Author Archives: Hue White

I would not have thought of this, but Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com notes that architecture – how a building is laid out – can impact how, and whether, a pathogen spreads throughout a human population, an important consideration in this era of pathogens developing antibiotic resistance:

When writing about bathrooms in an earlier post, I suggested that Le Corbusier put a sink in the front hall of the Villa Savoye as an historical allusion. In fact, there is a much simpler and more straightforward reason: His client, like the clients for the Maison de Verre and the Lovell Health House, was a doctor and was obsessed about germs. People had known about germ theory since 1882, when Robert Koch identified that tuberculosis was caused by a bacillus, but they didn’t have antibiotics until after World War II.

Architecture, planning and public policy were surprisingly effective at dealing with disease, once it was figured out what caused it; in her book The Drugs Don’t work, Professor Dame Sally Davies writes:

Almost without exception, the decline in deaths from the biggest killers at the beginning of the twentieth century predates the introduction of antimicrobial drugs for civilian use at the end of the Second World War. Just over half the decline in infections diseases had occurred before 1931. The main influences on the decline of mortality were better nutrition, improved hygiene and sanitation, and less dense housing with all helped to prevent and to reduce transmission of infectious diseases.

Lloyd covers the opposing viewpoints of Le Corbusier and those who fought tuberculosis with air and sunlight, and also mentions SARS, spread through mists coming from various pieces of machinery. Coming to my mind are isolation units in hospitals, which have been used in an attempt to stop MSRA from spreading, barriers to pathogen spreading insects. Throughout history it seems like some cultures alternate between considering Nature as analogous to Eden, and an evil morass which kills our infants and cripples adults – think of FDR’s polio.

Just happened to notice this guy hiding in … I’m not certain.

This really is the same specimen, so the color change is quite interesting. I’m wondering if it’s akin to dragonfly color changes, caused by structural coloration:

… is the production of colour by microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light, sometimes in combination with pigments. For example, peacock tail feathers are pigmented brown, but their microscopic structure makes them also reflect blue, turquoise, and green light, and they are often iridescent. [Wikipedia]

However, my Arts Editor has also enhanced these pictures and may have reinforced the colors for better appreciation of the specimen. In fact, here’s the original of the last picture, just for comparison.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) has some mildly interesting ideas in special effects, particularly in the representation of star fields – although my Arts Editor just shook her head. And some of the color selections were sort of fun.

Otherwise, science that ranged from “yeah, sort of” to “NO!”, a limp story where the characters’ actions are unbelievable, dialog of dubious quality, virtually indistinguishable characters, and barely acceptable acting. And a sneaking suspicion of misogyny, given how the ladies were cast.

This one’s awful. I only finished it out of morbid curiosity. Don’t waste your time, the good guys eventually win. Whoever they were.

Postscript: I see the Wikipedia page references the trailer on YouTube, which I will reference with no recommendation. However, I did note that, puzzlingly, at some point it flashes the phrase “Your Eyes Will Glaze!“, to which I nearly joyfully shouted, “Over!“, but decided not to alarm the neighborhood. The Wikipedia page also has some faint praise for the concepts of the movie.

I still think it’s bad.

Lurking near the strawberries, it is … not so clear as some of our pictures, sadly. Hitting the limits of smartphone cameras. Or my hands are too shaky.

Steve Benen of MaddowBlog is reveling in his perception of Donald kicking dirt – inadvertently – in the eyes of the NRA, who has already endorsed him:

[Trump] “[Police officers are] proactive, and if they see a person possibly with a gun or they think they have a gun, they will see the person and they’ll look and they’ll take the gun away. They’ll stop, they’ll frisk and they’ll take the gun away, and they won’t have anything to shoot with.”

[Benen] I have a strong hunch Trump doesn’t appreciate how interesting his comments are.

Trump, who’s never demonstrated any real understanding of criminal-justice policy, apparently likes the idea of police being able to stop-and-frisk Americans – including those who’ve done nothing wrong and have been accused of no crimes – effectively at the discretion of individual officers. If the police find a gun, under Trump’s vision, it will be taken away.

From FactCheck.org

Steve believes the NRA is about to swallow it’s tongue – or some poison. But I’m not so sure they’ll squawk. My suspicion is that we’ll soon see a clarification: anyone who doesn’t fit the profile of a true-blue American will be subject to such searches. Trump is appealing to those who are fearful of crime, those who hear about the recent bombings on the East Coast and the stabbing attack in nearby St. Cloud and think of terror, who haven’t heard, or refuse to believe (which, in a separate tactic, Trump has also tried to use to his advantage), that crime rates are at historic lows.

From FactCheck.org

This is basically an attempt to chisel the fearful group, those who haven’t the time to do the research, or have personal – but irrelevant – contradictory experience, off from Hillary and transfer their allegiance to Donald, who doesn’t hesitate to promise any tactic, no matter how much it contradicts the core values of Americans. Playing on fear is a celebrated political tactic that probably dates from the third Presidential campaign of the Republic (I’m just guessing no one tried too hard when General George Washington was nominated for president).

So the question becomes, will the fearful educate themselves so we can continue to hang together? Or will they move to Donald, who verifiably lies through his teeth in a shameless strategy to gain the presidency?

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8fIVTH0TiM

Lyrics are so unimportant, eh?

Remember the Chinese drywall problem of the last few years? It’s come to Congress’ attention, and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would like to do something about it, particularly the problem that the company in question was a subsidiary of a government-owned company – which means the parent has sovereign immunity (I’ve linked to “state immunity” as “sovereign immunity” doesn’t appear to apply here – and you’ll see why in a moment), although the subsidiary can be sued in American courts. Senator Grassley’s bill would remove the immunity of the state-owned company as well.

This makes international lawyer John Bellinger nervous for its possible unintended consequences. He explains it on Lawfare:

In his Senate floor statement introducing the legislation, Senator Grassley states that the amendment “would mean only that a foreign state-owned company would have to respond to the claims brought by American companies and consumers, just like any other foreign company that isn’t owned by a government.”

I expressed concern earlier this year that Congress might  amend the FSIA to reverse a single district court decision with an amendment with far-reaching consequences that could upset the delicate balance in the FSIA between sovereign immunity and the need to ensure accountability by foreign states for certain acts.

I have also previously written at Lawfare about “earmarks for lawyers”—legislation that is intended by trial lawyers to reverse judicial decisions against them. As I said then, “Members of Congress and their staffs should ensure that these bills and others urged by plaintiffs’ lawyers to reverse their losses in federal courts are subject to very rigorous review.” U.S. companies have objected strongly to “special” legislation in other countries, such as Ecuador and Nicaragua, that has made it easier to sue U.S. companies in their courts. It makes it harder for the U.S. Government and U.S. companies to complain about special-purpose laws in other countries that limit the immunity of the United States or limit the defenses of U.S. companies when the U.S. Congress engages in similar actions.

It would be interesting to know more: do American companies expect/get special treatment in foreign countries? Does it really make sense that government-owned companies should have immunity?

In this age of international companies does it even really make sense to suggest that the companies with substantial international reach, not only for sales but for manufacturing, have any nationality at all? When a company can by another company so that it may claim its headquarters is in Ireland, mostly for the tax benefits, then how should it expect to claim protection from American laws (and firepower!) when a foreign country takes some action to which it objects?

The Russian news outlet TASS reports on the analysis of HD 164595:

An unusual signal registered by the Ratan-600 radio telescope at the Zelenchukskaya observatory in the North Caucasus Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia is a terrestrial disturbance rather than a sound from an unearthly civilization, telescope researcher Yulia Sotnikova told TASS on Tuesday.

“Last and this year, the telescope’s work has focused on searching for sun-like stars,” Sotnikova said.

“There have been no scientific results within the framework of this research so far. Some time ago, in the spring of this year, an unusual signal was received but its analysis showed that it was most likely a terrestrial disturbance,” she noted, adding that the observatory was preparing the text of an official disclaimer to dismiss media reports on the discovery of a signal from an unearthly civilization.

Jacob Aron provides additional context in NewScientist (10 September 2016, paywall):

Although we can’t say for sure, it is almost certain that aliens have arisen from the primordial goo elsewhere. Even if the odds of life are incredibly low, a universe 93 billion light years wide provides ample rolls of the dice to get things started.

And yet, its vastness also prevents us from making contact. Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, calculated that if the signal had been real, aliens at HD 164595 would have needed to consume an entire sun to provide enough energy for it to reach us, assuming they beamed it in all directions. If the message was specifically directed at us, that energy requirement drops to “only” the entire historical power consumption of humanity.

A reader appreciates the points from Andrew’s article:

Good points, all. I especially like this quote from Sullivan: “Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.”

Either online or offline, but not both?

Or instant journalism or long form journalism (as Andrew called it elsewhere), but not both?

I enjoyed this:

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.”

If only for the oddiy of associating porn with joy, although it’s a slippery assertion.

I had forgotten the role of the League of Women Voters in the Presidential debates oh so many years ago, but Bill Moyers and Michael Winship on The Daily Kos repair that forgetfulness in great detail:

A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian Jill Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:

“During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of Women Voters, warned against that move: ‘Broadcasters are profit-making corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which ratings assume utmost importance.’ They would make a travesty of the debates, she predicted, not least because they’d agree to whatever terms the campaigns demanded. Also: ‘We firmly believe that those who report the news should not make the news.’”

Ridings’ prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League pulled out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, “It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

Interesting that a journalist doesn’t hesitate to point the finger at the journalistic empires for usurping the debates for their own financial purposes:

But as Ridings said, it’s not just the candidates involved in this criminal hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates — NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21^st Century Fox, Time Warner — have turned the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will — a farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks to maintain their cartel of money and power.

While I’ve become a big fan of not permitting the various sectors of society to use each others’ methods, as they often operate at cross-purposes and corrupt the sector doing the borrowing, I’m a little hesitant about letting politicians regulate their own debates. I just see these big ol’ softballs being used as questions. Which is why the League of Women Voters and similar civics organizations should be in charge of these debates – and the campaigns should not be permitted to influence them.

Go, Bill & Michael!

My Arts Editor says these are gorgeous.

Morgan Housel of The Motley Fool responds (paywall) to a fascinating Wall Street Journal article:

$100 invested in the 20% of companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 over 10 years. The same amount invested in the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367.

Amazing.

The stat is from a study from MSCI, which ranked CEO pay and total shareholder returns from 2005 to 2015. My first thought was that this makes sense, because the highest-paid CEOs tend to come from the largest companies, and large companies in general have lagged small-cap stocks over the last decade. But the study’s authors removed the largest companies from the sample and found similar results. Higher CEO pay, on average, is correlated with lower returns. Ten years isn’t a long time — I’d love to see a study spanning 30 or 50 years — but it’s still a staggering statistic.

Morgan goes on to note that the last Lehman Brothers CEO was making nearly half a million dollars a day, right before old Nessie ate them they went bankrupt, touching off the Great Recession. While I’m not a deep diver on investing – I generally find that the study that found making a quick decision when faced with a mountain of information is more likely to be right than trying to digest the whole thing applies to me – I do find it fascinating to consider looking at the executive’s pay when making an investing decision. The inverse correlation had not occurred to me – but given how it would pressure a CEO to make decisions for the short-term, it makes sense.

The really interesting point? Morgan points out similar phenomenon has been seen in psychological studies of various sorts – basically, when the motivational rewards are too high, the guinea pigs choke.

Readers respond to the afterdeath…

I like the mushroom suit idea. You can also be made into a diamond but I haven’t investigated how costly that might be.

The Cremation Solutions price guide is here, but I’m not sure this is what you’re thinking about – they seem to be more about diamonds as carriers of ashes, rather than converting the ashes into a diamond. Maybe not. Not a good web-site.

Another:

So no Tibetan sky burial?

No Tibetan mountains in Minnesota, otherwise it might be an attractive option :). Honestly, it sounds really good, although I’m having visions of mountains covered in corpses now…

In Palestine the forces of religious purity are at work. Adnan Abu Amer reports in AL Monitor:

… since Sept. 9, Khaled al-Khalidi, a professor of Palestinian history at the Islamic University in Gaza with ties to Hamas, has been posting statements on social media calling for the enactment of an anti-blasphemy law, provoking a storm of reactions online. …

Of course, climate change won’t be bad for all of Earth’s inhabitants. NewScientist (10 September 2016)  reports on a new habitat – for whales:

The original uploader was Mohonu at English Wikipedia.

Sue Moore at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle has analysed 30 years of whale survey information gathered in the Chukchi Sea – which separates Russia and Alaska – and the surrounding area. She realised that three species of plankton-eating baleen whales – humpback, fin and minke – are now routinely spotted in the region, even though surveys in the 1980s never encountered these species there.

The population of bowheads – a baleen whale native to the Arctic – may also be thriving, according to Moore’s analysis (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0251).

Speaking of ice clearing off, I recall that J. G. Ballard‘s The Drowned World is set on an Earth in which the Sun has increased its output enough to make Earth appreciably hotter. The ice caps are gone, the tropics are uninhabitable, and many life forms are reverting to earlier forms, presumably in a bid to adapt to the new ecological niches opening up. Mankind is drying up (if I may indulge in, what, an anti-pun?)….

Some random pics. First, the view of the posterior of a bee.

Next, a close look at a bud on our rhododendron. You may need to squint.

Proof that precipitation happens.

And, on schedule, the blooming of the asters.

In “The Search for a Legendary Ship” (American Archaeology, pp 43-47, mostly offline), Alexandra Witze describes Lieutenant (later Captain) Cook’s use of HMS Endeavour to explore the Australian coast for the European powers, and at the end of that journey the ship disappears from the history books. Now a volunteer group named the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, in conjunction with some amateur historians, has suggested she was paid off and sold, renamed and then sunk by the British near Newport Harbor during the American Revolutionary War to discourage an approaching French force.

All this is to lead up to this head-scratching paragraph. All typos mine….

In a rare use of salvage law, the state of Rhode Island filed to “arrest” the abandoned wrecks as its property. A federal court agreed. Now, if and when the Endeavour is identified, the vessel will belong to Rhode Island.

I suppose no other law applied for taking possession of the wrecks, so one had to be stretched to make it work. It still makes for an uncomfortable sentence and concept.

A reader remembers the BBS days:

What’s really strange is that my time as the system operator of a BBS was over 15 years which seems scarcely believable now. However there are times when I have dreams where keeping the board running figure prominently – that I need to perform maintenance on the board or back up the database or do other tasks I used to do to keep it running. And this is about 16 years after last running a board regularly. I’m not really sure what that says. However it seems like only yesterday I had to do all these things to keep the system running and it was a task which I attended to with a fairly religious fervor.

Don’t I know it. I recall the second time I moved, it was absolutely necessary that the system was down for a minimal amount of time – so many people used it! It felt like I was letting them down if I didn’t get the system back up.

Another doesn’t like some of the implications about social aptitudes:

I don’t think our lives on BBSs were so “derivative” of actual human contact, so much as an adjunct and catalyst. After all, we contrived to get together in person about as often as possible. And look at today — at least for me, most of my circle of friends are those people I met in person on the BBS. I went to their weddings, and they to mine, etc.

Which I might argue proves the argument. We were comfortable with each other, but the rest of the world was a little off-putting. And, for another reader, what impact does the suggestion of not using a smartphone have?

One, because I’m reading it on my smartphone.

Too bad, Andrew. It’s permanently affixed.

The Twin Cities radar right now, courtesy Intellicast:

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Over the last week or two a couple of news stories have cropped up concerning Mr. Trump which, if true, would have serious consequences. First is one concerning a possible rape, from Mamam!a:

You’d think an accusation of child rape levelled [sic] at one of the most powerful men in the Western world would be front page news, and yet reports of a federal lawsuit filed against Donald Trump, which claims he and another man sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl, have hardly made a sound.

While the billionaire US presidential hopeful has denied any wrongdoing — his lawyers have described the reports as “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated” — that doesn’t mean they aren’t potentially credible and it certainly doesn’t render them not newsworthy.

It’s difficult to judge the plausibility without more evidence. But, on another matter, there is more evidence. David Fahrenthold of WaPo reports:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

This looks much more solid at this time. Trump may be in legal trouble, although I don’t know if it’s criminal.

So what’s the maneuver?

Get yourself elected President. “They”, whoever they may be, would never dare to arrest a sitting President. Impeachment? His hordes of followers wouldn’t permit it. And in 4 years? A lot can change. If it’s not King Donald by then.

Chemists at New York University have developed a method for generating 3-D views of the innards of a lithium battery.

Image courtesy of NYU’s Jerschow Lab.

“One particular challenge we wanted to solve was to make the measurements 3D and sufficiently fast, so that they could be done during the battery-charging cycle,” explains NYU Chemistry Professor Alexej Jerschow, the paper’s senior author. “This was made possible by using intrinsic amplification processes, which allow one to measure small features within the cell to diagnose common battery failure mechanisms. We believe these methods could become important techniques for the development of better batteries.”

The work, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on rechargeable Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are used in cell phones, electric cars, laptops, and many other electronics. Many see lithium metal as a promising, highly efficient electrode material, which could boost performance and reduce battery weight. However, during battery recharging it builds up deposits—or “dendrites”— that can cause performance loss and safety concerns, including fires and explosions. Therefore, monitoring the growth of dendrites is crucial to producing high-performance batteries with this material.

My Arts Editor cleaned up the image slightly.

Jerschow Lab image, modified by Deb White.

(h/t Christine Lepisto @ Treehugger.com)

Steve Benen @ Maddowblog notes that Mr. Trump is once again participating in the GOP echo that people who commit violent crimes on American soil should somehow be classified as combatants:

As Rachel [Maddow] has explained on the show, the purpose of the designation is to deny suspects Miranda warnings and prevent the appointment of defense counsel – despite, you know, the U.S. Constitution.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that: every time there’s an incident like this, Lindsey Graham and his ideological allies almost reflexively roll out the “enemy combatant” argument. Unfortunately, the idea isn’t improving with age.

Just to clarify the situation, I think someone should ask Senator Graham the following question:

Should Timothy McVeigh, noted terrorist, have also been classified as an enemy combatant?

Mr. McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Why? From Wikipedia:

McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, sought revenge against the federal government for its handling of the Waco siege, which ended in the deaths of 76 people exactly two years before the bombing, as well as for the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992.

That’s terrorism – spreading fear among your enemies. Indeed, Mr. Rahami, accused of the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey, killed precisely 0 people, injuring 31. So how would Senator Graham respond?

For years I’ve been telling my wife (aka our Arts Editor) to just toss me in a ditch when I die. (She doesn’t like that.) The options traditional to our society, being burial and cremation, seem to me to be a rejection of our earthly origins, and, on a more tangible level, an insult, however tiny, to our environment – we remove our bodies as food for the worms, after all our years of consuming, consuming, consuming: we either immolate, denying the scavengers a last chance at us, or we bury ourselves, usually full of noxious chemicals and hidden away in a box of varying materials.

But now a new alternative is being put forward (discovered by my wife, of course). Fiona McDonald of Science Alert reports:

… a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option – a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.Also known as the ‘mushroom death suit‘, the idea is that the mushrooms will begin to grow from your body once you’ve been buried, slowly digesting you, while neutralising any environmental contaminants you harbour – such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives – in the process. First announced to a whole lot of controversy five years ago, the suit will now officially go on sale as early as April this year, with the first test subject already locked in.

Given my positive reaction to mycoremediation, this may be just the thing. Estimated retail: $999 – why can’t they just be honest and call it $1000? Marketing pursues us unto the grave?

Fiona also provides this rather shocking tidbit:

Cremation may sound more natural, but it isn’t much better, with our bodies needing to be burnt at temperatures between 760 and 1,150 degrees Celsius for 75 minutes – that’s an incredibly energy-intensive process, and it also releases a significant amount of greenhouse gases and toxins into the environment. In the UK, for example, cremation is responsible for 16 percent of the country’s mercury pollution thanks to all our old dental fillings.

I’ll just repeat that – 16% of UK mercury pollution comes from the cremation of corpses with mercury dental fillings. And mercury is a well-known environmental contaminant, usually associated with coal-burning power plants. I would never have guessed that dental fillings would have that sort of backlash.

Leader, NewScientist (10 September 2016):

THE descent into a post-truth world continues at a depressing rate. The latest winner of the pants-on-fire award is former US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In an interview with CNN after a speech in which Donald Trump wrongly claimed that violent crime was rising, Gingrich cherry-picked the facts – then abandoned them altogether. “The average American does not think crime is down,” he said. “As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel.”

In someone who claims to be an intellectual, this is exceptionally depressing and discouraging. Shame on Newt.

About 30 years of it.