Author Archives: Hue White

From the NewScientist (28 February 2015) letters section comes correspondent Martyn Thomas:

Changes in human behaviour may make driverless cars unusable. Why would you wait to cross the road, or pull out at a junction, if you know that the approaching cars are programmed to give way?

I’m having visions of passionless driverless cars in massive traffic jams while people caper across the road at randomly selected intervals…. doom for an industry?

My current free time project is the implementation of an XML SAX-like parser (much like that offered by Apache), but written in (and for) Mythryl, a functional language heavily derived from SML/NJ; the goal of the folks working on Mythryl is to transform SML/NJ from an academic language mainly used for doing PhD work into a production level language usable by commercial entities.  I’m doing this for these reasons:

1. Mythryl doesn’t have such an XML parser;
2. I’m doing it using a recursive descent parser engine;
3. And I’m doing it using the EBNF definition of XML

The latter two reasons can be best illustrated from an example.  From the definition of XML comes this specification:

prolog ::= XMLDecl? Misc* (doctypedecl Misc*)?

The ‘?’ means optional, and the ‘*’ means the element may appear 0 or more times.  This is an ordered set of instructions, as in “first this and then this and then this ….” other statements can also include “or” statements.  The words themselves refer to other specifications; eventually, those specifications will actually mention characters in specific formats.

In Mythryl I can write, given sufficient preparation,

prolog = |xml_decl| & <misc> & |(doctypedecl & <misc> )| ;

Here, the |xyz| means xyz is optional, the <xyz> means xyz may apply 0 or more times, and the ‘a & b’ means ‘a and then b’, as discussed above – i.e, the ordering mechanism.   Given a little leeway for capitalization conventions and symbol changes, and the Mythryl code assumes an amazing resemblance to the EBNF – which means I can copy the EBNF from the document, make a couple of changes, and all of a sudden I have a parser to handle the syntax; a little more meddling and I have semantic support.  And the semantic can be added as I have time; the parsing works on any valid XML doc, and I can slowly add in the other details, such as detecting problems with well-formedness, etc.

I’m interested in just how close I can come to using the EBNF, how quickly I can go from copying to full-blown functionality, and the post-development maintenance aspects – if any, of course.  One of the interesting facets of using Mythryl is that about half the time, once you get it to compile something (and that can be a challenge, even for an experienced programmer, for someone new to Mythryl), it Just Works – a phrase that the developer of Mythryl has been using.  No further debug …

That hasn’t applied to the parsing engine, as shoving large amounts of data at it had a performance impact; I may have gotten around that with an optimization; generally, though, functional programmers are encouraged to design a good solution without worrying about performance – let the compiler do it.  One estimate of its garbage collection is that it’s 10 times faster than Java.

As a quick PS, this the recursive descent parser isn’t built into Mythryl; it’s a part of a small library I developed using a Mythryl tutorial as a starting point.  Operator overloads and currying are very interesting after decades of programming in C and some OO languages.

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate, and while I have not sat down and studied the content of G-S and compared it to the collapse, others have.  Those who think there’s causation include James Rickards at US News & World Report:

The oldest propaganda technique is to repeat a lie emphatically and often until it is taken for the truth. Something like this is going on now with regard to banks and the financial crisis. The big bank boosters and analysts who should know better are repeating the falsehood that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Panic of 2008.

In fact, the financial crisis might not have happened at all but for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. If there is any hope of avoiding another meltdown, it’s critical to understand why Glass-Steagall repeal helped to cause the crisis. Without a return to something like Glass-Steagall, another greater catastrophe is just a matter of time.

In 1929, the music stopped, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It took eight years from the start of the boom to the bust. Subsequent investigations revealed the extent of the fraud that preceded the crash. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall in response to the abuses. Banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans. Brokers would be allowed to underwrite and sell securities. But no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, there were very few large bank failures and no financial panics comparable to the Panic of 2008. The law worked exactly as intended.

In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm joined forces to repeal Glass-Steagall at the behest of the big banks. What happened over the next eight years was an almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and once again they sold them to their customers in the form of securities. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008. The hard-earned knowledge of 1933 had been lost in the arrogance of 1999.

Cyrus Sanati at the New York Times reports on the same theme:

But 10 years later, the end of Glass-Steagall has been blamed by some for many of the problems that led to last fall’s financial crisis. While the majority of problems that occurred centered mostly on the pure-play investment banks like Lehman Brothers, the huge banks born out of the revocation of Glass-Steagall, especially Citigroup, and the insurance companies that were allowed to deal in securities, like the American International Group, would not have run into trouble had the law still been in place.

“Commercial banks played a crucial role as buyers and sellers of mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps and other explosive financial derivatives,” Demos, a nonpartisan public policy and research organization, wrote in a report discussing the problems it said were caused by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

“Without the watering down and ultimate repeal of Glass-Steagall, the banks would have been barred from most of these activities,” Demos said. “The market and appetite for derivatives would then have been far smaller, and Washington might not have felt a need to rescue the institutional victims.”

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins at Forbes disagrees:

By far, the single most cited example of this financial “deregulation” is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), which partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act thirteen years ago today. Regulatory evangelists including Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and recent senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street protesters, have named the overthrow of Glass-Steagall as public enemy number one.

Stiglitz, for instance, in a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair, could only muster two examples of the deregulation he thinks bears primary responsibility for the crisis: the repeal of Glass-Steagall and theSEC’s 2004 decision to raise banks’ debt-to-capital ratio from 12:1 to 30:1. The latter, of course was not deregulation, but re-regulation. For the regulatory evangelists, the repeal of Glass-Steagall is all they’ve got—and what they’ve got ain’t much.

Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933 to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks: commercial banks could not underwrite or deal in securities, and investment banks could not accept deposits. The Act also restricted commercial banks from being affiliated with any company that underwrote or dealt in securities.

But by the 1990s, the affiliation provision was widely viewed as unnecessary and even harmful to financial institutions. In 1999, President Clinton signed GLB into law. Although it left the bulk of Glass-Steagall in place, it ended the affiliation restrictions, freeing up holding companies to own both commercial and investment banks.

…

GLB [the act repealing Glass-Steagall] didn’t cause the financial crisis—and, when push comes to shove, the regulatory evangelists must admit as much. Stiglitz, in the same Vanity Fair article, concedes that Glass-Steagall did nothing to “directly” cause the crisis. Warren, meanwhile, confessed to New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin that Glass-Steagall would probably not have stopped the financial crisis, but that she was pushing to reinstate it because, in Sorkin’s words, “it is an easy issue for the public to understand and ‘you can build public attention behind.’”

Meanwhile, Senator Byron Dorgan (D – ND) tries on the hat of Delphi (from the NYT article):

One of the leading voices of dissent was Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. He warned that reversing Glass-Steagall and implementing the Republican-backed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a mistake whose repercussions would be felt in the future.

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010,” Mr. Dorgan said 10 years ago. “We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Mr. Dorgan still feels the same way. “I thought reversing Glass-Steagall would set us up for dramatic failure and that is exactly what has happened,” the senator told DealBook on Thursday. “To fuse together the investment banking function with the F.D.I.C. banking function has proven to be a profound mistake.”

Senator Richard Shelby from the other side of the aisle also voted against repeal and so gets a feather in his cap as well.

Matthew Yglesias gives some initial coverage to O’Malley’s possible run here by way of covering Elizabeth Warren’s avowed non-run:

His agenda:

• Reinstate Glass-Steagall and break up the largest and most diverse banks.

• Prevent banks for taking tax writeoffs when they pay fines.

• Insist on CEO resignations as part of the resolution of regulatory misconduct claims and seek to prosecute individual executives for misconduct.

• An equivalent of the three strikes and you’re out policy to “revoke a bank’s right to operate if they repeatedly break the law.”

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate; certainly the prohibitions of Glass-Steagall on commercial banks owning securities firms makes sense, since conflicts of interest can occur.  So I find this attractive.

Ballotpedia covers O’Malley here.  They report that a VoteMatch analysis evaluates him to be a Moderate Liberal Populist:

Follow the above link to see his responses to the quiz.  I’m appalled that he wishes to expand the Military and opposes legalization of marijuana; in fact, I would like to see the military budget reduced substantially and marijuana legalized – the nation would greatly improve, depending on the metrics used.  Otherwise, his views are not unreasonable, although I suspect an omniscient creature would find the gun ownership issue will be unresolvable (not because the two sides are stubborn, either).

This is simply one of the most beautiful bits of writing I’ve seen on the web.  H/T Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, now inactive.  It is a stream of consciousness piece by a Nepalese woman before, during, and after an avalanche swept away a number of Sherpas.

Jonathan Keane covers it in NewScientist:

The Breathe Project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Breathe Cam – four high-resolution cameras that capture haze and air pollution activity, along with software that visualises the data online. Up and running since December across Pittsburgh, the idea is that residents equipped with accurate information can lobby more effectively for companies and councils to stick to environmental guidelines.

Wonkblog on the Washington Post covers the future with robots from the distinctly human perspective:

According to a widely-cited study by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at high risk of disappearance due to improving technology. …

Techno-optimist Kevin Kelly of Wired [former editor of Whole Earth Review] celebrates the coming of our robot overlords, arguing that they will free us to do more fulfilling and higher-value jobs in the future. …

Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute finds that the skill-based technological change explanation for wage stagnation and high unemployment doesn’t track with trends like the declining wage premium for college, and so can’t be a driving force behind income inequality. …

In a Pew survey of 1,896 technology experts, about half believed that technology would destroy more jobs than it creates, creating mass unemployment, and half disagreed.

Not exactly definitive.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post takes issue with the kudos rained down upon Lee Kuan Yew at his passing:

The democratic model used by the USA, South Korea, Japan, and many others emphasizes more participation, more decentralization, and if it’s less efficient than Yew’s at its peak, it is also self-correcting.  Today is may seem as if our democracy is broken due to the inability of one side or the other to accept reality, but at some point reality will trump ideology, and those promoting ideology will fall by the wayside and become historical curiosities; we’ll revamp or dump the conflicting ideas and then carry on, buoyed up by our democracy – not weighed down.

NewScientist (28 February 2015 ) publishes Hal Hodson’s “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” (print: “Nothing but the truth”):

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

I must be paranoid, because all I can see here is potential for abuse: gaming the system, er, vault, so that your truth is its occupant; infiltration of Google’s employee base by folks who want to make sure the vault has the proper truth; “tweaks” by Google executives and low-level employees; database rot – .01% error rate in the database still implies millions of fallacious “facts”.

Not to mention the lawsuits.  Oh, the lawsuits!  I’ll have to check with a lawyer or two of my acquaintance and get their thoughts on the matter.  And then government interference, both here and overseas, as certain uncomfortable facts make their way into the vault.

If you’re an older programmer, like moi’, then perhaps you haven’t had the training to appreciate Big Data.  If you want to learn in a competitive environment, then it’s time to hop on over to Kaggle, a web site which poses problems thought vulnerable to Big Data techniques, supplied by organizations ranging from obscure academic groups studying oddball problems (such as determining, given unlabeled data, whether any particular record is causative or merely correlative) to medical organizations (example: given pictures of eyeballs, identify which ones may have diabetic retinopathy) to commercial organizations trying to solve a number of different problems, ranging from optimizing flight planning to selecting the proper place to locate a new restaurant – all in an environment in which teams of programmers try to best each other while a deadline looms.

I indulged in this for 3-4 months before other obligations reduced my free time to zero; add in that I didn’t have the tools others had and had to write my own, in a language (Mythryl) still in development, and had to learn stats and probability on top of that … exhilerating exhilarating actually, and good for the brain, but way too time intensive.

But if you have time, want to learn something new, and get turned on by solving really advanced crossword puzzles, hey, Kaggle’s a fun place to start.

And today the GOP spews out more evidence of how the clutching hands of ideology have it by the neck … take it away, Steve Benen:

We’re well past the strange op-ed stage; McConnell yesterday “sent a detailed letter to every governor in the United States laying out a carefully researched legal argument as to why states should not comply with Mr. Obama’s regulations.”

The letter even cites Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, who believes the Obama administration’s regulations probably exceed the EPA’s legal authority.

But that doesn’t mean Tribe is on board with McConnell’s campaign. On the contrary, the law professor told The New Republic last month that states “can’t count on my being right.”

A reader responds to the meat of the issue:

“Shouldn’t adults be able to make decisions about end of life?  But if one has a mental illness, particularly a treatable illness, then they may make a decision which they might not otherwise make.”

The question is, who decides if an illness, especially a mental illness, is treatable.

The more current research delves into how the brain works, the more (what I read) it appears that many treatments are no more effective than placebos.  That is, conventional wisdom, or the accepted position of therapeutic professional organizations is that they CAN treat most or all illnesses — but those positions are based both upon out-dated science and self-preservation (of reputations, organization and business income).  But the emerging reality is that there’s more we don’t know, causes are more myriad and complex, and most of all, most drugs prescribed are next to worthless and often actually harmful.

The doesn’t make me feel very comfortable with allowing an organizational “opinion” be the deciding factor in what an adult can choose to do or not do.

On the other hand, I’m not saying we should make easier for people to impulsively commit suicide.

It’s a tough question, indeed.

I think – or hope – as genomic medicine begins to mature, we’ll see medications differentiated based on the responsiveness of a patient with a particular genome to the medication family – i.e., your genome will suggest which medicine is best for you. I believe this is already taking place in oncology, although still in its infancy.  Here is a study at Mayo.

I think we lack a really objective view of the human mind.  I know psychologists work to achieve such a viewpoint (my sister is a psychologist), but … well, I recall  listening to a psychiatrist talk about the ‘schools’ of psychiatry, by which he meant the various schools of thought on psychiatry.  He seemed a little bemused at the very thought; I think his medical degree (pediatrician) training had trained him to see things one way, as the right way, and the schools approach didn’t have the same rigor.  Or maybe not.  I failed to interrogate him when I had the chance.

If we had that objective view of the mind, then perhaps we could make real progress on this question.  I believe Senator Eaton’s bill will require two doctors to sign off on permitting the dispensation of fatal meds:

Eaton’s bill would require two doctors to sign off on a terminal patient’s state of mind before prescribing medication that would end the patient’s life.

It doesn’t say what sort of doctors, and Eaton hasn’t issued anything more specific that I can find.  But I can’t say I’m comfortable with that requirement, even if they’re psychologists.  At least not without credible studies showing psychologists can properly assess the current state of someone’s mind at a high enough accuracy rate.  It’s a conundrum.

Minnesota State Senator Chris Eaton wants to start a discussion (h/t MPR Radio), leading to a bill, on the subject of Right to Die:

“My mom used to beg us to take her to the vet because they would treat her better than what she was being treated, the amount of pain she was in and the lack of quality of life,” Eaton said. “You know it’s, people reach the point where they’ve had enough.”

Is pain a good enough excuse to commit suicide?  Medically speaking, we are not very good at treating pain, despite the efforts of many fine institutes, such as MAPS; we simply do not know enough about all the causes.  For example, neuropathy (damage or disease affecting nerves) has several causes, and it can be idiopathic, i.e., no known cause.  My mother had a neuropathy which manifested as severe pain in her rectum, brought about by a bout of viral meningitis where the germ involved was the shingles virus.  She endured the pain, multiple treatment types ranging from standard drugs to experimental surgeries to acupuncture and hypnosis: none of them worked over the long term.  She’d occasionally get a little relief from this or that, but in the end, after enduring fourteen years of agony, she passed away.

Mom never talked about suicide with me.  As long as Dad was around, she was determined to be there; and, I suspect, suicide was not really thinkable for her.  But without Dad, she may have chosen it since there did not seem to be any workable approach.  She didn’t have a quality of life, just hope that gradually faded over the years.

I don’t know if the pain had become an illness in itself, as is noted in this article from WebMD.  In her case, it was so hard to tell as she developed a host of other problems over the years, no doubt from the inactivity caused by the pain and spinal problems she developed during treatment for the meningitis.

Back to the Right to Die issue, there are concerns about individuals not fitting the expected profile of the acceptable users of such a program.  This may indeed be happening in Oregon, where the Death With Dignity Act has been in effect  for 16 years.  NewScientist (28 February 2015) covers the issue here (paywall):

Diane Coleman, head of advocacy group Not Dead Yet, which opposes assisted suicide, says the Oregon Health Authority’s annual reports on the practice show the law there isn’t working as intended. She points to the motives people gave for choosing this option. According to the latest figures, released on 12 February, only a third of people who took a prescribed lethal dose of medication in 2014 cited pain or fear of pain as one of the reasons for doing so.

Supporters of assisted suicide often cite pain as a primary reason why people should have the legal right to die. But the state’s report showed that people’s concerns tended toward loss of autonomy (91 per cent), loss of dignity (71 per cent) or being a burden on their family (40 per cent). Coleman is particularly concerned that people are choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. “To me that feels more like a duty to die than a choice to die,” she says.

Unlike some issues, this is certainly an issue where all sides have a point, and if I think about it, it tends to tear at me.  Shouldn’t adults be able to make decisions about end of life?  But if one has a mental illness, particularly a treatable illness, then they may make a decision which they might not otherwise make.  Yet again, if they have been given a terminal prognosis, like Brittany Maynard, then why not permit them to terminate a life when it’s clearly become untenable and has no hope (outside of unpredictable spontaneous remissions)?

The bill under development by Senator Eaton is targeted for introduction at the next legislative session, not the current session.

Bob Jones III apologizes for advocating murder.

Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore and its founding father, died earlier today at age 91.  The New York Times:

The nation, reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic.

“We are ideology-free,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”

Al-Jazeera:

“The Father of Singapore” as he came to be known, first took power amid a host of problems including a multi-racial and multi-religious society with a history of violent outbursts, inadequate housing, unemployment, a lack of natural resources such as a water supply, and a limited ability to defend itself from potentially hostile neighbours.

Whip-smart, self-assured and unflappable, Lee earned plenty of criticism along the way.

“If someone living in Singapore in the 1950s could have entered a time machine and travelled to the Singapore of today, he would have found the transformations of this island literally unbelievable,” former Singapore president SR Nathan said at a September 2013 conference on the legacy of “LKY”, as he is commonly referred to.

Central to Lee’s vision were the creation of good governance, political stability, a quality infrastructure, and improved living conditions.

I suspect for the average American of a certain age, Singapore just equates to the caning of Michael Fay.  In truth, Singapore is much more – transformed from victims during World War II into a First World economy nowadays, they can be viewed as a success story, an alien society, or, as usual, the fetish for which you search.  But how many Americans could find it on a map?  I couldn’t.  I had to go look.

TIVO’s summation of this evening’s episode of LAST MAN ON EARTH:

Phil continues living in Tucson.

Glad I don’t live in Tucson.  That snow coming down even as I type looks infinitely better than Tucson, I’m sure.

Andrew J. Hoffman at Stanford Social Innovation Review comments on a recent encounter with a denier:

In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a potential donor—a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest in environmental issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began at 7 a.m., and while I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, the potential donor began the conversation with “I think the scientific review process is corrupt.” I asked what he thought of a university based on that system, and he said that he thought that the university was then corrupt, too. He went on to describe the science of climate change as a hoax, using all the familiar lines of attack—sunspots and solar flares, the unscientific and politically flawed consensus model, and the environmental benefits of carbon dioxide. …

Why is this so? Why do such large numbers of Americans reject the consensus of the scientific community? With upwards of two-thirds of Americans not clearly understanding science or the scientific process and fewer able to pass even a basic scientific literacy test, according to a 2009 California Academy of Sciences survey, we are left to wonder: How do people interpret and validate the opinions of the scientific community? The answers to this question can be found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.

Precisely what I’ve thought about.  My (always contingent) conclusion is that, for a denier, at this juncture, crucial ideologies and interpretations of history, and assumptions about the nature of that history, take precedence over the elements of science: observation, deduction, the testing of hypotheses.  If a scientific conclusion clashes with an ideology then there is a problem with the science: bad observation, unknown variables, even vast conspiracies.

My remark about history encompasses this: an analysis of history is performed and certain lessons are drawn from that analysis; then an assumption is made that those same lessons will hold in the future.  This is where I suspect intellectual mayhem is committed, as certain ideologies, effective in one environment, will not perform as expected in another environment – and, as anyone paying attention knows, environments are changing: population levels, available land, resources, pollution, understanding of justice.

Many groups perform such analyses, formal or informal, correctly or incorrectly, which is to say, with or without bias.  Andrew continues down a different path than I had hoped, noting increasing polarization:

Then he briefly discusses the psychology behind group dynamics, and then moves on to communications strategies.

Here’s the thing for me: ideology is based on goals, on hopes, on dreams.  It seems to me a subtle assumption of this article is that science is just another ideology.  Science is not ideological, not at its best.  Some practicioners are flawed, it’s true, but the very structure of science is designed to call them out and invalidate their conclusions.  Science is all about understanding what’s happening right now, right here: the what, the why, the how, from abstract principle to gritty reality.  That’s what needs to be communicated to any ideologue: science is neither for or against, it’s simply a way to study reality.

(Interrupt to help Deb with rogue crackers.)

And, just maybe, measure the ideology against reality.  Perhaps that is one component of the reaction against the scientific consensus – people naturally, tribalistically, attach themselves to the ideology, and it takes on a significance greater than truth after a while.  When the ideology is threatened, community is threatened: the interloper is demonized, even if it’s science, because the community is more important than the science.

(h/t NewScientist 28 February 2015)

… Senator Ted Cruz (R – TX), the Houston Chronicle reports:

Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.

Make no mistake, Cruz is smart, holding degrees from Princeton (B.A. in Public Policy, cum laude) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).  While his appeal will mainly be amongst the Tea Party conservatives, he is Hispanic and so may pull in some voters from that ethnic group.

After appointment as Solicitor General of Texas, which he used to argue conservative causes, sometimes in front of the Supreme Court, he defeated sitting Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst for the Senatorial nomination, and then handily beat the Democratic nominee Sadler by nearly 16 percentage points.

For all his educational and political acumen, he’s struck me as a bit of a bull in a china shop so far in the Senate, but perhaps this is purposeful.  Can he avoid the blunders of Mitt Romney?  Can he build an appeal to the Independents who decide elections these days?  Or can the Democrats paint him as a dangerous conservative who would roll back important gains?  He certainly does not care for the ACA, but the longer the ACA is in place, the more favor it may gain.  It’s a quicksand landscape out there…

UPDATE: When I mentioned “Cruz is smart” to my wife, she remarked, “So why is he Republican?”

Rohollah Faghihi reports that a conservative critical of the current Iranian administration,  Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, unexpectedly wins an election to head the Assembly of Experts, responsible for electing Supreme Leader:

Seemingly, Yazdi’s victory was the result of the quiet activities of conservatives. According to an Iranian newspaper, Movahedi Kermani, a key conservative figure, had visited Qom, considered one of the power centers of Iran, one day before the election. This visit is indicative of a coordinated effort to obtain the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts.

A red herring may have been waved about:

What may have misled the moderates was the publicity campaign of conservatives over the possible nomination of Shahroudi. One day before the election, Hujjat al-Islam Reza Taghavi, a member of the conservative Combatant Clergy Association, said: “I assume that the majority of Assembly of Experts’ members are in agreement with Shahroudi [chairmanship].” It’s possible that moderates felt assured that either Rafsanjani or Shahroudi would be the new chairman. (Yazdi denied that his nomination had been planned.)

And yet the loser, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may in the end have a different goal in mind:

Political observers feel that perhaps Rafsanjani’s nomination was aimed at reminding people that the upcoming Assembly of Experts election is vital. Rafsanjani’s nomination in the 2013 presidential elections — which was denied by the Guardian Council – certainly helped create an early level of enthusiasm for the election.

The current period of Assembly of Experts is to end next year, and the next election scheduled Feb. 26. We’ll see then if Rafsanjani’s gambit pays off.

However, others see the conviction and harsh sentencing of his son, Mehdi, on corruption charges as indicative of his permanent loss of power:

Many Iranian analysts have interpreted the harsh sentence handed down to Mehdi Hashemi as politically motivated and aimed at hammering the last nails on his father’s political coffin.

This analysis may contain a kernel of truth but it is a mistake to ignore the essential reality of the case, namely that prosecutors had a very strong case against Hashemi junior, who besides corruption was also convicted on an additional security-related charge.

Undoubtedly the sentence damages Hashemi Rafsanjani and may come to be regarded as the moment when he was finally ousted from the system. A key figure in the post-revolutionary Iranian establishment, Rafsanjani fell out of favour in the summer of 2009 in the wake of street protests following Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election to the presidency.

The undercurrents of Iranian politics seem to be at least as murky as our own.

In NewScientist (21 Feb 2015) Teal Burrell conveys new information about the brain in “Brain boosting: It’s not just grey matter that matters” (print: “Meet your other Brain”) (paywall):

To test her idea, [Heidi] Johansen-Berg [at the University of Oxford] turned to a 2004 study, which had found that learning a new skill such as juggling changed the density of grey matter – an example of classic synaptic plasticity. Johansen-Berg decided to recreate the study, and measure changes in white matter too. A group of volunteers agreed to learn how to juggle, and after six weeks, brain scans showed that their myelin had increased more than that of a control group who had no training (Nature Neuroscience, vol 12, p 1370).

“We saw a change not only in the grey matter but also in the underlying white matter pathways, suggesting that these pathways strengthen in some way as a result of experience,” says Johansen-Berg. The changes to white and grey matter took place over different timescales, suggesting two separate processes. Johansen-Berg thinks the increase in white matter would have enabled faster conduction along the circuits coordinating juggling. What’s more, the effect was seen in everyone who learned to juggle, regardless of how good they became, which means it is the learning process itself that is responsible.

This was the first study to reveal that training can alter white matter in healthy adults, and it opened the door to a plethora of similar findings. Since then, numerous activities have been linked to extra myelin, from learning to read, to meditating, and learning a new skill like playing the piano or another language.

Myelin is one of the keys to a properly functioning brain, and a lack of it, for any reason, may lead down the path to Alzheimer’s, MS, and ALS.

Harvard contributes information on the apparent role of myelin in accelerating intelligence here, including this possibly contradictory information:

But the new research shows that despite myelin’s essential roles in the brain, “some of the most evolved, most complex neurons of the nervous system have less myelin than older, more ancestral ones,” [Professor Paola] Arlotta, co-director of the HSCI nervous system diseases program, said.

Websites dedicated to reporting on myelin are here and here.

Subject: Neutrinos ugetiPills Online transcends

Message: There are many swamps slavishly swimming a blast was utterd from the horn

Really makes you wonder what’s going on out there sometimes.  Rogue emails mating and having mutant children?

Yeow.

NewScientist retitles articles from print edition to digital edition.  My policy will be to use the digital edition titles in all cases, and to mention the print title as “(print: title)”.

NewScientist (21 Feb 2015) (paywall), “I can’t keep up with climate change” (print: “I’m always drawn back to the ice”), an interview with Antje Boetius:

Does that make it difficult to understand the changes that are happening now?
The environment is changing faster than we can research it. It’s a shitty feeling for a scientist if you are trying to learn something from that change and you know you’re far too slow. People only started seeing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing 30 years after it began. That is crazy. The change is happening right now and we can’t wait 30 years to conclude: “Oh, by now the entire typical life of the Arctic has been lost – wow, we have finally shown it.”

Is it hard to live with that feeling?
One year I do the climate change work and the next I like to do exploration work because it’s just too depressing otherwise. In 2016, I have a mission to explore a gigantic underwater mountain that starts in a hole at a depth of 4000 metres and climbs 3500 metres. I’ll go with robots and cameras to explore what life we find on these very steep walls. That’s not as sad as climate change research.

(Emphasis mine)

“Very Louisisna”

Say that five times fast.

(h/t Steve Yelvington)