Author Archives: Hue White

The World Bank has released a report¹ (summary here) on the impact of (usable) water scarcity on GDP (Gross Domestic Productivity). From the Executive Summary:

The impacts of climate change will be channeled primarily through the water cycle, with consequences that could be large and uneven across the globe. Water-related climate risks cascade through food, energy, urban, and environmental systems. Growing populations, rising incomes, and expanding cities will converge upon a world where the demand for water rises exponentially, while supply becomes more erratic and uncertain. If current water management policies persist, and climate models prove correct, water scarcity will proliferate to regions where it currently does not exist, and will greatly worsen in regions where water is already scarce. Simultaneously, rainfall is projected to become more variable and less predictable, while warmer seas will fuel more violent floods and storm surges. Climate change will increase water-related shocks on top of already demanding trends in water use. Reduced freshwater availability and competition from other uses—such as energy and agriculture—could reduce water availability in cities by as much as two thirds by 2050, compared to 2015 levels.

From the other summary (second link):

The combined effects of growing populations, rising incomes, and expanding cities will see demand for water rising exponentially, while supply becomes more erratic and uncertain.

Exponentially?

• Unless action is taken soon, water will become scarce in regions where it is currently abundant – such as Central Africa and East Asia – and scarcity will greatly worsen in regions where water is already in short supply – such as the Middle East and the Sahel in Africa. These regions could see their growth rates decline by as much as 6% of GDP by 2050 due to water-related impacts on agriculture, health, and incomes.
• Water insecurity could multiply the risk of conflict. Food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame latent conflicts and drive migration. Where economic growth is impacted by rainfall, episodes of droughts and floods have generated waves of migration and spikes in violence within countries.

So just what is the World Bank? I found this from the Wikipedia entry:

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans^[3] to developing countries for capital programs. It comprises two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the International Development Association (IDA). The World Bank is a component of the World Bank Group, which is part of the United Nations system.

The World Bank’s official goal is the reduction of poverty. However, according to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of Capital investment.

Which is actually rather interesting, because in a recent NewScientist (23 April 2016, paywall) interview piece with Arjen Hoekstra comes the concept of a water footprint:

You came up with the idea of the water footprint. What is it?

The water footprint is the total volume of fresh water used in the making of products such as food, clothing or energy. People also have personal water footprints, because we consume these products and of course use water in our homes. Countries, too, have their own water footprints.

This is then connected to international trade:

How is the UK doing in terms of water use?

Because it imports so many goods, three-quarters of the UK’s water consumption is actually outside of its borders. And about half of that usage is not sustainable. For example, the UK imports rice and olives from southern Spain and sugarcane from Pakistan, regions where water is overexploited. This means groundwater levels are declining and rivers dwindling or drying up. That’s bad news for the exporting countries and for the UK, because these food sources will ultimately fail.

And his conclusion:

We lose our own agriculture because elsewhere you have free water, cheap land, cheap labour. But it is not truly cheap; it is at the expense of the people over there, their land and their water. And in the long run, our own food supply is at risk. We need to change the rules of the market by discriminating in favour of sustainable production. It is a global challenge for agriculture, power generation, trade and economics, which we must work together to address. It’s a big deal, and it will only get bigger.

It’s worth keeping in mind the agenda of the World Bank – promotion of international trade – and the deeply hidden costs that accompany its advantages, such as, say, quality olive oil. While specialization permits great improvements, the costs can be hard to measure.

But from the other side, I feel that trade is an important part of the process of keeping peace between nations. It’s harder to kill people outside your tribe when those people happen to be supplying something you have learned to want and even need. Of course, you may think you can invade and take it (for example, Germany invading Russia to secure fuel supplies in World War II), but often the product requires specialized knowledge not in your possession, or labor you’d prefer not to indulge in; sometimes constriction of trade can even lead to war (another World War II example would be the banning of shipping scrap metal to Japan, leaving them without a source of metal to build industry).

The challenge will be in finding ways to continue to co-exist without inadvertently wrecking our trading partners’ eco-systems.

¹ World Bank. 2016. “High and Dry: Climate Change, Water, and the Economy.” World Bank, Washington, DC. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO

Seen on CNN.com:

‘Jurassic World’ dinosaur found

Oh, that was a documentary?

Actual article video (without above title) here.

Steve Benen @ Maddowblog covers Sarah Palin’s outrage that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan hasn’t immediately endorsed Donald Trump for the GOP Presidential nomination:

The Alaska Republican added yesterday that she’s throwing her support behind Trump supporter Paul Nehlen, who’s taking on Ryan in a Wisconsin primary.

“Yes, I will do whatever I can for Paul Nehlen,” Palin said. “This man is a hard working guy, so in touch with the people. Paul Ryan and his ilk, their problem is they have become so disconnected from the people whom they are elected to represent … they feel so threatened at this point that their power, their prestige, their purse will be adversely affected by the change that is coming with Trump and someone like Paul Nehlen that they’re not thinking straight right now.”

A few hours later, Palin posted a Facebook message, which she appears to have written herself: “Rep. Paul Ryan abandoned the district he was to represent as special interests dictated his legislative priorities. Without ever having a real job outside of politics, it seems he disconnected himself from the people, thus easily disrespected the will of the people. It’s time for a change.”

Doesn’t the former Alaskan half-term governor realize just how much of her own words applies to her?

In Framed (1947) Glenn Ford, a simple mining engineer who’s been down on his luck, is entangled in a wicked plot to embezzle money from the bank. It’s a tense, interesting tale as Ford finds himself at odd with a beautiful blonde and her lover, while chasing the job opportunity he needs, and battles his bad luck and his propensity for the big bad: alcohol. Like many a good movie, Framed has important moral questions for morally dubious characters, and examines how they react. With the Great Depression fresh in the original audience’s mind, Ford is presented more than once with access to uncertain wealth – and how he reacts each time is what twists the tail of this movie. Add in the superior talents of Ford, Janis Carter, and the balance of the supporting cast, and this is a movie that, while not paced as they are paced now, is worth the time.

North Korea and the West are working together – but not about what you may think. As dangerous as it may be for the DPRK to have nuclear weapons, there’s something far worse lurking in its backyard.

Mount Paektu.

NewScientist (23 April 2016) is on the story.

Paektu’s last eruption, a thousand years ago, is the second largest ever recorded, topped only by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

“If it erupted, it would have impacts way beyond Korea and China,” says James Hammond of Birkbeck, University of London, one of the scientists involved.

 In 946 AD, the eruption of Mount Paektu, Korea’s highest mountain, blasted 96 cubic kilometres of debris into the sky, 30 times more than the relatively puny 3.3 cubic kilometres that Vesuvius spewed over Pompeii in AD 79.

Yet despite is size and the potential impact of an eruption, little is known about this enigmatic volcano.

 

National Geographic gives an overview:

Unlike most volcanoes on Earth, Mount Paektu isn’t located where tectonic plates collide. It’s parked in the middle of a plate, at least 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) away from the massive subduction zone that created the Japanese islands. Simply put, Mount Paektu shouldn’t really be there.

“That’s one of the big mysteries,” Iacovino says.

For North Koreans, Mount Paektu is sacred. It’s their national emblem, and it is believed to be the birthplace of the founder of the first Korean kingdom. Small villages are sprinkled on its flanks, and in the summer, the surrounding area is covered in blueberries.

Higher up, hot springs and gassy vents hint at the mountain’s still beating volcanic heart, and a pool called Heaven Lake sits in the crater at its summit. On the Chinese side of the mountain, there’s a national park that is a popular destination for tourists and hikers.

From World Atlas:

Right on the Chinese border is Paektu-san. The Chinese are also interested, for obvious reasons.

The Killer that Stalked New York (1950) is a movie that has a tense plot, well-drawn characters, and a climax that was hard to see coming.

Except for the part where the movie makers explicitly tell us what to expect.

This is a clumsy ménage à troi of a fairly well done medical sleuthing story, a diamond smuggling tale featuring a conscienceless womanizer, and a documentary about the potential dangers of smallpox when vaccinations are no longer administered. The result is the ruination of the first story, the trivialization of the second, all as the third plays the part of the E. Coli that ruined dinner by killing half the diners at your birthday dinner. And it’s really a shame as a clutch of excellent actors bring the stories to life, primary being the emotional journey of a woman so in love she’s blind to the fatal flaws of her husband. He’s convinced her to smuggle diamonds out of Cuba; along with the diamonds she brings smallpox, and soon people are dying in her wake.

His betrayal of her, seducing her sister while she was away, transforms that love to burning hate, so hot that even the smallpox that tries to drag her into Hell is impotent in the face of her fury; she hangs on as her beautiful face deteriorates, waiting for her husband to reappear so she can have her revenge. Meanwhile, she’s avoiding the Customs Inspectors who’ve trailed her from Cuba, as well as the Health Department workers desperate to find the source of the smallpox, as it appears at apparently random spots throughout the city. Immunizing an entire city is their Herculean task if they can’t find her, so they spare no effort on either vector: as this is a scratch on vaccine, rather than injected, even the sewing machine companies are requested to chip in.

I’ve made clear my disappointment with the movie. But there are two facets I found interesting.

First, even in a movie from 1950 we see an appearance by the anti-vaccination crowd. Brief and not intrinsic to the story, but it provides verisimilitude. The most basic objection is given: “You’re not going to inject germs into my family!” the man snarls at the health worker before slamming the door in his face. It’s an objection which makes intuitive sense to those with no familiarity with the workings of vaccines and the body’s immune system, and a reminder that we are all responsible for having a grasp of these high level concepts.

Second, a message about the role and efficacy of government. Over the last thirty years, if not more, government as an institution has been under attack. We have all seen the humor about government workers, waste, impotency, etc, abetted by the occasional true horror story. These horror stories are the exceptions, not the story itself, and yet there has been a sustained effort to assert the exceptions are the entire story. But anyone who has seriously studied the role of government knows that Reagan’s politically motivated statement, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” was a miserable lie that has done more damage than we can know. It has motivated the reduction in budgets until programs no longer function, slowed reaction times when moments count (just think Hurricane Katrina), and inspired distrust of a government trying to safeguard a country from enemies foreign and domestic, human and non-human, even animated and non-animated.

But when the Mayor of New York is presented with the problem of immunizing an entire city, there is no shilly shallying, nor pushing the decision off, or worrying about money. We get to see government performing at the moment of crisis, as only a government really can:

Mayor: “How much money do you need?”

Doctor: “A million.”

“You got it. What else do you need?”

etc. And then later, when informed that vaccine supplies are exhausted, the heads of the vaccine supply companies are brought to the Mayor’s office.

“How many can you supply?”

“Maybe 20,000 units.”

“It’s 30,000.  And you, sir, how many can you supply? 30,000, that’s how many you’ll supply. And you?”

“But Mayor, we cannot supply that many, it’s not possible!”

“Why?”

“Because they must be individually packaged! It’s medical regulations!”

“Ignore the regulations. Deliver them in beer bottles, we have lots of those. And these don’t need to be injected, right? Just scratched on? [turns to an assistant.] Call the sewing machine companies, have them send all their needles. We’ll sterilize them.”

No mucking about with private sector perogatives. People are dying, and the Mayor, as the top political dog, knows who to talk to and when to tell them they either deliver or we all die. It’s a reminder that the government sector is neither evil, trivial, nor an inevitable dunghill of incompetence and corruption. In moments of emergency, it supplies the coordination, authority, and manpower to safeguard the disorganized, poorly informed citizenry from threats outside of the usual realms of danger. Of all the themes of this movie, that might be the most important.

With the ascension of candidate Trump to the throne of presumptive nominee, certain Republican conservative elements remain unreconstructed in their feelings towards the real-estate developer cum Presidential wannabe. Leon Wolf on RedState.com makes a tactical recommendation:

Republicans must know that there is absolutely no chance that we will win the White House in 2016 now. They must also know that we are likely to lose the Senate as well. So the choices, essentially, are to confirm Garland and have another bite at the apple in a decade, or watch as President Clinton nominates someone who is radically more leftist and 10-15 years younger, and we are in no position to stop it.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog remarks on this change of heart:

Or put another way, just how sure are Senate Republicans that Trump is going to win in November? If the answer is “not very,” Merrick Garland is going to start looking far more appealing to GOP senators.

Of course, Republicans have been loath to even pay Garland the courtesy of a confirmation hearing, fearing a right-wing backlash from their own party’s base, but that’s what makes the RedState commentaries so important. Conservative activists may now be far more tolerant of the Senate process now that they know who their party’s presidential nominee is going to be.

HuffPo reports Senator McConnell is standing firm:

But the calculus hasn’t changed for McConnell, who has kept his conference in line.

“While I’m glad to see Democrats concede that there won’t be a Democrat in the White House next year, Republicans continue to believe that the American people should have a voice in this decision and the next president should make the nomination,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell.

“Despite the White House coordinating with liberal groups and millions of dollars in special-interest ads, no Republican has moved from their principled position,” he added.

Indeed, a spokeswoman for New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a vulnerable moderate Republican up for re-election in November, on Wednesday confirmed the senator “plans to support” Trump in the general election.

It occurs to me that President Obama could, at this time, withdraw the nomination and nominate someone younger and more liberal. This would put the GOP in a real bind. However, insofar as I can read anyone’s character, would not be in character with the President. Using anyone, much less a respected jurist, as a mere chess-piece doesn’t seem to be part of the President’s modus operandi. This would also undercut the strategy mentioned by Steve Benen and explained by Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere:

They’re calling it the 9-9-9 campaign: nine states, over nine days, to push for a court with nine justices. (No apologies to Herman Cain, who coined the term for his 2012 tax plan.)

More and more, though, they’re going to be talking about Donald Trump, tying in Republicans’ discomfort with the largely unpopular likely Republican nominee to say that refusing President Barack Obama’s nominee amounts to enabling a would-be President Trump’s.

The plans represent an unspoken acknowledgment that the Supreme Court fight is less about actually trying to get Garland on the bench before November, and more about turning the Republican resistance into a campaign issue to maximize GOP losses in the Senate, and even in the House. The recess efforts are both a shot across the bow from Democrats, and a test run for some of what they’ll be ramping up through the fall.

Pulling the nomination would seriously damage this strategy, so don’t look for a change in nominee.

A few days ago my Arts Editor and I finished watching Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967), a South Korean monster movie, and ever since I’ve been awaiting that moment of inspiration that will let me build the proper review of this … this …

It didn’t come.

Apparently inspired by the classic Godzilla, I’m completely bewildered as to its artistic purpose. Godzilla, and to some extent the other Japanese kaiju flicks, often had a message at their heart. Godzilla was awakened by nuclear bomb testing and laid waste to the Japanese as if in punishment. Rodan was more environmental, as a toxic mine shaft is driven to the lair where the eggs containing the Rodan monsters have survived, ready to hatch and dine upon the monstrous caterpillars killing the miners. (OK, so the message is a bit mixed.)

But in Yongary, the monster is released upon South Korea due to nuclear activities in the Mid East – not connected to the Koreans. The monster sports a fiery breath reminiscent of Godzilla’s, and adds in a laser beam emanating from his nose horn. People die from its actions, especially one poor chap who Yongary picks up for particular attention and a curiously bland death.

And our attention is not drawn to anything that might be considered a message, but instead to a young boy who has no impulse control, apparently can breach security perimeters at will, as well as the laws of space & time, not to mention my own sense of propriety when it comes to child management. At one point, for no particular reason, the monster breaks into what might be charitably described as a dance, and the child dances, too; based on this sentimental attachment, the kid later advocates for letting the monster go, rather than exterminating this critter that has rampaged through a couple of cities, drank fuel oil like a cocktail, and sprayed various military personnel with a spectrum of awful death. Since we can credibly say Yongary is not part of the ecological cycle, having slept underground for an unknown number of millennia, it’s thoroughly reasonable to leave its bloody corpse for the seagulls.

So … this is a four beer movie. You’ll need to drink at least four beers before you can even hope to enjoy it. The best I can say is that the dubbing is well done. After that, it’s a charity case.

From this CNN report:

It will mean that searches at depth, or underwater work on, say, oil rigs, is not limited by the time divers can stay down or how deep humans can go — around 40 meters (130 m) for recreational divers.

Back when I picked up my diving license (never used), we were told 100 ft was the limit for recreational divers. Now it’s 130 miles?

It’s actually a cool report about a robot diver. Includes haptic hands! I want one for my birthday!

Continuing this thread on AI-directed warfare, I ran across an opinion article in NewScientist (16 April 2016, paywall) by David Hambling on self-charging drones and couldn’t help but combine these capabilities with the hypothetical combat-oriented AI we’ve discussed earlier:

Air power is often the only option when it is politically unacceptable to deploy soldiers – but aircraft cannot hold ground. Wars cannot be won without “boots on the ground”, say military analysts and critics of the Allied air campaign against IS.

Long term, that may change with efforts like the US air force’s Micro Munitions Program, which is developing small, lethal drones able to occupy an area and hold it. Drones like the 2.5-kilogram Switchblade used by US special forces have already proven effective against light vehicles and people. The new models will be just as deadly, but able to stay in action for weeks or months.

Resembling the beetle and bird drones deployed in the film Eye in the Sky, which examines the moral case for drone warfare, at least two prototypes have been built. An insect-like 1.5-kilogram drone made by AetherMachines of New York perches on power lines to recharge while sending video. Its rotors turn into wheels, allowing it access to buildings.

Much like the AI “Mike” in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and its collection of directed space rocks with which it threatens the cities of Earth, it is less accurate to think of an AI and its potential collection of drones as an army than as a single entity with a large number of sacrificial, closely directed arms. The arms may have brains of their own, but they will be severely limited, while the central AI would (at least in my design) provide target selection and fire control. This is C³ taken to an entirely new level. Mr. Hambling thinks about replacing infantry with drones:

The technology expands the potential for intervention without foot soldiers, but it may lessen the inhibitions that can stop military action. Do we want every foreign policy issue to be settled by sending in the drones?

Better yet, do we want to consider the possibility of a single combat entity with highly superior C³ capabilities, such as hard to spot directed or automated drones with a mission to take out high value targets? Analogies with the kamikaze attacks of World War II would not be inapt, except it’s quite probable that the success rate of the drones would be much higher than that of the kamikazes (11% according to this article), although such would be dictated by defensive tactics, which are hard to predict.

Back in December I noted a study wherein two thirds of a representative sample of published psychological studies could not be replicated. NewScientist (16 April 2016, paywall) has more dirt in “The Unscientific Method” (Sonia van Gilder Cooke):

Science is often thought of as a dispassionate search for the truth. But, of course, we are all only human. And most people want to climb the professional ladder. The main way to do that if you’re a scientist is to get grants and publish lots of papers. The problem is that journals have a clear preference for research showing strong, positive relationships – between a particular medical treatment and improved health, for example. This means researchers often try to find those sorts of results. A few go as far as making things up. But a huge number tinker with their research in ways they think are harmless, but which can bias the outcome.

Science defenders often note how it’s self-correcting, which makes it better than “competing” ideologies. So this is rather dismaying:

Traditionally, once results are published they tend to go unchecked. “The current system does not reward replication – it often even penalizes people who want to rigorously replicate previous work,” wrote statistician John Ioannidis of Stanford University in California in a recent paper entitled “How to make more published research true”. Proponents of a new discipline called metascience (the science of science) aim to change that, and Ioannidis is in the vanguard.

Part of the problem is simply we’re trying to do difficult things:

Some fields of research are less susceptible than others, though. In astronomy, chemistry and physics, for instance, “people have a very strong tradition of sharing data, and of using common databases like big telescopes or high energy physical experiments”, Ioannidis says. “They are very cautious about making claims that eventually will be refuted.” But in fields where such checks and balances are absent, irreproducible results are rife.

Take the case of cancer researcher Anil Potti when he was at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In 2006, staff at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, wanted to investigate treatments based on Potti’s published work on gene expression. Before pressing ahead, they asked their colleagues, biostatisticians Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, to look over the findings. Their efforts illustrate how hard it can be for peer reviewers to pick up on mistakes. It took them almost 2000 hours to disentangle the data and reveal a catalogue of errors. It later transpired that Potti had falsified data, but in the meantime, three clinical trials had been started on the basis of his research.

Bold mine. 2000 hours is 50 man-weeks of 40 hour weeks. I get the impression that the breadth of the field and a relative dearth of competent personnel makes it difficult for self-correction to occur, when the fields themselves are difficult – and personnel may be more interested in the creative, exploratory part of science, and not the replicative side of things. Those researchers who want to build on novel results, as above, are those most likely interested in replication – but that’s not their commercial goal, it’s simply part of the process responsible researchers should follow, and not all researchers will be as responsible as this group, as evidenced by the last clause noting that three clinical trials were underway. I always wonder how scientists like Dr. Potti (is it possible to retract a PhD?) feel when they realize their false research is used for building treatments.

Gilder Cooke goes on to note responses from the various subfields of science, including registration of studies, including the analysis methods to be used once the data is collected, on an online platform by the Center for Open Science. In a sidebar, she notes this:

Blindfolding – Deciding on a data analysis method before the data are collected.

This serves to safeguard researchers from cherry-picking statistical methods for the one which gives the most significant results. By selecting the analysis method before hand, hopefully the researcher will justify why it’s the appropriate method.

Which reminds me of the struggle in software engineering between sitting down and hacking out a solution, and putting together a formal design that analyzes the requirements, anticipated data quantities, etc. I usually fall somewhere in the middle – the document exists, but only in my mind.

Advertorial:

An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term “advertorial” is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words “advertisement” and “editorial.” Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. (Wikipedia)

Why bring it up, besides being new to me? Because I spotted it in NewScientist (16 April 2016, p 42) headlining a page containing an article named “A career at the frontier of immunotherapy.” Why not just call it an advertisement and be done with it?

Just to finish it off, this is from a 2009 editorial from the same magazine (6 June 2009, paywall):

This blurring of the boundaries between independently refereed publications and advertorials is unacceptable. Promotional material should be clearly marked and easily identifiable. The production of drugs and the production of reliable knowledge about their safety and use must be kept separate.

Not that I’m condemning NewScientist, but rather marking an evolution in publishing in which advertising is moving from single image, single message to a more nuanced approach. It’s clearly marked as advertising (in this case, trying to attract medical talent to the advertiser), but is intermixed with editorial content traditionally kept separate from advertising.

We’ve discussed a closely related subject here.

Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940) is our latest TV viewing. This is the first installment of a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan in the eponymous role. Shayne’s a bit down on his luck, as even the boys working for the repo man have little respect for his promises of solvency, but he doesn’t let that get in the way of his deductive reasoning, whether it’s to foil the police inspector’s suspicions about his latest activities, or to investigate the gunshot death of the man who he’s drugged and wiped ketchup all over.

But his powers of reasoning do not overcome the tide of random, willful activities of those all around him, whether it’s the young femmé gambler (quite the addict, she is) he’s been hired to oversee, or the delightful Aunt Olivia, an addict herself – to murder mystery stories. Good plots often feature clever plans gone awry, and Shayne, as clever as he may be, cannot depend on his plans to always work out – but a quick tongue can sometimes turn the lock on the latest problem.

And, more interesting, and unlike Bogart’s Sam Spade, Nolan’s Shayne did inspire me to wonder about the character of the private detective. Does it require a formal education? Or is this something a clever man, short in the credentials department but overly gifted in the gall section, turns to as he realizes that the habits of EveryMan are not for him?

Like many movies from this period, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, especially if you like frisky old ladies trying to teach a lesson to the younger crowd.

Continuing this thread, AL Monitor shows nuance as they cover the other end of the spectrum – Islamophobia in Turkey, as Mahmut Bozarslan reports:

In an interview with Al-Monitor, [Mehmet Yanmis, a scholar of religious sociology at Dicle University in Diyarbakir,] said the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and its slaughter of civilians had fueled Islamophobia in Muslim societies as well, a process he believes will strengthen trends toward secularization.

“In the Islamic world, young Muslim generations with a secular education or strong political or commercial bonds with the West are being estranged from Islam, especially by the killings of civilians,” he said. “I think Islamophobia or fear of fundamentalism will become a major topic of discussion in the near future for all of us in Muslim societies, from Morocco to Indonesia. … This will encourage secularization along with modernization.”

According to Yanmis, who has been researching Islamophobia for six years and is a published author on the issue, the trend is very real in Turkey, especially in the southeast, where a bloody feud between Islamist and secular nationalist Kurds dates back many years.

The Kurdistan Workers Party, which espouses a Marxist ideology, and the local Hezbollah, a Kurdish-dominated Islamist group unrelated to its Lebanese namesake, fought a vicious war in the 1990s that claimed hundreds of lives on both sides. In later years, Hezbollah’s chilling reputation reverberated across Turkey with the discovery of so-called “grave houses” where dozens of the group’s victims had been killed and buried after being tortured. Old enmities flared anew in October 2014 as Kurdish protests against the IS onslaught on Kobani in Syria degenerated into deadly street clashes between nationalist and Islamist Kurds.

So as the forces of religion push forward in Turkey, a reaction is setting in as the young, not yet set in their ways, ponder a future with or without their local religion.

According to Yanmis, Islamophobia appears in different forms in Turkey. “We keep discussing the West, but in Turkey we have Shariaphobia and reactionary-phobia. Those are the names of Islamophobia in our country. It’s all the same,” he said. “Especially in communities where religious tradition has weakened, young people, business people, and social and political elites are wary of Islam and opt for secular identities and lifestyles.”

Pointing to the different faces of Islamophobia in the West and Muslim-majority countries, Yanmis said, “In the West, we speak mostly of hatred for Islam because of fundamentalist attacks. In the Muslim world, this is manifested as an estrangement from Islam — first by shunning religious symbols and rituals and then, perhaps as an ultimate form, estrangement on the level of faith.”

A reader writes about Speaker of the House Ryan:

This kind of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with us as a nation today. The whole idea that there are no experts, and my ignorant, stupid opinion is as good as any expert’s opinion on any subject. Yeah, let’s get rid of those elites like Albert Einstein, the experts at NASA that put us on moon, the experts at CDC and NIH and myriad medical research institutions who have saved our collective bacon from everything from polio to heart attacks to cancer to Hanta virus. Elites like Nikola Tesla, Luther Burbank, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Alfred Nobel, Louis Pasteur, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, etc. etc. etc. without whom we’d still be plowing fields by hand and sending communication via horseback couriers, etc. Ryan’s not jus intellectually lazy. He’s an idiot.

Or he’s playing to his audience. I think the Trump constituency tends to be made up of those who feel disenfranchised, but not for good reasons: misogynists, supremacists. And others who, while not of any particularly repulsive group, find themselves in a position inferior to where they were perhaps two decades ago, and resent it. The entire GOP constituency is, apparently, not far different, given Trump’s primary triumphs. Rep. Ryan no doubt has some understanding of this and is attempting to be inclusive of these people by suggesting the experts are really not any better than themselves.

However, dealing in what amounts to falsehoods is quite dubious; and, of course, if he actually believes this (and I could build a case that this behavior is congruent with someone who places ideology before reality – and a politician is certainly a likely suspect to make that intellectual error), then we’re back to being just bloody lazy. Or an idiot. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two. I wish Ryan was a real leader: who gives people what they need, not what they want.

In Egypt, one of the most popular TV personalities is the puppet host of “Live From the Duplex.” Egyptians apparently like the puppet for its opinions of Parliament, as reported by AL Monitor:

Abla Fahita has often criticized the conduct of the country’s parliament, with the puppet presenter of the show describing parliamentarians as “defects” in a satirical song on the program’s April 7 episode. She maintained her criticism and attack on independent member of parliament Elhami Ajina during the show’s April 14 episode, following Ajina’s statements that he would submit an urgent motion to the government requesting that the program be halted and financial penalties imposed on Abla Fahita for denigrating members of parliament and accusing them of profiteering.

Sometimes politicians hate being entertainers. In this case, the show has received a warning and is modifying its behavior:

[The production team] has lately acquiesced to the conditions set by the management of the channel and its financiers to refrain from criticizing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, though that may not be the only measure guaranteeing its on-air survival.

Still, it’s good to see another country cares so much about its future that it’ll lampoon an institution not seen as being up to snuff.

NewScientist (16 April 2016) reports on the more outré missions NASA has given some small funding. Here’s my favorite.

A clockwork Venus rover. No lander has survived on Venus’s hostile surface for much more than 2 hours. The solution might be a fully mechanical one, with no electronics. To send messages back home, it could record data on a phonograph, then loft it on a balloon to rendezvous with a spacecraft overhead.

I’m having some difficulties imagining a balloon getting high enough, even if the spacecraft swooped down to snag it. But how about a gig like that used by Virgin Galactic, where a plane takes the spacecraft to about 50,000 ft and releases it, and then the spacecraft activates its main engine for the remainder of the ride? On Venus, the balloon lofts the payload to a respectable height, and then a rocket boosts it up where an orbiter could retrieve it up for either return to Earth (hard) or reading & relay. But how to synchronize the spacecraft with the balloon and launch? And could this be done sans electronics?

From one of the Soviet Venera spacecraft, courtesy Space Answers.

Moving right along in the Crime Doctor series is The Crime Doctor’s Diary (1949), once again with the dependable Warner Baxter (this time saddled with a suit a good size too large). Here he’s assisting a man an arsonist whose out on parole. Or was he framed? He keeps insisting he didn’t do it. He’s hardly out of prison a day before he gets himself shot, while the man who might be considered an alternative suspect in the arson is found dead. Meanwhile, the retarded psychotic won’t stop playing the music that drives everyone mad! (My Arts Editor just yelled that the song, about a man with a french horn, is “quite the ear-worm”, so prospective watchers, beware the cave of the ear worm!)

Just for fun, the arsonist has a girlfriend who’s working at a precursor to Netflix (hey, I’m just as surprised as you), and she & Steve can hardly wait to get it on, indeed even messing him up as he applies for a job. Our good Doctor has little more to do than stumble about, looking for clues, and indeed one wonders why they made this movie in this series since, in retrospect, Dr. Ordway has little to do with the solution to the crime; instead, mere chance triumphs over spite, and in a hail of bullets, all is revealed.

It’s fun and interesting, but fails to capitalize on the elements unique to the Crime Doctor. A story for a sleepy, rainy day. Like today.

http://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/2016/04/24

Which reminds me that someday I should try to take a closer look at Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. From Wikipedia:

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory in linguistics, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, proposing that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain.^[1] It is sometimes known as ‘Mental Grammar’, and stands opposed to other ‘grammars’, e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical.^[2][3] The theory suggests that linguistic ability becomes manifest without being taught (see the poverty of the stimulus argument), and that there are properties that all natural human languages share. It is a matter of observation and experimentation to determine precisely what abilities are innate and what properties are shared by all languages.

It seems to me that effective communications dictates that a grammar (a specification) must be followed in order to fulfill the functional requirement of communications, for otherwise you stray into irremediable ambiguities, and thence into nonsense; and that, if you can accept effective communications is generally a positive survival characteristic for the members of a group, once any sort of communications system comes into being, then a grammar must be followed for it to work. Naturally, it would be easier for all this to happen if the ability to accept grammar were hard-wired into the brain, but I do not see it as necessary. The general intelligence which we’ve evolved should be enough to comprehend instinctively (like I do 🙂 language grammar, simply because if we couldn’t, we’d be incommunicado and, shortly thereafter, dead. Or at least until recently.

I also mused on the way home that acceptance of the Universal Grammar implies acceptance of competing grammars. The Wikipedia page mentions them but provides no links. What would such grammars be based upon? Illogical systems? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Like I said, this would require some study.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

Sigh.

OK, as I recall from 1979, the visuals were quite good for the time.

DeForest Kelley got all the best lines. But why was he there at all?

The rest of it was awful. Unconvincing subplots with neither purpose nor beauty. Bad acting. Hopefully the customer designers and the director was never permitted to work again.

Occasionally so bad it was funny, but generally not. George Takei presence in one scene made him look like he was on drugs. And not the good kind.

In fact, the movie was about as good as this rushed review.

A dull post title, no? So let’s take it immediately into the realm of the concrete. Steve Benen @ Maddowblog provides the information on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) view of the operations of government:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) delivered a speech last week at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s anniversary gala, and the Wisconsin Republican highlighted an interesting excerpt from the remarks on social media over the weekend:

“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong. […]

“Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve. We believe every person has a piece of this puzzle, and only when we work together do we get the whole picture.”

The speech as delivered was slightly different from the speech as written, and some of the changes are notable.

Regardless, I found the speech interesting because it sheds light on Ryan’s broader worldview and what he sees as the major points of contention in these divisive political times. What was challenging, however, was understanding the meaning of some of the Speaker’s labels.

For example, what exactly is an “elite” and who believes we should be governed by them? Ryan didn’t specify, though he did note that he supports the idea of crafting a health care reform plan that’s guided by consumers guided by the free market, rather than relying on guidance from health policy experts at HHS.

In other words, Paul Ryan seems to have a problem with expertise. Indeed, he explicitly rejected the idea of “experts” helping guide policy debates.

This plays into the questions of truth, predictability, democracy, free markets, and science. How? Here’s a stimulating question:

Is science a democracy?

In one superfluous, even deceitful, sense, it is. The accepted results of science are accepted because the qualified practitioners in the field have come to a substantial agreement that a given result is a reflection of the reality in question.

But in a very fundamental sense, it is not. Regardless of what a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears Ph.D.s have to say, the reality they are studying, poorly or not, remains the same¹. It takes just one insightful scientist to upset the status quo, and those so tumbled often tumble most willingly.

Here in the West we tend to make democracy a sanctified word and institution, and yet we don’t really apply it to science. What does this say about science, government, and perhaps even other institutions? To come to some sort of sensible answer, let’s employ a complete-knowledge metric, which means how complete is our knowledge in a given arena, with an additional facet of how important is it to society? Using this as a lens, let’s evaluate a few arenas and which mass-decision we employ for questions in that realm.

Criminal Justice. Defined as the application of criminal laws to the actions of individuals, we employ the police, a governmental entity, to apprehend suspects and collect evidence, prosecutors and defense attorneys to represent the two sides, and a jury to evaluate the case. In this last place comes something like democracy within criminal justice, but it is a very limited form of democracy: a small number of citizens are to direct their undivided attention upon the case at hand. They have a limited role (which varies from State to State) and are generally limited to determining whether the evidence is credible and meets some sort of standard for convicting the suspect of a crime. In terms of knowledge, we theoretically attempt to collect all the knowledge concerning an alleged crime, connect it to one or more suspects, and penalize those violating the laws. The results of not doing so could be drastic: a civil society disrupted by injustice in which doing anything constructive is endangered by those who do not believe the strictures of justice apply to them.

Readily available commodities. Shampoo, for instance. Defined as a substance used to cleanse hair, there is a basic formula and some outré approaches to producing shampoo, but it’s not a critical substance, nor is there an iconic formulation worthy of documentation. It’s supplied by a free market which works to increase profits by refining production and formulations; there is little danger in doing so since bad shampoo, unless poisonous, merely results in bad hair. In this regard, the free market bears a great resemblance to democracy as free choice is involved.

Emergency Action Teams. By which we mean organizations for controlling & extinguishing fires, rescue squads, and the like. These are managed by the government, if not actually supplied by the government. In terms of knowledge, we know the what and how of such things to some extent.  More importantly, the proper handling of emergency situations is paramount to society. Since the free market is not known for its spread of knowledge (among other reasons), its employment in this field is limited; the government retains and distributes specific knowledge about the management and resolution of emergency situations, from house fires to hurricane relief.

Military Defense. In the realm of defense, the military is a directly controlled branch of the government. In terms of knowledge, again we run up against free market limitations, so management is part of the governmental portfolio, for otherwise the nation is up at undue risk. Of course, we must acknowledge that if Defense was largely a free market activity, the ambition of men might result in the upset of the country.

Government. Here we have democracy, as frustrating and dysfunctional as it is. Why? There are many factors, including the fact that a lack of representation leads to societal instability. But in terms of knowledge, despite millenia of study and example, government is hard. Our knowledge of how to run the affairs of any particular nation, especially this one which espouses so many ideals which run counter to our evolutionary history, is relatively scant when we consider that a proper decision is rarely made on the first cut at a new problem. So therefore we employ democracy, as, ideally, it gives those who vote some sense of a stake (in order to tolerate the failures of those they elect), and to bring many possible solutions to problems. We tolerate to perhaps too great a degree the follies of the amateurs who often occupy positions of power; we worry about those who might use those powers against us, unjustly or not; we even innovate governmental design to balance the powers among many men so that corruption may be detected and abolished.  But democracy we use, because we just don’t know much.

Medicine. In the study and application of healing we see one of the most confused fields; it is instructive for its management errors, not for its achievements. An application of concrete methods and results from science to the  health of the human (or animal) body, we might expect to see its management similarly managed. Instead, under the rubric of free speech, we have marketing of a wide variety of treatments to an audience nearly completely incapable of proper evaluation, and this has had concrete negative results, as antibiotic resistance climbs due to the demands of a clientele for treatments that are inappropriate – and doctors who tire of saying “No”, or who see it as a way to increase income. Medicines are developed by the free market, which means those diseases which are seen to bring the most profit if treated, rather than those which most rationally require medicines – new or old. Worse yet, conspiracy theories arise that companies develop treatments, not cures, as being more profitable; such conspiracies lead to resentments and lack of trust for such important health remedies as vaccines. Thus, mismanagement of the field leads to the confoundment of its goals.

Rep. Ryan’s statement “… Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve,” is just so much nonsense. We are not equal in knowledge; even at a gross level, there’s inequalities between the experts and myself, and you, and you. The statement (which, God help me, sounds Marxist to me – all apologies to Rep. Ryan) is, along with being an affront to common sense, a contradiction to the above analytical suggestions – when we know something, and that knowledge suggests we should take action to protect our interests, then we bloody well should do so.

In practical terms, there will always be the experts and the rest of us. It’s not an ideal situation, as some experts really aren’t, some experts are experts at nothing in particular, even though they think their specialty matters, or even exists (consider various alternative medical therapies, such as therapeutic touch); some are simple frauds. Their collective frequency is so high that there’s no need to give references, we all know of them. The key is to design a system in which experts may be tested and removed from their positions when they are proven irremediably wrong. This is one of the goals of science: to self-correct to a more accurate view of reality through the testing of the predictions of experts.

But Rep. Ryan’s statement generates a more difficult problem. As his collective attacks some problem, it’s going to generate expertise as an inevitable by-product of the work. And he’s just denied the importance of expertise. Soon he’ll be awash in what he considers to be the irrelevant. What will he do? Discard the experts and continue on with the amateurs? The road he’s walking no longer has asphalt, but pebbles; if he continues, it’ll be dust, dirt, mud, quick-sand, and then a cliff – in that order.

Rep. Ryan’s statements are really that of a profoundly intellectually lazy person. He’s saying, “I’m not an expert, and I loathe the conclusions of the experts, so I can’t risk becoming one. Thus, I’ll discredit them as a group, and continue on with my supporters to our desired conclusion.” This is the message of many a failed revolutionary group.

¹Even at the quantum level. Schrödinger’s cat’s quantum superposition is the reality being studied; its variability with regard to the observations of the observer are merely an artifact of that reality. Or at least that’s the best I can make of it.

A reader catches me scanting my research re Prince:

As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I think Prince brought an immense amount of wealth to Minnesota over the past 35+ years. He spent a lot here; he put us on the map musically speaking. He made four movies here, not two, as far as I can tell: Purple Rain, Graffiti Bridge, SIgn ‘o’ the Times, and Under the Cherry Moon.

Wikia (“The Home of Fandom”) confirms and adds a rumor of one more:

There is also a rumor that Prince appears for a few seconds in Batman (1989). He provided the soundtrack for the film and some fans believe you can see Prince crossing in the background of a scene, wearing a dark trenchcoat. Prince did visit the London set during filming for meetings with director Tim Burton so it is possible he made a secret cameo.

NewScientist (9 April 2016, paywall) goes after the subject of migrant economic impact for the UK, as reported by Debora MacKenzie:

[Migrants] who do end up in wealthier countries are not the burden people sometimes assume. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which represents 34 of the world’s wealthiest nations, calculates that its immigrants on average pay as much in taxes as they take in benefits. Recent research shows that EU workers in the UK take less from the benefits system than native Brits do, mostly because they are younger on average. Moreover, they bring in education paid for by their native countries, and many return to their homeland before they need social security. Based on recent numbers, Britain should conservatively expect 140,000 net immigrants a year for the next 50 years. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s fiscal watchdog, calculates that if that number doubled, it would cut UK government debt by almost a third – while stopping immigration would up the debt by almost 50 per cent.

Illegal migrants make a surprising extra contribution, says Goldin. While many work “informally” without declaring income for taxes, those in formal work often have taxes automatically deducted from their pay cheques, but rarely claim benefits for fear of discovery. Social security paid by employers on behalf of such migrants, but never claimed by them, netted the US $20 billion between 1990 and 1998, says Goldin. That, plus social security contributions by young legal migrants who will not need benefits for decades, is now keeping US social security afloat, he says.

While the UK and the United States are not directly comparable, this work is based on broader work on 1st world countries accepting immigrants, and their impact, which basically boils down to an initial extra strain as the newbies settle in, and then they begin working, often with great enthusiasm.

This morning the following letter came across my virtual desk:

Subject: Silly immature Minnesota Senator Wants State Color to be Purple.

Her reason is because he nodded towards her years ago after she waited outside for three hours hoping to catch a glimpse before he drove off. That’s all it takes to influence this Minnesota lawmaker. LA TV just picked up on her suggestion.

So…what is the Minnesota state color? There is none. The state flag is blue with gold fringe, the official poem is “Minnesota Blue” and the state muffin is the blueberry, designated in 1988 at the request of a third grade class.
http://kstp.com/politics/minnesota-senator-wants-state-official-color-to-be-purple-prince-death/4115578/?cat=12681

Clearly, someone doesn’t like the idea of honoring Prince, so the idea is presented in ad hominem, denigrative terms. If you follow the link, you’ll find that state Senator Karin Housley is presented (by the AP via kstp.com) as suggesting the idea merely because she liked Prince, and he was “ours”.

So let’s remove the emotional content on both sides of the issue and ask: did Prince do anything worthy of state recognition?  (See my earlier related commentary here.)

1. He became one of the indisputable great pop stars. As part of that, he transformed the pop scene. Pop is certainly one of the largest, and perhaps the largest, music scenes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
2. He never advocated violence or any other socially repugnant activities in his music. Instead, he celebrated love and peace and understanding, with a special interest in the physical aspects. I realize some will shake their heads and claim I don’t understand love; I suggest that love always has a physical aspect, for do not the old Christian mystics speak of the physical effects of their attachment to their Savior? Even the love of our parents can bring a sense of peace, which is attended by a dropping of blood pressure.
3. He was ours. Senator Housley’s remark is stronger than it might seem at first, because Prince never left for the big-time. He brought it here. This is important because of both tangible and intangible benefits – including making the Twin Cities a music scene in its own right, which brought in dollars, contributed to our movie making (he made two movies), brightened the arts scene, with knock-on effects – and gave the residents of the state a sense of having produced a special person. Certainly, we have many of those: Humphrey, Hrbek, the Brotens, Mondale, all just in my lifetime. Prince had pride in his home state, and while I don’t know if that was a conscious part of him, it is certainly illustrated by his staying, if only in the face of our inclement weather.

Conclusion: He was a dominant part of the landscape if you lived in the Twin Cities, and certainly had impact throughout the state.

The Senator has not proposed a statue or a building, so she’s fiscally responsible. I think this is a fine idea and should be implemented at the first opportunity.