Author Archives: Hue White

It has always been important to me to seek unconventional viewpoints. Before the Internet era, one of my favorite magazine subscriptions was to World Press Review (now known as WorldPress.org), which reprinted articles printed in newspapers and magazines world-wide – except those in the United States. Reason Magazine also fell into that category for a while, as did the venerable Whole Earth Review. So, too, did The Daily Dish, with Andrew Sullivan being a gay conservative Brit living in the United States. The fresh eye, not yet entrenched in the inevitable societal patterns, will see facets unremarked by the familiar eye, which may be banal or may give rise to exciting insight. A similar phenomenon comes in programming with the aphorism fresh eyes, which simply means bringing in someone unfamiliar with the code for a review.

And now a blog that is just going dormant has come to my attention, SaudiInIran, a blog written by a young Saudi woman who, until the recent tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, was living in Iran, studying the culture.  I haven’t had a lot of time to survey the blog, but this caught my attention:

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to negotiate myself into a zoorkhaneh. The term literally means ‘House of Strength’, and refers to an ancient Persian institution where athletes practice rigorous regiment training in a domed structure, a sort of traditional gymnasium (the zoorkhaneh). As a system of athletics originally intended to train warriors, it dates back to the Parthian era and is currently recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s longest-running forms of such training. Although there were efforts to curb the sport, first during the modernisation campaigns of the Pahlavi era due to it being a ‘relic of the past’, and then shortly after the Islamic revolution due to its pre-Islamic origins, it is currently promoted as varzesh-e bastani (ancient sport) and is a symbol of Iranian culture and pride for many. In their contemporary form, zoorkhaneh rituals blend elements of pre-Islamic Persian culture (including Zoroastrianism and Mithraism) with the spirituality evident in Shi’a Islam and Sufism. While difficult to do it justice in words, the sport is ritualistic in essence and consists of a series of exercises combining martial arts, physical aptitude and special skills which are practiced against the backdrop of sacred poetry chanted by a musician, with drums and bells being sounded to mark the beginning of the different sections.

The balance of the entry is a wonderful view from the outside of a Persian institution of which I had never heard. I don’t know if the balance of the blog is as interesting, but if you like unusual viewpoints, Saudi In Iran may be worth your time.

AL Monitor presents an interview with the blogger, Sara Masry, here.

This is exactly the premise of her popular blog, A Saudi in Iran. Masry has written extensively about her various encounters with Iranians as a means to break Arab stereotypes of the country. “As the political scene got more and more tense over the past few years, I felt there’s just one narrative of Iran — and it’s mainly a political one. There’s no disconnect between political and human aspects … politics is one thing, but from my [Iranian] friends — the people I know — other things I see on social media is not how Iran is,” she said.

Masry said this view is mutual. In her telling, many Iranians see Saudi Arabia solely as a puritanical Wahhabist state. Confronting these mirroring stereotypes was what compelled her to move to Iran in the first place. “I felt going there would be the ultimate thing, to see it in person and actually live there and at the same time [see] how people react to me as a Saudi. Obviously there’s this whole thing between Saudi Arabia and Iran — or Arabs and Iranians. I felt like this is something that should be put to the test. I was really happy with the results that I got.” She added, “It’s very important that we tap into our common ground and stop viewing each as the ‘other.’”

The sanctions against Iran have been lifted, which makes it timely to consider their effects. While their purpose was to modify the behavior of Iran’s leaders, it’s worth considering unintended consequences, and to this point Abbas Edalat, professor of computer science in both London and Tehran, speaks in NewScientist’s (20 February 2016, paywall) One Minute Interview section:

What impact did sanctions have?

Ironically, virtually none on the government, but for many ordinary people they were devastating. Because the Iranian banking system was cut off from the rest of the world, vital medicines could not be paid for. A lot of cancer patients died. For a couple of decades, researchers couldn’t download software from the US or buy vital equipment. As sanctions deepened, they could not even pay for journal subscriptions. US researchers were barred from visiting or giving advice without permission, and a lot of Iranian researchers could not get visas to travel to the US or to Europe. It was very difficult to do any collaborative work.

And yet Iranian science seems in relatively rude health. How come?

Scientists in Iran took the view that failure was not an option. They would just try to get around the problems posed by sanctions – smuggling in the part they needed, building it themselves or devising ways to do without it. They innovated.

They innovated, which might be best considered as they evolved. Using the language of evolutionary biology, selection pressures were brought to bear on Iran, and they adapted to them.

Frankly, this had not occurred to me, but I presume most direct observers of Iran had noted it. But do our political leaders? We advocate for sanctions as a peaceful approach to stopping aggressive countries who do not share our ideology, but we never consider the possibility that a sanction may result in the development of a better technology than our own, in part or in total.

This seems to me to be an underappreciated risk of the strategy – and something to think about.

And don’r forget this guy.

The Big Heat (1953) has occupied a bit of our time of late, a Fritz Lang film starring Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin. Ford is a policeman faced with a nightmare situation, and we witness his reactions, his choices, and how those choices can damn a soul – or save it.

This is a dark bit of lightning in a bottle, featuring ordinary, yet memorable, characters faced with the problem of crime overcoming law and order, and what to do about it. It is a classic treatment in that, while horrid violence resulting in death or ugly scarring occurs, it is not emphasized as it is today; the important element is the influence the violence has on the lives connected to those afflicted, and the implications for society at large. The lessons have to do with greed and heedlessness and the chaos it inflicts on society.

Technically an astute movie as well, it’s hard to find anything to really criticize.  The dialog might have been better, but the plot specializes in the tension of choice, not in the question of who: we know, or can credibly guess, those responsible for the crimes, and their motivations. The tension comes from the decisions facing those who need to respond to the antagonists, and whether or not they are fit for their roles.

NASA Heliophysics (one of my favorite words, BTW) has released a video created from observations by the Solar Dynamics Observatory of the Sun at 171 angstroms.  About 3 minutes in, a researcher begins to explain what we’re seeing.  Fascinating, gorgeous stuff.

This also serves to remind me that one of the disappointments of the Obama Administration is their apparent lack of interest in space exploration.  For example, NewScientist (20 February 2016) is reporting the agency would suffer a funding cut under the latest (and last) proposed budget by the current administration, compared to Congress’ final provision last year.  Over at The Planetary Society, Casey Dreier gets into the details:

The President proposes to cut the space agency by roughly $260 million, down to $19.025 billion in 2017. On the plus side, this represents the highest-ever request from the Obama administration, representing a 2.7 percent increase over their 2016 request. That’s a step in the right direction, though NASA needs to grow, not shrink, if we want it to achieve the goals set out for it by the nation. …

Well, we’re five for five. This is the fifth year in a row that the White House has proposed cutting NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

While every other science division at NASA would receive a funding boost in this budget, Planetary Science, the year after flying by Pluto and confirming flowing water on Mars, earns a $110 million cut.

Now, credit where credit is due. The request is for $1.52 billion, which, compared to previous requests, is a marked improvement and very much a step in the right direction. We’ve been advocating for at least $1.5 billion for this program for years now, and it is satisfying to see this number reflected back in the President’s budget.

But the fact of the matter is that this program has been underfunded for years and needs to rebuild. Congress stepped up and provided $1.631 billion last year, and that number needs to continue to improve in order to position NASA for a spectacular decade of planetary exploration in the 2020s. As expected, most of the cut appears to impact the Europa mission (which would get about $50 million in 2017, down from $175 million in 2016). The Administration is sticking with its intent to launch in the late 2020s. The request tones down some of the optimistic planning for the Europa flyby mission set forth in last year’s budget. NASA runs the numbers to assume an Atlas V launch, not SLS, though SLS is very much under consideration.

This is not the first such disappointment.  Fortunately, Congress does tend to resolve the budget in NASA’s favor, not the Administration’s, although whether this is an honest belief that a stronger NASA is a national asset or simply a partisan reaction to the Obama Administration’s activities is not clear to me.  Which reminds me of Andrew Sullivan’s general commentary on Obama’s performance vs the GOP: Meep meep!  Perhaps this is precisely what they want to happen…

And here’s the ultimate aim of astronomy: beautiful pictures.

(h/t Tom Yulsman @ ImaGeo/Discover Magazine, who has some lovely information on his blog post.)

Steve Benen has been taking some delight in the antics of Senator Grassley, who represents our neighbors to the south, aka the good people of Iowa.  In particular, Senator Grassley, running for re-election this year, is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

But the GOP senator’s support for an unprecedented blockade against any Supreme Court nominee, sight unseen, has cast Grassley in an even less flattering light. The Iowa Republican, unable to defend his ridiculous antics, has become so embarrassed that last week he “raised a binder to cover his face before hurriedly retreating” from reporters on Capitol Hill with questions about his behavior.

But I’d like to say I’m 100% behind the good Senator’s actions regardless of what he does. Why?

If he reverses field and does begin a normal procedure for Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Scalia, then the people of Iowa will know that the Senator has proper respect for the Constitution and they can go on to evaluate him on his merits.

And if he does choose to indulge in this scandalous (is it too much to say illegal?) and unexplainable neglect of his Constitutional duties, the people of Iowa, in particular those of a conservative bent, will know his mind and can begin to choose his replacement, as I’m sure the vast majority of Iowans have nothing but the utmost respect for the Constitution and those servants of the people whose conduct is informed by the Constitution. While a Democratic replacement might be considered to be a good lesson to the GOP, in truth I merely desire a Senator beholden to no covert personality (as it appears most of current GOP Senators have become), who properly respects the Constitution, and is dedicated to proper governance, and not to the current bout of game-playing and incompetence to which we are currently witness.

So who and when decided two spaces after a period is no longer acceptable? All of a sudden I have to edit my posts to remove any double spaces or the formatting potentially goes to hell. This is seriously annoying.

On this thread, I joined Andrew Sullivan in worrying about the effect of the commercial world on the content of Internet publications, and now a couple of more developments come to light.

First, ptressel @ The Daily Kos reports on the demise of Al Jazeera America, starting with this great contrast:

When other news outlets were obsessed with Football! or Oscars! or political horserace!, AJAM was writing about lack of police training in dealing with the mentally ill, or that that PTSD and depression is driving an epidemic of suicide among firefighters (to pick just two recent stories).  If you read the Overnight News Digest diaries, you’ve seen AJAM stories there frequently.

AJAM is closing for financial reasons:

Great journalism doesn’t always draw a big audience. That’s what happened here at Al Jazeera America (AJAM), where superb reporting, bolstered by a first-rate opinion section, found a following, just not one big enough to interest major advertisers.

— David Cay Johnston, The way news should be done

And he continues from a broader viewpoint:

Independent news organizations are hurting across the board. The problem is not a bad economy, it’s not the 1%…it’s the Internet that’s the culprit, and our penchant for free content. We’ve gotten used to advertiser-supported, non-subscription content — we watch shows on YouTube, we read our monthly allotment of free NYT articles, we ignore content behind paywalls, or look for someone to copy it out and repost it. But purely ad supported content isn’t paying the bills for real journalism. So what we get instead is infotainment, scandal, shock-value — we get what sells ads.

I think this is a great point, and I know that, while I subscribe to a number of magazines, I do not currently subscribe to any online-only content¹, instead depending on free articles and using up monthly free allotments. There’s nothing precisely wrong with such an approach, but, as ptressel points out, it turns out there are long-term consequences to the current dominant content model of the Internet.

In contrast, recall Stewart Brand’s assertion

Information wants to be free!

While the original context was somewhat different, the phrase enjoyed a brief period of great popularity amongst the technorati. but has since faded (or at least in my perception). The problem is that production of information can be a costly business. The original context of Mr. Brand’s slogan had to do with scientific information², wherein scientific journals can be a costly investment; the Internet offers a way to lower the cost. Similar arguments apply to information outside the scientific realm. But we’re seeing the downside of this claim: the contamination of information with commercial interests, where the accuracy of the information becomes a secondary consideration to the private interests of the sponsors. (The sponsors need not be commercial, but can come from other sectors as well.)

Second, in the previous post on this thread, Science was reported to have mixed sponsored content with real content. Now this is happening at another online publication, Treehugger.com. I observed this just a day or two ago, but I had not been at the website for a while. They are intermixing commercial advertising with the links to their articles. True, each commercial link is clearly marked with a small, green “SPONSORED”, but these advertisements are intermixed with the standard TreeHugger content. In a very visual manner, they are breaking the old newspaper rule about separating editorial content from advertiser influence, and while maybe the reader should be on their toes when reading any website, I still find it jarring that a website with an explicit purpose of doing good is not properly segregating commercial articles from the important content of the website.

Stay tuned as the parsimony of the typical Internet user continues to influence the information we seek and – sometimes – find.

¹I did subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s now-dormant The Dish. Andrew indicated in public postings that they thought their model was working, but there was a dependency – explicit – on Andrew’s personality/temperament as an important draw for subscribers, and when his health fell apart, the model did as well. Which is not to condemn the approach – simply be aware that the model, like most, has its weaknesses.

²NewScientist (20 February 2016) reports that Sci-Hub.io

… claims to have 48 million journal papers, and that its mission is to “remove all barriers in the way of science”. It was set up in 2011 by researcher Alexandra Elbakyan, thought to be based in Russia, after she couldn’t afford papers behind paywalls.

Tonight my Arts Editor and I chose to frequent a local eatery for our evening repast. Having waited the requisite half hour for a table, we ordered appetizer, soup, and entree, and the first two eventually arrived, although it seemed to take longer than usual.  It was a Friday night, after all, and the place was full to capacity.

Then my entree – a flatbread drizzled with chicken and soaked in BBQ sauce – arrived. A single bite revealed that it had sat perhaps overlong on the counter post-baking, and we asked the waitress to return it to the kitchen for a bit of reheating.

Perhaps five minutes later a young lady stopped at our table, introduced herself as the manager, and, with a slight degree of mortification, delivered the sad news that the flatbread had been forgotten and was now fired beyond redemption; it had been condemned to Limbo, at best, and she had ordered its replacement forthwith. We laughed with her (inasmuch as mortification can be laughed with), expressed good will, and returned to our conversation.

Five minutes on, the manager returned to our table, and crouched in front of our table. Now, you must be given to understand, this lady is not a particularly tall lady, so when I say that, upon attaining her crouch, she then leaned towards our table, you must see what we saw: a pair of goggling eyes, a forehead, and some windswept blonde hair. From this position, she announced, in a slightly muffled voice, and with a definite increase in mortification, that she really, really didn’t want to be here, but that there would be a further delay:

“There was an, um, collision in the kitchen, and now your entree is floor-pizza. I’ve ordered another replacement.”

Being of an occasionally slightly sadistic disposition, I assured her that this was merely my birthday dinner treat, and all would be well, I trusted, and, indeed, a flatbread pizza did eventually appear at our table, along with assurances that we need not pay for the evening’s entertainment.  We dined, with pleasure, and will return in the future.

If only in hopes of more entertainment.

As Mr. Trump continues to steamroll his opponents, Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare expresses his disgust with the candidate:

Fourth, even as he endeavors to undo the Bush and Obama administrations’ commitment to separating this country’s engagement with Islam from its struggle with its enemies. Trump openly flirts with America’s actual adversaries. I don’t know what to make of his repeated kind words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but I think it’s fair to say that Trump has compromised himself with them. He has shown that for all his tough talk, at least where dictators are concerned, he’s actually a bit like a loud barking dog who dissolves in slobbery affection the moment some treat or praise gets thrown his way. Putin is not a fool. He has noticed, I’m sure, that he has gained a would-be client strongman in Trump, and that he has bought him unbelievably cheaply. He has noticed, I am also sure, that with only a modest amount of public ego stroking—a few stray words, really—he bought himself an ally at the top of the GOP field. He has had to pay a lot more, hard cash actually, for his European political allies. Trump likes to boast of the great deals he makes, but he sold himself to Putin for a pittance—and that has national security implications too.

I suspect a cartoon of Trump being Putin’s butt-monkey might be in order. Oh, wait, my Arts Editor has something handy…

Our thanks to South Park, of course.

Iran just ran their first election since the nuclear deal was signed.  It’s interesting to read the run up to the election – and see the (possibly justified) concerns about foreign conspiracies. For example, as reported by AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami, Supreme Leader Khamenei warning about the Americans and the British:

Khamenei said that in the last 37 years, since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s enemies, including US officials, have attempted to dissuade Iranians from voting by describing the election process in the country as being useless. Khamenei now believes, however, that the United States has learned from experience that taking a direct position against Iran’s elections has had the opposite of the desired effect, prompting Iranians to show up and vote.

“Based on this,” Khamenei said, “the Americans have been silent in these elections.” His comments made an interesting contrast to his Feb. 17 speech, in which he said that “British radio is giving the people of Tehran instructions to vote” for specific individuals. …

Khamenei also called some observers’ dismissal of US “infiltration” into Iran “unwarranted and unjustified.” He warned that sometimes an individual may be an agent of infiltration and repeat the statements of the enemy without realizing they are in the service of the enemy.

One such instance of repeating the statements of enemy countries and “adopting the enemy’s political discourse,” according to Khamenei, is rhetoric that divides Iranian camps into hard-liners and moderates. He said the implication of doing so is that hard-liners are people who are bound to the Islamic Revolution and the principles of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and moderates are people who will surrender and compromise with foreigners.

An anonymous AL Monitor article from Iran notes further suspicion concerning the backing of the moderates.  Their strategy includes the publication of a list of moderate candidates, a ticket if you will, and a response:

Amid the launch of the “No to these 5” (hard-liners on Jannati’s ticket) campaign on social media, prominent dissident Akbar Ganji and BBC Persian separately published articles that examined and analyzed this strategy to sideline hard-liners. Hard-liners were quick to seize on the latter as an opportunity to hit back at Rafsanjani, thereby undermining the “No to these 5” campaign.

Hard-liners subsequently started branding the “No to these 5” campaign — as well as Rafsanjani and leading members of his list — as “English” and directed by the BBC. In this vein, the hard-line Vatan-e Emrooz newspaper wrote, “The plans for preventing Ayatollah Jannati, Yazdi and Mesbah [Yazdi] from getting into the assembly are being managed by the BBC. The formulas of this British channel and its staff for not allowing these clerics to get into the assembly signal their long-term plans.” Vatan-e Emrooz added, “They are seeking to create a new makeup in the Assembly of Experts, one which gives Rafsanjani the upper hand.” Moreover, the hard-line daily published a picture of the five hard-line ayatollahs and deemed them “anti-British.” Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the Iranian military, has also harshly reacted to this controversy, saying, “If those who are being supported by Britain and the United States do not condemn these two countries’ meddling in Iran’s elections, they are considered [tried and] convicted.”

Khatami, the interim Tehran Friday prayer leader who is targeted by the campaign, has also spoken out. “British and foreign media outlets are asking our people not to vote for Jannati, Yazdi, Mesbah [Yazdi], Alamolhoda and I. This is none of your business; you nosy people should know that these five are the top choices of our people,” Khatami asserted, adding, “My sin is that I have given the seditionists a hard time during my Friday sermons.” One day later, Khatami stated, “I’m sure that their [Rafsanjani’s] list won’t be able to attract votes, as they are thought of as supporters of the sedition [unrest in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election] and are as hated as the [former] shah.”

The fact this is anonymous blows a little cold for me.

Despite the veiled warnings, polling indicates the Iranians would prefer a moderate government, as noted in this AL Monitor article by Barbara Slavin:

Of those polled, 67% said they approved of Rouhani’s job performance, while only 18% gave him a negative rating. Despite the fact that the Iranian economy has not yet rebounded following the recent nuclear deal, Rouhani saw his favorable ratings go up by 13% from a previous poll last July.

The survey showed a wide variety of political sympathies but strongest support for Reformists among the choices on offer. Some 20% of respondents said they preferred the Reformist camp, while only 12% identified with a more hard-line faction known as the Principlists. Interestingly, 44% of those polled said they weren’t sure what group they liked and 11% expressed no preference at all.

And the results?  This BBC article’s title gives a subtle hint:

Iran election: Reformists win all 30 Tehran seats

Early results gave former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate conservative, and Mr Rouhani the most votes for the assembly, which is composed of mostly elder and senior clerics.

This stunning election result will make a difference in Iran’s engagement with the wider world.

President Rouhani’s hand has been strengthened in parliament to help open his country to greater trade and investment. That will help him, and others in his reformist camp, to deepen the dialogue with the West, which began with negotiations on a landmark nuclear deal.

Vox‘s Max Fisher opines:

When nuclear negotiations got started, there was concern that Iranians would reject any deal as a humiliation, given that it would likely require surrendering most of the nuclear program and submitting to embarrassing inspections.

Rouhani got around this problem by promising that the deal would bring economic relief and an opening with the outside world, which would itself bring Iranians dignity and pride.

It worked. The election became a mechanism for demonstrating that Rouhani’s strategy is popular, for giving Rouhani’s allies more power to continue that strategy, and for weakening the hard-liners who opposed the nuclear deal.

This has been reflected in Western coverage of the elections. The New York Times’s Tehran-based Thomas Erdbrink, for example, wrote of the elections’ results, “The most reactionary voices in Iranian politics are losing ground to moderates buoyed by the sweeping nuclear deal with big powers, including the United States.”

But a bit of realism:

Hard-liners might be down in Iran’s elected bodies — they lost the presidency and lost their majority in parliament — but they still hold the powerful unelected bodies I mentioned earlier. They’re under growing political pressure to accommodate moderates, but they’re still very powerful themselves.

“Here is the rub,” [Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s senior Iran analyst] told me. “The moderates have more wind in their sails, but the overall balance of power remains unaltered. The moderates’ victory is above all symbolic. Rouhani still needs other power centers and the conservatives to advance his agenda.”

Will US Congressional leaders even take notice of the electoral result, or does Senator Cruz’s promise to “tear up” the nuclear deal still hold firm? Appraising Iran is a complex undertaking, and while I enjoy reading and learning about them, I’d hesitate to take any judgments on them. However, without a doubt any move towards a more moderate government is a positive sign, and the fact that the nuclear deal is seen as advancing that cause should rise quiet hopes of Iran becoming less and less a force for disaster in the Mid East.

The deadline for my whitehouse.gov petition has come and gone, and I am unsurprised to say that we failed to reach the 100,000 signature level required to attract the attention of the Administration: in point of fact, we attained 15 signatures.

I am not disappointed, though.  The point was to get the idea out there and, hopefully, a few people did start thinking about coal as a dangerous material, subject to national controls analogous to uranium, rather than just a source of energy.

The headcold persists, the car has a flat tire, the cat remains ill and the vet won’t return our phone calls. The solution?

Another movie. Of course. This time it’s The Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951), a surprisingly adequate semi-sequel to the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (any of a number of productions qualify). A friend of Jekyll agrees to act as trustee for the child of Dr. Jekyll and his murdered wife once the mob has dealt with the remorseless Mr. Hyde. 30 years later, Jekyll Jr. (we’ll just call him JJ) is conducting his own research when the trustee gives him the notes of his father. JJ then sails off into madness as he continues the research.

Or does he? We’re surprised when the experiments don’t work … until they do after a mysterious addition while JJ sleeps. The result is upsetting for JJ’s fiancee, but she sticks with him. But the mystery thickens as friends of JJ’s late mother accuse him of a horrendous crime. Now the trustee, who also runs a sanatorium for the mad, must take JJ under his care .. and retain his trusteeship.

We were surprised, yet disappointed. If the writers had maintained the mystery as late as possible, it would have been much more gripping; the secret at the center of the plot is mildly clever, and that’s all that’s really needed if it’s concealed as late as possible while having likable characters. And we do like JJ and some of the other characters, including the fiancee. But we learn the secret of who’s manipulating JJ and for what reasons far too early, and so our problem-solving faculties get far too little of a workout.

But it was still fun for my negative IQ.

Dr. Carson has been running a consistent last, or at least near the bottom, in the GOP nominating contests so far, which makes his persistence puzzling.  Today we had the honor of an automated phone call from his campaign. His advocate claims to be Kirk Cameron (an evangelical Christian actor), who made the following statement (possibly paraphrased):

I know Ben Carson listens to God, and I believe God listens to Ben Carson.

A quick check with my wife suggests this may be overstepping the bounds of good taste for evangelical Christians, at least the sort she grew up with. Is the campaign getting desperate to draw the attention of the voters? Or is this just an inadvertent misstep for a candidate who experienced a brief flurry of excitement, but has not – for whatever obscure reason – not been able to retain the initial attention as the louder, more brash bull moose of the season have crashed through the underbrush?

Last night we saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), the John Barrymore version; according to Wikipedia, this is the fourth rendition. This is a silent movie with an incredibly irrelevant organ (and later symphonic) accompaniment. My Arts Editor and I are in agreement – the silence was quite disagreeable, and this quality was enhanced by the organ.

This is not to take away from the efforts of the makeup artists and special effects engineers, who did excellent work in creating the execrable Mr. Hyde, nor that of Mr. Barrymore, who evokes an authentic revulsion when he beats Mr. Carew to death with a club, the highlight of a good, if not great, performance. But, in the end, the odd pacing and lack of interaction via audio is sufficient to make this movie disagreeable.

Courtesy SpaceWeather.com comes this apparently useless information:

Researchers have long known that solar activity and cosmic rays have a yin-yang relationship. As solar activity declines, cosmic rays intensify. Lately, solar activity has been very low indeed. Are cosmic rays responding? The answer is “yes.”

You can see the incurious shrugging (and whining about the cost of measuring) from here, can you not?  So, don’t wait for it …

Cosmic rays, which are accelerated toward Earth by distant supernova explosions and other violent events, are an important form of space weather. They can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Among patients who have an implanted cardioverter – defibrillator (ICD), the aggregate number of life-saving shocks appears to be correlated with the number of cosmic rays reaching the ground.

Why the relationship?  A workmanlike explanation is given on SpaceWeather.com, why should I spoil their fun?  Go read it!  But I will steal one of their lovely photos, which may be the best reason of all for High Frontier explorations:

A reader and climate scientist contributes some information concerning this thread. First up, a new organization backed by Bill Gates and other corporate forces, concentrating on development of basic science and technologies for a low-emission future, the BREAKTHROUGH ENERGY COALITION:

Technology will help solve our energy issues. The urgency of climate change and the energy needs in the poorest parts of the world require an aggressive global program for zero-emission energy innovation. The new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions, and investors. Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone. The existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks, and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilize investment in truly transformative energy solutions for the future. We can’t wait for the system to change through normal cycles.

Founders include Bill Gates of Microsoft, Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, Ratan Tata of Tata (India), Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and other corporate titans. It’s interesting that on their website I’ve been unable to find any calls for higher taxes on undesirable forms of energy provision, or other regulatory attempts to herd the general populace along towards the proper goal. I’m not sure if they see such as a futile attempt in one of the most important nations of the planet, or if they see themselves as fulfilling the role themselves. I suspect they don’t:

But in the current business environment, the risk-reward balance for early-stage investing in potentially transformative energy systems is unlikely to meet the market tests of traditional angel or VC investors – not until the underlying economics of the energy sector shift further towards clean energy. Experience indicates that even the most promising ideas face daunting commercialization challenges and a nearly impassable Valley of Death between promising concept and viable product, which neither government funding nor conventional private investment can bridge. …

We are committed to doing our part and filling this capital need by coming together in a new coalition. We will form a network of private capital committed to building a structure that will allow informed decisions to help accelerate the change to the advanced energy future our planet needs. Success requires a partnership of increased government research, with a transparent and workable structure to objectively evaluate those projects, and committed private-sector investors willing to support the innovative ideas that come out of the public research pipeline.

Together we will focus on early stage companies that have the potential of an energy future that produces near zero carbon emissions and provides everyone with affordable, reliable energy. We will invest based on a few core investment principles …

The New York Times covers this new effort here. While the above web site makes it clear they’re investors, here it’s more baldly put:

“It won’t be as fast, but we do expect to make money out of this thing,” Mr. Gates said of the fund. “If you can drive a new approach, then the energy economy is absolutely gigantic. Now, getting it scaled up fast enough, so that you benefit from your invention or your trade secrets, that is tricky.”

The New York Times Blog supported Q&A with Mr. Gates. This particular question & answer gets to the heart of one issue:

Why does Gates ignore market-ready solutions that are at hand and ready to deploy? In so doing, he ignores hundreds of studies and scientists. While we need more research, Gates does a disservice by diminishing the potential for today’s solutions. —Andy Olsen

Gates: The rich countries have provided incentives and subsidies for solar and wind, and that’s had the beneficial effect of not only getting the installed capacity reducing CO2, but also getting the volume learning curve for those technologies to move costs down. Solar electric in particular has come down a lot. So, in some places, up to a certain percentage, it’s an economic part of the system.

People shouldn’t ignore the fact, though, that the demand is still somewhat driven by the tax credits and portfolio standards. So we still have quite a ways to go, particularly when you’re trying to get from 20 percent of the energy sources up to the eventual 100 percent we need, where then you run into the big challenge of intermittency [dips and peaks in power as wind and solar sources vary] and the cost of adding storage that would deal with that. This makes the economics dramatically tougher because batteries haven’t improved that much. Now I and many other people are investing in companies that are going to try and see what we can do with batteries. But it’s not guaranteed that their price will come down a lot. So solar and wind are great, but as they exist today, for countries like India, either in terms of cost or reliability, they aren’t going to get used substantially without innovations in cost and storage or alternative approaches.

On the technical end of things, our reader provides a link to Scientific American concerning the latest thinking on the Hiatus:

An apparent slowing in the rise of global temperatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is not explained by climate models, was referred to as a “hiatus” or a “pause” when first observed several years ago. Climate-change sceptics have used this as evidence that global warming has stopped. But in June last year, a study in Science claimed that the hiatus was just an artefact which vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.

Now a prominent group of researchers is countering that claim, arguing in Nature Climate Change that even after correcting these biases the slowdown was real.

“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”

Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory.

Good scientists all, they worry about everything:

“It’s important to explain that,” Solomon says. “As scientists, we are curious about every bump and wiggle in that curve.”

But what of education? I ran across an article in the latest Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2016) by Matthew Nisbet, entitled “Shifting the Conversation about Climate Change“, unfortunately not available online. A couple of tidbits, the first being something we should all know (any errors are probably mine):

Surveys of climate scientists and comprehensive reviews of thousands of peer-reviewed studies confirm the same basic fact: at least 97 percent [my emphasis] of climate scientists say that human-caused climate change is happening [citation omitted]. … Yet recent surveys find that only one out of ten Americans correctly estimate agreement among climate scientists as greater than 90 percent [citation omitted].

This is cited not merely as a fact, but in the context that many members of the public are not truly aware of the scientific unanimity on this point. Matthew goes on to briefly cover various communications methods used to communicate important information to the public, with this summary paragraph:

Across each of their experimental conditions, boosting awareness of scientific consensus increased beliefs that climate change is happening, that it is human caused, and that it is a worrisome problem.  These shifts in beliefs in turn increased subjects’ support for policy action, with some of the biggest increases observed among Republicans, who tend to be more dismissive of the issue [citation omitted].  Interestingly, in comparison to the tested metaphors, subjects who received either the simple text statement or the pie chart displayed the greatest increase in their beliefs.

So it’s not so much denial as ignorance; and that once the true magnitude of consensus is understood, most people begin to understand this is a truly important issue.

As good a reason as any to write a blog.

A reader quotes concerning any apocalypse,

“I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”

http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scribd.com%2Fdoc%2F24008084%2FThe-Art-of-Literature-and-Commonsense%23scribd&h=aAQE89wjI

Worth meditating upon, yet I cannot help but note that the scenario – falling from a tall building – has an immediacy standing out from the paper such to render it an extra dimension in the reader’s mind, and yet that very immediacy damages the metaphor’s power in that, at least in the United States today, most of us wander about the landscape with little sense of the mortality creeping up our ankles.  Yet, even as I write this, I must acknowledge that today is not yesterday, and perhaps the reader of past centuries would have felt more keenly the power of the presented metaphor, whereas we have had our sensitivities blunted by the advance of medicine.

Casting about further in the essay, I see I must draw my Art Editor’s attention to this passage:

In this divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not thrive.Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how dutifully it mimics theconvolutions of our dreams and the quantums of our mental associations, can never reallyexpress what is utterly foreign to their nature, considering that the main delight of thecreative mind is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seeminglydominant generalization. When commonsense is ejected together with its calculatingmachine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. Statistics pluck up their skirts and sweep outin a huff. Two and two no longer make four, because it is no longer necessary for them tomake four. If they had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had beenmerely a matter of habit: two and two used to make four in the same way as guests invitedto dinner expect to make an even number. But I invite my numbers to a giddy picnic andthen nobody minds whether two and two make five or five minus some quaint fraction.Man at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled bygods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt soinclined. He accepted that inevitable indeterminism which they now and then introduced,called it magic, and calmly proceeded to count the skins he had bartered by chalking barson the wall of his cave. The gods might intrude, but he at least was resolved to follow asystem that he had invented for the express purpose of following it.

It should appeal to her sense that mathematics is little more than an intellectual folly.

Returning to this intermittent thread concerning story-telling, my Arts Editor and I have been sucked into the new TV show You, Me, and the Apocalypse, and the show illustrates some of what I look for in new drama.  Some of this is novelty: the scenario of a bit of space debris heading for the Earth, with fatal consequences, while not unknown in fiction (for example, the Willis movie Armageddon), is unusual; just as importantly, the approach appears to be unexpected, as we get to watch a person with OCD pursuing his missing wife, a mildly irreverent priest and his new found assistant, and others, some with links, known or not, to others, pursuing their lives in the face of imminent extinction.

As darn near the only thing I can do today, we saw Cry of the Werewolf (1944), a Nina Foch vehicle in which an aged researcher working on werewolves amongst the Romany stumbles across important information concerning the Princess of werewolves, and is murdered for his troubles in New Orleans.  He is found hours after his son returns from research as a chemist in DC, and helps his father’s research assistant begin examining his partially destroyed notes.

Meanwhile, the police get involved, and this is the point where the movie departs the sidewalk for more elevated thoroughfares: as the detective talks on the phone, the door behind him slowly opens.  Oh, is the monster going to get him?  Is a henchcreature going to leap on him all unawares?

No, he’s ready with a gun – “Come out of there!” he shouts, and we’re genuinely surprised as a trope is overturned.  How nice!  Even better, the surprises continue; a gun, casually shown in a drawer, is suddenly useful when a werewolf is ready to attack – wait, where did it go?  The Princess werewolf is … sad that she must kill the blundering janitor?  These and several other unexpected twists in the plot (one even had us exclaiming as we watched) served to elevate the movie from mere horror flick to something a bit more interesting to watch, which helped as, honestly, none of the characters were particularly distinguished¹.  The cinematography was excellent, although a dark basement was suspiciously non-dark in the light of a single match, and the dialog was merely adequate.

Its merits discussed, in the end it still falls flat and fails to crawl from the great well of standard horror flicks, for the simple reason that no particular theme stands clear in the end.  The virtuous lady is rescued, the beast is slain, the bodies are cleaned up – but what light has the movie cast upon our own great moral problems?  None that I can see, and, so while the plot enraptures us with people making unexpected decisions or tropes not troping as expected, in the end we don’t feel like we’ve learned anything important.  And so the movie, like any story with similar failings, does not become part of the great moral landscape of American culture.

¹ A most helpful funeral director is the exception, as he’s most excellently cast and shines forth like a beacon, although none of the cast are the barren rocks of disaster; he simply, in this monochromatic presentation, wears a red sash of panache.

This thread has been dormant for a while, but the Georgia legislature has chosen to reawaken it as it passes the First Amendment Defense Act:

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Title 50 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to state government, so as to prohibit discriminatory action against a person who believes, speaks, or acts in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such marriage; to provide for definitions; to provide for the granting of relief; to provide for construction and application; to provide for waiver of sovereign immunity under certain circumstances; to provide for a short title; to provide for an effective date; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

Jay W. Belle Isle of the Legal Reader has little use for this law:

In a move reminiscent of something one would see in the 1950s, the Georgia Senate just passed a ridiculous piece of… legislation by a 38-14 vote. The Georgia First Amendment Defense Act is highly discriminatory and dangerous. The next step in this blow against basic human rights and dignity is to send the bill, known as FADA, back to the Georgia House. Given that a version of FADA already had unanimous approval in the House, it’s certain that it will pass again and be sent to Georgia’s Gov. Nathan Deal, possibly as early as Monday when the House reconvenes.

FADA is reminiscent of the numerous anti-LGBT bills promulgated in 2015 by bass-ackwards legislators who would like to see a return to a time when men were men, women were barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen and silent unless spoken to and anyone who stepped outside those boundaries was subject to censure and death threats. Guess what? I’m about to step outside those boundaries in a big way. For those who may be uncomfortable with that notion, I suggest a Xanax and a seat belt, because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride, y’all!

But that’s mere commentary. Where does the rubber hit the road? Thanks to RawStory, right here:

A telecom company will be picking up and moving out of Georgia after state lawmakers passed sweeping anti-gay legislation, the New Civil Rights Movement reports.

Decatur-based 373K announced it would be leaving via Twitter. Its founders are outraged over the poorly-named First Amendment Defense Act, which extends legal cover state-wide to individuals and corporations to discriminate against LGBT people and same-sex couples. …

“I’m gay, our CFO is gay, we have people from every walk of life working here,” co-founder Kelvin Williams told NCRM on Saturday. “I’ve got Muslims, Buddhists, atheists here. We’ve got great Christians working for us. They’ve never thought of not serving anyone – that’s not the message of Christ.”

“We don’t tolerate that crap,” he added definitively.

So another push against the framework the Founders designed to build a stable society by attempting to put religion beyond the reach of the law – and a reaction from a corporation (surprisingly hard to track down, I have no idea if this is 10 or 10,000 employees) that made little attempt at diplomacy.

For those of us who believe our principles should have good results, this is interesting in that the corporate world, which depends on forecasting in order to survive, appears to prefer the Federal principles, rather than the religious principles advanced by the GOP. Some might argue that a “good result” depends on which side of argument you reside, yet I think this is sympomatic of short term thinking.Ironically, this is a pernicious problems for public corporations, but this is more a problem in financial reporting; the Personnel departments, as well as the managers, can and should think long term. For them, discrimination means greater potential for failure.

Georgia legislators need to stop jumping every time someone claims to have had their religious sensibilities offended. Perhaps, even, suggest that a religious sensibility is an oxymoron.

(h/t Melissa Summers)

As is tradition, this head cold is spent sleeping and watching movies – so last night we watched THE LADY AND THE MOB (1939).  Featuring a cast of an old lady and six mugs, she observes the beginnings of a protection racket, and, noting its economic impact on herself, demands the authorities remove the racket. They prove dilatory, so she pursues the problem herself, sending for help from a formerly unsavory character.  Beatings are administered, cars dash about emitting terrible clouds of smoke, we have a torture scene with a most terrifying denouement, the lady makes jail, but not bail, and the final corruption is rooted out.  And the introductory kiss …. I do believe the fellow is rooting around for gold down there.

What a little gem!

The star of the show is Fay Bainter, who is new to me. IMDB claims she was born in 1893, so she was only 45-46 for this performance – but the makeup artists achieve the level of a 75 year old lady.  Strong, decisive, oblivious to collateral damage, and taking delight in what she’s doing, she achieves the charisma demanded by her role.  She may, indeed, beat the rap.

The balance of the cast, aside from Ida Lupino, are character actors who know their requirements and fulfill them well, to excellent results; Ida’s part could have been stronger, but she has not enough lines to really do anything but a bit of flash, which is a pity. The cinematography is adequate, the script is very good, the dialogue is mostly spot-on, although sometimes the mugs get to be a little much.

Recommended.

P.S. There are two cars involved in this movie, and the first appears to be … electric!

An abecedarium is an alphabet table.  I ran across this in the Artifact column of Archaeology (March/April 2016):

The first alphabetic writing system was created in the Levant and Sinai Peninsula sometime in the second millennium B.C., probably between 1850 and 1700 B.C., by adapting Egyptian hieroglyphs—a writing system expressing both concept and sound—to represent only sound. This Proto-Sinaitic alphabet is the ancestor of many of the writing systems that developed across the world. Until now, the earliest known alphabet tables, called abecedaries, have been found on cuneiform tablets from Ugarit, in what is now Syria, dating to the thirteenth century b.c. But while studying an undeciphered ostracon found in a tomb at Luxor, Egyptologist Ben Haring of the University of Leiden discovered an abecedary that predates those tablets by two centuries, making it the oldest example ever found.

Is the (anonymous) author suggesting the creators were creating phonetics?  Or is this something else?

Lawfare’s Adam Klein writes an appreciation of his former boss, Justice Scalia:

The first is a firm adherence to his bedrock jurisprudential principles regardless of his policy preferences. For the Justice, the only variable to be discovered in the process of judicial decision was the governing rule of law in each case—not the equities between the parties; not the policy stakes. For him, judging was simply a matter of solving for that variable using the interpretive tools sanctioned by textualism and originalism. As law clerks, our bench memos to the Justice were limited to two pages. No lengthy summaries of the facts; no long discussions of the policy merits of each side’s proposed rule. The only question that mattered was “what is the legal rule that resolves this case?”

A rough but fair measure of any judge’s commitment to principle is how frequently the judge’s legal reasoning leads to a real-world result that diverges from his or her presumed preferences. No judge is perfectly consistent, of course. (Some readers may wish to pause here to gesticulate angrily while shouting “Bush v. Gore! What about Bush v. Gore!” Take a moment and get it out before we move on.) But Justice Scalia accepted what he presumably considered “bad” real-world results with striking frequency—more than any other Justice, I would venture, and often to the exasperation of his conservative allies.

Good article – i can tell, because now I wish I had known the guy.  In some ways, he reminds me of a programmer, although I’m at a loss to express how.

The headcold movie of the evening was Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), starring the iconic Rathbone and Bruce in the lead characters.  Set in WW II at an estate housing emotionally damaged British officers, a junior doctor is attacked – and then the owner of the estate is killed, swiftly followed by his heir.  The next heir is a lovely lass, so now the tension is set, as aristocratic young men who are not serving are not to be truly respected, yes?

Lovely cinematography, fair script, but the pacing was a little out of whack as the ending became rather too long.  And they never did explain why the clock struck 13 times.  And the owner, the first to die, was actually a rather interesting character.  Couldn’t they have killed Lestrade, instead?