Author Archives: Hue White

In computer science we occasionally – and not often enough in the past – refer to how well an algorithm scales, which means asking how does the algorithm react across the range of data, as measured by size, it encounters? Does it crash? Does it grind to a halt? Does it limp along with performance in the toilet (sometimes known as the N^x problem, meaning the algorithm’s performance, as related to N, the amount of data, is roughly N^x, where x > 1), or is it good (x == 1), or even very good (x < 1)? One of the difficulties in calculating the potential scaling is communications. Are you talking to another server or a database that’s not next door, but in Paris/Shanghai/Seattle/all three? How does that affect scaling?

The reason I bring this up is an observation by Richard Hanania:

People go into academia and journalism for generally idealistic reasons. Some conservatives might be turned away from these professions for political reasons, which poses a “chicken or egg” problem. In my experience though, a smart young person going into journalism is probably better off going into conservative media than they are liberal media, which is already saturated with people with elite degrees who cannot find stable employment. There’s a great deal of demand for conservative journalism among the general public, but few competent conservatives who want to be journalists given what the profession pays relative to what else smart people can be doing. Thus conservative media tends to see the rise of completely incompetent outlets like OANN, which posts fake COVID cures when it’s not arguing the whole thing is fake.

While he doesn’t cite any studies, intuitively it seems correct. To my eye, this is an example of scaling gone mad. The data, in this case, is the audience size; the algorithm is the journalists.

And the Internet is the communications channel that replaced broadcast TV and local newspapers.

If the algorithm is efficient then fewer resources – fewer journalists – need to be dedicated to it.

But the result is not better journalism to more people. While, yes, you can get WaPo or The New York Times – both of which some argue are falling on hard times, quality-wise – even better than before, and these were quality national newspapers prior to the Internet, you can also get sucked into such propaganda outlets as RT, Fox News, OANN, and an absolute myriad of scam sites that deliver false news or malicious analysis of news.

In a sense, nothing new here. I was simply struck by the parallels between my world and the journalism world as observed by Hanania. But analogies occasionally end up being more than illustrative: they can produce solutions that are not obvious, which is known, as I understand the terms, as isomorphic.

So maybe someone will see a solution in this analogy.

John McWhorter on cop-on-black violence:

Funny thing – nothing makes this clearer than the Washington Post database of cop murders. Just pour a cup of coffee and look at what it shows, month after month, year after year. As South Park’s Cartman would put it, “Just, like, just, just look at it. Just look at it.”

Yet, the enlightened take on the issue serenely sails along as if that database proves that cops ice black men regularly while white men only end up in their line of fire now and then by accident. The database reveals a serious problem with cops and murder, period, quite race-neutrally. [It Bears Mentioning]

If I’m to judge from the picture that accompanies his post, McWhorter is black. Let’s switch to Andrew Sullivan for a moment, who provided the link to McWhorter’s piece:

Whenever I find myself embroiled in an argument about police shootings, I ask my friends a simple question to get a handle on where they’re coming from. I ask them quite simply how many unarmed black men were killed by the cops last year. Don’t read on, and test yourself: what’s your rough guess?

Done? Good. The answers from my friends range, but I’d say the most common is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. We have, after all, been made much more aware of stories of these horrible killings, and the vividness of some of the videos have tapped into our psyches, as well they might. The correct answer, which usually results in a round of shame-faced jaw drops, is 17. Check it out yourself, under “Search the database”. There’s lots to explore there.

Almost all of these friends are educated, often beyond grad school, are interested in public affairs, and many marched last summer. Yet their understanding of the scale of the problem — and it is a problem — is off by hundreds and thousands. There have been some polls on this distorted perspective. In one, around 20 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated 10,000 or more police killings of unarmed black men a year. Politics skews perspective on this, but even those who count themselves as conservative or very conservative vastly over-estimate the number. Around 20 percent of those self-identifying as “very conservative” said police killed 1,000 or more in 2019, with 4 percent saying the number was more than 10,000.

While 17 is greater than 0, it’s a lot less than I would have guessed – so color me red, too. But what about the documented misproportions of black deaths by cop? Back to McWhorter:

But the disproportion … !

Yes, yes – but please see my post on Derek Chauvin on that issue, which in no way disproves anything I have written. Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.

Accounts of this issue that pretend people like me have not presented figures like this – i.e. most mainstream media discussions — are out of court, even if their authors feel it’s their duty to pull people’s eyes away from “irreligious” ideas. Ignore the numbers and, even if you are writing about descendants of African slaves, you are simply plain wrong.

[Bold mine]

And it’s worth noting that the tradition-without-honor of the poverty-stricken taking it in the shorts from whatever passes for the law is far older than the trope that the black community is being targeted for being black.

That is, if you’re poor and disrespected, and thus lacking political power and defensive weaponry, your interactions with cops who may be upholding unjust laws that hurt the poor will be prone to violence; the eagerness of activists to attribute black deaths by cops to racism, rather than the far more complex problem of poverty and its interactions with racism, mental health, physical health, and many other factors, may in effect abuse those in poverty yet again. It’s a difficult situation to assess, and I, not being a social worker professional, refuse to go any further at the moment, but to express my unease with what appears to be the mischaracterization of the situation, unintentional as it may be, by activists and, according to McWhorter, journalists alike.

Nor is this to deny the existence of racism in the police force. I’m sure they’re there. The cops fired in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for decorating their precinct Christmas tree in an inappropriate manner probably qualify. We can easily go back through history to the American Civil War and attribute black community problems to white behaviors: the Tulsa riots, segregation, redlining, profiling.

But McWhorter’s insistence on data rather than emotion as an explanatory force is highly important. Assuming his analysis is correct, it suggests that alleviating poverty may be more effective than protesting police brutality – although both may be necessary. It may be an argument in favor of Universal Basic Income.

And it suggests that each case of police killing needs to be assessed on its own merits. Attempting to claim all cases of black death at the hands of cops under the rubric of law enforcement racism when each case is different may discourage all the good cops, result in the protection of criminals, and misguide our efforts at improvement.

I hope McWhorter’s analysis can be repeated and verified.

Just for completeness’ sake when it comes to the Ever Given, there’s … this:

Why should the Suez Canal have all the fun? From the comfort of home you can get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly.

Want to play? Or at least see who has too much time on their hands? Click here.

This Politico report from three weeks ago keeps nudging me to mention it, because it indicates political feelings on the other side of the Atlantic can run almost as high as they do here in the United States:

French left-wing parties have spiraled into a bitter fight over whether white people should be asked to shut up – or be banned outright – during meetings about minority issues.

The controversy erupted after revelations that a left-wing student union, called UNEF, organizes meetings that are off-limits to white members.

Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, stepped in Wednesday after a candidate from the same party, Audrey Pulvar, failed to condemn such meetings.

“The field of politics is not a therapy session, it’s the domain of the universal, where we seek unity, and defend our secularist values,” Hidalgo said on BFMTV.

Pulvar, a Black former news anchor running under the Socialist banner in the upcoming regional elections, said on Sunday that white people should not be banned from discussion groups on minority issues, but that “they can however be asked to keep quiet and be silent spectators.”

Asked whether she would have said the same thing, Hidalgo said “obviously not.”

The clash over non-white discussion groups has reignited a debate in France about the growing influence of U.S.-style identity politics, and how it challenges the country’s existing political traditions.

Much like societies which suppress an entire gender’s voices, I think the left will find that suppressing white voices on minority issues, while no doubt giving non-whites a sense of control and authority, also loses them the diversity of views the white community brings to whichever issues matter to them.

Moreover, the suppression of a large portion of the potential participants means those voices of a more radical persuasion now have a more pronounced platform from which to make their case. It’s one thing to be a single radical voice against a million far more reasonable voices, but when it’s one voice against one hundred other such voices, then the advocacy has a better chance of succeeding – regardless of its worth or lack thereof.

And if there is a community of voices that is being silenced or ignored, and it earned it through the natural errors of humanity, historical or contemporary, then if those one hundred opposition voices that are not being silenced happen to be singing in harmony with the silenced & ignored, well, now they, too, are ripe to be ignored as well. Distrust is a fume of the devil, alluring with a false logic that drives people mad.

Leaving only the radical voice to be believed. And people often greatly hunger to believe; not to intellectually evaluate and analyze, but to believe. To believe in something different from a distrusted group, right or wrong.

Something around which the historically wronged community can rally.

This is a fundamentally illiberal position. Liberalism philosophically values debate. Not positions, but their clash. Silencing voices for reasons of anger and hatred is not acceptable in the search for progress, improvement, and justice. It leads to second-rate solutions – or worse.

I don’t know a thing about the European Left, but it sounds like they are discovering the foolishness of illiberalism.

They’re very tough:

But a little hard to find. Like, oh, Sasquatch. I’ll always have a place in my heart for MIB, though.

[Image shamelessly stolen from the American Jewish History Museum Store.]

When it comes to political discourse, I fear the idea of mature, thoughtful discourse has been replaced with stir-up-the-base statements, regardless of the speaker’s political loyalties. Consider this statement from the acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in response to a recent SCOTUS decision that didn’t go their way:

Our front yard apples are beginning to bud!

A bit of a dark day, but a lovely promise.

Too bad those front yard apples tend to be too wormy to eat.

The novel … Nominative Determinism. The opening:

“Here,” said the doctor as he handed me the black brew, “this is from Nicaragua and should cure what ails you.”

I glared at Dr. Rich darkly, bleakly wondering if I could possibly finish the proffered drink – and how much it would cost me.

In so many ways.

When it comes to police officers having to carry insurance, Dr. Rashawn Ray notes that settlements paid by civil authorities often hurt historically disadvantaged communities:

Because Chicago budgeted only about $20 million for police misconduct settlements, it used what are informally called “police brutality bonds” to cover its $225 million in settlements. Unlike other bonds, police brutality bonds often do not affect a city’s credit rating. And again, this money does not include the lawyer fees, which cost the city $13 million in 2015 alone. In addition to aiming to implement changes related to police training, deescalation, and the use of force, then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel proposed increasing appropriation funds to cover police misconduct settlements.

Even more egregious are the financial implications of the funding for bond fees, appropriated funding, and civilian payouts for police misconduct more broadly. In a 2018 report, the Action Center on Race & the Economy described police brutality bonds as “financial instruments that transfer resources and extract wealth from Black and poor communities to Wall St., through the fees banks charge cities for the bonds.” Moreover, funding that should go toward education, work infrastructure, and health care is fueling police brutality of those same disenfranchised people in underserved neighborhoods, as is the case from Inkster, Michigan, to Gage County, Nebraska. [Lawfare]

A requirement that police officers carry brutality insurance would reverse the flow of money, resulting in Wall St. paying the families of those abused by the police. Wall St. won’t like that, and so we might see reformation come not from riots – but from people with a lot of money to lose or win.

There is also a second model:

Under the police department insurance model, the premium is paid by the municipality. To increase accountability, the premium should come from the police department budget. Departments with more misconduct settlements should not simply be given higher yearly budgets to cover higher premiums. Instead, the premium costs should be taken into account when departments ask for budget increases.

I do not think this is as potentially effective.

It seems the realm of cryptocurrencies is mutating. I’ve been basing some of my thoughts on the widespread observation that “mining” the basic tokens is becoming more and more costly in terms of power consumption. This, evidently, is beginning to upset some of the cryptocurrency users, who are advocating for a new paradigm for producing said tokens:

William Entriken, one of the authors of the NFT protocol for Ethereum, a popular alternative to bitcoin, says NFTs aren’t inherently bad, but that rapacious speculation is pushing them and cryptocurrencies down a destructive path as their carbon footprints rise.

Most cryptocurrencies rely on “proof of work” to secure their networks, meaning that computers must perform huge numbers of calculations to “mine” new currency and verify transactions on the blockchain. This uses large amounts of electricity – bitcoin’s annual power consumption is comparable to that of Finland.

Investing money into cryptocurrencies – either through simple speculation or by purchasing expensive artwork – boosts demand and therefore prices, says Entriken. That makes mining that cryptocurrency more profitable, but also more difficult, increasing carbon emissions.

Entriken contrasts cryptocurrencies with carbon offsetting, in which people pay to have carbon emissions removed from the atmosphere. “Bitcoin is the opposite of that. When you purchase bitcoin you’re purchasing carbon creation credits,” says Entriken. “When you purchase the $50,000 [of bitcoin] somebody else is directly putting that much carbon into the atmosphere. Ethereum is the same.”

He has called for Ethereum to switch from a proof of work (PoW) approach to a proof of stake (PoS) approach, which would remove the need for intense calculations by allowing the owners of existing coins to control the network, rather than the owners of the computing power. It is estimated this could cut the total energy demands of Ethereum by 99 per cent. “You have to switch to proof of stake. Proof of work should be illegal,” says Entriken. [NewScientist (3 April 2021)]

So what is “proof of stake”? Investopedia:

The Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins they hold. This means that the more coins owned by a miner, the more mining power they have.

If this sounds puzzling, keep in mind that miners compete with each other – and all the losers in each competition are wasted energy. By limiting the field for each miner, there’s less competition and less waste.

On the other hand, there’s also less pressure to find new optimizations for mining.

But in a field that is coming under increasing pressure because of energy consumption, I suspect that concern is secondary.

Sans-culottes:

The sans-culottes (French: [sɑ̃kylɔt], literally “without breeches“) were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to that of the aristocrat, seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by officer Gauthier in a derogatory sense, speaking about a “sans-culottes army”. The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Federal judge keeps Capitol rioter in jail because Trump keeps peddling the Big Lie“, Darrell Lucus, The Daily Kos:

We’ve seen Donald Trump talk himself into trouble too many times to count over the years. Well, if we’re to believe a federal judge, he may have talked one of the sansculottes who stormed the Capitol in his name into an all-expenses-paid stay in jail pending trial.

I had no clue at all.

There are many ways to reject science, of course, and quite often there’s a cost to that rejection. In this case, it’s the fear of gene engineered food crops, as noted in NewScientist (3 April 2021):

[Emma Kovak at the Breakthrough Institute in California] and her colleagues have now worked out what the change in carbon emission would have been if the adoption rates of five key GM crops – soya bean, maize, cotton, rapeseed and sugar beet – had been as high in Europe as they were in the US in 2017, which has a much more favourable view of genetic engineering.

The team used data from a global metastudy of GM crops and previous studies of land-use change to calculate the 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent figure. This is a substantial amount, equivalent to 8 per cent of all the EU’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. For comparison, total global emissions from all human activities are around 100 million tonnes of CO2 per day.

And does this cost get advertised? Probably not. The emphasis with be on Frankenfoods and the terrible dangers associated with gene-engineered foods – whatever those might be.

And I’m sure they hope it’s lucrative. Jann Bellamy on Science-Based Medicine provides the relevant criticism and this pointed quote from a proponent’s paper:

But how does it “work”? From 5,000 papers collected in a literature search of the China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the authors of this article

summarized that TCM effect mechanism of catgut-point embedding therapy includes the effects of needle retaining and embedding, harmonizing yin and yang, balancing zangfu organs, promoting meridian qi, regulating qi and blood, tonifying for the deficiency and reducing for the excess, strengthening the antipathogenic qi and eliminating pathogens. From the point of view of western medicine, the effect mechanism of catgut-embedding therapy refers to recovering nerve function, regulating neural reflex, increasing human immunity, improving local circulation, inhibiting the release of inflammatory factors, reducing apoptosis, regulating cellular factor and improving body metabolism. It was found that the effects of catgut-embedding therapy were not only related to the effects induced by common acupuncture, but also to the persistent treatment through prolonged stimulation duration, especially in the treatment of chronic diseases with many systems involved.

In case you hadn’t taken your daily quota of sheer gibberish yet today.

Catgut acupuncture. How do these people waste their time so?

In case you wonder if the Georgia Republicans are justified in claiming they’ve liberalized voting laws, here’s Stacy Abrams eating Senator Kennedy’s (R-LA) lunch on the question.

"Ok, I get the idea. I get the idea" — Stacey Abrams gave Sen. John Kennedy waaaaay more than he bargained for when he asked her to list off provisions of the Georgia voter suppression bill she objects to pic.twitter.com/PP7s7ZltMS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2021

A helpful compendium and aid to a nuanced issue.

Dike:

But if magma travelled from [Mercury’s] core through its mantle, finally solidifying to form a crust on the surface, that could have stirred up the core. Usually, volcanoes are fuelled by many small veins of magma called dikes, but Mercury may have been cooled by melted rock flowing through larger tubes called heat pipes. [“Mercury may have shrunk because magma was being piped to the surface,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (3 April 2021)]

The last of the first spring flower pictures.

Can’t quite guess? It’s lungwort.

The big Foxconn plant that was going to save Wisconsin’s bacon and make then-Governor Walker (R-WI) a serious national political force continues to … shrink:

Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former President Donald Trump once called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Under a deal with the state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000.

This’ll continue to be a blight upon everyone involved. It’s quite possible Walker will never hold elective office again.

This Politico report on a recent SCOTUS decision is from three weeks ago and demonstrates … well … I’m not quite sure:

In a little-noticed 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court just lodged a blow to large corporations. The rare, unanimous outcome marked a distinctly progressive pivot on a thorny jurisdictional question that has bedeviled plaintiffs in corporate liability cases for decades.

But the most significant effect of the decision might be the message it sends that the court, with its decisive 6-3 conservative majority, is not condemned to predictably partisan splits.

Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court consolidated two cases brought in connection with accidents involving vehicles manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The plaintiffs alleged that Ford was at fault, and brought the cases in the states where the accidents occurred and the motorists had resided: Montana and Minnesota. The Montana resident was killed when a tread separated from a rear tire of her 1996 Explorer, causing the SUV to land upside down in a ditch. The Minnesota resident suffered serious brain damage when, while a passenger in a 1994 Crown Victoria, his airbag failed to deploy after the driver rear-ended a snow plow.

Ford tried to get both suits thrown out on the rationale that they could only be brought where Ford designed, manufactured or sold the cars; personal jurisdiction, as it is known, is an area of constitutional law that historically has given corporations a home-field advantage when defending product liability claims, among others. Given the court’s pro-business track record in these cases, Ford had reason to be sanguine about the outcome. Instead, the unanimous ruling departed from the court’s solidly conservative trajectory stretching back over 40 years.

So SCOTUS is slapping Big Business in the face, and that includes the entire conservative wing, with the exception of Justice Barrett, who did not hear the arguments.

Is this Chief Justice Roberts getting the conservative wing together and telling them to cool it in the interests of keeping the Court relatively non-political?

Or did Justice Kagan’s arguments simply carry the day?

This is important because a Court that pays attention to image, while not a new behavior, has to be part of a counsel’s fact-base when deciding on how to spend their clients’ or employers’ money.

On the other hand, I can certainly see requiring large corporations such as Ford to come to the consumers’ local Court. If they’re willing to sell in that jurisdiction, then they’d better be ready to be sued there as well. Yes, these are used vehicles in these particular suits, but the car manufacturer has a substantial presence in the consumers’ residential locations.

So remember, if you need to sue Big Business, you may be able to do it in the comfort of your own district – and it may be due to a desire to keep the Court looking non-political.

Reminiscent of Ghostbusters, isn’t it?

Last we saw our trusty heroes, Fin Sheppard had just blown up a tornado composed of menacing fish, and his former wife, April, has found his actions, while perhaps unconscious of personal danger, at least useful in that said whirling vortex of doom has collapsed. Sharknado 2:The Second One (2014) finds our heroes bound for New York City in a jet liner.

And, as they come swooping in on the ol’ Apple, something’s on the hunt. Something that goes bump in the night.

And it wants revenge.

But family and red shirts friends await them, wanting to indulge in all those touristy things, like baseball, and hot dogs, and getting bloody stumps bandaged up. Who will survive? And who will become a bloody smear, suitable only as a hors d’ouevre?

Silly and heart-breaking (why do all the hot ladies think Fin is hot?), and replete with guest stars, Sharknado 2 is for that night where you want nothing of significance to happen.

From WaPo in an article on a paleontology dig that is yielding results suggesting T. Rex hunted as part of a pack:

The researchers are still exploring why the tyrannosaurs would have hunted together but believe a collective effort helped them compete against large, plant-eating dinosaurs.

No! T. Rex may have competed with other predators for prey, but they don’t compete with the prey itself.

They just eat them.

And just for fun …

This letter from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) is a bit startling:

Dear Woke Corporate America,

I hope you are all having fun with your virtue signaling. I hope you are enjoying trying to one-up each other and showing how woke you can be, all the while believing that you are more sophisticated and morally superior to the hard-working people of this country.

You must have loved the accolades from your elitist, left-wing peers when you took the MLB All-Star Game from Georgia. What a fun day for you on Twitter. Congratulations.

Never mind that you have destroyed working people’s jobs and hurt people who haven’t worked since COVID-19 took a member of their family or destroyed their small business.

You get texts from your elitist friends praising you for your courageous stand when you support “mostly peaceful” movements that loot small businesses, set fire to government buildings, and take the lives of innocent people.

It goes on with brazen threats of what’ll happen in 2023 when the Republicans win back Congress: no more corporate welfare, etc etc.

I must say that it’ll be getting chapters in future history books all of its own.

I suppose the Republicans see their strategy of changing election laws to disadvantage non-Republican voters as possibly their last gasp before they’re forced to do normal politicking – that is, putting forth policies that the public likes, finding people who are more honorable to run, have competency, and that sort of thing.

The stuff that they’ve gradually become worse and worse at.

The American relationship to its territories – such as American Samoa, Puerto Rico, D.C., etc – is a bit fraught because they are infamously lacking in Federal representation, one of the foundation stones of the United States. The Democrats would like to make at least some of them States, as Steve Benen notes:

The Democratic-led House is expected to vote this week on the “Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51), which would welcome D.C. as the nation’s 51st state. The plan entails carving out a new federal district — limited to the National Mall, to the west of Capitol Hill — where there are no residents, while making the rest of D.C. a state.

But after some discussion with my Arts Editor, we more or less agreed that it doesn’t sit so well with us making D.C. into another State, even if lawmakers as diverse as Goldwater, Nixon, and Biden have been in favor of the transition. We’d rather see D.C. be made part of one of the local States and attain representation, as well as control of the National Guard, in that way. The lack of control inherent in the uneasy relationship between D.C. and the Federal government was a major issue during the January 6th insurrection.

But it occurred to me today that we could take an aggregate approach. This would consist of making all extant territories, not otherwise with Representation, into an ad hoc State, duly allocated its two Senators and however many Representatives in Congress as is appropriate. D.C. could either become a core member of this unnamed State, or it could become part of one of its neighboring States; Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and all the others could also have, at their option, be part of the ad hoc State, or become a State of their own.

That might be a good compromise for  my competing dislikes of a city-state and of some American citizens lacking full representation at the Federal level.

He can’t help but dribble out some more every time he opens his mouth:

[former President] Trump was asked in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity set to air Monday night whether GOP congressional candidates should run on the so-called make America great agenda.

“If they want to win, yes. We’ve expanded the Republican Party,” he said, citing the electoral gains he made among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. “If you want to win and win big, you have to do that. You have to do it.” [The Hill]

[Bold mine.]

Wah Wah Wah …

Yes, that would be the Republican Party’s popularity plunging under President Trump.

But Spaceweather.com sets me straight:

Researchers once thought that Southern Lights were exact counterparts of Northern Lights on the opposite side of Earth. Indeed, the physics is the same. Energetic particles rain down from space, causing the atmosphere to glow green, purple, and pink. Simultaneous observations of Earth’s poles from space, however, show that auroras dance differently at the two ends of our planet–an assymetry that researchers are only beginning to understand.

The upshot: Southern Lights may be present even when Northern Lights are not. Monitor the Amundsen-Scott camera for updates.

Keeping in mind that magnetic fields have polarity and that the Sun’s magnetic field flows out with the solar wind, I can see that the interactions will be different in different locations on the Earth magnetic field. The details escape me, though, as I did poorly in college physics.

And there’s a fascinating pic at the link above.