Author Archives: Hue White

As it probably must in order to keep its hardliners in line, Iran test fired a new ballistic missile, according to AL Monitor‘s Abbas Qaidaari:

Last week, Iran’s Ministry of Defense managed to successfully test-fire its Emad medium-range ballistic missile. According to Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, “This is the first ballistic missile developed by Iran that can be precision-guided until it reaches its target.”  …

The Emad launch was Iran’s first ballistic missile test since the nuclear agreement was concluded. According to the JCPOA, Iran is not allowed to improve and test medium-range ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. Iranian officials do not, however, interpret the rule as a restriction on its missile arsenal, arguing that the weapons are not designed to carry an atomic payload. …

So Iran begins pressing the boundaries.  A nation ancient in prestige and pride vs the Great Satan.  Both sides had best be careful.

Kimberly Mok @ TreeHugger.com waxes ecstatic over the latest work of Vo Trong Nghia:

© Vo Trong Nghia Architects

It’s a gorgeous space, especially when strategically lit up at night to emphasize its bamboo construction. Designed to hold up to 300 people, the conference hall is intended to serve a variety of functions — hosting concerts, meetings, lectures and the like. Though the floor plan is in a simple, rectangular footprint, the space itself is elevated by the use of bamboo members that are bent and shaped into spectacular vaulted forms, which hold up the asymmetrically pitched and thatched roof.

A visual treat – more pictures are provided by Kimberly.  But the practical questions abound – what are the upkeep requirements?  What is the expected lifetime?

AL Monitor‘s Ayah Aman reports on the recent first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt:

Throughout the two days of voting, Oct. 18-19, conflicting figures emerged as to the percentage of voters casting their ballots after the Supreme Electoral Commission announced on the first day of voting that the initial estimated rate of participation was only 1.2% as of the middle of Oct. 18.

This figure raised the ire of the government and official media outlets, which mobilized to urge voters to participate through extensive media campaigns that blanketed official television station airwaves under the slogan of “Inzil” (come down).

Why?

As she headed to cast her vote, Mirfat Hussein, 50, told Al-Monitor, “I am participating out of fear that Islamists and remnants of the old regime would prevail. But I do not expect to be well represented in parliament.”

Along the same lines, a number of young people interviewed by Al-Monitor on the outskirts of Dokki and Agouza neighborhoods indicated that they lacked confidence in parliament and its ability to echo the opinions of the Egyptian people. In that regard, Mohamed Hosni, 20, said, “I do not have a lot of trust in the candidates … and do not expect them to back youth-related issues.”

Hazem Baily, 37, disapprovingly said, “I did not know that there were elections being held in the first place.”

Political activist Safwan Mohammed talked with Al-Monitor about the reluctance of young people to participate, and said, “Lack of participation by the youth in these elections is clear to everyone; the reason simply is that most young political front-runners in Egypt are currently jailed.”

The site Madi Masr provides coverage of various issues related to the elections here.  Villagers in Upper Egypt and the West Delta region have an old concern:

But as the discussion continued, people dropped the political jargon and their focus on “Egypt’s interests” faded away as they turned their attention to local issues. After his initial insistence on the importance of state institutions, Braik then defined the perfect parliamentarian as one who “gets the deed done.”

But what is the deed? And who can get it done?

For most Fayoum voters, “the deed” is getting access to water. Most villages in the governorate have suffered from a severe water shortage for months. They also want better infrastructure and more job opportunities, especially for young people.

People here agree on the key issues to be fixed, but their idea of who can “get it done” depends on their tribal and family affiliations.

I wonder if access to water may someday become a nationwide issue in the United States.  Otherwise, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

For the smaller government crowd, there’s another advantage to solar power: less regulation.  After all, the sun delivers its energy in a form which, at this distance, we can easily withstand with little damage, and collecting it, in the current forms of solar collection, has little impact on the environment.  Oil, the medium of energy in our legacy power system, is a messy, dangerous substance to collect, transport, and refine.

Naturally, there are questions concerning the equipment used to collect solar power, as National Geographic pursued last year:

… researchers say it’s difficult to get quality data across solar panel markets.  The numbers available on the environmental impact of solar panel manufacturing in China are “quite different from those in the U.S. or in Europe,” said Fengqi You, assistant professor of engineering at Northwestern University and a co-author of the May study. “It is a very complicated problem.”

Business continues relating to reality.  Ceres, “a non-profit organization advocating for sustainability leadership,” reports that 68 more companies are signing on to the American Business Act on Climate Pledge.

As key international climate negotiations near, 68 additional companies today joined the White House-led American Business Act on Climate Pledge. Companies making the pledge have set significant greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energy sourcing goals for 2020 and beyond, and are focusing on increasing energy efficiency, boosting low-carbon investing and making sustainability more accessible to low-income Americans.

This second round of business pledges at the White House – in addition to 13 company pledges announced in July – includes 19 businesses that work directly with Ceres, a sustainability advocacy group, or its climate policy coalition, Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP): Autodesk, Best Buy, Bloomberg, CA Technologies, Dell, eBay, EMC, General Mills, IKEA, Kellogg’s, Levi Strauss & Co., L’Oreal, Mars, Nestle, Nike, PG&E,  Starbucks, Unilever and The Walt Disney Company.

It would be interesting to put some solid numbers to these pledges, of course.  For example, is eBay emitting  gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere?  Or does it consider itself to be quite a minor player?  It might reveal some sincerity and, played properly, bring more pressure to bear on competitors who are not yet on the wagon.

(h/t Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com)

A reader reminds me of another local expression of Brutalism:

There’s also the Southdale Library and Courthouse building http://images.publicradio.org/…/20120308_hennepin…

A building of uncertain fate.  From the StarTribune:

Edina’s 42-year-old Hennepin County Southdale Library, which also houses courtrooms and a busy service center, squats like a white box on columns in one of the Twin Cities’ busiest areas, close to strip malls, big-box stores, groceries and chain restaurants.

With the imperious but distinctive building now in need of millions of dollars in upgrades, county leaders are looking into whether it would make more sense to demolish it and sell the land at the high-demand corner of W. 70th Street and York Avenue S.

Inadvertently forgotten remark on this subject:

SSRIs are perhaps less unpleasant than the Ludovico Technique, but I suspect just as fictional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_technique

SSRIs from Wikipedia:

SSRIs are the most widely prescribed antidepressants in many countries.^[2] The efficacy of SSRIs in mild or moderate cases of depression has been disputed.^[3][4][5]

Federico Pistono writes in a NewScientist (3 October 2015, paywall) opinion piece about the unintended, er, consequences of UBI – unconditional basic income:

It’s a simple concept with far-reaching consequences. The state would give a monthly stipend to every citizen, regardless of income or employment status. This would simplify bureaucracy, get rid of outdated and inefficient means-based benefits, and provide support for people to live with dignity and find new meaning.

Perhaps the biggest UBI experiments, involving a whole town in Canada and 20 villages in India, have confounded a key criticism – that it would kill the incentive to work. Not only did people continue working, but they were more likely to start businesses or perform socially beneficial activities compared with controls. In addition, there was an increase in general well-being, and no increase in alcohol, drug use or gambling.

He notes that this is only an initial study, of inadequate size and design – but still very interesting.  I should think one of the eventual study insights will be the recognition by the study participants that they do not have to risk everything in order to try out a business concept – there will always be a way to put food on the table.  I recognize this is contrary to the American mythos of the inventor or businessman who risks all to start a business, succeeds, and is granted great riches and glory – but think about it, just how moral is it to risk your family’s security, possibly its very existence, just so you can start a business?  That, of course, is a question which a perfectly rational person would shake their head to – but humanity is neither rational nor particularly, in general, moral; we are subject to whimsy, to obsessions, to the needs and requirements of a brain out of context.

Pistono’s statement also punctures another old myth – that humanity is a bunch of lazy SOBs who wouldn’t work without the lash of hunger and insecurity across their shoulders.  This old myth, which, it occurs to me, is used to justify the greed at the top of many corporate ladders (and I’ll happily grant this fellow an exception).  Remember that out of context brain?  It requires stimulation and challenge, the chance to explore, whether it be new ways to make textiles or valleys on Mars.  By giving folks a predictable, stable base, they can begin exploring the landscape that interests them the most. From this, I have to wonder about knock-on effects.

1. Creatvity.  A small explosion of creativity may occur as folks use this modicum of security to try to new solutions to old problems, or attempt solving new problems in themselves.  It would be very interesting to watch these experiments and measure the creativity unleashed, and how well it works in Canada vs India.  Which culture is more creative?  Which upbringing constrains innovation?  That could cause some fireworks.
2. Employee stability.  How stable is employment at established companies in these zones?  At larger companies?  Smaller?  How about measuring companies’ hierarchical components and correlating it with employee stability?  If an employee is not constrained by hunger to retain a job, then how much happier must a company keep their employees?
3. Employer reactions.  I know that, years ago, the large automakers in the United States were actually for single payer health systems, because that would allow them to simplify their HR departments.  But how would employers feel about UBI?  They could maybe lower wages, but if employee stability was lower, the costs of training more new employees might not be worth it.

I can easily see a healthier, better educated workforce populace.

For those who’ll rear up and shout about socialism, I have a few observations.  First, we’re a lot wealthier than we used to be; second, change is good (I’ve observed that many 50+ year old men will hunch their shoulders and mutter, “Change is baaaad!” – including me) in general, as we explore the general problem of societal survival in a world undergoing change that impacts us all; and, as the greater context of this opinion piece is robots and the impact on jobs (I’ve written about that before here and here), we must consider how those whose jobs are eliminated by intelligent robotics (if, indeed, that is permitted to happen) will continue to be fed & housed – because idle, hungry hands are devil’s ….

…. which reminds me of my friend Chris Torkildson, who, declaiming that idle computer cycles were the devil’s plaything, wrote a program of deduction for an otherwise idle computer, and fed it a whole bunch of facts.   It was a little stunning when it asked if a platypus was a mammal or a bird.  But idle computer cycles does suggest some necessary questions about how much an app, or an AI, should be paid for its work.

Here is the UBI-Belgium website.

Just a lovely bit of snark over at The Daily Kos.

In order to win the future, it is my belief as a self-stated expert that ALL depositors must hit certain benchmarks by 2014. Your bank will be monitored for progress towards these goals.

Here are the benchmarks:

By 2011, 60% of your depositors must have at least $100,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2012, 75% of your depositors must have at least $500,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2013, 90% of your depositors must have at least $750,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2014, 100% of your depositors must have at least $1,000,000 in their savings accounts.

…

… but this one’s a little odd.  Tech Insider reports on sequestering soot on paper.

[Anirudh] Sharma built a demo device that can pull soot from a burning candle and accumulate it in a modified syringe, which is then used to fill a modified HP inkjet cartridge with a mixture of the soot, vodka, and olive oil. When the cartridge is integrated with an Arduino ink shield, this decidedly low-tech ink can be used to print at a 96 dpi resolution. …

Sharma estimates a 4-year-old diesel engine could produce enough carbon to fill an HP cartridge within 60 minutes. A chimney would take only 10 minutes approximately.

I’m seeing contraptions for positioning this device at the top of chimneys all over Minnesota.  From Anirudh Sharma’s website comes this charming bit:

I was once day dreaming about the awesome days we spent back in Bikaner, a small city in the west of Rajasthan. It reminded me of the heat, travelling in sweat inducing autorickshaws while we used to do our experiments with building our Multi-touch table with low tech techniques. The month of June there was full of sweat, with unburnt smoke rising from unending tur-tur-ing of autorickshaws blackening our skin.

I can imagine that, having putted around Pune, India one day a few years back.

In all fairness, they are not positioning this as a source of sequestration.  Sharma says he was just having fun.

(h/t Derek Markham @ TreeHugger.com)

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog comes up with a chart of Obama-era budget deficits:

and notes,

In the not-too-distant past, talk in the political world of the U.S. budget deficit was all the rage. As the Tea Party “movement” took shape, conservatives quite literally took to the streets to express their fear that President Obama and Democrats were failing to address the “out of control” deficit.

Congressional Republicans agreed. As recently as 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was asked about the radicalism of his political agenda and he responded, “[W]hat I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year.” Around the same time, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued that Congress should be “focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.”

The Republican rhetoric was ridiculously wrong. We don’t have a trillion-dollar deficit; the deficit isn’t the ultimate problem; and it’s not growing.

Which is interesting, but fails to note that the Executive doesn’t make major spending decisions – Congress does.  All the Executive does is propose a budget, which may be ignored by Congress.  Veto threats are the only direct negotiating tactic available to the Executive.  The two red bars indicate when the Democrats also held Congress; the budget deficit is highest in the second year.  Then the GOP takes control of Congress and the deficits fall.

A naive observation, of course; Obama had to clean up the mess left by one of the worst Administrations in recent memory, and the announcement of a continual presence in Afghanistan reflects the magnitude of the disaster of the last GOP Administration.  The chart is virtually meaningless, which Benen implicitly admits:

To reiterate a point that bears repeating, I don’t necessarily consider this sharp reduction in the deficit to be good news. If it were up to me, federal officials would be borrowing more, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.

And I agree.  The Government is not expected to run at a profit.  The Government is not a business.  Its purpose is to govern, with all that implies.  Our crumbling public works is a dangerous situation, and will result in changes perhaps unwelcome by the American public, as noted by my contributing blogger, Chris Johnson.  It would benefit all of us greatly to take advantage of the low interest rates to fund the repair of roads and bridges, plumbing and national parks.

But to the group that believes everything is economic, the chart will be important, even if the interpretation is open to wide debate.  Add in the GOP’s relentless push to increase Dept of War funding without raising taxes, and the cognitive dissonance becomes quite entertaining.

When it comes to enhancing moral choices, one reader has an idea:

So, citalopram for all congresscritters and titans of industry, I say.

Another reader hits the obvious home run:

Which had slipped my mind completely.   I present, without comment (since I’m out of context), from Wikipedia:

In his essay, “Clockwork Oranges,”^{[citation needed]} Burgess asserts that “this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness.” This title alludes to the protagonist’s positive emotional responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will. To induce this conditioning, the protagonist is subjected to a technique in which violent scenes displayed on screen, which he is forced to watch, are systematically paired with positive stimulation ^[16] in the form of nausea and “feelings of terror” caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of the films.

“Brutalist Architecture.”  TreeHugger.com‘s Lloyd Alter celebrates the 40th birthday of Robarts Library:

Brutalist architecture is not very popular these days. The concrete in them has barely cured through, yet they are under threat everywhere. They are solidly built; tearing them down is a difficult job and a huge waste of energy, both embodied and in the process of demolition. Some people even say that they were designed to intimidate; at Slate they recently asked Were Brutalist Buildings on College Campuses Really Designed to Thwart Student Riots?

From Wikipedia:

(“Robarts Library” by Dr.K. – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.)

Quite the thing.  Not too far from here, the University of Minnesota has Rarig Center:

(“Rarig Center Minnesota 1” by AlexiusHoratius – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.)

Perhaps not as horridly magnificent, but it has its quiet sense of having stomped on something as it settled into place.

Ross Andersen’s article for The Atlantic concerning an oddball star, designated KIC 8462852 (this is the link to the academic paper), roughly 1481 light years distant, is being noised across the Net:

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash. …

And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.

When I spoke to [postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

Well, I gotta say, 150,000 stars is peanuts in this Universe – in the Milky Way galaxy, even.  That bit of rhetoric fell flat for me.

But the rest is the stuff of dreams.  Sure wish I was an astronomer working on that team.  Or even the janitor.  About all I can guess at this point is it’s not a Dyson sphere – although maybe we’re catching a glimpse of one under construction.

Now to wait for our wonder to be deflated …

…. appears to be dancing.

This is going to make my hair itch for weeks.  Dan Jones investigates the problems of moral choice and big problems for NewScientist (26 September 2015, paywall) and comes up with a doozylicious problem, at least in my mind.  First, he covers the basics: intuitive moral sentiments are those gut reactions you have learned for local situations – you see it, you act.  These are good when the situation is, ah, local, or better put, when the effects of your action are limited to the local (geographical) area, and, although it’s not stated, an analogous statement about chronological measurements.

And then there is what Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene calls “manual mode”, where the situation calls for deliberate consideration.  The decision may not be quick, but it may more often be correct, especially if the intuitive reaction yields an improper result.  Manual mode appears to be more appropriate for situations where the choice, correct or not, will have a far-reaching affect.

He covers a bit of history, such as the British history of abolition (it involves shame), and then moves on to modern movements, which also utilize shame, which brings us to this:

However, harnessing the power of rational reflection, collective identity and shame may not be the only options for would-be moral revolutionaries. In their book Unfit for the Future, philosophers Ingmar Persson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford argue that our moral brains are so compromised that the only way we can avoid catastrophe is to enhance them through biomedical means.

In the past few years, researchers have shown it might actually be possible to alter moral thinking with drugs and brain stimulation. Molly Crockett of the University of Oxford has found that citalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor used to treat depression, makes people more sensitive to the possibility of inflicting harm on others. Earlier this year, for instance, Crockett and colleagues found that participants who had taken citalopram were willing to pay twice as much money as controls to prevent a stranger from receiving an electric shock (Current Biology, vol 25, p 1852).

I leaned back and wonder, Is this the loss of moral choice?

Of course that raises moral questions in itself – who to treat, how, and at what age? But Persson and Savulescu argue that if the techniques can be shown to change our moral behaviour for the better (who or what defines “better” is another question), then there are no good ethical reasons not to use them. Take the issue of consent, which children could not provide. “The same is true of all upbringing and education, including moral instruction,” says Persson.

But wouldn’t biomedical moral enhancement undermine responsibility by turning us into moral robots? Persson and Savulescu argue that biomedical treatment poses no more threat to free will and moral responsibility than educational practices that push us towards the same behaviour.

Assuming this was practical across a large segment of the population – it’s not, yet – can I agree with Persson & Savulescu that this is no different from moral instruction? I’m finding this difficult.

Education is the provision of known true facts (as best we can know them) and processes to sentient beings in order to facilitate better actions.  In other words, the brain is altered by the impact of knowledge.  However, as sentient, self-aware beings, we have at least the potential to understand why we react as we do to the world, such as understanding how increasing greenhouse gasses causes world wide climate change.  If the administration of a drug would cause a comparable change in reactions as does knowledge, well, how is this working?  The example is interesting, as it suggests an increase in empathy, but I have to wonder if it would a similar impact in manual mode.

Yet, unless one believes in the deterministic model of the universe, I see a difference in that the person subjected to education, general or moral, is still making a choice: a choice to believe, or disbelieve, the evidence, the processes, or even the inclinations of God, and whether or not the result of these actions are beneficial or not for themselves and those they are impacting in the non-local area.  Is this so true of the person with the medicated morality?  As I think about it (with my head-cold bound brain), it seems more and more fantastical to think a medication can change morality.  To be sure, the cited study appears to have modified the intuitive moral mode; would it also affect the manual mode?

Is it coercion?  Is shame coercion?  Yes, and yes.  Which is impermissible?

Another question: if a drug can make us “more moral”, does this imply there is a morality of some certainty, and that it’s known by our bodies if not articulated by our philosophers?  Or is it simply a matter of interpretation: sure, the behavior is modified by the drug, but whether this is more or less moral depends on the interpretation put on the action?

Yep, the hair will be itching for weeks.  Let me know what you think.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog has a post on the most recent poll results for the GOP in this thread:

1. Donald Trump: 24% (down two points from last month)

2. Ben Carson: 23% (up five points)

3. Ted Cruz: 10% (up two points)

4. Marco Rubio: 9% (unchanged)

5. Jeb Bush: 8% (up one point)

6. Carly Fiorina: 5% (down four points)

6. Mike Huckabee: 5% (up two points)

8. Rand Paul: 3% (up one point)
…

But it’s the top of the GOP standings that are hard to overlook. Indeed, the pattern should cause some consternation among GOP leaders. Over the summer, Donald Trump created several controversies for himself, making outlandish comments about all kinds of people and issues, and each time, a variety of pundits said, “Now he’s gone too far.” And soon after, in each instance, Trump’s poll numbers went up.

More recently, however, it’s Carson who consistently finds himself in the news for making comments that raise questions about his stability and connection to reality. And yet, the more unhinged Carson appears, the greater his support in national Republican polling.

It says something important about the perspective of GOP voters, and just as importantly, it creates an incentive for Republican presidential candidates to be as reckless and irresponsible as humanly possible.

This is the mirror of the constituents of today’s GOP – but will it be tomorrow’s?  The implications of the various stunts pulled by the occupants of the entire poll, where the more ridiculous the statement, the more support the instigator gains, indicates the GOP’s core is located, increasingly, on the fringes of American society.  Granted, our increasingly fragmented society makes this easier than it did in decades past, where the fringe was relegated to lithographic presses, late night dinners, and the occasional radio show, but at some point the saner elements of the GOP will either, from self-disgust, assert themselves and kick the bums out – or leave themselves, vowing never to vote for the bums.  Either way, the team politics would founder, and with it the ship the fringe-right has been riding.

And this would be a shame, since a single party does not debate well with itself, even the Democrats.  The movement towards ‘starve the beast’ is having a deleterious impact on the United States in far too many ways; worse, few adherents will be persuaded of this viewpoint as the defenders are quite inventive of not only persuasive technique, but even facts.  There is a lot of debate about the causes of this.  I’ll pass on figuring that out tonight.

Russia is doing what it can in the clandestine war waged by the United States and Saudi Arabia.  Dalan McEndree of WorldPress.org reports on how Russia is attacking the OPEC oil alliance:

Putin’s moves also are strengthening Russia’s influence with OPEC. Russia already has extensive and close ties with Iran and Venezuela, and is now laying the basis for such ties with Iraq. Putin has aligned Russia with OPEC’s have-nots—the members lacking the financial resources to withstand low crude prices for an extended period and that have objected to Saudi policies (Iran, Iraq, Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Ecuador and Venezuela)—against the haves (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar). He has continually supported Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s calls for an emergency OPEC meeting on prices and his efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to reverse its policy. At the beginning of September, Putin told Maduro that the two countries “must team up to shore up oil prices.”

In addition, Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of energy policy, Arkady Dvorkovich, made comments that mocked Saudi policy, saying that “OPEC producers are suffering the ricochet effects of their attempt to flush out rivals by flooding the world with excess output,” expressing doubt that OPEC members “really want to live with low oil prices for a long time,” and implying that Saudi policy is irrational.

Indeed, Russia can be seen as maneuvering to split OPEC into two blocs, with Russia, although not a member, persuading the “Russian bloc” to isolate Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab OPEC members within OPEC. This might persuade the Saudis to seek a compromise with the have-nots.

A strategic alliance with Iran and Iraq offers Putin two more potential avenues by which to pressure the Saudis. They can test Saudi determination to defend their market share at any price and its financial wherewithal to do so. Iran claims it can raise crude output by 1 million barrels within six or so months of the lifting of sanctions. The Saudis may be calculating that Iran must first rehabilitate its oil fields and that Iran, cash poor, cannot do so quickly. If this is the case, Russia could step in, offer Iran financing, and force the Saudis to contemplate prices staying lower longer than they anticipated and therefore continuing pressure on their economy.

He also addresses the Chinese market:

Russia also could cooperate with Iran and Iraq to take market share from Saudi Arabia in the vital Chinese market. As a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Iraq and other countries are vying intensely for sales to China, the second-largest import market and the major source of demand growth in coming years. Coordinating their pricing and consistently offering the Chinese prices below the Saudi price, they could seek to win market share. Such a price war would pressure the competitors’ currencies.

I feel less certainty about China being a major source of demand for fossil fuel.  In the case of coal, the rulers of China are beginning to demonstrate that, once a decision has been taken, they can follow through.  If this holds true – a large IF – and were to be extended to oil in concert with a growing renewables or nuclear-based energy grid, then the entire context changes.

Suppositions like this may render the Saudi Arabian strategy and associated goals moot – as well as the Russian export strategy.  The entire renewables movement, as much as it’s denounced and ignored by the American right-wing fringe, actually serves to further their purported goals – just not with bayonets and mustard gas.  (Appropriately enough, I’ll place in parenthesis the obligatory reference to covert goals, much of which is motivated by the oil industry, and thus the low oil prices are not desirable.) Of course, there are other uses for oil, so it’ll not go completely out of style – unless someone comes up with a replacement for plastics.

Continuing the theme under a new name, Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com believes he may have found evidence of another scandal, much like the VW scam:

Samsung likes to brag about its ‘smart’ televisions. Well, maybe they’re a little too smart for their own good. Drawing an uncomfortable parallel with Volkswagen’s emission rigging scheme, the European Commission is now investigating the South-Korean company to figure out whether its televisions’ are designed to modify their power consumption when they detect that they are being tested for energy efficiency. This alleged fraud has been uncovered by independent labs, once again.

From his source at the guardian:

The European commission says it will investigate any allegations of cheating the tests and has pledged to tighten energy efficiency regulations to outlaw the use of so-called “defeat devices” in TVs or other consumer products, after several EU states raised similar concerns.

Which sounds very upright, doesn’t it?  Outlawing defeat devices, that is.  Except we’re really talking consumer fraud here, and so there’s a law already in place to cover the situation.

But as an engineer, my question is this: why are the test engineers disclosing their test environment to the development engineers?  That’s madness barely understandable, and I do mean barely.  Additionally, the testing should cover a very wide range of conditions in order to understand the behavior of the device as conditions change – it’s close to insanity to suggest that recognition of a test environment is even possible for responsible testing.

At this point, it’s really on the test engineers to explain how the device manufacturers can possibly discern the difference between real environments and test environments, and why their test environments should be detectable.

Malcolm Gladwell addresses the tide of school shootings as well. His thesis is that this is a version of riot behavior spread over time and space.  I suspect this piece and Dowd’s earlier piece actually work together to some extent, as Dowd’s would provide an important communications element.  Gladwell doesn’t suggest, however, that these are just sexually deprived young men.

Newswise reports that melanin is retained during fossilization of mammals:

“We have now studied the tissues from fish, frogs, and tadpoles, hair from mammals, feathers from birds, and ink from octopus and squids,” said Caitlin Colleary, a doctoral student of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study. “They all preserve melanin, so it’s safe to say that melanin is really all over the place in the fossil record. Now we can confidently fill in some of the original color patterns of these ancient animals.” …

The researchers said microscopic structures traditionally believed to be fossilized bacteria are in fact melanosomes — organelles within cells that contain melanin, the pigment that gives colors to hair, feathers, skin, and eyes.

I wonder if this can be combined with modern scanning techniques for high volume processing.

(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com)

Steve Benen catches up to me after word comes that Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is too moderate to be Speaker of the House.

Having my second head cold in three months, Deb & I decided to watch THE MONSTER MAKER tonight.  It had some good acting in it, but the plot was uninspiring and the bad guy was decidedly unbalanced, rather than interestingly avaricious.  The guy in the monkey suit didn’t get a credit, despite a courageous effort, and the bad guy’s haircut was subtly awful, which we didn’t realize until halfway into the movie, and then couldn’t take our eyes off it.

Oh, and the special effects were actually subtle and well done.  I did notice that.  They just needed a better script.  Rotten Tomatoes’ Audience score is a … 3.  Which may be unfair – I’ve seen far worse in the horror series we’re grinding through.  But it wasn’t good.

I’ve wondered and dreamed about this for years.  The Materials Project doesn’t test new materials – it calculates them.

To date [The Materials Project] has calculated the basic set of properties for more than 58,000 compounds, says lead developer of The Materials Project Anubhav Jain, who is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – a lot of stuff, but only a start to the vision of sourcing new materials at a few key strokes.

(Leigh Phillips, NewScientist, 26 September 2015, paywall)

Definitely a site for professionals, not passive readers like me – but it looks fascinating not only as a repository of results, but …

It has also recently launched an app that allows anyone to dream up a compound and submit it to Jain for computation. Another enables you to input the qualities you desire and then uses machine learning to suggest compounds that fit. These tools are designed so that anyone can begin with a handful of atoms and a rough idea of a material they want to make and begin generating ideas for compounds. Personal jetpack, anyone?

For a materials scientist tired of throwing atoms at a wall and hoping they stick, this has to be the dream come to reality.  Apparently a genomic computation approach is used, as simulating reality in every detail is well beyond the capabilities of today’s computers – certain simplifications are made and this, I presume, forces some hunting about for materials with given properties in certain conditions.

Along with enjoying the idea of calculating what you need, rather than slopping about in a lab, I also found this bit interesting:

[The Materials Project] s part of a much wider Materials Genome Initiative coordinated by the US federal government. Just about every US research outfit and government agency with an interest in science is involved, from Harvard University to the Department of Defense to NASA. Since 2011, $250 million has flowed into the scheme, much of it spent on powerful computers that will “support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost”.

So once again, the US Government¹ is playing a key, probably indispensable part in advancing the state of science and the nation.  Having read REASON Magazine for far too long, I can hear the railing about interference in business and how business would have accomplished the same from here.

Guys, it’d be a private database held closely by P&G – if it even came into existence.

¹Random quote: “The business of America is Business.” – C. Coolidge.  Although History Central gives me to understand Cal believed government should interfere as little as possible in business; the quote is apropos in an alternative sense.