Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gotta love the helmets these guys wear. I’d say it’s for holding their brains in, but there’s no brains to hold in.

Some stories are very culturally dependent, stories that, viewed by an audience embedded in the milieu of the story, have great significance. The rest of us? Not so much^[1].

So it may be with Cute Little Buggers (2017). It’s Brit, not American, and is the story of the alien invasion of Earth, starting with a strangely dysfunctional British village. They want our women for the usual thing, and the invaders, ably represented by Ernest and Brian, are nearing extinction – thus their motivation for making it with the loathesomely ugly humans. In some ways, they get the best lines in the show, even if they do look like fish with arms, stuck up in their ship in orbit.

Their proxies for their war for survival are robots who disguise themselves as bunnies!

I’ll not spoil the plot – as much as there might be one – as to advise you that, at least to American sensibilities, this was unappealing. Bad acting, unsympathetic characters, shockingly bad bunnies, and a lot of unnecessary nudity. Oh, and the word FUCK seems to be a big part of the dialog. Maybe the Brits liked it.

While I have to say it reminded me of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in that neither I nor my Arts Editor appreciated it, at least Shaun of the Dead had good acting and pointed commentary; we just didn’t really think a self-absorbed Londoner weathering a zombie attack was funny or profound. Cute Little Buggers doesn’t have the commentary nor the acting. The pacing is by turns sluggishly boring, then ridiculously filled with dangerous bunnies. Their sudden attacks are fairly repetitive, and if the defenses the beset villagers devise are silly, at least they’re creative.

And, just to interject a note of sunshine, I was pleased to see that one of the more despicable characters, who I had pegged for an early out in this cosmic version of Bombardament, actually does quite well for himself. I admired his skill with the cricket bat.

But this really struck me as more an indulgent fantasy than a rigorous exercise in story-telling, an amateur effort that will require large amounts of alcohol and pizza to bribe most viewers to actually finish. We made it to the end, but only by digging our fingernails into the palms of our hands.

And they really blew the first Easter egg. We’re guessing the second was just an outtake. Maybe the only outtake. Brrrrr, I’ve seen worse, but not much worse.

¹ In fact, that reminds me of the time an Iranian I knew for a short period watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) with a group of colleagues. She left at the Black Knight scene with her hand over her mouth. I suspect American tolerance for violence is greater than most of the world’s.

There’s an obvious lesson to learn concerning the consequences of the single-minded pursuit of profit in this appalling article from NewScientist (25 May 2019, paywall):

THE Medak district, to the north-west of Hyderabad in southern India, was once a pristine landscape. People came to bathe in the cool, refreshing lakes and streams. These days the air is foul. With every breath, chemicals irritate your lungs and, after a while, you feel nauseous. The colour of the water doesn’t help: it ranges from bright orange to deep brown, and is often covered in a thick layer of white foam.

The reason for this blight is not well hidden. Behind high walls and barbed wire fences, factories churn out cheap drugs for the global market. Tall chimneys belch black smoke and tankers trundle along dirt tracks under cover of darkness to dump toxic chemical waste. “It’s like a slow poison,” says Batte Shankar, the head of one village we visited. “When you Europeans are taking these antibiotics to heal, it is good for you. But we are suffering.” …

The foetid lakes and streams contain extraordinarily high concentrations of antibiotics, creating reservoirs of the drug-resistant pathogens that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Some suspect these places might even be incubating new superbugs that could rapidly spread around the world.

It’s a little horrifying that our pursuit of good health is pushing another country’s environment and health to the brink. You’d think the local authorities would be cognizant of the problem, wouldn’t you?

But Hyderabad’s hinterlands aren’t going to stop churning out antibiotics any time soon. In March 2018, local officials announced the construction of Pharma City, a new pharmaceutical park at Mucherla, south of the city, that will host between 900 and 1000 companies. Indeed, local authorities promote this latest venture with the slogan, “minimum inspection, maximum facilitation”.

Greed? Or desperation? Finding ways to transfer wealth from the wealthy West to the needy East is a great motivation, especially as India emerges from its former socialist form. While capitalism has a lot going for it, I think here we’re seeing a terrible excess which, if things go seriously wrong, a substantial part of human civilization, West or East, could end up paying for.

Gotta love a good orange lily.

I just happened to stumble on an update to this story concerning the destruction of some oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico by a storm. Owned by Taylor Energy, they had done some recovery work, but some 14 years later one (or more?) of the wells is still leaking, and apparently far more than Taylor thinks.

For Couvillion, who was belittled by Taylor Energy as too inexperienced for such a complicated job, told that a containment effort was all but impossible and sued by the company when he dared to press on, success is a vindication.

His business, the Couvillion Group, conceived and designed a containment system weighing more than 200 tons, built it in shops all over southern Louisiana and pieced it together deep underwater. The system has recovered about 63,000 gallons since March, according to Couvillion — virtually eliminating a rainbow-colored slick that has stretched as far as 21 miles.

“I’m in awe of what they did,” said Coast Guard Capt. Kristi Luttrell, who chose the Couvillion Group from among six finalists that bid for the job. “We gave them a task and they did it, and they should be very proud of what they’ve done.” [WaPo]

Is Taylor Energy grateful? No, they’re going to sue. To do anything else is to admit fault, I suppose, and we can’t be doing that.

Even Taylor Energy has acknowledged the Couvillion Group’s success. However, the company has sued Luttrell for ordering the cleanup, threatening to fine it $40,000 per day, hiring Couvillion and cutting it out of a $7 million project Taylor Energy must ultimately pay for.

“While the initial report from the Coast Guard is encouraging, the government refuses to share with Taylor Energy any verifiable scientific information or data despite the company’s multiple requests,” Taylor said in a statement. “Taylor Energy remains committed to its role as the Responsible Party and continues to advocate for a response that is grounded in science and prioritizes the well-being of the environment.”

In the suit against Couvillion, the company argued that he “was not professionally qualified” to perform the work and was “reckless and grossly negligent” for attempting it. The lawsuits were combined by a federal judge in New Orleans and are now pending.

And yet he succeeded. There’s certainly far more to this story than a WaPo reporter is going to cover, but for me the fact that some little firm went out and fixed this, over the objection of the bigger firm at fault, suggests a lot of foot-dragging on the part of the latter – perhaps criminally so.

Just in case my reader missed this bit of news, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been replaced by the First Lady’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, and she managed to crawl right past Sanders in the Incompetency Department:

A source at the scene said Grisham got in “an all out brawl” with North Korean officials as American and North Korean reporters were hustled in to view the summit. Grisham was bruised a bit in the scuffle, the source added. [CNN]

I mean, come on. I can’t even imagine anything more other than parochial, unprofessional shock at how the reporters get hustled around by NK security forces.

Sheesh. A new low on her third day in the new job.

Or is it just good that I live in fly-over land? I hadn’t heard of this before, but apparently those who transgress against the moral strictures of the woke community can be canceled, which I think means that no one in the woke community will pay attention to you, admit to your existence, help you in your hour of need, nor ever forgive you for any old clumsy mistake that offended the woke community. It sounds quite, ah, brutal.

Sarah Lazarus has decided to make fun of it, and quite effectively, at McSweeney’s:

Bernard Dubois, a retired physics teacher and WWII veteran, was canceled peacefully in his sleep at the age of 96 while mumbling aloud during a very racist dream. He joins his canceled wife Esther Marie Dubois, 95, who last Thanksgiving expressed a strong opinion about vegans.

But it gets better:

On Wednesday, three-day-old Lily Hobbes became the youngest person ever to be canceled, when her father read to her from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming and she immediately started crying.

But I appreciated the irony of the canceling of an ACLU attorney; the whole thing is worth a read. Andrew Sullivan wonders, in the third part of his weekly tri-partite diary:

I really wonder if we are on the verge of a new orthodoxy in which cancellation will forever be a brutal weapon to enforce woke behavior and discourse. Or whether, in a few years from now, we will look upon this era of woke leftism as one of those moral-panic outbreaks that temporarily make people completely mad.

It will be a temporary moral panic, although proponents of canceling will be around for a couple of decades. The leaders will be too addicted to their position and self-importance to easily give up this implement of coercion.

But as the woke community becomes fractured by the cancellation of followers for obscure and ridiculous offenses, it’ll begin shrinking. People will look at what they’ve built and ask if it satisfies the requirements of common-sense. So long as the outside world looks worse than the woke community, they’ll stick with it, but once the teeter-totter tilts the other way, off they’ll go, looking for a better way.

Speaking as an agnostic, I really appreciated Sullivan’s point concerning redemption in the various Christian sects. Given that we’re not perfect beings, the ability to recognize our own errors and correct them is a critical part of any community. While Sullivan admits the woke community supports redemption, it sounds quite severe and, almost as importantly, very subjective. At least with most of the Christians, you ask for forgiveness from God, and you – and most everyone else – assume you get it.

Funny, I thought I hid her on the right side, not the left.

I learned something tonight (or last night, depending on when this is published): that it’s not impossible to enjoy the romantic farces made in the 1940s and 50s.

I thought I’d hate Tell It To The Judge (1949) as soon as I saw the first gag, but they were smoothly done and organic to the plot. Oh, the plot? The former Mrs. Peter Webb, now Miss Meredith, is up for a seat on the Federal judiciary – in fact, the first woman to be nominated. Her problem? Her recent divorce from her philandering husband has placed her nomination at risk of rejection by the stodgy, conservative, and patronizing members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And she’s furious.

Mr. Peter Webb’s problem? He’s not a philanderer. The pretty blonde he was seen with, a material witness in an important case, keeps following him about, begging for protection against mobsters. Which is sort of like how he follows his former wife about, begging for her affections again. Throw in an opposed grandfather, a lighthouse keeper, and a grifter, not to mention the most adorable St. Bernard ever, balanced by some annoying high society types, and he’s in for a rough time.

The details are not important, except as to whether they seem organic or imposed, and, for the most part, they are organic. Are they funny? My Arts Editor burst out laughing at points where I thought we’d be squirming, so this observation suggests that, yes, they are funny. She can be a harsh audience.

Will this make you think for the next few days? I don’t think so. It’s light and fluffy and disappears like smoke. But it was fun while it lasted.

Seems like you can’t have a restaurant without a TV as a distraction.

This one, incidentally, is located within Zait & Za’atar, near the western corner of Snelling and Selby in St. Paul, MN. We’ve eaten here a couple of times now and note they seem unafraid of smoke and garlic, resulting in strongly flavored dishes. If you value ambiance and decor over food, then perhaps this won’t be your gig as it’s rather primitive in those respects, but otherwise we’ve enjoyed the food and relative quiet. If Lebanese food appeals to you, give it a visit!

The pink peony seems to have suffered a let down.

Recently, SCOTUS brought forth their view on the judiciary and political gerrymandering cases through their ruling on Rucho v. Common Cause, the North Carolina case, and Lamone v. Benisek, the Maryland case. This 5-4 decision, decided along ideological lines within the court, left the liberal wing with another loss – and a sense of outrage. Here’s Justice Kagan’s dissent:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to  advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require—indeed, they do not permit—courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.

Justice Kagan’s dissent is heartfelt, powerfully written – and symptomatic of her, and my, generation’s sins.

First of all, it’s characteristic of the Instant Gratification Generation. Fix this problem now, she cries! This failure to consider how the future may render this problem moot, how the festering of this manifest injustice may be more advantageous, in the long run, than its immediate cauterization, is characteristic of those I’ve grown up with in my generation.

But that leads to the second: is there a judicial solution? Hey, I’ve hardly paid attention, while Justice Kagan is one of the top professionals in her field. Who am I to comment? Maybe I’m just someone with too many opinions.

But I can’t help but notice that all the suggested approaches to the political gerrymandering problem are inevitably encumbered with one problem that they haven’t addressed, and that renders any analogies with race-based gerrymandering solutions invalid: voters can change their political spots. A voter cannot change their ethnic heritage, but when it comes to politics, they can change their vote.

This means that today’s solution is potentially tomorrow’s problem. Sure, voters of important ethnicities can change their geographical location, thus invalidating redrawn political maps to the befuddlement of the judiciary line-drawers, but it’s more likely that voters will change their electoral choice than move to a new home. I say this not just because it’s convenient to my argument, but because there’s a real difference between the two activities. It’s quite rare that a group, en masse, chooses to move. Sure, a river changing its course, or a shattering earthquake can cause a group to move, but those motivations are are exceedingly rare. The key realization is that, generally, people move for reasons particular to them. Sure, statistically, you can group them and study them – but look at a city of people selling their homes and moving and you’ll find a multitude of reasons, and most of them are non-political.

But politics and voting doesn’t require changing residence or even party registration. All you have to do is register to vote, and then do it – with a secret ballot, no less. Today’s Republican town could become tomorrow’s Democratic town – especially since the wildcard, the independents, change their spots quite easily.

But my reader may complain that most seats are safe, despite the swings we’ve seen in voter preferences in recently years. I would point at those recent oscillations, though, and notice that the key realization here is that the political activities of those in charge will impact those who live in that area, and while the impacts will be disparate in magnitude and in whether they are positive or negative, that is only two variables, unlike those who are changing residence. The probability that a mass of voters might change their votes due to the activities of those in political power is far higher than for those of a given ethnicity moving en masse.

Given a political organization of sufficient repugnance, whether it be from incompetence, abuse, or ideological zealotry, those living in that area can, as a group, uncoordinated or not, change their vote at the next election from favoring to disfavoring that political organization.

This brings me to my final point. Many people, if they have any concerns, interests, or agendas in which government can be involved, keep an eye on the political leaders. Even those considered reliable members of a party’s base keep an eye out, usually for ideological blasphemy by their leaders. These signals may be interpreted as indicative of a particular person, but, of course, they can also be taken as a whole to act as intelligence about the entire organization. This is simply how we’re put together; it’s a social survival mechanism, akin to Is that lion too full to chase me, or had I better take off running now?

But what if SCOTUS had instead found for the plaintiffs?

Here’s what happens: this signal, a signal of arrogance, pride, disdain for the voter, and perhaps worse, is lost to that key audience, the voter. Sure, it’s damaging the polity that their activities continue unabated, but those activities are also a signal of the attitudes of that organization towards the voter: that of treating them as cattle, their votes as commodities, as a group to be led about by their noses or excluded. But at least we know and can do something about it sooner rather than later. Even for a relatively high-profile cause such as gerrymandering, SCOTUS decisions are often obscure and unknown; if they had found for the plaintiffs, the lines would have been redrawn, and even with great fanfare, the resultant public consciousness of it would have dissipated within a week.

But finding for the defendants means this signal continues to impact the voters, and it also encourages that political organization to continue activities which are reprehensible. That makes their unworthiness even more obvious.

We may find that this decision by the conservative wing of the Court will actually damage the Republicans, in the end, as the independents and moderate Republicans vote out the hard-line Republicans who’ll do anything to win. They’ll be voted out because doing anything to win is not the American thing to do.

So don’t entirely despair at this decision. If they had found for the plaintiffs, they may have embraced a deeply flawed solution with little input from the public, and little chance for improvement. Now the problem returns, not to the political sphere, but to the public sphere, either formally, or motivated by the misdeeds of the miscreants, regardless of their political stripe.

When I heard that the city elections for Istanbul, Turkey, had resulted in a narrow victory for the opposition’s candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, but then the national government had nullified the elections on some obscure grounds or another, I got that bad feeling in my gut. Surely Erdogan’s national government wouldn’t let the rascally opposition gain a lick of power, much less the position of mayor of the largest city, would they?

Sometimes the gut is wrong:

The opposition’s stunning landslide victory in yesterday’s controversial redo of the Istanbul municipal polls has reignited hopes that Turkey’s democracy, which seemed to be in its death throes, has some fight in it still.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the once obscure former Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Beylikduzu, an ugly urban sprawl on the edge of Istanbul, defeated his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) rival Binali Yildirim by a whopping 800,000 votes compared with the measly 13,000 ballots in the first run. The result is widely seen as the biggest setback faced by the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who pressured electoral authorities to invalidate the March 31 results in Istanbul in the hope of winning this time.

Western diplomats cynically intoned that Erdogan would do so, cheating his way to victory if need be. But few counted on the apocalypse that was in store. Cheating was apparently not an option: AKP strongholds like Fatih and Uskudar, where Erdogan maintains his private residence, fell to the opposition, a resounding signal that his oversize sense of entitlement coupled with a poorly managed and polarizing campaign had backfired spectacularly.  Rising inflation and joblessness are however among the AKP’s biggest woes. [AL-Monitor]

Overconfidence and the belief that they deserved it appears to have been the undoing of the ruling party. That the AKP is basically a religious party – of the Muslims, but it doesn’t really matter – suggests they probably felt they had the imprimatur of their deity and thus they couldn’t lose.

It’s a common failing. We’ve seen that with the Republicans.

I don’t have much more to add, except don’t despair, there’s always a chance your opponents will become overconfident when they are ascendant – and then they become descendant.

Formal Methods in computer science are well summarized in Wikipedia:

In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically based technique for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems.^[1] The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.

I’ve commented on a number of occasions, usually to colleagues, that some day the profession has to find a way to apply Formal Methods in order to produce better products, even if I haven’t the faintest idea of how to do it myself^[1]. It’s good to see that some folks have been pursuing this objective, as noted in this pop-sci report on TLA+, which appears to be based on that notion:

TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy (say, if you were programming an ATM, a constraint might be that you can never withdraw the same money twice from your checking account). TLA+ then exhaustively checks that your logic does, in fact, satisfy those constraints. If not, it will show you exactly how they could be violated. [Pocket / The Atlantic]

The title reminds me of a chapter in FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING: Theory and Practice (MacLennan), in which the passage of time had to be accounted for by the functional programmer. Apparently functional theory didn’t account for the passage of time, and the author found this to be a problem that had to be treated. I fear I missed the point of that chapter.

I must say, though, that one of the arguments the driving force behind TLA+, Leslie Lamport of Microsoft, employs falls with a thud to the ground:

For Lamport, a major reason today’s software is so full of bugs is that programmers jump straight into writing code. “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.” Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code.

The problem is that it’s a rare person who has the resources to build a skyscraper on a whim. Programming, though, all you need is the compiler for the language of choice, and a computer. Anyone with a little intellectual gumption – or gall – can sail right into writing a program. And once someone gets the taste of success in their mouth, it can take years to wash it out. The analogy is broken.

The ease of writing code tends to obliterate the importance of the entire enterprise, truth be told. I recall way back when I was just starting to write code, I ran across a guy – I can’t remember his name – who didn’t consider it science, nor engineering. For him, it was an art form. This is not to say that all software engineers go to that extreme, but given how easy it is to indulge in writing software – programs, apps, code – compared to building even a shack, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of undisciplined writing of code out there, me included.

But code is written everyday for critical, life-involved applications. Forget “mission-critical,” I’m talking embedded software in medical devices, the software that controls various energy sources, all things that can cause death if they fail. The use of tools such as TLA+ should continue and grow, otherwise the promise of computers will be blighted.

But it’ll probably be after my time.

¹ I know I’ve mentioned related topics on this blog, specifically having to do with software dis-warranties and the general use of the customer as a beta-release mechanism.

I’ve talked about the decline of the moral standing of the American Evangelical before, but it appears their leading members are still intent on going over the cliff of hypocrisy and lying, as Steve Benen discusses the behavior of Vice President Pence (R-IN):

We have mushrooms, now. One giant organism? Or many? Beats me, I’m not a mycologist.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has come up before, as he’s under indictment for campaign fund theft. What was he doing with them? Talking Points Memo reports:

Justice Department prosecutors alleged on Monday that Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) used campaign contributions to have multiple extramarital affairs, including a $1,000 ski vacation with a female lobbyist.

According to the court filing, Hunter started using the campaign funds to “carry out a series of intimate relationships” with five women soon after he first entered office in 2009.

The first woman (“Individual 14”) was a lobbyist. For about three years, Hunter dipped into his campaign contributions to pay for a couple’s ski getaway (which cost more than $1,000), a road trip to Virginia Beach, and hotel stays, according to prosecutors.

And all I can think? ONLY $1,000 for a ski vacation?!

What sort of cheap asshole is this guy, anyways?

But this may not be an electoral disaster for him. After all, his TrumpScore as of this writing is 96% – and 100% in the current Congress. Just so long as he’s firmly humping President Trump’s leg, he’ll beat any primary challengers and probably any Democratic nominees as well.

Even if it’s with a monitor on his ankle.

Because, well, the Republican base has little enough self-respect nowadays.

You stick out your thumb and you never know what’ll pick you up.

Some stories are complete in and of themselves. Some stories are deficient in some way, but still worthy of a view for reasons peculiar to each: quirky characters, special-effects, philosophical underpinnings, whatever it might be.

And then there’s those stories that require the audience to bring something to the party in order to rise above the muck. In all likelihood, that addition, augmentation, whatever you want to call it, is going to involve alcohol and a finely tuned sense of snark.

That’s the category Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) falls into. This is the sort of movie the viewer must charge into with a desire to critique, preferably loudly, with the remote in hand. That sense of the aesthete, the critic, will be all that saves the sanity of the viewer.

Shall we begin? Since this claims to sail from the science fiction harbor, we’ll have to say the science is execrable, as they appear to be making the trip from Earth to Venus in the matter of a couple of hours, and while they may get props for actually having a space station to stop at, the space station appears to be defying the laws of physics: it spins as one might expect, but the people do not go flying off as they should.

This guy’s even worse when dead! And don’t try to eat him, he tastes like … rubber!

The special effects are spotty, although I must admit I had to stop the movie to exclaim in delight over the forty tentacled plant that tried to eat a handy astronaut. Like many movies of this sort, more money is spent on the special effects than on the story or actors, and it can show. But other special effects, such as the dead pterosaur, were little more than unconvincing rubber.

But, really, the worst were the actors and script. The script sends these actors wandering all over the landscape, as the rescue mission stops off at convenient locations to explore various ruins, and despite all this moseying about, somehow these sometimes horny astronauts never meet up with the half-naked native ladies. There’s no conflict, none of that stuff that makes stories like this compelling, interesting, or even vaguely worthwhile. Frankly, the astronauts are more or less repellent and wooden, although we didn’t cheer for them to actually die. Our incredulity may have been interfering with a full snark display. And this script employs narration, presumably to cover up a host of sins. It made my eyes water, figuratively speaking.

And the color palette! We speculated it was an artifact of age interacting with the film, but perhaps not: maybe everyone’s hair was supposed to be green on Venus.

Mom always said I should find something nice to say, so I’ll say that John, the Robot, undoubtedly a distant cousin of the better-known Robbie the Robot, is really sort of cool. We think the best art student intern working on this project did John. Too bad John’s “self-preservation unit” ultimately did him, excuse me it, in.

And, finally, what’s this bit about “fighting mathematics?” Why is it important to fight mathematics? Or so captioning claimed it said; it’s a little garbled in this Internet version that I found, and for that matter the original on Amazon. Oh, I’m not recommending you see this piece of trash, but if you do watch it, the mathematics remark is at 31 minutes in, more or less.

And that can be physical, mental, even emotional. Pressure, that is. We often hear, quite properly, Use it or lose it. This refers to physical capabilities, in most cases. But Michelle Singletary of WaPo has brought up the important topic of inheritance:

Some super-rich parents — Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — have said they do not plan to leave their adult children a great percentage of the wealth they’ve accumulated.

Of course, it’s a bit relative if you’re still getting millions of dollars from mom and pop.

“Intergenerational transfers are a widespread phenomenon, with an average of roughly 2 million households receiving either an inheritance or a substantial gift each year,” according to a 2018 Federal Reserve report.

But stories that wealthy business people such as Gloria Vanderbilt, who died last week at 95, do not want to pass on their considerable fortune to their heirs made me wonder: Should you leave an inheritance to your children? …

While interviewing Cooper in 2014, radio host Howard Stern asked: “Your mother inherited money. Why shouldn’t you inherit money?”

“I think it’s an initiative sucker,” Cooper said. “I think it’s a curse. Who’s inherited a lot of money that has gone on to do things in their own life? From the time I was growing up, if I felt like there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don’t know that I would have been so motivated.”

I’ve remarked on inheritance before, in the context of a meritocracy, and I must admit that I find the question of inheritance to be problematic. There are many cases of inheritances wasted by the recipients, although I have no idea if anyone’s sat down and actually examined the problem.

But I think of it this way: a species isolated from evolutionary pressures have little reason to change. After all, another way of thinking of this isolation is to say that they’re doing so well that there’s no reason to change. Apply this thinking to the human organism who receives an inheritance, and you realize there’s a predisposition for that organism to, well, sit on his or her hands.

This is not a deterministic statement, of course, because we are not all economic beings. Some of us are driven by other and numerous impulses, ranging from art to politics (think of the Roosevelt family, both Teddy and Franklin, who were cousins). But the easy availability of the trappings of life are, in the main, not likely to encourage someone to explore the extremities of life that can lead to an outsized results.

If that matters to you, restriction of inheritance to your children, or the cultivation of interests other than economic in your children may be of importance.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare may feel like he has a chicken bone stuck in his throat:

I want to say a few words in defense of Donald Trump’s tweets and statements today on the abortive military operation against Iran. This is admittedly contrarian. It is an argument I have never made before and frankly don’t expect to make again. It is also an almost comical example of damning with faint praise. …

… [but even] collegiate-level argumentation is a dramatic breakthrough for a president whose more typical behavior has given rise to Dan Drezner’s famous Toddler-in-Chief thread. The president’s comments on the Iranian situation reflect thinking that is genuinely unusual for Trump, who normally articulates a kind of government by magic in which one can have it all and without costs. Here, by contrast, Trump is overtly acknowledging costs, nuance and complexity. The man who campaigned for president promising to commit war crimes is now acknowledging that brutality isn’t an objective but a negative and that restraint may be valuable. I cannot think of any previous set of statements in which Trump’s thinking seems so coherent and linear and logical—and also so complicated.

The point of difference between a committed independent and a relatively useless zealot is their willingness to step forward and admit that someone they loathe has done something good. How many Republicans could do that for Obama, or Democrats for Trump or Bush II? And how much less valuable are their thought processes once we realize that they start from an assumption that the leader of the other side is inherently evil or an idiot?

This is the danger of political cults.

OK, all that said, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Trump was deliberately speaking to a different audience. To a great extent, Trump speaks to his base, a group committed to the idea that liberals are, well, evil or idiots. But, in this case, Trump may have been speaking to everyone and felt that a more nuanced approach was necessary. Why this would be, I’m not certain – but it’s worth considering during analysis of his behavior.

We were quite pleased when the Minnesota Museum of American Pattern Glass, a recent museum review, appeared on local news WCCO as a local place of interest. Congratulations!

If you haven’t been yet, put it on your list of things to see.

Hypogeum:

While excavating hundreds of graves dating from the third century B.C. through the third century A.D. in a Roman necropolis on the island’s eastern side, archaeologists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) found stairs descending to a long corridor and a hypogeum—a rock-cut underground burial chamber normally reserved for high-status individuals—predating the Roman burials. More than 100 tombs of this type were excavated in the 1970s and 1980s at Casabianda, another Etruscan cemetery just to the south. [“A Funeral Fit for Etruscans,” Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology (July/August 2019)]

Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum
Source: Wikipedia

Last weekend was the Back To The ’50s show at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, but I was not much in the mood for picture taking. However, I couldn’t resist these two, both parked convenient to my camera.

That impressive hood ornament was internally lit, which made it even more fun. And then there’s this little cutie:

We don’t often see a Studebaker going down the road.

The pinkies are a little behind the other peonies, but they at least as cute.

Someone’s measuring the cost of training a computer via machine learning, as reported by NewScientist (15 June 2019):

Training artificial intelligence is an energy intensive process. New estimates suggest that the carbon footprint of training a single AI is as much as 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – five times the lifetime emissions of an average car.

Emma Strubell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and colleagues have assessed the energy consumption required to train four large neural networks, a type of AI used for processing language.

Language-processing AIs underpin the algorithms that power Google Translate as well as OpenAI’s GPT-2 text generator, which can convincingly pen fake news articles when given a few lines of text.

These AIs are trained via deep learning, which involves processing vasts amounts of data. “In order to learn something as complex as language, the models have to be large,” says Strubell.

Well, that’s lovely to know, but why pick the car as your comparison? The point of comparisons is to compare like things, which is to say things that belong to the same functional category.

So compare to a human being. How much does it cost to bring a human from birth to the same level of capability as the computer, discounted for the fact that the human is, in most cases, multi-capable, unlike the computer. Another factor is the ease of replicating that ability from computer to computer, without the learning portion, while each human lacks that all important USB port in their head.

I have no idea how to answer the question. I just keep in mind that using computers to resolve problems within the manual capability of humans would seem to be a waste of energy and climate.

And, yet, who laments the disappearance of the great thundering herds of filing clerks? The entire question of which class of problems deserves the application of computers is a little nuanced than one might think.

From an age when they wore taco bowls on their heads.

The essence of Rhythm in the Clouds (1937) is light-hearted whimsical farce. Failing song-writer Judy bluffs her way into the apartment of acclaimed song-writer Phil Hale, and, finding him away on vacation, appropriates his name as co-writer on songs she has written. On the strength of that faux-collaboration, her songs are taken up by a radio station and one of its sponsors, the Duchess de Lovely. Yeah, no kidding. From there it becomes a farce of missed connections, misunderstandings, fumbled words, and, of course, a happy ending.

However, the pacing is far too placid to really emphasize the important parts, and the whole story feels very artificial. An artifact from another era, it took me roughly a month to watch, and it only lasts an hour. Don’t waste your time on this unless you have an historical reason to see it.