Category Archives: Uncategorized

The final appeal of Domineque Ray, convicted murder, was rejected by SCOTUS a couple of weeks ago, and he was put to death. He did not dispute the conviction nor the penalty, however, but who might be present. The State of Alabama’s rules of execution permitted only a cleric employed by the State on the “execution team” to be present in the room at the time of execution, and the only such cleric was Christian. Ray desired an imam of his Muslim faith to be present, but was denied by SCOTUS in a 5-4 decision.

Justice Kagan, joined by the balance of the liberal wing of the Court, dissented, arguing that this is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause, and the majority’s brief, unsigned argument that the appeal was filed too late is, well, bullshit. Read it in full here (starts near bottom of first page). David French of the conservative National Review concurred in the dissent as well.

Ian Millhiser at liberal ThinkProgress:

… it’s still hard to read Ray as anything other than a failure of empathy. The Roberts Court tossed out longstanding doctrine to rule in favor of Christian conservatives who object to many forms of birth control in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. And it seems destined to hold that conservative Christians may defy many anti-discrimination laws. It’s hard to imagine that they would have ruled the same way in Ray if the facts of the case were reversed.

If a Christian inmate were told that he could only have a spiritual adviser of a different faith present during his execution, the court’s Christians would have almost certainly been livid.

Nor is Ray an isolated case. To the contrary, the court’s “religious liberty” cases stand as a monument to its conservative members’ lack of empathy. When religious liberty was primarily invoked by minority religions seeking equal footing an a majority Christian society, the court’s conservatives often looked upon these claims with great skepticism. Yet, when religious liberty claims are brought by the Christian right, the court’s right flank views those claims as transcendent.

I’m not sure I’d call it empathy. It’s hard for anyone to step out of their cultural shoes and truly be dispassionate, and perhaps the conservative justices just couldn’t do it, unless you take the argument that the appeal was too late seriously – which their colleagues did not.

Will Baude at conservative The Volokh Conspiracy is also uncertain as to whether or not the suggestion that the appeal was filed too late was true or a fallacious pretext:

But there is another peculiarity. The district court, who is usually the court in charge of making factual determinations, had concluded that the claim was indeed brought too late, that:

Since Ray has been confined at Holman for more than nineteen years, he reasonably should have learned that the State allows only members of the execution team, which previously has included a state-employed chaplain, inside the execution chamber. Indeed, it was the state-employed chaplain who facilitated Ray’s involvement with an imam for spiritual advice regarding his impending execution.

The Eleventh Circuit second-guessed this determination, concluding that the state had “offer[ed] only the barest assertions about common knowledge in the prison.” But still, it was the district court who held a hearing and who usually makes credibility judgments and factual determinations.

So it seems to me that the execution really hangs on a set of factual judgments and procedural rules — should Mr. Ray have known (or did he know) about the prison’s policies earlier, and what is the Supreme Court supposed to do when the district court and a court of appeals disagree on a factual question like that in a case of thin evidence? I am not sure what the legal answer is, and that makes it an easy case in which to indulge one’s own priors about who are the bad actors here. And that is troubling whoever is right.

(Finally, speaking as a departmentalist, not every responsibility should end with the federal courts. Even if the Supreme Court forbids intervention, I think the state ought to try harder to accommodate the religious needs of the condemned.)

His last observation strikes me as a little blindered. If the state is descending into theocracy, wouldn’t this “rule” that only members of an execution team can be present, and then only employed a Christian cleric, be congruent with the hypothesis at hand?

Let’s simply contemplate a Christian cleric as part of an execution team. We can more or less assume that Jesus would spit on such a cleric, no matter how much he averred that he was there to comfort the condemned, and I say that as an agnostic. This only works in a nascent theocracy which is using the moral authority of the predominant religion in its bid for legitimacy.

Ed Whelan at the conservative National Review notes how this could affect officially out-of-favor Christian sects:

It is very lamentable that the prison did not alter this policy when Ray objected to its obvious religious favoritism. (The policy disfavors not only Muslims and other non-Christians but also, given the internal conflicts within Christianity, many Christians. I wonder how a Catholic inmate’s request that the chaplain pray a Hail Mary with him would be received.) The simplest way to abolish the favoritism would have been to bar the chaplain from the execution chamber. Had the prison made that policy change, the execution of Ray could have proceeded exactly as it did, but not under an Establishment Clause cloud.

Which is the pendulum effect: who’s in power today? The English monarchy, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, exhibited this phenomenon to horrifying effect, as I discuss in my Pillars essay. Whelan also notes the imam viewed the execution from a room with a glass window, meaning Ray could see the imam. He tends to believe too much is read into the decision, especially as he believes SCOTUS has given Islamic appeals several victories of late – a statement of great irrelevancy in that we don’t know if those were open and shut cases, which  do make it to the Court from time to time (as I interpret 9-0 decisions). To illustrate through contrariness, suppose a case in which the appellants appealed through the system to SCOTUS for a case which they claim should be resolved through the application of sharia law. When SCOTUS rules against the appellants, do we shake our heads at the injustice of it all and mark one against them? No, the case is prima facie ridiculous. Whelan’s assertion would require, as a disproving assertion, that some SCOTUS decisions result in breaches of the law while enforcing anti-Muslim discrimination. That is unnecessary. Let us ask this question: If a Catholic was told that only a Protestant cleric could attend his execution, and he appealed this rule 5 days after being so informed, would a hypothetical SCOTUS with Catholics in the majority reject the appeal? I find it difficult to take Whelan’s appeal to statistics seriously.

Matt Ford tries to inject another argument into the mix in The New Republic:

The near-unanimity of this criticism is remarkable by the Supreme Court’s recent standards. By letting Alabama execute Ray without equal access to the clergy of his faith, its conservative justices highlighted two disturbing trends in its recent decisions: the unequal treatment of Muslims who have faced religious discrimination, and an unyielding desire to preserve the death penalty. …

Perhaps the main reason the conservative justices rejected Ray’s claims was because they oppose to what Samuel Alito once called the “guerrilla war against the death penalty.” The justices have criticized the abolition movement in the past. In 2015, they upheld Oklahoma’s use of a sedative tied to two botched executions after complaining at oral arguments that the state only used it because an activist-led embargo had cut off other supplies. The majority opinion summarized itself with circular reasoning: “Because capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.”

The connection of this case to the abolition movement is tenuous at best, but illustrates how someone can see a broken down jalopy missing a wheel as a Formula-One racer. This is pure speculation, meaning Ford has a political agenda he’s trying to inject into what is properly a debate about the Establishment Clause.

For my part, it’s clear that, subject to security considerations, an imam should have been present, or all clerics should be banned. The law should be blind to the theology of the cleric, but not to any fell intentions. It doesn’t require a great long argument, to and fro, to be convincing. It’s simply disappointing that the conservatives cannot see this and hide behind an argument rejected by their colleagues.

The modern way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage.

It’s a tidy little superstition vs science horror show. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is somewhat more sober than its frenetic title. We’re introduced to Stephen Reinhart as he arrives at a small English village in which none of the locals will talk to him or give him directions, once he mentions the Whitley place. This is a little tough on him, as he’s here to ask for the hand of Susan Whitley in marriage, a woman he met and courted in college, where he trained in, ah, science.

The captive audience, don’t you know.

Her father, Nahum, is the lord of the local Whitley manor, and Stephen eventually finds his way to the rundown old estate. Here he finds unhappiness: Mother Letitia won’t leave her bed, but entreats Stephen to take Susan away; father Nahum is confined to a wheelchair and wishes to send Stephen away; servant Merwyn appears to be on his last legs. And where is servant Helga? Is she hiding in the mysteriously glowing greenhouse, locked.

Slowly, all is revealed: that green stone they find buried at the roots of the absurdly large tomato plants is radioactive. Merwyn disappears in a puff of smoke, as it were, while neither Letitia nor Helga meet happy endings. And when Nahum finally faces the truth, that his belief that the stone that fell from the heavens wasn’t the means sent by God to restore the fortunes of the proud Whitley family, but simply a poisonous curse that could have been voided by science, he screws up his own attempt at destroying the stone.

And then his monstrous hunt is on.

Not as horrific as one might wish, and the science is no more than a gesture. But Boris Karloff always brings a certain ambiance to a movie, and the plot is admirably parsimonious with information. It’s a fairly mundane addition to the genre, but kept us mildly, tiredly intrigued from the beginning.

Clade:

A clade (from Ancient Greek: κλάδος, klados, “branch”), also known as monophyletic group, is a group of organisms that consists of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants, and represents a single “branch” on the “tree of life“.^[1]

The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, a species (extinct or extant), and so on right up to a kingdom and further. Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently. Clades are termed monophyletic (Greek: “one clan”) groups. [Wikipedia]

I’ve been hearing about clades for decades, but don’t really know much about the concept. Noted in “Human or hybrid? The big debate over what a species really is,” (sheesh, ending a sentence with “is” seems ugly), Colin Barras, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)

Perhaps, instead, the ultimate solution is simply to remove the word “species” from the scientific lexicon. In 2018, [Brent] Mishler [at UCB] and John Wilkins at the University of Melbourne, Australia, set out this argument. They suggested that we should focus on another division of life, the “clade”, a group sharing a common ancestor and so comprising a separate twig on the tree of life. They say we could classify organisms as the Smallest Named and Registered Clade, or SNaRC, rather than as species. So, for example, Neanderthals, Denisovans and living humans would be three distinct SNaRCs. There is nothing intrinsically special about SNaRCs, according to Mishler: they might interbreed or not, and the groups that fit the classification would vary across the tree of life, forcing us to accept that there is no common currency. By abandoning “species” and turning to “SNaRCs”, he argues, biologists would have a blank slate for thinking about biodiversity.

Which leads one to wonder, into just which SNaRC does a snark belong?

And just because it caught me by surprise, in the same article is this:

In the past century, scientists have redefined what a species is time and again, heaping confusion upon confusion (see “Parsing nature”). [Frank Zachos at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria] identifies no fewer than 32 competing definitions in his 2016 book on the subject, Species Concepts in Biology, and notes that two more have been added since then.

32?! No, 34!? Sometimes Nature doesn’t cooperate with our categorization schemes.

Fatberg:

THE fatbergs are coming. These huge lumps of cooking oil and wet wipes lurk beneath UK streets, threatening to block sewers and put everyone off their lunch.

And they really are huge. In 2017, a 250-metre-long, 130-tonne monstrosity was found under Whitechapel in east London – a piece of it still resides at the Museum of London. Last year, another rivalling it in size was found south of the river Thames and later analysed on a TV programme called Fatberg Autopsy, while in December, a whopping 800 tonnes of fat were removed from sewers in Cardiff. Even a relatively modest 64-metre blockage in Sidmouth, Devon, made national headlines last month. So is this a new problem, or do Brits just have a new-found love of talking about it? [“All you want to know about fatbergs but are too disgusted to ask,” Kelly Oakes, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)]

The romantic interest of the heroic astronaut: the lady with microscopes in her eyes.

Perhaps a bit too earnest, Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) is a chronicle of the discovery of the first hostile pathogen in space – a fungus carried on specimens of ice retrieved from the Moon. It grows rapidly once exposed to the warm atmosphere of a human space station, and soon the crew is fighting for its collective life against a … hairy growth. Throw in a romance, a space station commander afflicted with the “space raptures” which has driven him into the arms of paranoia (rather than Lt. Connie), and who therefore believes the crew of space station is plotting against him, and there’s sort of half a plot here. The special effects are a disaster, but while the science is sometimes dubious, at least it’s not a complete joke.

But outer space horror requires more bang to the buck, and while the space raptures was a nice go, it’s a little abrupt to really work. Think of Alien (1979). The initial horror is the idea of little monster spawn insinuating themselves down your trachea and bursting forth from chest, right? Yet, what really put Alien over the top was the discovery that the owners of the ship, the Company, deliberately sent the crew into danger purely in the pursuit of a bioweapon which will generate more profit for the Company. In fact, the science officer, Ash, is revealed to be a cyborg, controlled by the Company rather than by the crew, and tasked with ensuring a specimen Alien makes it back to the Company labs.

In short, the crew has been abandoned by the Company, leaving them in a desperate situation in which most do not survive. The physical threat is shocking on its own, but the horror comes at the realization that mere profit has motivated the Company to abandon them. And that throws the humanity of the Company itself into question.

We don’t see that in Mutiny In Outer Space. Ground control does all it can to help, ultimately saving the day, but it means that the story is not as horrifying as one might hope. In fact, it turns into a “solve the problem” story, which is not as interesting as other forms of outer space horror have proven to be.

But that’s not to say it’s completely boring. The story has a few moments, and even throws in some cute wordplay. But it’s more of a dated curiosity than anything else.

We had the pleasure today of taking in the 2019 Shen Yun performance at the Ordway in St. Paul.

Full of color, it consists mostly of stories told through dance and music, with two solo singing performances. Full of color, choreography, and Chinese tunes in traditional modes, it also contains more than a bit of Falun Dafa, and some fairly pointed commentary on the current rulers of China.

We had a good time; my Arts Editor was particularly fascinated with the costumes. On top of all that, we were interviewed during intermission by a representative of Epoch Times, which let my Arts Editor gush about the beautiful clothing designs and color choices.

A super Valentine’s Day treat, albeit a day late!

For those readers who loathe Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), they should probably bury their heads in the sand for the next few months, because, with her sweet smile and mastery of American politics, she’s about to rain hellfire down on the Republican Party in the wake of this morning’s declaration of a National Emergency by President Trump. I’ll let Gary Sargent explain:

Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position.

Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.”

But Pelosi has recourse against such a declaration — and if she exercises it, Senate Republicans may have to vote on where they stand on it. …

But Pelosi has a much more immediate way to challenge Trump’s declaration. Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency.

Elizabeth Goitein, who has researched this topic extensively for the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me that if Pelosi exercises this option, it will ultimately require the Senate to vote on it in some form as well. The NEA stipulates that if one chamber (Pelosi’s House) passes such a resolution, which it easily could do, the other (McConnell’s Senate) must act on it within a very short time period — forcing GOP senators to choose whether to support it.

Alternatively, Goitein notes, the Senate could vote not to consider that resolution or change its rules to avoid such a vote. But in those scenarios, the Senate would, in effect, be voting to greenlightTrump’s emergency declaration.

And then there’s the little problem of the future, as the Speaker herself notes:

“I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say,” Pelosi told reporters at the Capitol. “Because if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.”

Even many Republicans don’t want to see a national emergency declaration, according to polls – although a majority are OK with it.

So it’s time to start popping the popcorn and buying the milk duds. President Trump keeps tapping in the wedges in his efforts to divide the Republican Party satisfy his base, and each of these taps is driving more moderate Republicans away, and disaffecting more and more independents. Although, to be fair, the latest Gallup Poll is disconcerting.

But that is the past. Here comes the future.

Via NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall) I learn something new about the pharma patent wars:

… when a pharmaceutical firm’s patent on a drug expires, it may still hold patents on many of the chemical steps to create it. In other words, rivals that are able to copy a drug after its patent ends often have to pay the original firm to use the still-patented recipes.

So why haven’t the patents on the steps expired? But this is part of a larger article on how this profit-strategy is being obviated by the generics manufacturers:

[AI program Chematica] learned hundreds of patented reactions then devised recipes that avoid them (Chem, doi.org/czs4). “Pharmaceutical companies spend billions making sure there are no loopholes and people think these patents are bulletproof,” says Grzybowski. “But actually it seems quite possible to get around them.”

Chematica caused an earlier stir in 2012, when Grzybowski and his colleagues used it to find ways of making the nerve agent VX from readily available chemicals including water, table salt and sulphuric acid. This earned him an invitation to the Pentagon, he says, where he called for better regulation of chemicals that can be used to make weapons.

So having written the post title before finishing the article, I find out that War is even more apropos than I intended, which makes me a little sad. Nor is it an idle question to ask when a terrorist group will gain access to Chematica or similar program, for after all Chematica isn’t going to have the moral agency to tell them No. So long as Chematica lacks anything resembling moral agency, it’s just like any other tool – it can be used for good or for evil.

But, from a computer science perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this is a brute force approach, or if there’s some real ML (Machine Learning) application going on here, and, if so, what rules it learned on its own. (I’m a zero when it comes to chemistry, though.)

Pretextual:

done or used as a pretext (= a pretended reason for doing something that is used to hide the real reason):
The reasons given by defense counsel were not genuine and were pretextual.
The explanation for her firing was pretextual and influenced instead by a retaliatory motive. [Cambridge English Dictionary]

Noted in “Obama warned us about the Supreme Court we have right now,” Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress:

This reasoning is highly dubious. As Kagan noted, the prison did not deny Ray’s request to be accompanied by his imam until January 23 — so Ray filed his lawsuit just five days after he was officially denied the relief he sought. The brief explanation the Republican majority offered for its decision is so wildly out of touch with the facts of the case that, as I wrote shortly after the decision came down, “it appears very likely that the majority’s claim that Ray waited too long to file his suit is pretextual.”

What is this?!

I suspect there’s plotting against the king!

And I’m right!

A reader comments on the problems of cyber-insurance:

There’s a problem there, even several of them. But if Zurich said Mondelez was covered, then Zurich should pay up — regardless of how hard it is for their actuaries to calculate the risk. Don’t write a policy if you cannot or will not back.

I think that Zurich argued this was an act of war, not covered under the policy.

As for insuring software and/or holding the creators of an application liable — that’s a really tough nut to crack. Software is complex. Even using the very best development and testing methodologies, it’s impossible to prove correct.

And most people are unaware of those methodologies, and many of them cost extra money up front to implement. There’s constant research and change in what is thought to be the best methods, too. I’ve learned more about good software development in the last 10 years of my career than in the first, ah, 30. (good god, I’m old)

That’s just the software. Then there’s implementation, administration, monitoring, etc. Oh, and actually, it’s the systems of software applications which usually lead to security breaches, in my experience. That is to say, not one program/application’s fault, and hence, not one responsible party. Security is all about the layers of the onion, as they say.

I understand my reader’s remark about the complexity of developing software and software development methodologies and how they’ve changed over the years – but I have to wonder if they would have evolved faster, and into a more effective form, if the threats of responsibility had been hanging over the heads of the companies that produced them. Presently, changes (I hesitate to say “improvements,” as we’re going through a change to our processes at my employer) are driven by concerns about profitability, time-to-market, and satisfying the customers’ requirements – and I don’t care to include “security concerns” under “customers’ requirements,” because of the difficulty in evaluating & comparing various products’ security.

And, ideally, that shouldn’t be necessary. How many people think it’s appropriate that, when buying a sofa, the customer should be checking out the safety record of each brand of sofa? While a libertarian would no doubt have their hand up in the air at this juncture, they’re ignoring the concept of irremediable harm and the fact that we know how to build sofas that are safe from collapse, spontaneous combustion, etc.

I’m not claiming that we know how to write perfectly secure software, either – but I’m saying that this very hard thing to do should be our goal. We need to put together a vision of the ideal and then begin modifying the reality of the software world towards it. And if it’s necessary to get the attention of the software industry by hanging a sword over their head, then maybe we should do that because the alternatives, due to our growing dependency on computing, can be fairly horrific, from efficient logistics to nuclear plant meltdowns, from business bankruptcies to compromising information held on politicians.

Ugh. Sometimes the software industry just annoys me.

Forwent:

past tense of FORGO [Merriam-Webster]

Searching for a definition yields fewer than normal hits. Noted in “Democrats pick Friedenberg for special election,” no author specified, The Express:

As Friedenberg was the only candidate to apply, the county parties forwent a nominating convention and recommended him to the Party’s Executive Committee outright.

Not a word I’ve ever heard around here.

Manafort. Paul Manafort. He’s become the emblem of the Trump campaign, hasn’t he? He’s simply full of deceit and lies. Like Gates, and Flynn. Oh, and Trump. And others I’d rather not remember. Will Stone end up in the same boat? From his statements & behaviors, I’d be completely unsurprised.

Manafort’s latest alleged lie breaches his plea agreement, as detailed here. Once again, he’s apparently lied about a Russian contact. And that may land him in prison for the rest of his life.

So let’s think about this for a moment. This is quite a momentous personal mistake for Manafort. He is, after all, walking a very thin line here. He already made one deal with the government, which had to piss off a President who, as a matter of reality, shouldn’t be at all concerned about any deals his former campaign manager might have made if he, himself, is not guilty of anything. But, of course, there are suspicions, given his behavior towards the Russians: an Oval Office conference, huddles with Russian President Putin that go unrecorded, boasting of being the toughest ever on Russia when all the objective evidence tells otherwise.

All these lies that connect with the Russians. Is it possible that it’s not just Trump that’s been compromised, but all the key members of his campaign staff? I can certainly accept that they were simply mendacious, ruthless in their campaign. However, such people, once the rocks they hide under have been removed, find their possessions & prestige, those things they value most, under threat and “roll” for the authorities. It’s a simple enough matter.

Manafort’s broken this pattern. He’s continued to lie even under threat of a life, once so full of possessions and adventure, finishing behind dreary bars. This intrigues. This suggests that the Russians may have such a grip on him that he’ll sacrifice his personal liberty for something else he values even more. The traditional answer to this is family.

Or he’s a pathological liar, he cannot help lying and obfuscating and believing he’s still a free agent.

Or he’s absolutely certain that President Trump will come riding to his rescue with a pardon. If that happens, then the question will become what hold Manafort has on Trump, because the considerable cost to Trump would be considerable

This is going to be one interesting spider-web to examine once all is revealed.

When you need to see around a corner in a corridor, there’s a way to do that, as NewScientist (26 January 2019) reports:

WE MAY soon be able to see what is lurking out of sight, thanks to an algorithm that allows a camera to make out objects hidden from view. This might one day enable autonomous vehicles to spot hazards before they are visible.

The algorithm was created by Vivek Goyal at Boston University in Massachusetts and colleagues. It works by analysing the faint reflections of obscured objects on a surface such as a wall. Specialist equipment isn’t needed to gather the images of reflections – a normal digital camera suffices.

Which, of course, leads to questions concerning actually making this available:

The team thinks that phone cameras may be good enough for the technique and that eventually they will be able to create an app for seeing objects around corners.

“The results are stunning,” says Gordon Wetzstein at Stanford University, California. He says this is the first time that a technique like this has produced full-colour reconstructions.

Eventually? Someone’s probably working on making this fly next week.

This strikes me as a true enhancement to human capabilities, rather than merely replacing humans, as do many robots. I think this is more significant than those human-replacing robots.

Or word processors.

This is fascinating:

Little Kamikatsu was facing a big problem. The rural Japanese town of 1,500 residents didn’t know what it was going to do with its trash. Residents had always burned it, first in front of their homes or on the farms, then in a large community pit, then in an incinerator the government quickly banned out of fear of pollutants. The town didn’t have money for a newer, safer incinerator. It had to find a new way.

“They had to look into zero waste,” said Akira Sakano, chair of the board of directors of the Zero Waste Academy, an educational institution in Kamikatsu, explaining the discussions of those days in the early 2000s.

That research introduced the town to what was then a virtual unknown but has since grown into one of the most widespread and successful recycling efforts in history, bringing cities the world over to the precipice of what once seemed fantastical: the elimination of waste. Today, places in rural Japan to metropolitan Sweden send very little of their trash to the landfill. Many more — including the District — have a “Zero Waste” plan. In the United States, San Francisco leads the way, diverting more than 80 percent of its waste — two and a half times more than the national average. It has become a lifestyle, with millions of images flooding Instagram touting a #zerowaste existence, and generating new businesses. [WaPo]

I’m too tired to delve further into this, beyond finding Going Zero Waste, but it sounds like an important movement. Here’s Minneapolis’ statement on Zero Waste:

In June 2015 the Minneapolis City Council established a goal to recycle and compost 50% of its citywide waste by 2020 and 80% by 2030. The resolution also called to achieve zero-percent growth in the City’s total waste stream from levels set in 2010. In 2015 the city of Minneapolis formed the Zero Waste Project Team to develop a plan to meet those goals and set new ones.

Not moving really fast. St. Paul has a Facebook page here. I’m not quite sure how this particular movement managed to slip under my radar.

Quick, while he’s sleeping, tell me all your secrets!

For an iconic genre example, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) is very hard to beat. Nearly pitch-perfect, it is a spoof of those science-fiction films from decades ago, locking on to everything from the shaky science they depended on to the unbalanced social roles they promoted, from the bad acting to the nonsensical plots. Speaking of, this plot can only be barely described as a tug of war over a rare and useful new element. Keep an eye out for the strings used to manipulate the skeleton.

There are parts which you may not like, but if spoofs are your reason for existence, then make sure you see this one!

Egypt doesn’t really seem to care much for democracy – at least if they’re an Egyptian leader. Shahira Amin of AL Monitor reports in a posting entitled “Egyptians split as lawmakers pave way for Sisi to be ‘president for life‘”:

Egyptian lawmakers have proposed changes to Egypt’s constitution, including amendments to expand the military’s powers and to allow President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to remain in office following the end of his second term, and potentially until 2034. The amendments have sparked controversy in the country, drawing mixed reactions from members of parliament, analysts and activists.

The suggested alteration to Article 140 of the constitution would extend presidential terms from four to six years, and changes to Article 200 would allow the military to ensure “that the principles of the June 30 Revolution are observed,” which means preventing Islamists from ever rising to power. The amendments are being packaged with progressive changes, to make them more palatable to the public.

Sisi’s supporters praised the amendments, arguing that “four years are not enough” and that the president needs “more time to complete the development plans that he started,” while critics decried the changes as an “Arab Spring in reverse” and “a coup against the Egyptian Constitution.”

If his plans are all that wonderful, then his successors should be more than pleased to complete them. It’s a non-starter of an argument, in my view.

But, more importantly, this will present challenges for other nations in the future. Does the United States want to be associated with an autocratic Egypt? It certainly was when Sadat and then Mubarak ran the country, but then we had the USSR to contend with. How about now? Is Iran a great enough adversary to require the submission of ethics to the challenge? Indeed, perhaps Egypt is only half a step away from being an autocracy right now. Treating the constitution as a bit of jello, to be deformed as necessary to satisfy ambition, feels like the next half-step – and leaves me wondering about his trustability when it comes to international agreements.

Bollards:

Bollards Are Defined as Steel Posts Meant to Stop Vehicles From Passing [Heavy.com]

In case you hear that Congress authorized southern border funds for Bollards Fencing.

Another WaPo columnist, Henry Olsen, has joined the pro-Klobuchar crowd:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign kickoff Sunday was far from the dream-start to her presidential candidacy, given the blustery weather that coated her with snow over the course of her speech. Still, the event makes the Minnesota Democrat President Trump’s worst nightmare.

Forget all those recent allegations that she may have been mean to her staff. Unless there’s something more, such as tolerating or hushing up sexual or racial harassment, all this shows is that Ms. “Minnesota Nice” might just have the touch of steel a real leader needs. After all, no one ever accused Margaret Thatcher of being Miss Congeniality.

Focus instead on what she brings to the race: her record as a strong liberal without progressive zaniness; the example of keeping her head during the Kavanaugh hearings while all others were losing theirs; eight years as the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minn.; a stable, more than 25-year marriage; a daughter. Lawyer, mom, senator, president?

All good points. On paper, Senator Klobuchar does come across favorably. She has a good history of public service (Hennepin County DA, 2+ terms as US Senator from Minnesota), and a family history that includes teaching, mining unions, and journalists. She’s mature but not old at age 58, which in races that may or will include elderly leaders whose health must be kept in mind will give her an automatic advantage.

While I’m typing this, I’m listening to her initial Presidential speech out on Boom Island from last Sunday. This video includes all the warm-up speeches (which I skipped) as well as her’s – ah, “because we believe in science!” OK, so that’s just a personal thing for me. Her speech starts at about 1:49:30 or so:

Listening to her speech, I’d still say she’s a little lacking in the speechifying department – she’s certainly no Barack Obama, who I would say has been the standard against all other Presidential contenders have to be compared. Obama knew when to accelerate the pace, or opt for a slower delivery. This ability sharpened the impression that there was good intellect pushing out those words. Senator Klobuchar tends to just chug along.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I harp on her communications skills and not her policies, keep in mind that Presidents have to be communicators. They don’t make laws, except through veto and rhetorical influence, but as the focus of the Executive Branch, they have to communicate not only policies, but the shared morality by which we can live together.

Furthermore, that’s how Presidential contenders entice voters, who, in turn, will use all sorts of clues to try to make sense of someone they’ll almost certainly not meet – and they probably won’t read their campaign materials, either. Communicating effectively will go a long ways towards winning the hearts of non-Minnesota voters.

How’s her competition, declared and not, doing? Briefly:

Senator Harris of California struck me as charming and quick on her feet. A former Attorney General, one must presume she’s done some good work.

Senator Gillibrand, when she was on The Late Show, seemed to be giving a stump speech rather than conversing with host Colbert.

Biden’s old. Sanders is old.

Julian Castro impressed me, in my lone exposure to him, as being articulate and thoughtful.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has had an effective Senatorial career, but I fear she’s already stepped in a couple of gopher holes. She has a tall hill to climb, and, if we believe Olsen, above, she may be too liberal to win the Democratic nomination.

So Senator Klobuchar is off and running. We’ll see how liberal without zaniness plays with the Democratic membership.

WaPo has a report on another hunter bagging a rare creature:

The photograph, published last week in Pakistani newspapers, was stunning. It showed a magnificent mountain goat, with huge, symmetrically spiral horns, nestled on a rock and surrounded by breathtaking snowy mountains, with a man kneeling and smiling behind it.

It took a few seconds to realize that the animal, a wild Astore markhor, was dead. The caption described the man as an American hunter who had paid a record $110,000 to shoot it on a tourist expedition to Pakistan’s northern Himalayan region of Gilgit-Baltistan.

Outraged? Here’s the defense:

Lovely horns.

But there is another, more benign, rationale behind allowing Harlan, along with two other Americans, to pay enormous sums to kill three long-horned markhors in northern Pakistan in the past month. According to Pakistani officials and conservation groups, the practice has actually helped save a rare and endangered species from potential extinction.

How about this: you pays your $110,000, and when one of these impressive animals dies of natural causes, you can have the head. Or the entire body.

Or maybe you can hunt them, but you can only shoot one that would never reproduce again. Although making that work seems a bit difficult. Not to mention the utility of animals lying exclusively in their gonads is an unwarranted assumption. I don’t know for markhors, but among elephants the leadership of the matriarchs is an important element in their long-term survival strategy.

Looking a little thick in the backyard.

On the other hand, that was yesterday before last night’s snow came in. It’s a mite thicker on that table now.

Ariel E. Levite and Wyatt Hoffman have been surveying the state of relations between the insurance industry and software they are asked to insure. Here is a summary, published on Lawfare:

For many businesses, cyber risk was once either an amorphous threat or an occasional nuisance. But with reliance on all things digital skyrocketing, cyber threats now pose grave, even existential, dangers to corporations as well as the entire digital economy. In response, companies have begun to develop a cyber insurance market, offering corporations a mechanism to manage their exposure to these risks. Yet the prospects for this market now seem uncertain in light of a major court battle. Mondelez International is reportedly suing Zurich Insurance in Illinois state court for refusing to pay its $100 million claim for damages caused by the 2017 NotPetya attack.

They make explicit the risks insurers face:

Many hurdles stand in the way of insurance providing a more robust solution. Data on cyber risks are scarce, and the threat is evolving constantly, often rendering data obsolete before they can be used. That means actuaries lack a credible repository of information to accurately price cyber risk. Moreover, NotPetya and other attacks with cascading effects have reinforced fears of aggregation risk, meaning the potential for a single incident to cause simultaneous losses across multiple policyholders. If Zurich had underwritten even a handful of the major corporations disrupted by the attack, it could have faced catastrophic losses from just one incident. This is a particularly acute concern for reinsurers—companies that provide stop-loss coverage, or protection against unsustainably costly claims, to other insurers—making both reinsurers and primary cyber insurance providers naturally hesitant to support more extensive cyber underwriting. The lack of adequate reinsurance backing means that carriers may become overwhelmed with claims if a systemic cyber incident causes simultaneous losses across many policyholders.

And they have some recommendations, which appear to have one glaring hole:

In a recent Carnegie Endowment paper, we proposed a series of practical measures for insurers, corporations and governments to take—some separately, others together—to unlock the potential benefits of cyber insurance. These steps include upgrading the underwriting process, collaborating with cybersecurity services, and introducing specialized underwriting methodologies to better assess and price cyber risk. Governments, for their part, could help by developing common metrics for cyber-risk management, by encouraging companies to share information on cyber risks and security practices, and by standardizing corporate reporting requirements for cyber risk and data breaches. Sovereign wealth funds, holding companies and other major investors can also encourage responsible conduct by making regular, thorough cyber-risk assessments part of their due diligence.

Not all “cyber” risks are the result of poor programming, but most such risks can be traced back to such. Yet, I don’t really see any attempts in the above to get the software suppliers to share in the risk. It’d take just one major supplier going bankrupt after losing a lawsuit over the security of their software, such as PegaSystems, to finally bring questions of software security to the foreground. Make the people who make real money off of software sweat. They’re not sweating right now.

For example, I recently was required to use a web site by my employer and decided to read the Terms of Use. It had two admirable characteristics: it was succinct and devoid of legalese. After that?

It contained a phrase that took me back. Way back. And now I cannot access their terms of use. Hah! However, this one comes close:

EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT, NEITHER PARTY HERETO MAKES ANY REPRESENTATION AND EXTENDS NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, WITH RESPECT TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS AGREEMENT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING OUT OF PRIOR COURSE OF DEALING AND USAGE OF TRADE.

Bold mine.

I recall seeing bullshit like this 30 years ago, but I’m shocked that it’s still around. No fitness for a particular purpose? I recognize they’re distinguishing intended use from warranted use, but come on – this is ridiculous.

And who the hell buys such software? Would you want to roll the dice on your toaster not exploding?

Have these guys heard of the related legal phrase, irremediable harm? Because that’s what we’re coming to. I used to work for a supplier of software for energy systems, and I have no idea if they used this phrase in their license agreement – but imagine, as is rumored, that some foreign party penetrates such a system and achieves a position where they could knock down the American electrical grid. And then does it.

We’ll get the grid back up, but in the meantime many businesses will be badly harmed – and some will go out of business. Not those businesses’ fault. Who is responsible?

Now, maybe it’s still accepted practice that software gets a free pass on this sort of thing. But this enablement, if you will, of poor software practices will defeat all the good intentions of the insurance industry. Right now they’re treating symptoms, so far as I can see in Levite and Hoffman’s summary (I trust their summary is complete, so I shan’t spend time I don’t have on reading the paper), not the source of the problem. Free marketeers might argue that the market sorts these things out by customer evaluation, but this is the argument of the zealot. The truth of the matter is that the entire facet is occult^[1], as we’re not measuring functionality or performance or scalability, but the insecurity of the product. We barely even have measuring sticks, much less know how to apply them in a forward thinking manner.

An agency to do this sort of thing has been suggested before. I still think it’s a good idea.

Just stick “S” for Software in the middle. Although it would also stand for “Shitload of Work.”

¹ “to block or shut off (an object) from view; hide.” If you prefer, occlude. Not the religious bullshit definition.

Tranche:

• a division or portion of a pool or whole
  specifically : an issue of bonds derived from a pooling of like obligations (such as securitized mortgage debt) that is differentiated from other issues especially by maturity or rate of return [Merriam-Webster]

Ran across this word today in some company mail. In terms of its sound, it’s really an ugly word, isn’t it? All glottal. If I understand glottal properly.

Behind its technological magic, Rememory (2017) is a whodunit murder mystery, but rather than collecting physical clues and speculating on the motives of the potential criminals, professional model builder Sam Bloom is pursuing their very memories. He once met famous psychologist / neurologist Gordon Dunn at a hotel, on a very dark night of his soul, and Dunn had helped him get through that night. Now Dunn lies dead in Dunn’s office on the eve of the product launch of a machine which can harvest and display memories, unredacted by time, from people, with bullet-holes in the wall behind him, and the only working production model missing. The company he founded wants it because they cannot produce more of the machines without seeing this production model.

Sam needs it to solve the murder and repay Dunn’s kindness. Perhaps the widow could gain him access, so he visits the widow, expecting to find the wake, but instead, just her. He tells her parts of his story, and steals the key to the house. When he returns, he finds the machine, and a pile of memories – and he’s off to the races.

This is well-constructed, for the most part. Characters who appear to be one thing are another, everyone has a motive, yet doesn’t do it. The role memory plays in our lives is simplified, and then that simplification vilified, but this perhaps could have been better emphasized if the corporation, or corporate officers, had played a bigger role in the story.

That leads to one of the weaknesses of the movie: the corporation. There are hints that the corporate officers are desperate to bring their product to market, but they are never fleshed out, nor is that desperation illustrated in any meaningful way. Why not? Properly utilized, they could have brought even more pressure to bear on Sam Bloom, a man who bears a resemblance to the detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Spade becomes emotionally involved in his work to an extent that he’s endangering his case and himself, and that made him, and the audience, blind to critical clues. Bloom’s involvement isn’t just as a posthumous thank you for help he once received, but becomes something far more devious. The additional pressure the corporate officers could have brought to bear would have increased the tension, and perhaps led to even stronger revelations in the plot twist at the end. As it is, the ending feels like it was dragged out too long. Yes, it’s a surprise, yet it could have been more.

I think this is a sober, serious work, and we were hooked from the beginning. It’s not an action movie, nor any of the trends of the moment, really. If you’re in the mood, there’s a lot to like in this story. I just wish they’d taken it a step further.