Author Archives: Hue White

The Crime Doctor series were mostly partially eponymously named movies, but The Millerson Case (1947) was one of the exceptions, which has no particular bearing on the movie or much else. Dr. Ordway seeks to find relaxation in a long-delayed vacation, only to have the inhabitants of the small town to which he travels hate each other so much that they’re killing each other – or at least engaging in “shemale” fights. Under cover of a typhoid epidemic being mishandled by the town’s elderly, cantankerous Doctor Millerson, a murder of the town’s handsomest man occurs, and is only detected because Dr. Ordway has been drafted by the county doctors to help out with shots and blood analyses. He then proceeds, with evident reluctance, to lose his vacation to the duties of being a psychologist with insights into the doings of criminals, having been one himself, and, after the prime suspect is lured to an isolated location and shot to death, he finally establishes the identity of the killer, a man jealous of his wife’s extramarital proclivities.

The movie features the smooth Warner Baxter in the title role, a couple of excellent (almost too excellent) character actors handling the roles of Dr. Millerson and the town sheriff, and a generally interesting plot, mostly in that almost nobody in this example of small-town America really likes anyone else – sometimes spouses included.

But – in the “but” section of this review – why did the dunce identify the wrong man as shooting Dr. Millerson? What was the point?

But why does Dr. Millerson Ordway not believe in continuing education of, well, himself?

But why isn’t the town sheriff not doing anything more than being curmudgeonly?

But why the final scene? Just so Dr. Millerson can acquire a set of antlers to convince the home office that he’s a great hunter? Is there a hidden meaning in here? Has he somehow acquired the horns of a cuckold in some obscure joke? But he’s not even married!

It’s all a bit silly, with the a nice little ribbon around the package, but is not an awful choice if it’s a rainy afternoon, or if you’re a driven man who must see every installment of this series.

(4/24/2016: updated a typo)

Anyone for Cello to bring that new life into the world? NewScientist (9 April 2016) reports on the new biohacking language:

Verilog is a symbolic language that lets you specify the function of an electronic circuit in shorthand – without having to worry about the underlying hardware – and then convert it into a detailed design automatically. Voigt’s team realised they could do the same with DNA circuits.

Their system, called Cello, takes a Verilog design and converts it into a DNA wiring diagram. This is fed to a machine that generates a strand of DNA that encodes the specified function. The DNA can then be inserted into a microbe.

That sounds so cool to this old hack, but it’s necessary to realize that there’s a difference between a computer virus, and that bacteria you just hacked to be 20 times more virulent – the latter is more likely to kill you than the former.

Nature has a report:

The aim is to help people who are not skilled biologists to quickly design working biological systems, says synthetic biologist Christopher Voigt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who led the work. “This is the first example where we’ve literally created a programming language for cells,” he says.

In the new software — called Cello — a user first specifies the kind of cell they are using and what they want it to do: for example, sense metabolic conditions in the gut and produce a drug in response. They type in commands to explain how these inputs and outputs should be logically connected, using a computing language called Verilog that electrical engineers have long relied on to design silicon circuits. Finally, Cello translates this information to design a DNA sequence that, when put into a cell, will execute the demands.

Voigt says his team is writing user interfaces that would allow biologists to write a single program and be returned different DNA sequences for different organisms. Anyone can access Cello through a Web-based interface, or by downloading its open-source code from the online repository GitHub.

”This paper solves the problem of the automated design, construction and testing of logic circuits in living cells,” says bioengineer Herbert Sauro at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. The work is published in Science.¹

I haven’t actually tried it, but it sounds interesting.

NewScientist (9 April 2016, paywall) surveys the drug decriminalization/legalization landscape, checking in on various nations. I found the section on Portugal particularly fascinating:

In Portugal you can take any illicit substance without fear of jail – ecstasy, cocaine, even heroin. Critics warned this policy, introduced in 2001, would encourage more people to take drugs. Instead, drug use is slightly down by most measures.

The biggest change has been the health gains for users. Deaths related to drug use have shrunk to less than one-quarter of what they were in 2001. New HIV infections among drug injectors have shrunk to about one-twentieth.

Only the use of drugs has been decriminalised, not their sale, so criminals still profit. “But the policy was not brought in to reduce crime, it was to help people with drug dependence,” says Alex Stevens, who heads the International Society of the Study of Drug Policy, UK. “The evidence shows they have met their goals.”

Stevens says the health gains have not arisen from decriminalisation alone, but also from the services that were put in place when the law was introduced, like the provision of free needles for injectors, and methadone for those wanting to quit heroin.

A year ago Policy.mic provided a description and general history of Portuguese authority’s reaction to a drug user:

If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty.

And they provide a time-series chart, sourced from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation:

A more scholarly approach to the subject is provided by Hannah Laqueur in “Uses and Abuses of Drug Decriminalization in Portugal“, publishing in the Journal of the American Bar Foundation, where she comprehensively covers the subject, caveats and all.

Portugal did not conduct a general population survey on drug and alcohol use until 2001. The second survey was done in 2007, and the third in 2012; however, at the time of this writing, the results from 2012 were not yet available.32Researchers have frequently referenced the reports from 2001 and 2007 both in support of and cautioning against Portugal’s reforms (e.g., Greenwald 2009; White House 2010). The data are in Table 4. Recent use (within the previous year) of any drug including cannabis was virtually table
(3.4 percent in 2001 compared to 3.7 percent in 2007) and current use within the previous thirty days) was identical in the two periods (2.5 percent). Reported lifetime use of any drug increased from 7.8 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2007 (IDT 2009). As is always an issue with self-reported data, however, increases in reported drug use might be an artifact of greater willingness to report as a consequence of changes in the stigma rather than  actual changes in use. Insofar as the statistics represent real change, the increase mostly in reported lifetime use suggests the change was in short-term experimentation rather than an increase in the regularly using population.

Portugal is one small nation, and the United States is one big nation that is very tentatively moving along the spectrum – and not all at once. Consider Steve Benen’s recent coverage at Maddowblog of Governor LePage of Maine and his disparagement of the health model of drug use and addiction:

The Portland Press Herald reported yesterday, for example, on a LePage position that’s likely to literally cost lives.

Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bill Wednesday that would allow pharmacists to dispense an anti-overdose drug without a prescription, saying that allowing addicts to keep naloxone on hand “serves only to perpetuate the cycle of addiction.”

The Legislature passed the bill “under the hammer” – or unanimously without a roll call – this month as part of lawmakers’ attempts to address Maine’s growing opioid addiction epidemic.

In a statement explaining his rationale, the Republican governor argued, “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose.”

Note, this was a written statement, not an off-the-cuff comment made during a press conference or an interview. LePage actually thought about his specific position, and argued that a life-saving drug treatment that prevents overdoes “merely extends” the lives of addicts – and he’s against that.

Maine’s governor, in a rather literal sense, made the case in writing that those struggling with opioid addiction don’t have lives worth saving. If LePage is convinced these people’s lives shouldn’t be extended, practically by definition, he’s making the case that their lives should be curtailed.

Not encouraging.

There are so many variables that drawing general conclusions off-the-cuff is a dangerous business. My suspicion is that we’ll find there’ll always be a certain portion of the populace that will have an undeterrable interest in using drugs. We’ve certainly seen this conclusively with alcohol. Whether it’s a nurture or nature driver is less clear; examples and counterexamples abound just in my family history, where my maternal grandparents were alcoholics, while my mother, who was abused by them, was not interested in alcohol, while her brothers were rarely without a beer in hand; neither my sister nor I have an interest in alcohol, beyond occasionally cooking with it.

If we assume my suspicion is true, then it simply makes sense to proceed down the decriminalization and even legalization paths, and be willing to accept that a certain percentage of our citizens will use drugs. I know the anathema side of this debate will be horrified, but the simple truth is that many drug users do not qualify as addicts, they simply use as they feel the need and stop whenever they wish. And then there are those will be addicts, just as we have alcoholics, and we’ll have the hard business of taking care of them as well. The real question is whether it’s a health or a criminal problem; Portugal has chosen the former, and has not suffered horrid consequences. If we were to do the same, would our society collapse? Or could we stop endangering both citizens and law enforcement with drug busts?

Tonight I must indulge in that most fruitless of endeavours, a review of a theatrical production – on closing night.

The company? The Four Humors, a group of 5 or 6 guys who’ve been around for a while and seem to specialize in parodies.

The production? We Gotta Cheer Up Gary. Poor Gary. He seems to be down in the mouth, so, as a gift, he is being sent to be cheered up. Cheerology being more of a science than an art, the specially trained cheerologists will be working to cheer him up, checking off the boxes as they make their way through the scientifically designed procedures. Did you bring your ear-trumpet? You’re gonna need it. What’s your favorite color?

Blue-Green-Yellow-Red!

Make up your mind! Say, your blood pressure is all over the place. This will present a challenge. Did you know my kid just made it into the Rhode Island School of Design, and I don’t know how to pay for it? Oh, wait, there’s my boss – what do you mean, one of us will be fired tomorrow at 3 if we don’t cheer Gary up?

Chin up and all that, hey! Do you like magic? Here’s my colleague, who does it badly? Wait, improv! None of us have any training in it, who needs it anyways?

And so we see how it goes, to the gran’ denouement of a 20 inch long double headed dildo, which is guaranteed to awaken a smile from Gary.

And who’s Gary, you might ask?

WHY, IT’S YOU!

Susan Hennessey, the Managing Editor of Lawfare, chimes in on the discussion of Feinstein-Burr, also known as the “Compliance with Court Orders Act” (CCOA).

Relying exclusively on defining obligations to give technical assistance as a solution to Going Dark solves a fixed—and ever-diminishing—sliver of the problem. As companies move towards stronger systems, they will inevitably reach a point where they cannot meaningfully help at all or cannot do so within a time frame that is responsive the law enforcement needs. While partial solutions may have virtues, technical assistance is not a comprehensive fix now or in the future.

Recognizing this, Burr and Feinstein have apparently decided that if they are going to solve the problem, they are going to solve as much of it as they reasonably can. Thus, CCOA is a form of what Ben calls “the Full Comey“—legislation which sets a performance standard of being able to produce and decrypt information when subject to a particular type of court order. The broader performance standard is then supplemented by an alternative obligation to provide technical assistance to facilitate access to data encrypted by some other party.

It’s actually a pretty straight-forward legislative solution. Certainly some quantity of information subject to a court order will nonetheless remain inaccessible, but the bill covers as much of the terrain as is practicable. But this legislation is not technologically illiterate, as the echo chamber of criticism has convinced itself. Rather, it is rationally constructed to achieve the goals of its drafters. It may be fun to convince yourself that your opponents are illiterate and stupid, but the reason for the disconnect here is not brains; it’s values.

By values, I believe she means the divergent set of goals of the technorati and the government (the latter better characterized as responsibilities, to be honest). But, in the framework of my previous commentary, I continue to wonder if, and even believe, that the CCOA (aka “Feinstein-Burr”) should be reconsidered as a tactic, and a coherent strategy that considers the how to best use a limited set of resources in a technological landscape shaped by commercial needs, mathematical necessities, and human psychology.

I cannot help notice that, on a technical note, multiple levels of encryption and coding may be applied to messages, and if one of those are from a home-made application, or an application which is not determinable from its output, this entire bill may become moot.

For another view on the bill, here’s the CEO of Tozny, a security startup, by the name of Isaac Potoczny-Jones, referenced by Ms Hennessey:

Another amusing aspect of the bill is that it doesn’t just cover encryption. It also includes any data that’s been “encoded, modulated, or obfuscated”.

The process of turning human-readable source code into something that computers can understand often requires encoding it into a binary format. Furthermore, the definition of data includes “information stored on a device designed by a software manufacturer”, which would certainly seem to include the programs stored on that device. Does this require developers to provide source code?

During the FBI vs. Apple situation, the FBI’s had a specifically scoped warrant for a specific phone. Their request was for Apple to modify their OS’s source code to remove certain security features. The FBI could remove those features themselves, but they would more-or-less need Apple’s source code. (They would also need the signing key, but let’s leave aside the question of the signing key for now.)

My reading is that this law would give the FBI a new power to request the OS source code under the scope of a warrant to search a specific phone. They would not need a search warrant issued against Apple.

While the radio and TV blares out the news of the sudden passing of Prince, and how everyone is in shock over the death, I am surprised – nay shocked – to discover I share in that shock and grief at his sudden passing. I find this bewildering, as I’m not a music person (the dust on my stereo system is coveted by archaeology students for stratigraphy practice), even if I did enjoy 1999 and Doves and others, so I’ve been wondering what’s going on here.

First, I think, is how he became identified, if only in my mind, with the essence of the USA – a relentless drive to push the envelope, to break the taboo to see what happens, to fly high and fulfill your promise. Mythological, to be sure, but sometimes even myths come literally true – and that’s what he did, from exploring the artistic landscape in a very personal way, to demanding complete control of his music in an era when such was not normally permitted by the companies controlling the gateways to public consumption of music. Through his leadership, artistic and business, he stood for a better, more optimistic future – and helped achieve it.

Second, his apparent fearlessness was, and should be, an inspiration to everyone everywhere, not just artists, but to people who consider undertaking any task which may be beyond them. All too often, fear, doubt, taboos, expectations, bullying, and many other personal and cultural features inhibit those of us who could be our best from attempting to achieve the best. Prince performed, composed, made a couple of films which stirred up controversy and interest, and, most important, was an exuberant part of our world, right or wrong.

Third, he was still active. He performed right up until he died; he was still composing, with one of his latest being Baltimore, a reaction to the riots over the death of Freddie Gray:

It’s one thing when a retired artist, who has become a sentimental favorite but lost relevance, passes away; but Prince was none of that. His surprise appearance at a local cafe could have even sober WCCO-TV in a tizzy of excitement. Some of that was that he was the hometown boy who not only made good, but never left, thus imparting a level of glamour to a pair of cities that otherwise have a minor frisson of insecurity. But it was ever more true that he was still relevant, still creating in his trailblazing style.

At the personal level, I may have run into him once. I lived in Chanhassen for years in a townhouse complex just to the north of the Byerly’s, and I recall its construction. Shortly after it opened, at about 2AM one night, being a computer hacker I conceived I needed a snack to fuel the fires, and so I strolled over to that Byerly’s. It was empty, except for one aisle with a short, slender guy with a gal, impeccably dressed in the style he affected at the time, both of whom looked quite distressed when they saw me. Being what I was then (which is to say, fairly tall and fully bearded), I gave them a polite nod, that being the extent of my sociability, and kept on going, no doubt to their relief. I speculate perhaps he needed a snack, or was curious about the new, upscale grocery store. I misdoubt that this contributes to my current shock, though.

But, whether or not that was him, it made him a fixed part of the Minnesota landscape for me. Whether you adored 1999, or When Doves Cry brings memories of an old love, or he was your inspiration, he was there, always a possibility to say something smart, or stupid, to try out a new song, or in the end, to stir up a culture that is nowhere near perfection.  He made people think. Blessed are the people who make us better.

And that’s what we lost today.

Pursuit to Algiers (1945) is yet another in the Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce series of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson films. According to Wikipedia, this version contains some elements from Doyle’s stories, but I suspect is rightly considered to be extraneous to the Doyle canon.

As such, it is deficient in the pleasures of the purely intellectual deductive capabilities of Holmes, but also lacks the buffoonery some of the movies have inflicted on the faithful Watson when played by Bruce. That said, there’s much to enjoy in this installment. Twice we’re given enormous head fakes that had this audience going one way, only to find out the movie is fleeing down an entirely different path. As a bonus, in the first one we’re permitted to see that Mr. Bruce could move outside the acting boundaries normally imposed upon him by the strictures of these movies; glancing at his biography, I see he sustained severe injuries in World War I, took up acting after service, and mainly played characters much like his Watson. That, perhaps, was a pity, as for a brief moment I could see a set of deep emotions briefly afflict him, before events made the sequence moot and he could return to his old self.

Also of particular interest in a movie about a supremely logical detective is that he is asked to be, basically, a bodyguard for the presumptive king (of a fictional country), under the assertion that losing the king would be a blow … to democracy!

Excuse the laughter.

Whether an artifact of the speed at which these films were produced (14 films between 1939 and 1946) or the whimsy of the scriptwriter (Leonard Lee), this intellectually suspect statement has no impact on the film, so worry not. The cleverness is not in the intellectual ideas at play, but at two sets of men playing a tense game for high stakes. Add in a display or two of Holmes’ sense of extremely dry humor, and this movie, despite a couple of characters with potential that fall away, under-utilized, is worth some lazy time, especially if you have a cat needing a lap.

With regard to the computer hardware architecture mentioned in this post, it has occurred to me that writing a regression test on an architecture in which the LSBs are not predictable would be a special challenge. I suppose you’d have to implement a +/- approach to mathematical checks.

A reader comments on the bill:

Since there is already strong encryption available without backdoors, how would this legislation stop its continuing use? Make every one who owns a computer a criminal until they submit said computer to a “cleansing” agency?

Yeah. I don’t think the bill has been well thought out. Maybe those who already use strong encryption would be grandfathered in? Sounds a little ridiculous, just off-hand.

Lawfare has made available a link to a C-Span taping of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on this issue. I have not watched it, and at nearly 7 hours long, I don’t know if I’ll have time. The Lawfare link lists the witnesses.

To steal a post title from The Dish…

Thanks to my Arts Editor….

UPDATE: My Arts Editor can’t see the picture from her machine. Let me know if you can’t see it…

UPDATE 2: My Arts Editor has provided a .jpg version of the image, which was a .png. Let me know if it is still unviewable.

“This solution will work for carefully chosen values of ‘now’.”

– Paul Close

While crafting a solution to a race condition.

I’m not quite sure why I, a non-lawyer, find I must comment on an opinion on a legal matter authored by a lawyer, but I find I am so compelled.  Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare, commenting on the newly introduced Feinstein-Burr bill, suggests it’ll be un-Constitutional and uses the following analogy:

It seems to me, however, that there are a number of objections to that plan – the most notable of which is that it probably violates the US Constitution. Granted, the precedent is a bit old, and comes from the Ninth Circuit, but nonetheless, there is a good basis for thinking that such a ban would violate the First Amendment. In Bernstein v. Department of Justice, the government tried to stop Bernstein from publishing his encryption algorithm. In that case they said it violated export law (rather than a hypothetical import law). But the 9th Circuit rejected that ban and ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and any regulations preventing publication would be unconstitutional. Of course, the cases are different – the export case is about the right to publish and the import case is about the right to read what has been published outside the US – but the similarities are strong.

The government objected that Bernstein had violated ITAR regulations regarding export of weapons technology, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains here. A closer reading indicates some strong variances, despite Rosenzweig’s assertion, chief of which is the fact that Bernstein wished to publish the algorithm and supporting mathematical analysis, as well as lecture on his work. This is a far cry from the current concern of Feinstein-Burr, which is the actual use of a working product lacking any sort of backdoor or decryption approach. A better comparison would be to suggest that it is lawful to possess plans for a machine gun, while not lawful to possess a working machine gun.

OSS (Open Source Software) is, I believe, protected under the First Amendment, so assuming you’re technically competent, you could download foreign OSS encryption software, compile and use it. Then the onus is on the individual user. But not all software is OSS.

Which is not to say SCOTUS wouldn’t still invalidate this legislation, assuming it becomes law. I just don’t see this analogy as being particularly strong.

Overall, I actually agree with Rosenzweig that this legislation seems impractical. As he says,

To summarize it seems to me that:

• Encryption technology is global;

• To enforce Feinstein-Burr domestically we will either need to run a firewall to prohibit importation of non-conforming encryption technology OR prohibit (civilly or criminally) the illegal possession of such technology; and

• Success (as unlikely as it is) in that endeavor would divert determined encryptors to other means of storage and communication which would be systematically less transparent to law enforcement than the current status quo.

And, of course, a backdoor usable by the government is a backdoor usable by a hacker.

It seems to me that the government needs to consider the encryption question in a strategic rather than tactical manner. NewScientist provided some brief coverage on that particular point in the UK back in January, which I covered here. To summarize, they recommended legislation requiring all databases that are online be encrypted; that encryption be completely legal, with no backdoors. While their particular points may work or not, the real idea here is to consider the big picture and the unintended (but not unforeseeable) consequences of laws that directly address the short-term problems we face; formulation of a strategic approach which may incorporate elements deemed to be counter-intuitive to agencies such as the FBI is certainly a notion I could entertain. But approaching these issues piecemeal may result in a lack of progress, or even steps backward.

Major Kong @ The Daily Kos Daily Kos covers those who didn’t make the Big Leagues during the Cold War:

The one that should really make you scratch your head and go “Just what the hell were they thinking?” is Project Pluto. If an 88-foot-long nuclear powered cruise missile flying at Mach 3 a thousand feet off the ground isn’t enough to give you nightmares I don’t know what is.

Yeah, you heard me, nuclear powered cruise missile. The nuclear ramjet was elegant in its simplicity. Air goes in the front, gets heated to a gazillion degrees by a freakin’ unshielded nuclear reactor and expands out the back with something like 35,000 pounds of thrust — forever. Well, not really forever but for a very long time.

The SLAM or Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, as it was called, would be able to orbit for weeks over (hopefully) the ocean until signaled to attack its targets. It would then drop down to low altitude and dash at Mach 3 across the Soviet Union, dropping nukes as it went.

Many of his pics are amazing.

This from Steve Benen just amused me:

If these culture war fights [un-Constitutional laws against abortion] were merely a waste of time, they’d still be annoying. States like North Dakota and Alabama are facing plenty of real challenges, and the public is best served when their elected officials invest their time and energies into meaningful policymaking.

But it’s also a waste of money, all of which come from taxpayers, and all of which goes to progressive organizations conservatives don’t like.

And it’s true. But no real reason is given as to why. Statement of belief? But they’re using taxpayer money, not their own. As members of government, they must walk a fine line between using their best judgment … and not allowing their personal views to interfere with their duties. Given their touted fiscal conservatism, even if it’s mistaken, these continued efforts seem hypocritical.

You can strangle the source of fossil fuels, or cut off demand. NewScientist reports (9 April 2016):

Last December’s Paris deal on climate change agreed national limits on emissions from power generation, land transport and deforestation from 2020. But it left untouched fast-rising emissions from aircraft and shipping. Meetings being held this month could change that.

The aviation industry is holding the last set of regional discussions this week aimed at finalising a deal to cap its emissions from 2020. Airlines will either have to improve engine efficiency and convert to biofuels, or offset emissions by investing in reforestation projects.

No mention of electric aircraft, though.  Airbus is working on them, albeit in small steps:

The electric E-Fan training aircraft is a highly innovative experimental demonstrator based on an all-composite construction. Airbus Group Innovations (AGI) intends to mature the aircraft for pilot training in four to five years, while also using it as a platform for understanding the potential of electric propulsion. The E-Fan is a key element in Airbus Group’s electric aircraft roadmap. This strategy outlines a step-by-step approach for Airbus Group’s short-, medium- and long-term development of electric planes.

Elon Musk has also made some noise on this front, and given his record of achievement, he’s worth taking seriously, as Quartz discovered:

When asked to reveal his “next great idea” during a brief Q&A session this week, Musk answered: “Well I have been thinking about the vertical takeoff and landing electric jet a bit more. I mean, I think I have something that might close. I’m quite tempted to do something about it.”

Shipping is a harder nut to crack, but in 2012 Treehugger reported on a planned sailing ship fleet, by Ecoliner:

Fair Transport’s founders Andreas Lackner, Arjen van der Veen, and Jorne Langelaan have for three years been sailing an old brig, the Tres Hombres, to demonstrate that sustainable wind-powered shipping is possible. But the trio would also like to offer the shipping world a fleet of high-tech sailing ships that can carry dozens of industrial containers while being navigated by a slim crew, and reducing container ship pollution – in other words, be economically and environmentally sustainable.

Fair Transport hopes the higher cost of building this ship can be amortized over its 30-year lifetime via lower fuel costs.

The Ecoliner is estimated to have a top speed of 18 knots, and when speeds drop below 12 knots it needs the assistance of an electric motor.

However, finding news concerning the Ecoliner is not easy, but seems to indicate they did not hit their 2013 schedule; they garner a puzzling mention here. While the thought of returning to sail for moving cargo has a certain romantic allure, whether it’ll actually work is another question. If it doesn’t, the price of foreign goods will go up as fossil fuels are restricted either legally or economically, and while this may benefit local manufacturers, it does slow down the progress necessitated by competition. Depending on who you are, these can all be bad or good.

Meanwhile, Green4Sea reports on the climate change goals of the mainstream shipping industry:

Shipping is the lifeblood of the global economy without which intercontinental trade, the bulk transport of raw materials and the import/export of food and manufactured goods would not be possible. About 90% of world trade is carried by sea and shipping is already by far the most energy efficient mode of commercial transport. Shipping is therefore part of the solution to preventing climate change.

Proportionate to its 2.2% share of the world’s total CO2 emissions, international shipping accepts its responsibility to contribute to the CO2 reduction measures being taken by the global community.

A prime candidate for film noir is Johnny O’Clock (1947), a movie about a junior partner, O’Clock, in a gambling operation who happens to be involved with the senior partner’s wife. A cool customer who continuously calculates the odds and is always on the lookout for himself, he misses something when the corrupt cop trying to muscle in on the operation disappears, and the cop’s girlfriend commits suicide. When the girlfriend’s sister shows up to mourn her sister, O’Clock, knowing the slain woman, finds himself taking the role of consoler as he pretends to be a decent man.

And, as a man who’s always calculated the odds, coolly made the right decisions (those being the decisions in his best interest) he’s always been a pretender. Decency gains him trust, thus he’ll be decent. So the man who works as his personal servant is an ex-con who owes his living to O’Clock; he treats the lower-level players in the gambling operation decently, because that enhances their performance.  Even the cheating dealer is treated decently, not because O’Clock is necessarily soft but because, as O’Clock observes, the man’s a good worker, a poor cheat, and now knows he’ll be under suspicion. A replacement might be better at cheating, and thus get away with it.

But O’Clock will slap a woman when he thinks it’ll improve her behavior, at least as it relates to himself; and he’ll formulate a complex plan ending in murder, betraying just a small amount of rage that the man may have tried to have O’Clock murdered. First, he’ll get the money owed him by the intended victim. Then, when the time is right … he’ll stop pretending.

O’Clock’s an elemental, only restrained by the practical considerations of breaking the rules of society, unconcerned about the indirect effects of law-breaking. God plays no role in his life, nor any other entity that influences him in the moral realm. He pursues what he wants, as a narcissist, possibly even a solipsist, although admittedly the topic is not broached in the movie.

So when the slain woman’s sister, Nancy, appears and finally awakens his passion, he finds himself ill-equipped to manage a relationship with her. She won’t run to escape danger when so instructed.  Unlike him, she doesn’t have a clear view of how to make a decision; she may, in fact, be “the fool” that he is not.

Nancy, however, is the one who sees clearly in the end.

And yet, the film technically fails as film noir. A good noir film follows the logic of the behavior of those living in the twilight of society right to their sordid ends. So the anti-hero of Rififi, even as he rescues the child, ends up dying because of his evil ways; film noir is full of morality tales. O’Clock may meet a destiny he’d spent a lifetime avoiding, but it’s not the one we’d been expecting. My Arts Editor exclaimed, “Well, that was a little flat.” And it was.

The cinematography is wonderful.  We were exclaiming over it immediately, while the audio is better than many movies of the era. The characters were mostly fascinating, although the slain woman was a bit of a cliched milksop. Dick Powell’s O’Clock is a cool cucumber, betraying emotions in small, ambiguous ways; Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) brings a certain freshness to a role requiring vivacity, vulnerability, frustration, and a certain sly sarcasm; and actor Lee Cobb. playing the cop who’s investigating the disappearance of a fellow cop, is neither perfunctory nor brutal and is given a certain cleverness, even if it’s not always effective. The supporting characters vary, but I thought the ladies in the boarding house where the woman’s corpse is found were a minor delight, betraying eccentricities and contradictions worthy of real life.

But the plot, while intriguing, does fail to give us a good view of O’Clock’s inner life. We can understand him, but too much of it is from inference and deduction, which is another strike against it being a noir film; illustrating that ill choices lead to ill ends is the raison d’être of the genre, so not understanding O’Clock is a strike against including the movie in the noir genre – and makes it a little harder to enjoy the movie. It’s hard to whole-heartedly endorse this movie, but it’s certainly worth your time if you enjoy the genre.

For those who are fans of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, or believe in the importance of a secular Turkey, these are dismaying remarks, as reported in AL Monitor by Pinar Tremblay:

The prominent attorney Erdal Dogan told Al-Monitor, “The Turkish state has never been able to achieve a proper functioning secularism, but never before has it been this far from secularism either. Jihadism has now been normalized in all of Turkey’s institutions.”

Dogan emphasized how government-sponsored religion can lead to discrimination and intimidation on multiple levels. “Anyone who is critical of the government is immediately labeled an enemy of the state, and this ‘one religion, one language, one nation’ ideology becomes particularly threatening to the most vulnerable groups — minors, prisoners and hospital patients,” Dogan said. Indeed, these are the groups currently being targeted through imamization.

Hatice Altinisik, chairwoman of the Alevi Bektasi Institute, told Al Monitor, “In a country where there are more mosques than schools, more imams than teachers, where science, philosophy, art, dance, theater are discouraged at the expense of religious education for minors, what should we expect? Soon, perhaps, when we need to see a doctor, we will first be required to get a permission slip from our local imam.”

The predecessor to modern Turkey was the Ottoman Empire, a devotedly Muslim state. At the time of its dissolution in World War I, it was known as the Sick Man of Europe, because it had become backward relative to the European Powers. I worry about these developments in modern day Turkey because religion rarely leads countries to enlightenment. The leaders of these religions (I include just about every cult that can be named) are concentrating on an intellectual edifice built on something no one has credibly observed; the energy of those involved dissipates on theology, on ideology, and hostility to those who might be your brothers is brokered by obscure points of intellectuality founded on nothing concrete. Rather than resolving tangible issues such as disease, local conflicts, or even global disasters, their talents and energies do little more than inspire their followers, and while the magnifying glass of religion may bring about great things, more often the navel is consulted for a while, and then it’s just off to work again.

I’ve noted that religion, upon receiving questions and criticisms rooted in the real world, excuses itself on the grounds of the fallen nature of Man, or that God approves, even if we disapprove. This is crucial as most of men’s endeavours, at least in the rational corners of the world, are subject to measurement, discussion, and, after the self-interested are oustered, correction or abolition. Sadly, this does not apply to the edifice of religion; historically, the measures that often are taken are of a bloody, repulsive nature; occasionally, adherents will simply no longer adhere, but this is not often seen. So I see Turkey slipping away from secularism, I see a religion taking the reins of government, and I wonder – will we see the same here? The religion’s name doesn’t matter, see the sad history of England (or this page) if you think it does. But how will it proceed? How will it end? From history, it does not augur well. The last end of the Ottoman Empire was not a good ending, only a good beginning. Will the Turks let it all slip away?

My Arts Editor today observed that an “exaflop“, deriving from this post, is clearly the divorced spouse currently sleeping on your couch.

While related to the odd approaches to software bugs discussed here, NewScientist’s “Let’s cut them some slack” (2 April 2016, paywall), by Paul Marks, makes the case that engaging with the harder computational problems require us to be able to accept being generally correct while being precisely incorrect, and using that acceptance to strategically underpower tomorrow’s big scientific supercomputers – a dimension to computing that I’ve never considered.

Let me illustrate the current context: Most programmers worry exclusively about functionality, which is to say that the proper answer is computed on demand. A few get tasked, often after the initial solution has been designed and implemented, with questions of performance – did the user go get a cup of coffee while we computed the solution? (The extreme example of this is the P=NP question discussed here.) And then come the large problems that consume unsupportable amounts of resources – the scalability problem. The goal is to reduce consumption of resources – commonly CPU cycles, memory, and access to databases – while still computing a proper solution such that, analogous to performance, growth in consumption of resources does not correspond to growth in input, but instead has a non-linear correspondence, such as log₂N.

But this problem is literally that of power:

Next-generation “exaflop” machines, which are capable of 1018 operations a second, could consume as much as 100 megawatts, the output of a small power station.

And they want to engage this problem in hardware, not software. How?

[Krishna] Palem’s answer was to design a probabilistic version of CMOS technology that was deliberately unstable. His team built digital circuits in which the most significant bits – those representing values that need to be accurate – get a regular 5-volt supply, but the least significant bits get 1 volt. “The significant bits are running at a proper, well-behaved voltage, but the least significant get really slack,” says Palem. As many as half the bits representing a number can be hobbled like this.

This means that Palem’s version of an adder, a common logic circuit that simply adds two numbers, doesn’t work with the usual precision (see “Missing bits“). “When it adds two numbers, it gives an answer that is reasonably good but not exact,” he says. “But it is much cheaper in terms of energy use.

Assuming all the main memory is treated this way, it seems a bit like … metaphors fail me. The alternative, however, implies a language¹ that can control which pieces of memory must be precise, and which can be fuzzy. While the hackers are no doubt drooling at the thought, the functional paradigm folks are probably twitching. (Not that this is completely unprecedented, as C used to support – and no doubt some implementations still do – the ability to assign certain variables to the CPU’s registers, rather than main memory. Registers are much faster to access than main memory.)

Researchers think application selection will be key. Climate forecasting is one keenly interested area:

The pay-offs could be huge. Today’s climate models tackle Earth’s atmosphere by breaking it into regions roughly 100 kilometres square and a kilometre high. [Tim Palmer, a climate physicist at the University of Oxford,] thinks inexact computing would get this down to cubes a kilometre across – detailed enough to model individual clouds.

“Doing 20 calculations inexactly could be much more useful than 10 done exactly,” says Palmer. This is because at 100-kilometre scales, the simulation is a crude reflection of reality. The computations may be accurate, but the model is not. Cutting precision to get a finer-grained model would actually give you greater accuracy overall. “It is more valuable to have an inexact answer to an exact equation than an exact answer to an inexact equation,” he says. “With the exact equation, I’m really describing the physics of clouds.”

But some parts of the job require exact precision, and some don’t, right? Do they know how to pick?

Researchers are attacking the problem from several different angles. Mostly, it comes down to devising ways to specify thresholds of accuracy in code so that programmers can say when and where errors are acceptable. The software then computes inexactly only in parts that have been designated safe.

Ah, no doubt I’d read this once already and it triggered my above speculations about computer languages, even though I don’t recall it. Brain inexactitude. But I do have my own observation here: if you can partition the computing space and you know the desired result for some particular set of inputs, or, better yet, multiple pairs of inputs and desired outputs, then you should be able to run repeated simulations in which members of the computing space are randomly selected to receive various levels of precision within some constraint of total computation. Run it a few hundred or thousand times, apply some statistical analysis, and soon you (or at least your computer) may understand where precision is required, and where it is not, in your problem model.

This all does make me wish I worked in this field. Sounds quite challenging.

And remember my “brain inexactitude” moment, above?

But there is a huge discrepancy in power consumption between the brain and a supercomputer, says Palmer (see “Power hungry”). “A supercomputer needs megawatts of power, yet a human brain runs on the power of a light bulb.” What could account for this?

Palmer and colleagues at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, are exploring whether random electrical fluctuations might provide probabilistic signals in the brain. His theory is that this is what lets it do so much with so little power. Indeed, the brain could be the perfect example of inexact computing, shaped by pressure to keep energy consumption down.

I’m somewhat suspicion of attempts to rate the brain in any measure we use for computers, be it flops or instructions/second. However, the overall point holds true: how do we solve the problems we solve while consuming power equivalent to that used by a light bulb? (And, yes, I understand the allusion to the old visual joke.)

And, finally, even scientists can be drama queens – which doesn’t mean they are wrong.

What’s clear is that to make computers better, we need to make them worse. Palmer is convinced that partly abandoning Turing’s concept of how a computer should work is the way forward if we are to discover the true risks we face from global warming. “It could be the difference between climate change being a relatively manageable problem and one that will be an existential problem for humanity.”

My bold.

¹We’ll just skip assembly and machine language.

V82 beached at the foot of Whale Island, as painted by William Wyllie between 1920 and 1922. Painting: National Maritime Museum PAF2085

The above comes from the Navy News, of the British Royal Navy, and is a reproduction of a painting by William Wyllie, as noted. V82 was a World War I German torpedo boat, roughly the same size as British destroyers of the era. This article, at Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War, details V82’s and V44’s (not pictured) life and fate:

The wrecks appear to have been almost totally forgotten and only came to light when a 2011 Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment of Portsmouth Harbour noted that two possible destroyers were present in Second World War era aerial photographs. After the Trust established that the remains were still present in 2015, work on identifying them began. This was achieved with a mix of German language and Admiralty sources, as well as the kind support of a number of academics and volunteers. The Maritime Archaeology Trust would like to thank WO1 Jim Rooney (HMS Excellent), Caroline Barrie-Smith, William Pounds, Professor Ian Buxton, Mike Greaves, Timo Inwich (webmaster of www.navy-history.com), Queen’s Harbour Master Portsmouth, the Defence Reserve Ships Organisation, all of whom assisted or volunteered to help with the fieldwork, post-fieldwork processing or research relating to V44 and V82.

The painting originally caught my attention (via a rotating advert on archaeology.org), but it serves to remind me of one of those odd reactions to which we’re all subject. In my case, it’s this: we really should pick up after ourselves. How many military naval wrecks litter our oceans, seas, and rivers? And what threats do the more recent wrecks pose? Many are oilers, while others carry ammunition. Have we ever seriously considered trying to clean up these wrecks that threaten lives, both human and non-human?

Another rant here.

Rather like Douglas Adams’ famous admonition, “The knack of flying is to learn how to throw yourself at the ground and miss,” You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) throws itself at frightfully predictable plot twists and manages to avoid the grimacing, whining, and outright groaning which should come from them. Sometimes, it takes a different twist than is perhaps anticipated, while other times there’s such a light touch, a disdain for the close examination, that before we can wipe our collective forehead in relief we’re already running down the next gag.

And gags come aplenty, as Fred Astaire, playing a theatre choreographer, must play backup to his employer’s indiscreet ways. Rita Hayworth, as Sheila, is one of the employer’s attractions, and as the ignored but wealthy wife of the theatre owner comes roaring into the picture, Fred must step in to be her faux-swain. Naturally, his heart is snagged by her beauty and dancing acumen, but all comes to naught as she detects the subterfuge and flounces away.

Fred, appalled at the bruising of his heart, turns to the Army for solace, but soon Sheila is in the picture again, as well as his irrepressible employer, with yet another bird in his gunsights. Between dancing, a jilted, then unjilted, then once again jilted Army Captain, which is difficult to believe, to gags ranging from moderately fun to downright painful, this movie is worth a lazy, stormy day where the chores are less than urgent, the affairs of the world churn your heart, as would those in the years following the making of this movie, and a beloved pet yearns for your lap. Coherency is not a virtue in this world, but the art of the dance, literal or figurative, is the song of the Gods.

NewScientist (2 April 2016) reports on the work of climate change scientist James Hansen in an alarming manner:

A MASSIVE rise in sea level is coming, and it will trigger climate chaos around the world. That was the message from a controversial recent paper by climate scientist James Hansen. It was slated by many for assuming – rather than showing – that sea level could rise by between 1 and 5 metres by 2100.

But now, just a week after being formally published, it is being backed up by another study. “He was speculating on massive fresh water discharge to the ocean that I don’t think anybody thought was possible before,” says Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “Now we’re about to publish a paper that says these rates of fresh water input are possible.”

The new study is here.

Here we use a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.

Add in the water coming off the ice cap of Greenland and it’s all more than a little disturbing. Here‘s glaciologist Jason Box of Denmark:

“Increased glacial surface melt water infiltration induces ice internal warming. Warmer ice deforms more easily, promoting a dynamical flow response to climate warming and increasing irreversible feedbacks from surface elevation drawdown into warmer parts of the atmosphere. The increase in melt area and volume with warming is non-linear because ice cap or ice sheet elevation profiles are flatter as elevation increases. In a warming scenario, a melt-elevation feedback threatens to produce irreversible ice cap and ice sheet loss. Irreversibility depends on sufficient ice surface elevation drawdown and warming sustained above some stable threshold. The larger the land ice body, the longer time needed for the irreversibility threshold to be crossed.

“The Greenland ice sheet is essentially lost in a climate as warm or warmer than that during 2000-2015. Yet, the loss rate depends strongly on amount of warming above a stable level. In the case of Greenland, summer warming above pre-industrial is 1.2-1.6 C. If warming were stabilized at 1 C above the preindustrial era, the loss of a significant fraction of the Greenland ice sheet appears to require 10s of thousands of years. Larger and expected warming (3-6 C above preindustrial summer temperatures by year 2100) reduces the time of significant ice sheet loss from millennia to centuries.”

In the meantime, the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute is developing this interesting tool for climate modeling:

Climate Reanalyzer is being developed by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine to provide an intuitive platform for visualizing a variety of weather and climate datasets and models.

Investigate climate using interfaces for reanalysis and historical station data. Plot maps, timeseries, and correlations; export timeseries data to a text file for later use in spreadsheet software; export map layers to Google Earth.

Checking the latest weather forecast is really easy. Just enter a placename beside the “Search Weather” button at the top-right of every page. You can also view and animate forecast maps for different parts of the world.

Here’s a sample picture showing today’s temperature anomalies. I must find some time to experiment with this more.

The gears of justice grind ever so slowly, and I had lost track of Professor Clarkson’s lawsuit, so here’s an update. First, The Wichita Eagle notes she has lost her court fight (thanks to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News). Kris Kobach, Secretary of State for Kansas, where Clarkson resides and filed her lawsuit, has proposed a new law for auditing voting, as noted by The Wichita Eagle:

“As you know, there was an individual in Sedgwick County who wanted to do a private audit of ballots in Sedgwick County. Kansas law clearly prohibits that. Although I favor having audits of election equipment, I believe that the rule of law trumps any elected official’s preferences, so my answer had to be no,” Kobach said, noting that a judge had ruled against Clarkson’s earlier efforts to audit 2012 election results. “So the responsible thing to do, I believe, is to offer a bill to change the law and allow the audit.”

About 30 states audit election results in some form, Kobach said. His bill, which would take effect in 2017 if passed, would require counties to conduct public audits of election results between the election and the county canvass of 1 percent of the votes cast. If a discrepancy is found, the secretary of state would have the power to call for a more robust audit.

In response to the suggestion, state Representative Jarrod Ousley (D-District 24) reviewed the the audit process with Dr. Clarkson and then the bill proposed by Kobach, and came away with these thoughts, as reported by the Shawnee Mission Post:

With Dr. Clarkson’s help and legislative researchers and revisers, I began work on an Election Audit Act containing the critical safeguards recommended by Dr. Clarkson and other experts.  This draft would become HB 2659, a four page bill I introduced in committee Vision 2020, after which it moved to the Elections Committee.

In October, KU hosted a symposium where Secretary of State Kris Kobach voiced his support for effective and robust auditing practices, and this session Secretary Kobach also introduced a one page bill expanding Kansas audits.  However, his bill did not have the critical safeguards.  The Secretary’s bill was placed on the Elections Committee agenda, and Dr. Clarkson prepared testimony in support of auditing requirements, stressing the need for the additional provisions.  I had amendments drafted to expand the Secretary’s bill, and during the committee hearing, Secretary Kobach, Dr. Clarkson and I, as well as election officials from multiple counties (including Sedgwick, Johnson, and Wyandotte) all testified regarding the election audit process in Kansas.

Will they be effective? Hard to say, I do not get a sense of how the Kansas Legislature, a body with some serious state-wide problems, will react to such a bill, or whether Governor Brownback, who used to be considered a GOP visionary and is now never mentioned, would look on this favorably. The safeguards proposed by Dr. Clarkson seem reasonable, but I still prefer manual recounts, as they are harder to corrupt, if slower and less accurate.

Who.What.Why. profiles Dr. Clarkson here.

Then something happened in 2012 that shook her world. One day, Clarkson came across a statistics paper on the internet titled “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies.”

The authors of the paper found that in elections all over the country where electronic voting machines were used, a strange pattern kept appearing: the larger the number of registered voters in the voting precinct, the larger the Republican vote. Since precinct size should have no effect on the vote distribution, the authors concluded  that the data “indicates overwhelming evidence of election manipulation.”

Clarkson said she was astonished. She proceeded to reproduce the results of the study — she called it essentially a peer-review — and began to seriously question the trustworthiness of our electoral system. …

Eventually, the attention drew the interest of an attorney, who offered his services to Clarkson pro bono. To help defray some of her legal expenses in preparation for her March trial date, she founded the Show Me The Votes Foundation and set up a gofundme site.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) is a Zero Mostel vehicle deriving from a play in which he is a Roman house slave looking desperately for a way out of his situation. Various far-fetched and dubious events occur, including a memorable turn by Leon Greene as Captain Miles Gloriosus, a Roman soldier in desperate search of the woman to be his wife – dead or alive.

The romp is non-stop and mildly clever, but some of the gaps are too large to cover up. This is worth an afternoon of a head cold, but otherwise is a bit out of date.