Monthly Archives: June 2023

This thread had gotten quiet, but now NewScientist is reporting a development in the domain of proof-of-work currencies, in which miners compete to solve difficult math problems.

Brennen and his team have proposed using a kind of quantum computer called a boson sampler to create a new cryptocurrency network, which should be a more energy-efficient alternative when run on quantum hardware.

For two people on the network to agree on something, which is required to certify transactions or mine currency, they both must prove they have performed true boson sampling, which involves measuring a sample of photons that have passed through a labyrinth of mirrors and beam splitters. Classical computers can’t accurately make these measurements above a certain number of photons.

Sounds … expensive … and a bit silly.

And how is Bitcoin doing? It’s actually nearly doubled (CoinMarketCap here) from my last note of a while ago, from $16,000 to $30,000, which I don’t take to mean anything in particular, except volatility is not a desirable characteristic of a currency.

I wonder about unintended consequences:

Left-leaning New York groups pledged $20 million Thursday to support a change to the New York State constitution to protect abortion rights that will be on the 2024 ballot — something they believe will boost turnout for Democrats in key swing House districts.

A state Equal Rights Amendment will ask voters next November to codify a number of rights, including abortion and LGBTQ rights, in the state constitution. New York Democrats are hoping to replicate a model they found successful last cycle, when a constitutional abortion amendment was on the same ballot as vulnerable Democrats in Michigan. The amendment passed and those members held their seats. [Politico]

If this were to succeed, resulting in abortion rights being in the New York Constitution, are the Democrats throwing away a useful tool for spurring independents to vote Democratic? The fallout of the Dobbs decision is among the most potent weapons in the Democrats arsenal, particularly as the Republicans have given up on the central tenet of liberal democracies – persuasion.

One might argue the same is true of Democrats on other topics, of course.

Thag’s new invention, the wheel, in its factory on Mars:

Might be wrong but I reckon @NASAPersevere has spotted a big, ring-shaped meteorite in Jezero crater… Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/S Atkinson pic.twitter.com/k4TUcPgvWy

— Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu) June 24, 2023

It still needs refinement. But it is cool.

CNN/Business has a report on an interview that current Fox News host Jesse Watters gave at the Big “I” Legislative Conference of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, where he’s reported to have made some grotesque remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris, thereby angering some of the participants. The organization disavowed the remarks and sidelined the interviewer, who happened to be their retiring President.

Or did Watters say something else?

When asked for comment on Wednesday, a Fox News spokesperson told me that Watters had “no recollection” of the events.

“In fact, the unscripted Q&A he participated in was well received with executives thanking him profusely afterward, enthusiastically taking photos, and presenting him with an award,” the network spokesperson said. “He was told it was one of the best talks they’ve ever held and never received feedback from the organization or his speaking agent after the event.”

Double-plus unbad?

Could this be the Fox News moral landscape?

Yeah, that’s how it reads. Caught with deliberate crude remarks on their employee’s lips, go with “profuse thanks,” instead. It sounds like something out of the pages of the Soviet Union’s PRAVDA, and, for those who wonder what that means, it wasn’t a compliment. PRAVDA had a reputation for being the most untrustworthy of sources, an instrument of the Soviet government.

Of course, I wasn’t at the conference. Maybe this is a hit job on Watters. But the reaction and language of Fox News speaks to coverup, not correction. We’ll probably not hear of this incident again, but the Fox News reaction, given the recent devastation of the Dominion Voting Systems suit, is most instructive.

Discursive:

1. 1. : moving from topic to topic without order : RAMBLING
      gave a discursive lecture
      discursive prose
   2. : proceeding coherently from topic to topic
2. philosophy : marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones : marked by analytical reasoning
3. of or relating to discourse
   discursive practices [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Supreme Court says a conviction for online threats violated 1st Amendment,” Ann E. Marimow and Robert Barnes, WaPo:

A jury’s determination about “when angry hyperbole crosses the line will depend on amorphous norms around language, which will vary greatly from one discursive community to another,” [Justice] Sotomayor wrote. “Unfortunately yet predictably, racial and cultural stereotypes can also influence whether speech is perceived as dangerous.”

Hmmmmmmmmm.

One of our few annual reseeding poppies:

Often, marketing & sales is combined into a single entity, not only by the public, but by the organization employing them as well, because they often seem to be the same. But this example may be helpful.

Marketing is the message an organization sends out to advertise its wares. Consider a few of the GOP’s various marketing messages: We’ll lower taxes and raise prosperity; climate change is a lie; regulation is bad; all of the legal indictments and impeachments of former President Trump are hoaxes; we’ll never change abortion rights; fiscal responsibility is our middle name.

Sales is the wares delivered. In the case of the GOP, it has delivered lower taxes for the top 1% of taxpayers while prosperity dropped; the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights and, consequently, high profile attempts to restrict access to abortion, sometimes successfully; increasing environmental damage from weather & climate, which, in turn, is impacting our economy; increasing Federal deficits that are directly tied to Republican financial policy, implemented when they controlled Congress.

An organization in which marketing and sales is significantly divergent is an organization in trouble. And the thoughtful American public is delivering on this model, as Steve Benen summarizes:

• A combined 65% of Americans believe the charges against Trump are either very or somewhat serious.
• 60% of Americans believe the former president acted inappropriately in the way he handled classified documents after leaving the White House. (The poll found that 1 in 4 Republican voters agree.)
• 60% of Americans believe Trump has left serious questions about the scandal unanswered.
• A narrow 51% majority of Americans agree that Trump should be prosecuted.

To be sure, the results weren’t all bad for the Republican: The Quinnipiac poll found that most Americans agreed that politics have played at least some role in the case.

But those assumptions — which do not appear to have any basis in fact — do not negate the other findings. In other words, most of the country has effectively said, “Politics probably contributed to Trump’s indictment, but it’s a serious prosecution anyway.”

Circling back to our earlier coverage, these results were hardly inevitable. In fact, I wasn’t necessarily expecting them. For months, there’s been a noticeable asymmetry to the public conversation: One side of the political divide has flooded the airwaves with vitriol, insisting an indictment would be proof of a corrupt Justice Department and an unjust system, while the other side has been largely circumspect, saying very little about the suspect, the process and his alleged crimes.

Given this, Americans have generally only heard one side of the argument. As Republicans have screamed bloody murder in defense of Trump, Democrats have largely responded with “Anyone want to talk about infrastructure and the importance of reproductive rights?”

And that’s because the White House has told the Democrats to stay away from the topic, as Benen notes. The President appears to have confidence that, if the message is not obscured or confused by the Democrats, then the indictments being delivered will speak loudly, and without Democratic intercession, there’s less of a chance of Americans disregarding serious legal claims as being political.

Which means that, once more, Republicans are caught with marketing making one assertion, while sales, in rough analogy, is quite a different matter. In essence, this pack of fourth-raters claims Trump is just a bit foul-mouthed, and nothing more; instead, the indictments speak of brazen law-breaking, with more to come.

I look for 2024 to be a blowout, unless Republicans begin adapting to the landscape. That would entail admitting error, though, and the Party backed, quietly as they may whisper it, by God, well, they just can’t do that.

Polysemy:

Polysemy (/pəˈlɪsɪmi/ or /ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi/; from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) ‘many’, and σῆμα (sêma) ‘sign’) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The race to extract an Indigenous language from its last lucid speaker,” Simeon Tegel, WaPo:

Over time, Campos, who communicates with Zariquiey in both Iskonawa and Spanish, has managed to share much of this frequently onomatopoeic tongue from the Panoan family of languages of the Western Amazon. It’s heavy with polysemy — words with multiple meanings — and notable for allowing users to stack multiple verbs one atop the other.

The turning of Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of restaurants and other food services to the Kremlin^[1], as well as the leader of the Wagner Group, a mercenary band fighting in Ukraine, and, according to Wikipedia, owner of groups accused of interfering in the 2016 and 2018 American elections, on President Vladimir Putin is a grave new step in Russia’s evolution, and not necessarily a welcome step. Prigozhin is unlikely to inspire a popular revolution against the current effective form of government in Russia; instead, he appears to be attempting to establish control over the military facilities in Russian cities:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to punish those behind an “armed uprising” after the head of the Wagner private military group launched an apparent insurrection, claimed control of military facilities in two Russian cities — Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh — and warned that his troops could head for Moscow. [CNN/World]

And, of course, Russia has an immense nuclear arsenal.

Speaking of which, it’s not beyond imagination that Putin, if finding Prigozhin out of the reach of conventional means, decides to resort to nuclear weapons to put down this attempted coup. In that case, everyone in the nuclear chain of command becomes potential coup plotters, as using nuclear weapons on “the motherland” will not sit well with them.

Putin may fall to the classic internal plot.

And, for those convinced that Putin and former American President Trump shared, and continue to share, links, this must be provoking intense speculation as to how Trump’s Russian ties will change, and how that will echo throughout what passes for his business and political empires. And it’s worth wondering if the fall of Putin might affect his view of the generic autocratic head of state, which has been famously positive.

This may mark an inflection point in world history, and not necessarily a positive inflection.

¹ Thus, the epithet Putin’s caterer or Putin’s chef.

floccinaucinihilipilification:

floc·ci·nau·ci·ni·hil·i·pil·i·fi·ca·tion

noun

rare

noun: floccinaucinihilipilification

1. the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. (The word is used chiefly as a curiosity.).

   “my new book is more than just a 400-page exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification.“

Courtesy my Arts Editor.

Randy Rainbow, hard at work:

Professor Richardson is not entirely pleased with the media:

… a study out today by Media Matters shows that cable news networks are “obsessed over Biden’s age while overwhelmingly ignoring Trump’s.” Biden is only three years older than Trump—80 and 77, respectively—and apparently in significantly better health, but in the week after Biden announced his reelection campaign, CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned his age 588 times, suggesting it is a negative attribute rather than a positive reflection on his experience, while mentioning Trump’s only 72 times.

Then again, most pundits are not always happy with the media. Erick Erickson regularly rails on and on about its tilt to the left.

No doubt everyone has a point. Also true: for zealots, there are no independent, neutral media. Either you’re for us or agin’ us!

It’s worth nuancing Richardson, though. Age is only guaranteed to bring wrinkles^[1]. Good experience comes from working in an area for many years and then properly analyzing one’s failures and accomplishments. From this perspective, Trump is little more than a yahoo who managed to get elected to a single four year Presidential term, and, in that term, was ineffectual or worse by most measures, although conservatives will argue that is picks to SCOTUS were acceptable, an assertion disputed by non-conservatives.

Former Senator Joe Biden (1973–2009) and former Vice President Biden (2009-2017) benefited not only from being an influential Senator from age 31 to 67, but from being a VP, as he famously built a close working relationship with President Obama.

And he was a council member prior to his shock election to the Senate. That’s called working your way up, rather than buying position.

That’s a lot of experience, and, given his surprising list of accomplishments, from infrastructure to his response to Putin’s War, it’s clear he’s put that experience to good use.

Is it surprising the House GOP, already clearly a pack of third and fourth raters, has been repeatedly humiliated and defeated? Not really.

Yes, Biden’s age, just like Trump’s, should be concerning to the voter. It concerns me. But that’s why we have VPs. Right now we’re benefiting from his experience in two legs of the stool.

¹ An observation I picked up from late SF writer Robert Heinlein, but I doubt it originates with him.

You guessed it. Starting tomorrow, with this sneak special preview.

This weekend it’s Back to the Fifties at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds!

For those readers who’ve noticed a drop in output, we’ve been busy with other things (hello, solar panels! Well, not yet), and, politically speaking, it’s actually quite boring. The GOP is melting into a puddle as the fourth-raters desperately dig for a scandal to uphold their conspiracy theories, the transgender advocates are discovering reality is a tough nut to crack, and the rest is just details.

And I’m working on other projects as well, mostly the sort of thing that tortures my Arts Editor.

We’re in a mini-drought here in Minnesota, and it’s impacting the garden.  All season I’ve been remarking on how pictures don’t seem worth it. I tried to make something happen with a couple of clematis, but this is the best of the bunch.

And that’s after a good watering yesterday. Hopin’ the rain comes through on Saturday as forecast.

Freeze corer:

To extract [Lake Crawford’s] layered sediments, the team used a tool called a “freeze corer,” but more affectionately known as “the frozen finger.” The long aluminum wedge was filled with a mixture of alcohol and dry ice, making it much colder than the surrounding water, soil and air.

They suspended the freeze corer from a tripod and lowered it through a hole in the raft. Down, down it went, through 75 feet of water, until finally it sank into the squishy mud on the lake bottom.

Then they waited. It would take about 40 minutes for the lake sediments to freeze onto the corer’s chilly surface. [“HIDDEN BENEATH THE SURFACE,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

WaPo’s latest reporting on mental illness the desire for control over our lives:

One surefire way to bring the American left and right together is an external existential threat, and in this context China, despite its enormous problems, is mentioned from time to time. This appears to be the next, ceremonial step in a careful attempt to push the divided American States out of the way and off their perch at the top:

In the last couple of years, financial news about Egypt has mainly focused on the country’s economic crisis, mounting debt and subsequent IMF bailout. However, there was some more positive news in May: The African Development Bank approved a Partial Credit Guarantee (PCG) equivalent to $345 million in renminbi as Egypt accessed the Panda bond market for the first time to finance green and social development projects.

The Abidjan-based multilateral development bank said that the PCG will allow Egypt to raise the equivalent of $500 million in the panda bond market, in which a non-Chinese entity issues bonds in Chinese currency that are placed in the domestic market of mainland China. It is often seen as an attractive funding source to businesses and sovereigns looking to diversify their funding and access low-cost capital. In 2022, the market was worth around $21 trillion but the demand for overseas yuan funding is growing.

Egypt’s fundraising also marks the first time an African country has accessed this lucrative market. [AL-Monitor]

Small in itself, but an opening that may prove attractive to borrowers who distrust American reliability. Squabbles, beware. And read Turchin.

It turns out smart phones aren’t so good for photographing bumble bees, but here’s my best.

At least when it comes to politics. Here’s Paul Waldman making an important point:

Yeah, let’s send her first. The alligator looks hungry.

See How They Run (2022) is a comedic telling of what’s happening behind the scenes at a London run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It’s elaborate, is populated with vivid, even overblown stereotypes, and is fun while it lasts.

But a week or two later you won’t remember it. A pity, as good work was done here, but there’s no feeling of a real heart here.

This one is odd enough I have to wonder if a password was busted,  and is from the account of Rep Clay Higgins (R-LA):

President Trump said he has “been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”

This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this.

Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.

If his account hasn’t been usurped, then he’s going to have some explaining to do soon enough. It’s quite the embarrassment.

Which is to say, the pics are at least a week old, and the irises are done.

In a season in which the garden has seemed a bit scrubby, these were a nice pickmeup.

Canard:

a false report or piece of information that is intended to deceive people [Cambridge Dictionary]

A word that we should be used far more often. Noted in “In the House, a spectacular flameout,” Dana Milbank, WaPo: