Category Archives: Uncategorized

Over the American Thanksgiving holiday we’ll be busy with family stuff. Blogging may or may not be curtailed.

Yesterday evening my Arts Editor and I attended Theater In The Round’s production of a recently re-discovered play by Agatha Christie, Towards Zero. Per usual, this is a murder mystery involving British gentry, involving those with too much money, those with barely enough, and a few staring into the blackness of insanity. It was a little slow in the first half, as the conventions of 80 years ago are not those of today, but in the second half the pace of events picks up, the body is found, and we get a peek into the diseased intellect of a killer who thought themselves too cool to be caught. And as two lovers sail off to South America, it seems to be a commentary by Christie, or whoever is responsible for the leavetaking, on the subtle illnesses of English society.

Nicely produced in the circular space of TitR, we had a fun little evening, and if it wasn’t all that profound, that’s OK. Sometimes a bit of fluff is just what the doctor ordered.

From a New York Times story on the recent release of Donald Trump, Jr’s^[1] book Triggered, and its quick ascent to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List:

But a financial disclosure form filed to the Federal Election Commission showed that the R.N.C. paid $94,800 to the bookseller chain Books-A-Million on Oct. 29, a week before the book went on sale. Disclosures filed by the R.N.C. indicate that the payment was for “donor mementos.”

When asked about the disclosure on Thursday, [R.N.C. spokesman Mike Reed] confirmed that the money went toward “Triggered” orders, and added that the party committee made additional purchases in November. “The book has been hugely popular,” he said.

OK, Boomer.

¹ I wait with morbid fascination the gossip which will inevitably erupt from Donny, Jr.’s ghostwriter. And I can’t help but wonder what the median age of the lover of Triggered will be. 45? 55? 65? 75?

I’m going with 65, quite honestly. The middle of the boomer demographic and most solidly locked into a culture war without regard for the future of the United States – or humanity.

I wonder how much it would take to buy the top position of the Bestseller List for Secular Cycles. It has more relevance to the current political situation than anything else I can think of.

"Consumptuary," I said,
   Deliciously rolling the words
About My Mouth.

"Ossuary," came the reply,
   Each and every femur 
Bumping the metaphorical
   lid of the psyche.

"Not -"
   Appalled
Repelled
   At language's
Failure.

"No," with her smile,
   And a laugh,
And a pirouette,
   "Not at all,
But bones in a box."
   And with that, a precise little cough.

And now, in labor,
   Creating a box,
A cute little box,
   Lined in finest marble,
Long enough for tibias,
   And, with the finest of chisels,
"XDR" in the corner.

Let the archaeologists wonder.
   Perhaps they'll cough, too,
And have use of the box.

I see CNN is reporting that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has finally been charged with various crimes:

Charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust have been unveiled against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in three separate corruption cases, the Attorney General announced on Thursday evening, marking the first time in Israel’s history that a sitting PM faces indictment in criminal investigations.

During a final pre-indictment hearing last month, Netanyahu’s high-powered legal team tried to convince prosecutors to close the cases, including the most serious charge of bribery. But Avichai Mandelblit, a Netanyahu appointee who once served as his cabinet secretary, is moving forward.

Israel’s deadlocked parliament means that a formal indictment may still be months away. Nevertheless, the charges are a significant blow to Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, who has held office for a total of more than 13 years. He has proclaimed his innocence ever since the criminal investigations became public nearly three years ago.

AL Monitor’s Danny Zaken gives a succinct summation of the situation:

Why it matters:  Netanyahu’s investigations have trailed him throughout the 2019 electoral season and have dominated this year’s elections. His rivals blame him for holding his Likud Party — and the whole country — hostage to his criminal cases and preventing the formation of a unity government that could end Israel’s political paralysis.

Netanyahu has led the country for more than 10 years and his upcoming legal fight against the charges is expected to be deeply intertwined with Israeli politics. The impact on national security is also not to be discounted as Israel steps up its attacks against Gaza and Iranian targets in Syria.

This is an interesting parallel to the American situation: a populist politician who has used fear to manipulate and draw voters to him, who has displayed unlimited ambition and a certain arrogance which seems to attract a certain class of voter, whose actions in pursuit of power can be easily seen as dangerous to the very country which he purports to lead, and who now appears to have been caught indulging in crass actions which are designed to use the powers of the office to personally and illegally benefit himself.

Of course, when we’re talking about grasping, self-interested individuals – and entities – there are certain differences in behaviors from more admirable entities. Trump has proven to be less than a constant ally of Israel, a matter which has given the right-wing Israelis fits, and should give Trump’s religious allies some heartburn.

But I think – I hope – we’re seeing the mechanisms installed by the designers of these governments to guard against untrustworthy politicians and foolish electorates springing into action. The importance of independent agencies, a professional bureaucracy with strong whistleblower protections, co-equal and independent branches of government with oversight power – all of these and more stand as safeguards against the inevitable winds of corruption which will dog humanity for as long as it’s around.

Now it’s up to those taken in by Trump and like-minded would-be politicians to learn from their errors and select better leaders, despite the blandishments of these power-hungry men.

And will the Trump-admiring Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison end up in the metaphorical cell next to their’s? I have a morbid fascination on the matter. And what of the Poles, and the Hungarians? Are their institutions strong enough?

In case you’ve been listening to the right wing propaganda machine, here’s political Professor Keith Whittington to set you straight:

It’s not what you think.

When a bit of insanity has another bit of insanity added to it, sometimes the mix comes out quite odd. Blood and Donuts (1995) is the story of the awakening of Boya, a vampire dating back to the 1800s, and the reason he hides away periodically from the world:

He’s clinically depressed.

His friends grow old and die off, when he’s stressed he can turn into a monster, and while he’s as immune as any mythological vampire to the general weaponry of the age, he’s also just as vulnerable to the Sun. And he misses the old fireball in the sky.

Between the depression and the knowledge that his immense powers have made him not-human, an outsider looking into a condition that he loves but can only temporarily return to – I mean, damn, he keeps scrapbooks! – his future, so apparently bright to others, is deepest black to him.

Trying to staple a body to the hood of the car a la Mad Max.
We need bigger staples, he said.
She said, Shut up and drive!

Thrown back into life by a golf ball, life happens to him: a taxi driver and a donut shop clerk come to know him, and as they try to save each other from impetuous mobsters, each time Boya must make a move, things die. He hardly dares move for fear that he may kill those that he loves.

Humanity.

It helps that the supporting characters have their own lives they’re living, their own burdens to share, but this is about Boya and his life existence, and the importance of shared struggle in making life worth living.

It makes for a disquieting story with abrupt changes in rhythm, and Hollywood would never want to own up to this (no fears for Hollywood’s virtue, this is Canadian), but it feels organic, if not necessarily much fun.

SCOTUS has stepped up and accepted the Google appeal of Oracle’s victory in Federal Circuit Appeals Court concerning whether computer language API signatures are subject to copyrights, as Ars Technica reported a few days ago:

The Supreme Court has agreed to review one of the decade’s most significant software copyright decisions: last year’s ruling by an appeals court that Google infringed Oracle’s copyrights when Google created an independent implementation of the Java programming language.

I wonder if the industry has thought about readying itself for a rebuff from SCOTUS, leaving companies as possibly legally vulnerable. From the previous Ars Technica report on this subject:

If APIs can be restricted by copyright, then every significant computer program could have legal landmines lurking inside of it. Grimmelmann warns that API copyrights could easily give rise to API trolls: companies that acquire the copyright to old software, then sue companies that built their software using what they assumed were open standards. API copyrights could also hamper interoperability between software platforms, as companies are forced to build their software using deliberately incompatible standards to avoid legal headaches.

While I think it’s a misstatement to suggest that every significant computer program might be at risk, because they don’t usually indulge in this practice, those firms who are providing software libraries which replace others will be at risk.

What can be done? Sequestering the copyright interests in entities which refuse to pursue copyright infringement suits might be a first step. Industry giants who feel they are at risk might contribute to these entities, and acquisition of APIs which they may have innocent violated should zero out those risks.

Similarly, acquisition of those entities owning those rights would also safeguard those manufacturers. Those firms which have gone out of business would also confound the persistent copyright troll.

Another approach would be to lobby Congress into passing laws which either obviate the judiciary’s decisions, or limits the damage for those firms which trespassed before they knew the law was against them.

The industry had best get on the ball on this problem, because if they don’t, the damage won’t be limited to Court awards, but also the vitality this part of the industry contributes to the entire software project, warts and all.

The unyielding malice of people sometimes just leave me tired and defeated.

Attackers could reveal most of the genetic information for millions of people whose DNA is held on genetic genealogy databases by exploiting how the websites work. …

One attack involved uploading many real genetic data sets and monitoring for partial matches with short stretches of people’s genomes in the database.

A twist on that approach was uploading genetic data that is largely fake, apart from a genuine segment targeting a match for specific genetic variants linked to greater risk of certain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s.

A third way involved trying to trick algorithms by using completely faked data designed to match most people in the databases.

Tests returned more genetic data as the minimum matching segment length reduced. Using the first technique with the shortest segment length returned significant genetic data: about 60 per cent of an average person’s total alleles – their variants of a gene – could be recovered. “So we are in fact talking about most of the genetic information of most of the people in our database,” says Edge. [NewScientist, 2 November 2019]

It may just have been a result of how the article was written, or maybe I’m in a chronic bad mood, but that people will use sophisticated attack techniques simply to discover your genetic encoding just, augh. I hates it, I do, I hates it a lot, how about you?

Sorry.

Anyone got cheery thoughts?

Sometimes billionaires do good, as much as that may sicken lefty ideologists. CNN is reporting on the Bill Gates-backed company Heliogen and its recent achievement:

Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven — one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you’d find on the surface of the sun.

The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.

I’m somewhat intrigued in that they’re claiming they had to use artificial intelligence to make their scheme fly. Their web site doesn’t really discuss it:

The breakthrough in Heliogen’s technology starts with our patented closed-loop control system that makes our field of mirrors act as a multi-acre magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight. The HelioMax system is an industry first and a critical step in harnessing the power of the sun. Our ability to concentrate and capture sunlight allows us to create carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat (HelioHeat) commercially for the first time.

Their note about it being patented also piqued my interest. How does patents play into an artificial intelligence system? Think of pharmaceutical patents, where the owners will muck about a bit with drug formulas and patent the new ones as a way to extend their ownership of a drug. Can a patent be taken out on the information that necessarily lies at the heart of the artificial system, the machine intuition which I discussed a few days ago? Or do they extract a static version of that information and patent that?

This is hardly a panacea, either. There’s been a lot of strain on the raw materials for cement and concrete, so perfecting a non-carbon heat source for cement doesn’t relieve all of the problems associated with those materials. Treehugger hasn’t covered the Heliogen story yet, but Lloyd Alter has a connected piece of interest:

This is the fantasy of green hydrogen and carbon-free steel; yes, it can work, but we don’t have time. We would need to transform the entire industry, and produce billions and billions of tons of hydrogen, and build all the infrastructure to make it.

It’s why I always return to the same place. We have to substitute materials that we grow instead of those we dig out of the ground. We have to use less steel, half of which is going into construction and 16 percent of which is going into cars, which are 70 percent steel by weight. So build our buildings out of wood instead of steel; make cars smaller and lighter and get a bike.

Written before Heliogen went public with its claims. Will Heliogen be able to get around these problems? They claim they create hydrogen:

Heliogen said it is generating so much heat that its technology could eventually be used to create clean hydrogen at scale. That carbon-free hydrogen could then be turned into a fuel for trucks and airplanes.

“If you can make hydrogen that’s green, that’s a gamechanger,” said Gross. “Long term, we want to be the green hydrogen company.”

But enough to matter?

Finally, it looks like they plan to commercialize it and run it like any other business. I wonder if they ever considered giving it away. Otherwise, it may be difficult to get those companies involved in the carbon-releasing technology to switch over.

These two li’l trucks for sale are a couple miles from our place.

They have a very humble sense of class.

And this could be unsettling, depending on where you live. From NewScientist (2 November 2019, paywall):

Global warming could contribute to the failure of one in four steel bridges in the US over the next two decades. …

Hussam Mahmoud at Colorado State University and his colleague decided to model the effects of increasing temperatures on steel bridges around the US.

In particular, they focused on what would happen when joints that are clogged with dirt and debris are exposed to the higher temperatures expected in the years ahead as the climate warms. Clogging is a common problem, especially in deteriorating bridges, but it is costly to address. …

They found that current temperatures aren’t extreme enough to cause a problem, but one in four bridges are at risk of a section failing in the next 21 years, rising to 28 per cent by 2060 and 49 per cent by 2080. Almost all are set to fail by 2100.

Lots of risk, but a lot of business for bridge building companies, I sadly suppose.

Manichean:

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian religious movements and Gnosticism. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame,” Andrew Sullivan, New York Intelligencer:

[Ibram X. Kendi’s] capable of conveying the complicated dynamics of that violent mugging on a bus, but somehow insists that the only real violence is the structural “violence” of racist power. After a while, you realize that this worldview cannot be contradicted or informed by any discipline outside itself — sociology, biology, psychology, history. Unlike any standard theory in the social sciences, Kendi’s argument — one that is heavily rooted in critical theory — about a Manichean divide between racist and anti-racist forces cannot be tested or falsified. Because there is no empirical reality outside the “power structures” it posits.

When it comes to the future, this headline says it all:

Up to 630 million people could be threatened by rising seas
[NewScientist, 2 November 2019]

So far, forecasts are getting worse, not better.

Up to 630 million people are living on land threatened by flooding from sea level rises by the end of the century – three times as many as previously thought, according to a new analysis.

The greatest increase in risk was found for communities living in Asian megacities, due to the way earlier estimates were worked out.

The change is due to better technology at understanding the true elevation of a city. Skyscrapers were confusing the software doing the estimates.

If these estimates are accurate, I wonder where these 630 million people will go.

President Trump is looking for a quick diplomatic win:

Mr. Chairman, Joe Biden may be Sleepy and Very Slow, but he is not a “rabid dog.” He is actually somewhat better than that, but I am the only one who can get you where you have to be. You should act quickly, get the deal done. See you soon! https://t.co/kO2k14lTf7

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2019

The AP is reporting on North Korean reaction – or perhaps pouncing – to this latest overture:

North Korea on Monday responded to a tweet by U.S. President Donald Trump that hinted at another summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying it has no interest in giving Trump further meetings to brag about unless it gets something substantial in return.

The statement by Foreign Ministry adviser Kim Kye Gwan is the latest call by North Korea for U.S. concessions ahead of an end-of-year deadline set by Kim Jong Un for the Trump administration to offer mutually acceptable terms for a deal to salvage nuclear diplomacy.

This could be an underrated story, because if Trump becomes desperate for another bit of smoke to distract from his meltdown in Washington, he might knuckle-under to North Korean demands and really give away the store.

“Three rounds of DPRK-U.S. summit meetings and talks were held since June last year, but no particular improvement has been achieved in the DPRK-U.S. relations … the U.S. only seeks to earn time, pretending it has made progress in settling the issue of the Korean Peninsula,” he said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, referring to North Korea by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of, but get compensation for the successes that President Trump is proud of as his administrative achievements.”

I think this is a message to Trump that North Korea won’t help him retain his office without a big present for them, unearned and dangerous as it is. They know that Trump is inexperienced, incurious, temperamental, and won’t listen to advisors and experts – it’s their chance to take advantage of an amateur so hapless that he has no idea just how much he’s failing.

Let’s hope there’s still something left in the picnic basket by the time we’re rid of him.

Let’s go to the drive-in and murder EVERYONE!
Sure thing, honey.

In the category of being an object lesson, Detour (1945) presents Al Roberts, a down on his luck pianist who’s trying to hitch a ride from New York to California in order to rejoin his fiancee, who has insisted that they get on their feet before they marry. She’s in California, trying to jump-start an acting career, while he keeps jabbing at the black & white keys.

But he’s really down on his luck. He’s in Arizona and thinking he’s finally found the last leg of his journey in the form of Charles Haskell and his big, big convertible, when Haskell has the poor taste to die while Al is driving – and Al doesn’t notice until he stops to close up the big car against the driving rain, and Charles falls out of the car on his head.

Al panics, because he doesn’t think the cops will believe his story. He ransacks the body, takes the money and ID, and dumps the body under some bushes and is soon, against his better judgment, back on the road.

And then his luck takes a turn for the worse. He offers a ride to Vera, a woman who just happens to have ridden with Haskell and recognizes the car, but not Roberts-faking-it-as-Haskell. She’s a veritable volcano of poor judgment and rotten ethics, and soon she’s threatened Roberts into giving her a cut of the dough and a ride into San Bernardino.

But her search of the glove compartment is the crowning achievement: a newspaper clipping indicating Haskell’s father is in Los Angeles, is rich, and is dying. Vera guesses Haskell, who ran away from home lo so many years ago, was running back to freshen his stash, as he claimed he was running a little low. She sees a chance to hit it big and forget all about the poverty in which she grew up.

By now, the audience has figured out that Roberts, for all his bluster, tends to blow with the wind, and we settle in to see how he’ll perform as a scammer, but he and Vera play a little game of virtual chicken with a phone, and, in a retro moment for the modern audience, he strangles her, inadvertently, with a phone cord.

Basically a good man, he’s in shock and finishes his narration, a study in self-pity, about how he never had a chance.

The cinematography is a little blurry, and if you object to his initial decision to not trust the cops when Haskell dies, you won’t really much care for this movie. But I do have to give the actress who plays Vera props, she really brought out the pathological side of what appeared to be someone damaged by poverty. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder about the applicability of morality to the truly desperate.

The results of the third and final gubernatorial contest of 2019 are in, and the Democrats have now won two out of three. All three contests were in Deep South states, so what does Louisiana’s result have to say about the future of the Republicans in the great State of Louisiana?

Approaching this as I did with Kentucky, again I suspect the quality and reputations of local candidates are more important than their ideological labels, although the latter does play into the game. First, some charts. Keep in mind that Louisiana runs a jungle primary for its Senatorial and gubernatorial elections, which can result in highly fragmented votes. If no one wins the primary with > 50% of the vote, it proceeds to a runoff for the top two candidates, and so it can appear that a candidate has beaten their opponents by large margins when it’s not really true from a Party perspective.

And, once again, I have chosen to show vote totals rather than percentages as a way to judge the magnitude of interest in the contests.

While there’s been a declining general interest in the runs for the Senate, perhaps reflecting the quality or reputations of the candidates, it appears the Republicans have been making gains and taking control of late.

Much like Kentucky, Trump’s victory margin in Louisiana appears to reflect a long term trend for the State.

And, yet, when it comes to the governor’s seat, the Democrats have gained control.

This may all come down to the candidates. In 2015, Democrat Edwards, a lawyer with state house and military experience and traditionally conservative credentials, beat Republican Senator Vitter, damaged by scandal; Edwards won again yesterday against political novice and millionaire businessman Eddie Rispone. Coming into the contest, Edwards had high approval ratings from the state’s residents; Rispone, without experience, had President Trump, who endorsed him several times and visited the state for a campaign rally.

It was a close contest, but Edwards wins. Does it mean the Democrats have a bright future in the Bayou State? I think it’ll all hinge on the quality of their candidates, which is good for politics, for local races, but when it comes to the Presidential, it’ll be more difficult to judge. Was Clinton that awful a candidate? Maybe she was. Or maybe the Republican effort to tar her as awful was successful. Trump reportedly has approval ratings in excess of 50% in Louisiana, which sounds positive and roughly in the ballpark of the 2016 election.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

In response to the post about not trusting names of organizations, a reader supplies quite the list:

Here’s a few for you:
* Coalition for Health Insurance Choices
* Wise Use
* Citizens to Protect the Pacific Northwest and Northern California Economy
* National Smokers Alliance
* Americans for Properity
* American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy
* FACES of Coal
* Friends of Coal
* Energy in Depth
* CHANGEPAC
* VOTINGFORJUDGES.ORG
* Citizens for Judicial Integrity
* Consumers for Cable Choice
* Keep It Local New Jersey
* New Millennium Research Council
* Teach Plus
* Education Equity Project
* Educators for Excellence
* Alliance for Excellent Education
* Center on Education Policy
* Foundation for Educational Excellence
* Stop Too Big To Fail
* Consumers for Competitive Choice
* Alliance of Australian Retailers
* Working Families for Walmart
* Paid Critics

I’m not sure Friends of Coal fits the criteria – unless it’s trying to destroy the coal industry. Most of the rest I’ve not noticed. My personal favorite is Judicial Crisis Network, wherein the crisis appears to be that the judiciary doesn’t have enough right-wing activists as judges.

My reader continues:

There are also lots of other tricks, like Comcast’s paying people off the street to fill public spots in the audience of hearings to applaud for them (Comcast) and to take up seats which would otherwise have been filled by people more critical and the media. Or like organizations and politicians paying to set up fake social media accounts to praise them, e.g. https://twitter.com/queensquaykaren who is actually Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s deputy communications director, Fraser Macdonald.

Well, that’s certainly deceptive, but part of the job of the officials running hearings is to disregard hearings as indicators of popular support of any particular position on any issue; if an issue requires gauging public approval, then commission a poll. Hearings should be for collecting information from experts, and for limited public input.

I could research this stuff and list organizations and campaigns all day. Generally speaking, unless you know the source or can otherwise verify it, assume it’s someone trying to lie to you.

A sadly necessary bit of paranoia these days. Another reader remarks:

Al Gore never foresaw any of this when he invented the internet.

Which, for some reason, triggers me to think that the Web is a leading example of the old economic concept The tragedy of the commons. Although exactly whether or not the resource being harvested is of a limited or unlimited quantity isn’t entirely clear, is it? Perhaps the analogy is inapt. I’ll have to think about it.

Ipso facto:

The Latin term ipso facto translates as “the fact by itself.” It is used in science, philosophy, and law to refer to something that, by the fact that it exists – or that it occurred – means something else is true. For example, if you grew up in San Francisco, ipso facto you’re a Californian. By the very fact of having grown up in a city within the state, you are a Californian. [Legal Dictionary]

Noted in “A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame,” Andrew Sullivan, New York Intelligencer:

[How to Be an Antiracist] therefore is not an attempt to persuade anyone. It’s a life story interspersed with a litany of pronouncements about what you have to do to be good rather than evil. It has the tone of a Vatican encyclical, or a Fundamentalist sermon. There is no space in this worldview for studying any factor that might create or exacerbate racial or ethnic differences or inequalities apart from pure racism. If there are any neutral standards that suggest inequalities or differences of any sort between ethnic groups, they are also ipso facto racist standards. In fact, the idea of any higher or lower standard for anything is racist, which is why Kendi has no time either for standardized tests. In this view of the world, difference always means hierarchy.

It sounds like Kendi wants to leap directly to results without traversing the valley standing in the way.

That panicked moment when you realize you haven’t attended class all year, you’re not wearing any pants, and the teacher just painted you red? Wrong. The problem here can only be adequately described by another dream, and you only get to have one dream at a time. Sucks to be you.

First, drop some acid. First, be a schizophrenic. But, first, don’t sleep for 48 hours. And, first, have a dream like many of mine: indescribable, walking the intersection of mad and dull, unrestrained while being deeply constrained.

Then make a movie. You may get something like The Forbidden Room (2015), a feast for the slightly crazed eye, as the film shifts palettes and then melts; a maddening puzzle for the lover of plot and action; a beckoning finger for those who adore the mythic figure, the mythos, and the palm of the god who holds them in their hands.

But it’s more fun with a friend, especially when they try to walk away in frustration and you have to drag them back bodily to finish the epic marathon. Because this can be a mountain, if your temperament so dictates, worthy of cramps, ropes, frenzied breathing, and the random ruined friendship.

Enjoy it. Or not.

Maranasati:

In some corners it’s been suggested that, while President Trump may have committed a minor crime by pressuring Ukraine to publicly commission an investigation into 2020 Democratic candidate for President Joe Biden, surely this doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense. After all, Ukraine received the military aid that was being withheld, Trump didn’t know, etc.

But this WaPo summation of the history of the inquiry summarizes why it’s necessary for the future of the United States that this impeachment inquiry take place, even if GOP control of the Senate would seem to negate the possibility of a conviction of President Trump:

I use ‘occult’ in the secondary sense of ‘unseen’ and not mystical, just to be clear, although there may be a tangential connection with the usual meaning, at least for those who don’t mind stretching a point.

Last night, as I tried to relax on the couch following an unfortunate incident while I slept, an analogy between what is erroneously called artificial intelligence and a different human capacity came to mind which I’ve not seen elsewhere. I’ve discussed the topic of machine learning before, which is often taken to be artificial intelligence in some way, but I’d like to reiterate the point of interest (if only to me) right here:

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

Last night it occurred to me that there’s an analogy to something else than human intelligence, and that’s human intuition. Intuition is

The faculty of knowing or understanding something without reasoning or proof. [wordnik]

Or, more accurately, reasoning without knowing the rules. In my observation on machine learning, above, I suggested that in order for something to qualify as such, the algorithm must work out the rules based on experience, rather than have them encoded by the programmer. This deduction of the rules isn’t necessarily elucidatable, and, to my mind, that obscurity might qualify to suggest that what currently is called artificial intelligence, and is sometimes categorized as machine learning, might even be better described as machine intuition.

And while I can’t think of how that will generally advantage us in the future, it always makes any scientist or engineer happier to have properly categorized something. It’s just the way we are. And my relative lack of respect for same why I more or less inhabit the fringes of the profession.

I will win at RISK! Oh, wait, you’ve already won.

Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve watched too many movies, digested too many stories. Years and years ago, good friends of ours highly recommended Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), and we recently finally took them up.

It was meh.

This is the story of the rehydration of the dry river bed of the Yemen, the population of it with salmon from Britain, and the personal drama surrounding the project. The latter ranges from incredulity at the scope and even arrogance of the project, financed by a rich Arabian sheik who’s a fly fishing fanatic, to the breakup of the chief expert’s marriage, and ranging onwards to the coordinator of the project, who, midway through, loses her military boyfriend in a firefight in Afghanistan.

And then comes the Yemen locals who, being who they are, can’t stand the thought of a river going through their homeland. They’re going to do something about this sheik and his dam, you know?

The various elements of an interesting story are present, the conflict, the setbacks, new strategies, personal anguish, and the sheik has some nice charisma going for him, but it just didn’t come together for us. Some of it was simply that, for the major characters, all the disasters were cleaned up and dispensed with. The minor characters, well, who cares? They were basically spear-carriers, window-dressing to the drama.

It all felt just not quite right. And maybe that’s because I’ve seen the form too many times, and this was not as well done as some. I can’t fault the technical aspects of the production, and the concept has a nice tinge of outrageousness to it. But, in the end, I felt like maybe another two drafts of the script, concentrating on throwing some actual tragedy at the major characters and spicing up the supporting characters, might have benefited this story greatly.