Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!

Sordid. I think that’s a good adjective for Forbidden World (1982; aka Mutant), an exploration of the horrors of unrestrained scientific research. Troubleshooter Colby, whose usual tool is a laser gun, and his trusty killer robot, Sam, has been assigned to a mysterious problem on Xarbia, an uninhabited planet hosting a research station. An interlude with a pointless space battle occurs, which incidentally utilizes footage from Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), after which Mike reaches the station.

He finds three or four scientists specializing in various fields of genetics, a couple of assistants, and a mutant something-or-other imprisoned in a science lab isolation chamber. With movable panels. And all the other research animals ripped to pieces, and blood all over the walls. But never mind that, because it’s time for dinner!

During their meal of syrup dripped on tofu, Mike discovers the scientists are remarkably close-mouthed about their work, as well as a missing scientist, Annie. In the meantime, one of the assistants, Jeff, who has been assigned to clean up the lab, turns out to be remarkably slow-witted: He sticks his head into the lab isolation chamber, and becomes the horrified host to whatever that damn mutant thing might be.

This is what earning a Ph.D. gets you.

Well, there’s cleaning up the liquifying Jeff (don’t ask), there’s the sleeping with the beautiful lady scientist, there’s another mutant, now looking like a giant spider, who goes gallumphing about out in the inhospitable outer world and manages to trap the science team lead and eat him up (yum!) with some of the most unbrushed teeth I’ve ever seen in a movie, all with Mike and Sam running around shooting their laser guns with little effect. And don’t forget the nudity.

Finally, the crime comes to the fore: the mutant, singular or plural, are actually the result of crossing a human cell with something called “Proto B,” a synthetic DNA that results in … the mutants? But then there’s the liquifaction of the bodies, which the mutants are eating. Maybe it’s something the mutants excrete. Yeah, that’s it. Sure. And missing Annie? She was the host mother for this mess. It didn’t end well for her.

Anyways, the scientist who has cancer (and the fakest coughs in the world) comes up with the solution for killing the mutant: feed his own cancer cells to the mutant. With the rest of the scientists gone in various horrific ways, Mike ends up as the ad hoc surgeon who must cut out the tumor and then feed it to the oncoming mutant, who doesn’t appear to want to ingest it, but a little ingenuity and soon all that is left is Mike and the surviving assistant. And, ah, a foaming monster. With teeth.

So, what’s the point? There’s no real sincerity in the “science is evil” theme, no palpable You shouldn’t do that! Not like Frankenstein’s Monster, anyways. The science team lead is vigorous in attempting to forestall Mike’s mission from successful completion, but exactly his motivations in defending the mutant, which eventually lunches on him, are completely unclear.

No, this is mostly about the visceralities of life: pursued by monsters, getting it on with the beautiful ladies, cleaning up messes, and a lack of sleep. If you’re feeling like you need a bit of a dip into a crass exploration of, ummmm, whatever this is, have at it.

A random addition to the evidence that North Carolina’s GOP breeds some really dubious characters, provided by a reader:

A Russian bank owned by former North Carolina Congressman Charles Taylor has been accused of money laundering and lost its license, according to Bloomberg News.

The Commercial Bank of Ivanovo “failed on multiple occasions to comply with Bank of Russia regulations” on money laundering “of criminally obtained incomes and the financing of terrorism,” the Bank of Russia said in a press release.

The bank lied about its assets and reserves, the central bank said, “in order to improve its financial indicators and conceal its actual financial standing.” The bank also artificially inflated its capital to make it look like it was in line with Russian regulations, the press release said. [Charlotte Observer]

Furthermore …

The AP reports, “Taylor bought CBI in 2003 alongside his business partner Boris Bolshakov, a former KGB agent and Supreme Soviet deputy who is listed as the bank’s second-largest shareholder.”

That same year, two people tied to Taylor testified that he “knew about fraudulent loans made by Asheville-based Blue Ridge Savings Bank, which he owned at the time, to a political supporter,” according to the AP. The then-congressman said at the time he did not know anything about the loans.

Sigh. I may be amused by Republican sleaze, but it’s in a painful way. I have to wonder if they’re conscious that their activities are not honorable, or if they lie to themselves as well.

Glycome:

The glycome is the entire complement of sugars, whether free or present in more complex molecules, of an organism. An alternative definition is the entirety of carbohydrates in a cell. The glycome may in fact be one of the most complex entities in nature. “Glycomics, analogous to genomics and proteomics, is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism” and is a subset of glycobiology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Move over, DNA. Life’s other code is more subtle and far more powerful,” Hayley Bennett, NewScientist (29 March 2019, paywall):

The genetic code has just four biochemical letters strung together in lines. But the sugar code, known as the glycome, contains tens of different sugars that fit together in branched strings called glycans (see Diagram). Reading the sugar code isn’t just a case of decoding it letter by letter, but recognising the shape of each sugar and understanding what it means. That is hard. “It was so much easier to build on the DNA code, to develop tools for genomics,” says Godula.

I suppose I should be appalled, but instead I cheer on the winning side. Here’s the CNN headline:

Suspected rhino poacher killed by an elephant then eaten by lions in South Africa

Given the cruel manner in which poachers treat their prey, I just don’t have a lot of sympathy, even if the article expressed dismay at the sight of the poacher’s daughters mourning their loss.

Inaugurating a new UMB feature, these reviews will be of targeted messages to consumers by industrial groups, or even specific companies, in defense of their activities. This post might be considered a ragged, unfocused predecessor of this series.

So I received this one in email, but here it is online:

In the wake of the Green New Deal, which supposedly endangers the beef industry, this defends the beef industry by examining its many uses. I appreciated that the makers of this video, made (apparently) by Tech Insider, supplied references for their claims. I spot checked the bovine insulin claim and it appears to be accurate, although perhaps a little strongly put.

Clearly, though, the film makers are amateurs. Gelatin’s important in the making of … Gummi Bears? Collagen is important for … smoothing wrinkles out of faces? The selection of examples should exemplify the indispensability of cattle in the manufacture of products important in our everyday lives – not superfluous little shit that we would never miss if it had never been made.

All that said, perhaps its strongest defect is in what it doesn’t address. Speaking globally, there are often alternative solutions, sometimes environmentally or even economically superior, to the world’s problems. Suggesting that the utility of cattle makes it indispensable is intellectually deceptive so long as they don’t supply arguments to suggest why the cattle-associated solutions are far preferable to alternative solutions, especially on balance against the amount of feed (or just call it food) consumed by the beef vs how many people that food would support if eaten directly, as well as the climate change gases associated with cattle. That omission is disappointing.

In the end, its unintended message is, oddly enough, simply too many people.

As a working dude, I don’t always have time to do the sort of in-depth research I’d like to be doing on political figures, especially those who may be up-and-coming, but not yet here. When I can read what appears to be a positive report on them from a member, or former member, of the opposition party, or at least someone of a political philosophy differing from the reportee, I take an interest. Reports from the same side can be a whitewash; reports from someone with little or no reason to conceal flaws are more likely to be honest.

With that in mind, Jennifer Rubin, ex-Republican, comments on Democratic Presidential wanna-be nominees Stacy Abrams, who just missed out on being governor of Georgia, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana:

Stacey Abrams is an African American woman, of “sturdy build” she says, from the South who barely lost the Georgia governor’s race, has made voting rights her passion and knocked it out of the ballpark in her response to this year’s State of the Union. Pete Buttigieg is a white, gay man of slight build from the Midwest who’s spent eight years as mayor of South Bend, Ind., a mid-sized city, served in the military and is a genuine intellectual. They couldn’t be more different, right?

Not exactly. Both are quite progressive but do well in red states and both have made a giant impression on the media and among those voters who know who they are. What’s the secret of their success? I’d argue they have important ingredients rarely found in a single politician.

First, both are crazy-smart. She’s a Yale Law School grad, he’s a Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar. They don’t simply have credentials, however. They have nimble, curious minds and are voracious readers. That makes them interesting to listen to and makes them sound somehow different, more serious than traditional politicians who rely on buzzwords and catchphrases. [WaPo]

That they value knowledge is, of course, important to me, and should be to any voter. Rubin has lots more. My takeaway from this? To watch the other Democratic nominees with this in mind: are they trying to distract me with their body language, or are they talking to me. Do they seem chronically curious about the world, or do they think they know all the answers already?

That was part of Obama’s attraction for me: forever reading, always searching for a viewpoint that gave insight into problems he was, or might, face.

But more important is Rubin’s throwaway line:

Both are quite progressive but do well in red states …

In this line may well lie the winning Democratic Presidential strategy for 2020: to nominate someone from a red state. Buttigieg, of course, is not holding a state-wide office, but his last victory in South Bend was with 80% of the vote in a city in a red state. Abrams lost deep South Georgia by a whisker.

I wonder just how much they’d rupture the red states if one of them won the race for Democratic nominee and picked the other as running mate.

My exposure to both is confined to their appearances on The Late Show. Buttigieg came through as having a sense of humor, but of serious purpose as well. Abrams, which was just a night or two ago, seemed to have quite the nimble sense of humor, had just the right touch of embarrassment concerning her career as a romance novelist, undertaken to put food on the table, and was at least as impressive as Buttigieg and other The Late Show guests Harris, and moreso than Gillibrand.

Yes, they’re singing a song! But why?

Let’s say you’re in the mood for some psychoactive drugs, but you’re lacking any, whether it’s a dearth of cash on your part, or all the shops have closed up for the night. What to do?

Friends, I can heartily recommended Forbidden Zone (1980) to fill that gap in your life. It left us with mouths agape and eyes aswim with tears, as Frenchy’s family wanders into the Sixth Dimension in search of their kidnapped relative. Meanwhile, King Fausto lusts after her (she’s French, and therefore perfect), Queen Doris continually sends assassins after her, her family seems to be having, well, intimate relations with anything that’ll sit still for it, and Chicken Man. Yes, Chicken Man. Who needs complete sentences for this review?

Yes, you, too, can partake of surrealistic juvenilia. Just don’t ask me why anyone made this.

The lobbying update from AL-Monitor has more details on the attempted transfer of nuclear tech to Saudi Arabia:

In response to news that Tesla is making more games available on the drivers’ panel of their iconic electric cars, Lloyd Alter of Treehugger pines for a more apropros offering:

Classic movies would be good too, like Death Race 2000.

For those not in the know, Death Race 2000 (1975) wasn’t a classic race, but instead consisted of finding ways to kill people with the hopped up cars. The most points, the win.

Just a joke. Yet … if you can come up with 3 whole numbers a, b, c such that

42 = a³ + b³ + c³

Then these folks might want to have a chat with you.

A reader remarks on the imminent infidelity of cameras to reality:

The latest pro camera from Olympus has an AI that’s been trained (by feeding it thousands of images) to recognize a number of things (planes, trains, automobiles) and choose optimal focus points, shutter/aperture and image enhancement. They also are using AI in their endoscopes to recognize and help physicians diagnose cancer. The resulting images are perhaps not “true” but certainly useful.

Amazing stuff. But at some point there’s a change from “better focal selection” to “enhancements that renders the camera’s work a possible work of fiction,” as the authors of the article argue. I think the reader’s examples don’t step over the line. But what happens when examples are offered, in court, that do? And then court case after that, when maybe a cop beats up someone who’s been arrested, and then claims in court that the camera used to record the beating “just made it up”?

Reality is becoming more and more distant.

Often in rhetoric, the implicit logic of a position is followed into absurdities, thus, the argument goes, illustrating the folly of the position. Going in the other direction is a little less popular, but can be used to argue that some cultural position is, if not absurd, at least flawed.

In this spirit, I present the subject of an e-mail from known lefty organization MoveOn.org:

Join us tomorrow: We deserve the full Mueller report NOW

Stop and think about that: what have they done to deserve access to the full report? Are they such worthy creatures, by virtue of being American citizens – perhaps – that all such reports should be automatically bestowed on them? Have they attributes of Gods and must therefore have every whim satisfied? Is it true –

This line of reasoning ridicule can go on for quite some time, once you take their wording seriously.

If pressed, I suggest they’d shrug and suggest it’s merely a figure of speech. My reply is that reflects the basic absurdity of some facet of their philosophy of extreme individualism, and the >ahem< apparent divinity which goes along with it.

Naturally, as chronic readers of this blog know or can guess, I’m in favor of the full release of the Mueller report. Not because I’m a God^[1][2], or need to satisfy some intellectual / prurient interest, or some other self-interested, self-aggrandizing, or even grandiose reason.

But because I think the more information we have on the character of our President, shrouded as it is in lies and deliberate metaphorical fog, the better our country, as a whole, can make proper decisions about whether to cut his Presidency short – or to permit it to move on to a second term.

This may all seem akin to counting angels on the head of a pin, but let me draw a lesson from engineering: way too many times I’ve seem some subtle assumption or implementation decision that looked right, seemed right – and was wrong. And correcting that mistake rippled through the system like the waves of a pebble in a still pond, troubling the waters far out of proportion to the apparent size of the decision.

Operating from proper assumptions and philosophical underpinnings is far less likely to lead one astray. The self-entitlement mind-set evident in the subject of that email speaks volumes about the half-baked philosophy of those who wrote it.

¹ Which would be a funny thing to claim for an agnostic.

² Nonetheless, I’ve been proclaimed one an uncomfortable number of times, decaded ago. No kidding. Even in fun, it’s disturbing.

Michael Le Page reports on the climate impact of all your computing devices for NewScientist (16 March 2019):

Our tech addiction is cooking the planet. The manufacture and use of smartphones, computers and TVs will produce 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 8 per cent by 2025.

That is the conclusion of a report on the sustainability of the digital technology sector put together by 12 experts for a Paris-based think tank called The Shift Project, which says that energy use in this sector is increasing by 9 per cent every year.

In theory, digital technology could replace other activities that produce even more emissions. For instance, people might be using video conferencing instead of flying to meetings. But this isn’t happening, says Maxime Efoui-Hess, one of the authors of the report.

“The ‘good effects’ of digital technologies, in terms of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions, are constantly neutralised at global scale by the fact that we use these technologies without thinking about the right way to do it,” he says.

And if we fail to make excellent progress replacing fossil fuel power plants with ‘green’ power plants, however you wish to define ‘green’, then that raises the question of how to deal with these power hogs we have on our desk and in our pockets. Will we have rallies where we turn off all the computing devices for a day? A week? A month?

Or will we somehow enforce a ‘tasks suitable for computing’ regimen? No more computer filing, it’s all by hand? Back to Solitaire using real decks? A huge cached server to which you can make a request as to whether “something” has been computed, and get the immediate result back if true, otherwise you compute it and then contribute the result? That last one would present some interesting challenges in terms of problem specification and scalability, but for sufficiently difficult to compute problems, it might be useful.

And the impact on the public computing projects could be enormous. A choice between a better climate and more knowledge? Hard to make a pick. The servers that MUST be up 24 hours could continue to contribute, but everyone else, such as myself? It turns into an interesting question.

When it comes to North Carolina’s GOP, the charges are almost drearily to be expected:

Federal prosecutors have unsealed an indictment charging North Carolina State Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes and three associates in an alleged bribery scheme involving campaign contributions to the state insurance commissioner.

Hayes, along with political and business figures Greg Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, made initial appearances in US District Court in Charlotte Tuesday.

“The indictment unsealed today outlines a brazen bribery scheme in which Greg Lindberg and his co-conspirators allegedly offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in exchange for official action that would benefit Lindberg’s business interests,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski in a news release.

The March 18 indictment charges Hayes, Lindberg, Gray and Palermo with wire fraud as well as bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds and aiding and abetting. Hayes also has been charged with making false statements. …

The alleged scheme was to pay the commissioner of the North Carolina Department of Insurance at least $1.5 million in exchange for making staff changes, among other things, the court documents say. [CNN]

The little cesspool of North Carolina politics may have just had a filter put on it. I look forward to hearing how this turns out.

I keep wondering why I added my name to an email list AL Monitor uses to send mail concerning lobbying in Washington. Then I run across something like this from last Friday:

This newsletter reported last week that Saudi-owned alfalfa farm Fondomonte Arizona recently hired the Rose Law Group out of Scottsdale to lobby on “agriculture and employment issues.” Now the Guardian sheds new light on the issue with an in-depth look look into Saudi efforts to exploit loose water regulations in the drought-stricken American West to grow food for Saudi cows.

Which leads to this Guardian article:

Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town’s 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.

Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.

Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.

The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.

Each month, Fondomonte Farms loads the alfalfa on to hulking metal shipping containers destined to arrive 24 days later at a massive port stationed on the Red Sea, just outside King Abdullah City in Saudi Arabia.

The efficiency of the global transportation system continues to amaze me. More importantly, the ability of the Saudis to export the ruination of an ecological system, while not uncommon, is quite troubling, and speaks to the current position of royal agency the dollar has achieved in the American system – much to our unconscious (mostly) distress.

Much like The Day Of The Triffids (1962), the story Night Caller From Outer Space (1965) is an attempt by the British to infuse an essentially silly story with professional effort. Here we have a monstrous meteorite entering Earth’s atmosphere with neither an explosion or a crater left at its landing point, but just a small silicon-covered sphere. Found by the military in the company of a leading science team, they soon discover the sphere is actually a matter transceiver – but at the cost of the science team’s leader. Worse yet, the creature that comes through escapes the military compound with the matter transceiver in tow.

But it’s the connection to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, which is most puzzling. A number of young women in London and neighboring towns have gone missing, and somehow it’s connected to the creature – but how?

The police not accounting for the impossible, and a couple of bodies, and in the end, the creature escapes with the women. His goal? They will become the mothers of a new race of Ganymedeans, a race that is fatally damaged by their own hubris. As he leaves the horrified police behind, he shouts they needn’t worry about their safety.

Call it dark if you like.

This story has a few things going for it. The science, outside of the one incredible part allocated to it, doesn’t do too badly most of the time, although there’s a few head-shakers in the bunch. The lead female character is quite strong, and I liked her a lot – I wish she’d had more lines and scenes.

But the motivation of the Ganymedeans was more than a little difficult to take seriously. Perhaps if we’d spent a little more time with the creature, we’d have more empathy for the antagonist – but that would have shattered the tension the moviemakers are at pains to build.

In the end, this is not as good as The Day of the Triffids, and that’s too bad. It was a solid professional effort, undone by the script.

In NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall), Donna Lu notes that our smartphone cameras have been enhanced so much that, well, they no longer record reality any longer, but replace it:

THE phrase “the camera never lies” has never been so wrong. Artificially intelligent smartphones are now editing pictures in real time to create images that can’t be produced by conventional cameras. These enhancements, known as computational photography, are changing the way we view the world.

The goal of digital photography was once to approximate what our eyes see. “All digital cameras, including ones on smartphones, have always had some sort of processing to modify contrast and colour balance,” says Neel Joshi, who works on computer vision at Microsoft Research.

Computational photography goes beyond this, automatically making skin smoother, colours richer and pictures less grainy. It can even turn night into day.

These photos may look better, but they raise concerns about authenticity and trust in an era of fakeable information. “The photos of the future will not be recorded, they’ll be computed,” says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab.

The endangered activity that is not mentioned, I noticed, was citizen proctoring of police activities. After all, smartphones are the primary device for recording police misconduct by citizens. Is there anything to stop a policeman from arguing that the photography of his conduct cannot be introduced as evidence because it’s so easily modified?

Of course, this defense is less likely to work if there are more than one recording device employed, but it’s not hard to argue in this Age of the Network that the devices merely coordinated their modifications.

This will not be far in the future, I predict.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1962) is actually a play written by Joseph Kesselring, but we saw it in its movie form. This reminds me a little bit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in that both are about the unsuspected, shocking secrets we keep from even our closest friends and family. Drama critic Mortimer Brewster’s surviving family consists of his delusional brother, Teddy, who believes he’s T. Roosevelt, currently President, occasional digger of canals, and someday to go on a famous safari in Africa (his sense of time is remarkable); his unmentionable and, well, loathed brother Jonathan, unseen for years since his eviction from the family home; and his spinster aunts, Martha and Abby Brewster.

He’s hoping to add a new member to the family in the form of Elaine Harper, asking her to marry him, and she is joyful to answer yes. But while hunting for some papers at his aunts’ boarding house, he discovers a body hidden in the windowseat, a discovery which doesn’t perturb his aunts, since, you see, they stored the body there after poisoning the poor man.

One might say Mortimer’s hair becomes a trifle undone at the revelation, but it nearly flies from his head when he learns that Teddy digging his “canals” means the digging of graves, and there’s eleven more, or is it twelve, down in the basement. (I feel a little as if I should be doing Dr. Seuss rhymes at this point.)

Distressing as this is, it’s merely a warmup, for it turns out that long-lost brother Jonathan may not be sentimentally missed, but neither is he lost. The aunts Mabel and Abby are distressed at his unexpected return and his desire to make their home his on a long-term basis, but they soon become absolutely furious. Why?

Well, his count of kills rivals their’s, for one thing. This is intolerable, now isn’t it?

The plot continues on, to Mortimer’s distress, as he tells his beloved that he cannot possibly marry her because of unnamed defects in his family. But as the police descend on them, albeit for a chip and a sandwich, who will end in the lead in their morbid little race, and where, geographically, in their midnight travels? And about that story-ending twist…

I thought this was a lot of fun, if not quite as agile and slick as The Importance of Being Earnest. The script had been slightly modified, I assume, for the presence of Boris Karloff, and the mods gave it a little bit of an extra kick. The only real problems are the production values, as there’s quite a bit of glare and occasionally the sound is a bit off. But if you like farce, this is not a bad one at all.

A reader sends in a link to some more climate change that seems a bit contradictory, published in Snow Brains:

A major glacier in Greenland that at one point was one the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study reports and is covered by ABC.

In 2012 the Jakobshavn glacier was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet every year. But that has reversed and in the past two years, it has started growing again at the same rate, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary. …

There’s indeed a cold spot around Greenland – but it’s merely a day’s measurement, and isn’t measuring the ocean’s temperature. The scary part is all the red down around the equator. Sea Surface temp is more interesting in our case:

Again, a mere day’s measurement. But what I think is interesting is the connection to the North Pole. Could this be a result of the cold normally locked into the ice cap flowing down to Greenland, analogous to the recent breakdowns in the polar vortex? I hope to hear an answer to that unvoiced question some day.

You may remember the last, failed appeal by Dominique Ray to have a representative of his faith tradition (Muslim) be present at his execution, and that SCOTUS voted 5-4 along strict party lines in that decision. But now another such appeal has come along, this time involving a Buddhist – and SCOTUS voted 7-2 to uphold the appeal. So what the hell is going on? Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy explains the situation and has a guess as to the reason for the decision:

… the Supreme Court stayed an execution in a Texas case in which the defendant, a Buddhist, was denied the right to have a Buddhist priest join him in the execution chamber, even though Christian and Muslim prisoners were allowed the company of spiritual advisers of the same faith, in like circumstances. The facts of Murphy v. Collier are very similar to those of Dunn v. Ray, a recent ruling in which the Court allowed an Alabama execution to go forward, even though the prisoner, a Muslim, was not allowed to have a Muslim imam in the execution chamber with him, while Christian prisoners were allowed to have a Christian minister present. …

Why then, did Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts rule in favor of Murphy despite previously ruling against Ray? We cannot know for sure. But it is possible to make some educated guesses. …

A more likely reason, in my view, is that the justices saw the extremely negative reaction against their decision in Ray, and belatedly realized they had made a mistake; and not just any mistake, but one that inflicted real damage on their and the Court’s reputations. Presented with a chance to “correct” their error and signal that they will not tolerate religious discrimination in death penalty administration, they were willing to bend over backwards to seize the opportunity, and not let it slip away.

And, whatever can be said about the procedural question, it’s a good thing that the justices have taken a major step towards clearing up any confusion over their stance on the substantive one. Whether in death penalty cases or elsewhere, it is indeed impermissible for the government to discriminate on the basis of religion.

I’m a little conflicted. It’s dismaying to see the Court swayed by public opinion (or pundit prattle, if you prefer), since Courts are ideally in the business of interpreting the law & Constitution regardless of the whim of public opinion. They provide a stable pillar to how government works.

On the other hand, given the reaction from across the political spectrum to what appeared to be religious bigotry on the part of the conservative wing of the Court in Ray, it’s a little reassuring that at least Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts were willing to admit a prior mistake and have backfilled where they can, assuming that Somin is correct in his guess.

But then how do we evaluate the Gorsuch and Thomas votes? They may have reasoned that making this a 9-0 vote for the appellant in Murphy would have suggested they had made a mistake in Ray; or it might have suggested inconstancy in their judgments between the two cases. Neither looks good for their legacy. On the other hand, their vote in Ray is an equally outsized blemish on their legacies. It’d be interesting to know if any of these guesses truly are accurate, or if they’d put forth yet another reason for their stubborn position.

And for the long term? I’m not sure. That Chief Justice Roberts screwed up the Ray case is appalling and disappointing. Somin has already pointed out in text I did not quote that, if anything, the reasoning applied by the majority in Ray applied with even more impact in Murphy; yet three conservative justices did not accept that reasoning.

These two cases, although as I understand it not precedent-setting, may generate painful and logically twisted legal arguments for years to come.

For this dinosaur geek, this is actually a little sobering:

In a paper to be published April 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences an international team of authors, including University of Washington Provost Mark Richards, share the discovery of a site that tells another piece of the story from the day a meteor strike is thought to have led to the end of the dinosaurs.

“It’s like a museum of the end of the Cretaceous in a layer a meter and a half thick,” said Richards, who is also a professor in the UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences.

This unique fossilized graveyard – fish stacked one atop another mixed with burned tree trunks and conifer branches, dead mammals, a pterosaur egg, a mosasaur and insects, the carcass of a Triceratops and seaweed and marine snails called ammonites – was unearthed over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota by lead author Robert DePalma.

“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the KT boundary,” said DePalma, curator of paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. “Nowhere else on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.” [University of Washington News]

Associated with the Chicxulub meteor crater off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, the pictures that can be seen at the link above are a graphic illustration of the uncaring forces of Nature which could drop on our heads at any moment. These ancient creatures are not the unfortunate victims of predators, or predators who took a wrong step into a sinkhole and never made it out – they are the evidence of mass, instantaneous death.

A sobering thought.

A fully wooden car, the Toyota Setsuna, was displayed at the 2016 Milan Design Week.

I was led to this by an article in NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall) on the replacement of concrete and steel with processed wood:

… as cities grow, the potential of CLT [cross-laminated timber] does too. Around 65 per cent of the urban infrastructure that will be needed in 2030 has yet to be built. If it is constructed with concrete and steel, we have little chance of keeping temperatures down. CLT does not eliminate the old materials completely, but reduces them by up to 80 per cent. “We still use concrete for foundations,” say Shah. “But a wood building is about a third of the weight of a steel and concrete building. That means we require less deep foundations so it reduces the amount tremendously.” Wood also improves a building’s insulation, further cutting its carbon footprint.

In the not-too-distant future, wood could even be used in place of glass in windows. A few years ago, scientists at the Wallenberg Wood Science Center in Stockholm, Sweden, invented a way to extract the pigments from wood. The result was a transparent material that can be used like glass, but with better insulating properties – another small step toward a zero-carbon future.

They even go on to observe lasers have been built using deconstructed wood. Long time readers will recall I’ve talked about wooden buildings made from CLT, so this is all very interesting. Do we really have the wood-growing resources to switch to an economy in which CLT is the primary construction material world-wide? It’ll be interesting to see.

Bon Appetit!

Amateurish drek.

That’s the label I was going to apply to Planet of Dinosaurs (1977).

But, after a little wretched setup to explain why this group of people are running around a savage planet, came the dinosaurs. And I had to admit that, for the stop-action era of special effects, they were not at all bad.

So it’s just drek. But I have to admit I laughed when mama dinosaur registered a forceful protest about making her eggs into omelettes. If you’re a fan of movie stop-action dinosaurs, this piece of drek contains some of the best.

One of you was cheating at pinochle, but I’m not sure who!

If you’re going to watch Up In The Air (1940), you’d best be prepared for a little racism, as Mantan Moreland plays his usual role as the terrified menial help, and it doesn’t help that there’s a blackface scene – although it doesn’t end well for the guy doing the deed.

But other than that, Up In The Air is a pleasant little murder mystery. When the lights go out during rehearsal at the radio station, star singer Rita, who proved to be a real bitch in her few minutes in the story^[1], is shot dead. Who did it? The mysterious stranger who was quietly enjoying the show? One of the musicians? Hyper-kinetic page Frankie, eager to move up in the world?

The police eventually release everyone for want of evidence, and Frankie and his helper, Jeff, who together have been working on a comedy act, take it upon themselves to further the investigation. The mysterious stranger is the next to take it in the neck, just as the investigators discover he’s from Cheyenne and has a connection with a ‘Gladys Wharton,’ but who’s she? The dead singer? Her up and coming replacement, too-innocent Anne? Some floozy back in Cheyenne?

Things move along perhaps just a little too quickly, and the characterization was a little too scant so that when the murderer is finally fingered, I couldn’t remember who it was, so this is definitely a mediocre presentation.

But my Arts Editor said, considering the poor audio, the replacement singer Anne had a more than passable alto voice.

¹ Although, to be honest, her employers were no gems themselves. The word defenestration actually crossed my mind during the one scene with her and the radio management.