicans these days:

For generations, there have been interesting political debates over how elected lawmakers should best serve their constituents. Is it the job of a senator to simply vote the way his or her constituents would vote? What about when there’s broad disagreement?

In a lower-case-r republican form of government, don’t voters effectively hire officials to serve in legislative bodies, listen and learn, and then exercise their best judgment?

This is in the context of those few Republicans, having voted for impeachment or conviction in the last month, being censured by their parties for voting for impeachment. Here is an example involving Senator Toomey (R-PA).

I think Benen’s question of What about when there’s broad disagreement? delegitimizes the first suggestion, that of legislator-as-mouthpiece. But, worse, the first suggestion, if taken seriously, reduces the legislator to nothing more than a conduit for the opinions, well-informed and otherwise, of their constituents, an instrumentality of the ethos of amateurism, a tenet of the GOP. It becomes no longer a seat of honor and responsibility, but a convenient cubbyhole to thrust the politically ambitious but chronically incompetent.

And often those sorts of politicians have all sorts of odd notions about how the nation should operate. Sound familiar?

Even more importantly, there is now no motivation to develop expertise in matters beyond the mechanics of legislation. In a very real and rational sense, and in my view, a member of Congress is sent to Congress to become an expert in a subset of the matters before Congress, most usually those of particular interest to the member’s State. Through this expertise the member helps develop effective legislation, or at least effectively criticize election which is disapproved.

They may even develop opinions at odds with their opinions prior to joining Congress. Such is neither abnormal nor to be lamented. An informed opinion is generally better than an uninformed opinion.

And if it differs from the general opinions of the constituents, that’s just fine.

If, in the end and after much robust debate, the constituents just can’t stand the informed opinion, then they have an option: Vote the member out at the next election. But give the informed opinion a chance to educate the uninformed, to better the general intelligence of the constituents.

I prefer expertise over ignorance, and governing a nation as large and powerful as ours really demands the very best: informed legislators with curious minds and habits; neither inflexible ideologues nor braying, unserious mouthpieces need apply.

And screw the dude who doesn’t like Toomey, above. He’s a dead-ender.

Oh, and just a trifling bit of bondage!

If you’re a nascent fan or scholar of the old-fashioned movie serials, Lost City of the Jungle (1946) might be for you. Featuring fabulous B&W cinematography, similarly B&W characters which, painfully enough, gain credibility in the light of recent political events, a repetitive episodic plot that features a cliff-hanger every twenty minutes or so, wretched science, and the occasional plot hole, the repetitive parts are to be endured while we wait for the action – how did the good guys avoid being blown apart in the exploding boat? – to refloat our spirits.

The story concerns the search for an element that can be used to build an effective defense against atomic weapons – and one man’s search for it in order to sell it to the highest bidder, enabling war and world domination. Yeah, it’s silly.

The characters are static and predictable – no growth here! But the storytellers are to be congratulated on avoiding some chauvinistic ditches that they could have driven this vehicle into. For example, Queen Indra, a white woman ruling a small kingdom in the Himalayas, is no pushover, but an active, aggressive, and intelligent schemer – and perhaps the one exception to my observation that the characters are static. Another is the character of Tal Shan, played by Chinese born Keye Luke, which is a major part, if not quite leading.

It’s all your basic morality tale, as the personality flaws of the bad guys let the good guys win. There’s a lot of flaws, it has a share of chauvinism, even if it avoided some of the worst, but the scenery is gorgeous and the cliff-hangers are fun.

Theoretical frameworks – theories of how society should work vs how it does work – are a vital part of discussions about how almost anything in society works. For instance, conservatives – especially the extremists who have a religious tint to them – embrace deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes. Those on the left look more to government and are less sensitive to the concerns of the conservatives.

These discussions are important when it comes to products and services that don’t fit neatly into the free market paradigm. This morning I woke to read that it appears the theories of the right wing took quite a jolt over the last few days, and Professor Richardson provides a short summary:

First up is the deep freeze in Texas, which overwhelmed the power grid and knocked out electricity for more than 3.5 million people, leaving them without heat. It has taken the lives of at least 23 people.

Most of Texas is on its own power grid, a decision made in the 1930s to keep it clear of federal regulation. This means both that it avoids federal regulation and that it cannot import more electricity during periods of high demand. Apparently, as temperatures began to drop, people turned up electric heaters and needed more power than engineers had been told to design for, just as the ice shut down gas-fired plants and wind turbines froze. Demand for natural gas spiked and created a shortage. …

Frozen instruments at gas, coal, and nuclear plants, as well as shortages of natural gas, were the major culprits. To keep electricity prices low, ERCOT [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] had not prepared for such a crisis. El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT but is instead linked to a larger grid that includes other states and thus is regulated, did, in fact, weatherize their equipment. Its customers lost power only briefly.

And so I learn a little history as well as the problems of Texas. Naturally, those who adhere with frantic zealotry to ideological positions didn’t take well to the poor outcomes:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) told Sean Hannity [talking head at Fox News] that the disaster “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal” for the United States, but Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the organization in charge of the state’s power grid, told Bloomberg that the frozen wind turbines were the smallest factor in the crisis. They supply only about 10% of the state’s power in the winter.

Other sources directly blame the failure of the Texas energy system on its inability to prepare for extreme weather events because of low prices^[1].

And that’s the key, isn’t it?

Not really.

The problem is that the deregulation leads to an emphasis on low prices rather than an emphasis on availability. Look: Deregulation has lead to putting energy into the same consumer category as, say, coats. But while coats are easy to make and normally an optional item, abundant energy available 24/7 is the foundation of our civilization, as well as any other advanced civilization of which I’m aware.

You lose your coat, you get a little cold. And in this weather causing problems from Minnesota^[2] to Texas, you make sure you don’t lose your coat. But when it comes to energy, an individual can’t ensure they don’t lose it in this sort of weather. That moves energy out of the tidy confines of the free market and into the untidy range of public utility.

Texas’ insistence that deregulation and low prices are the be-all end-all illustrates the cost of having the wrong metrics in place for measuring success. Sure, it’s nice to have low prices for the most important commodity in the world – but the flip side is a greater addiction to it. And when it goes away in a dangerous situation, the consequences are dire. The proper metric is availability, and quite frankly this is a difficult metric to implement in a free market.

That’s why public utility commissions exist.

Will Texas figure this out? Not so long as the conservatives are in charge, but that’s a political and cultural matter. It may take a number of these events before they awaken to the question of how the energy system fits into the framework of society, and move it from the free market niche to the shared resource, shared management foundation. But it’s important to understand that the theoretical structures in play are the real culprits here, and if they are not corrected – or tossed out in favor of better theories – Texas and other states will continue to suffer.

¹ It’s worth noting that, while Abbot’s remark reeks of a frantic defense of the religious tenet that is deregulation, it has a worthwhile side to it. The freezing up of turbines, of which I’ve not heard of happening here in Minnesota, suggests that wind turbine technology needs an upgrade, or that the mix of renewables in the future should be tuned such that wind turbines are a useful auxiliary but not a main load bearing member. Batteries remain an important, and, in view of Abbot’s remark, an underappreciated part of the mix of future energy grids. But fossil fuels, while no doubt having a future role, are basically on their way out, and rather than whining about a Green New Deal that no one else is talking about, he should start planning for the future, rather than just warming the governor’s seat.

² Here in the Twin Cities we’ve had a stretch of temperatures in the minus teens Fahrenheit. This is unusual for February, and dangerous.

Intrauterine cannibalism:

The large birth size of O. megalodon suggests that the young sharks, like many present-day sharks, ate unhatched eggs in the uterus to survive – a phenomenon called intrauterine cannibalism.

“The consequence is that only a few pups will survive and develop, but each of them can become large in body size at birth which gives [them] an advantage as already large predators,” says [Kenshu Shimada at DePaul University. [“Megalodon sharks grew 2 metres long in the uterus by eating eggs,” Karina Shah, NewScientist (16 January 2021)]

A related phenomenon, I suppose, is the occasional occurrence of a human twin absorbing the other of the pair into its body. When the twins are fraternal, I believe the result is called a chimera, as different cells may exhibit different DNA signatures.

NewScientist (16 January 2021) takes note of a study concerning Lyft and Uber:

The introduction of ride-sharing companies, including Uber and Lyft, has been associated with a 0.7 per cent increase in car ownership on average in US urban areas.

Jeremy Michalek at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues analysed trends in vehicle ownership in 224 urban areas across the US between 2011 and 2017 to investigate how these were influenced if a ride-sharing company – either Uber or Lyft – began operating in the area.

“We would have expected ownership to probably go down, because when people gain access to this alternative travel mode they may be able to get away with not owning a car, or owning fewer cars in their household,” says Michalek.

I’m in line with this guy:

“In a lot of respects, this is not surprising,” says Os Keyes at the University of Washington in Seattle. “If there’s money to be made in having a car, more people are likely to have cars.”

And why get rid of the family car? Using ride-sharing may be perceived as a slightly chancy business, and, post-pandemic, people will be going into offices again – and have to get there. I couldn’t get a rideshare won’t be an acceptable excuse. Using ride share is a way to slow physical degradation of the owner’s car and avoid stress, but it isn’t a reasonable excuse for not having a car. Those who don’t want to own a car should arrange to live near a commuter rail line – and, even then, having that personal transportation is still desirable for most people.

I think Lyft almost has the right of it:

Lyft said: “Lyft has helped remove almost half a million cars from our roads by investing in technology and services that reduce our dependence on personal vehicles. This includes managing the nation’s largest bike share system, integrating public transit information directly into the Lyft app, and partnering with transit agencies across the country to increase mobility within their cities.”

In other words, use the proper metric: increasing the number of passengers per vehicle, thereby reducing the number of vehicle trips made. Car ownership is not a symmetric related metric. Fewer total vehicle trips doesn’t imply fewer vehicles, only different usage patterns.

They just don’t state it clearly.

I’ll also nitpick the study authors: We would have expected ownership to probably go down. No No No. Try Our hypothesis is that car ownership declines when ride sharing becomes available, and our hypothesis was falsified in the geographical region studied. The latter removes expectations, overt and covert, which might corrupt the study’s structure. The former suggests a lack of insight on the part of the researchers. Not that the study is not worthwhile, quite the contrary. Checking “insights” is always important, because not all insights are accurate.

But getting the statement right is equally important.

Asterism:

BETWEEN December and March, there is something special for stargazers in most of the world to watch out for. You will be able to see a pattern of stars, or asterism, made up of six bright stars. It is called the Winter Hexagon or Winter Circle in the northern hemisphere, or the Summer Hexagon or Summer Circle in the southern hemisphere. [“How to spot the Winter (or Summer) Hexagon by locating its six stars,” Abigail Beall, NewScientist (13 January 2021)]

I suppose this wouldn’t apply to, say, the cast of Ocean’s 11.

For those of us suffering being manly about this cold Minnesota day, here’s some pictures for encouragement:

I hope you all feel better.

Readers may recall my concern about bitcoin’s precipitous rise in late December. This has not abated:

Graph from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide

So what does this mean to me? Not as an investor, and don’t take anything I say to be investment advice, but as someone who, being part of American society, uses cash, checks, and credit cards – but not cryptocurrency.

First, I’ve never been a currency trader, and I’m guessing it’s a quick way to lose a fortune. This is really a currency trade at this point, isn’t it? But with one difference, as CNN/Business points out:

Investors have sent the price of bitcoin skyrocketing during the pandemic as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near zero in March 2020 (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar.

That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There’s a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin’s value can only increase.

No more new bitcoins, sometime in the future. That limitation differs from other currencies in which the issuing body can print more money, whether it’s to cover debts or compensate for increasing wealth. Currency traders must try to factor those changes into their calculations.

In the bitcoin case, though, the X factor may be investor naivete. That is a much larger X factor than governmental issuance.

But the other problem here is that limitation on how many bitcoins can be issued. One of the primary goals of most governments is growing the economy, which means stronger production of goods and services over time. Concomitant with a successful result is the need to issue more money in order to cover the increase in national wealth; otherwise, individual prices would plunge and disconcert everyone who depends on stable or even increasing prices.

Bitcoin apparently won’t do that. Indeed, that is a factor in the recent gain in the price of bitcoins. That suggests that bitcoin’s future as a primary currency is highly dubious.

I am also wary as the way to profit off a bitcoin investment is purely through the currency trading option. So far as I know or even visualize, investing in bitcoin doesn’t yield dividends. It’s all predicated on the bet that bitcoin’s value will increase faster than the currency against which trades are occurring.

And, for a currency dependent on a digital infrastructure, that worries me. A successful hack, or a collective decision by international government entities to shut bitcoin down, could be an extremely damaging hit to a financial situation.

But do your own thinking. Maybe I don’t understand currencies as well as I think I do.

The problem with “onesideism” is that it fits the facts around a narrative. Onesidedness is a product of ideology, of a belief that something is true because it ought to be true. This is not merely the stuff of 5-year plans in Soviet Russia—this is the essence of Trumpism, embodied in his false claims of victory in the 2020 election.

— Lionel Barber

I would only quibble that facts is a poor word selection, and perhaps assertions would be more accurate. Barber not only employs this in the context of Trumpism, but also The New York Times’ decision to remove opinion editor James Bennet.

You, sir, are an object lesson.

Planet of the Vampires (1965) is an odd, jarring movie, because it’s a witches’ brew of ingredients. Briefly, and with trepidation, I deliver the plot to you: two ships exploring deep space detect and respond to a distress signal from a nearby planet. As they assess the planet, gravitational waves impact the ships, the crews go mad, and the ship on which this story is focused, the Argos, lands on the planet willy-nilly.

Captain Markary, who alone has been resistant to the madness, bitch-slaps his crew back to rationality, and, well, since they’re on the planet, they have to go exploring. They find it is a graveyard of ships and the remains of their crews, and for a bit they get to play with leftover alien toys.

But then they find their partner ship, also grounded, and her crew dead. Per tradition, they put them in the ground with some fancy aluminum sculpture as headstones, but soon they find that’s not good enough: The dead crew is up and running around, stealing critical equipment and generally being assholes.

But it’s not them. The native race of this planet, who are spiritual in nature, are facing extinction, and have decided to take over a spaceship and just plum leave. It seems a bit of overreaction, but there you have it.

Will they make it? What about the “meteor rejector” device that keeps going missing? And Captain Markary’s resistance to their mad plans? Is he going to …

Oh, wait.

The science, as you may have guessed, is execrable, even laughable. The acting is earnest. The story, while it is admirably parsimonious is handing out information, is ultimately not compelling, at least for me. However, I am not a horror movie aficionado; the attractions of the genre escape me.

Just a little reminiscent of Alien (1979). Or maybe the other way around.

But the special effects are not bad, except for the bubbling mud standing in for lava, and the sets! Oh, my, a surrealistic collage of color, brutalist space ships and monstrous rocks, singular headstones, in which the people scampering about, lugging guns and dying messily, create a juxtaposition that I still remember, even two weeks later. The contrast between the sterile internals of the ships vs the wild colors and shapes of the planet underlines the difference between mankind’s desire for control, and the wild Chaos which eternally surrounds it.

It’s bad, with some interesting elements. You may get more out of it if you keep that bottle of second-rate brandy nearby.

Typosquatting:

In the domain name system, typosquatting is a well known problem. Typosquatting is the malicious registering of a domain that is lexically similar to another, often highly frequented, website. Typosquatters would for instance register a domain named Gooogle.com instead of the well known Google.com. Then they hope that people mistype the website name in the browser and accidentally arrive on the wrong site. The misguided traffic is then often monetized either with advertisements or malicious attacks such as drive by downloads or exploit kits. [“Typosquatting programming language package managers,” Nikolai Tschacher, incolumitas.com]

You have to like the dude’s results, too.

At least 43.6% of the 17289 unique IP addresses executed the notification [i.e., hoax] program with administrative rights.

That’s a lot of vulnerability.

As expected, President Trump was acquitted of high crimes and misdemeanors, winning – in a vote emblematic of his time in government – 43-57.

Yes, 57 Senators, a simple majority, voted to convict, but because a super-majority is required by the Constitution, the sordid political loyalties of 43 Republican Senators were sufficient to spare the former President the indignity of a post-Presidency conviction and probable banning from future public office.

I am appalled.

Who were the seven Republicans who remembered their duty?

Ben Sasse (Nebraska)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Richard Burr (North Carolina)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania)
Mitt Romney (Utah)
Bill Cassidy (Louisiana)

Burr and Toomey have already announced their retirements in 2022. Collins and Murkowski are the most moderate of the Republican Senators. Romney still believes the Republican Party can be a responsible governing body – and dislikes Trump for both moral and personal reasons. Sasse has a history of no follow-through when it comes to Trump, so this is a break in his pattern.

And Cassidy? He’s not been on my radar. But Louisiana is not the Republican long-time stronghold that it may appear to be. Cassidy, in fact, had to defeat a Democratic incumbent to become a Senator in 2014. In Louisiana, Senate elections consist of a jungle primary in which the top two advance to the general, unless someone wins more than 50% of the primary. In 2020, Cassidy did so. Given the number of Democratic candidates, though, he may be worried about Democratic voters in the future, looked at Trump’s non-existent future, and decided he’d rather be on the side of sanity, despite a TrumpScore of 89.1%.

And that may work for him. Or perhaps he was simply being earnest.

But the point is that all the Senators who owed some large part of their success, inasmuch assuming office and achieving their trivial goals counts as success, to former President Trump couldn’t help but bow down to the man who deliberately and maliciously put them in danger in a desperate attempt to stop a standard part of our democracy. It’s simply a travesty.

So what’s next for a disgraced Republican Party? Will we see more defections as more members of the base come to the realization that an insurrection was held in their name, their Senators failed to repudiate it, and now this moral depravity is on them if they do nothing about it?

Time will tell.

I wasn’t aware of this:

The sun is windy. Every day, 24/7, a breeze of electrified gas blows away from the sun faster than a million mph. Solar wind sparks beautiful auroras around the poles of Earth, sculpts the tails of comets, and scours the surface of the Moon.

Would you believe, Earth is windy, too? Our own planet produces a breeze of electrified gas. It’s like the solar wind, only different, and it may have important implications for space weather on the Moon.

“Earth wind” comes from the axes of our planet. Every day, 24/7, fountains of gas shoot into space from the poles. The leakage is tiny compared to Earth’s total atmosphere, but it is enough to fill the magnetosphere with a riot of rapidly blowing charged particles. Ingredients include ionized hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen.

Once a month, the Moon gets hit by a blast of Earth wind. It happens around the time of the full Moon when Earth’s magnetic tail points like a shotgun toward the lunar disk. For 3 to 5 days, lunar terrain is bombarded by H⁺, He⁺, O⁺, N2⁺ and other particles. [“A New Form of Space Weather: Earth Wind,” Dr. Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com]

Fascinating. And I wonder if those particles would constitute a hazard to any Moon-dwelling humans?

Earlier this week, three GOP Senators conferred with Trump’s defense team, and, as Steve Benen notes, this casts doubt on their legitimacy as members of the Senate:

Years old, still loved it: