Category Archives: Uncategorized

In a long dormant thread, I asked when light pollution could be addressed. In Colorado, they’ve done just that, as Melissa Breyer reports on Treehugger.com:

But if it’s up to the residents of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, two small towns in western Colorado that comprise Wet Mountain Valley, the great night sky will not be lost. After some 15 years of hard work, they’re finally seeing the light. And in fact, they boast some of the darkest skies on the planet, luring in stargazers from near and far to feast on the delights of pitch dark heavens studded with stars.

In their (approved) application to become Colorado’s first designated International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) community, they decribe their work as “a long 15-year process to change the mindsets of these old western communities from one of ‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do’ to ‘How can we protect our beautiful Wet Mountain Valley’s rural charm from being lost to big-city problems like light pollution?'”

And there’s a lovely video that goes with it. And I admit I laughed when a local resident, who I must admire (and envy!), say that the Milky Way (the galaxy in which our solar system resides) “… is the most magnificent thing in the world.”

Kelly Macias on The Daily Kos notes Alabama’s regressive politicians and their attachment to monuments for slavery:

Oh, Alabama—forever taking a few tiny steps forward toward progress and a whole bunch backward. The state that represents the tenacity and determination of the civil rights movement just took a giant leap back toward its “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” George Wallace days with the passage of its latest bill. Alabama lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a measure on Thursday forbidding any changes to Confederate or long-standing monuments in the state. The bill now heads to the Senate for approval.

Seems to me an enterprising developer could put out a smartphone app which, when viewed through the camera, recognizes all these monuments and labels them with the appropriate information concerning how they related to slavery, and perhaps some useful addendums such as the cruel punishments used to keep the slaves in line, the lynchings, etc. It’d be a little like Pokémon Go.

Monuments have consequences, but the consequences won’t reflect reality so long as historical revisionism obscures them. The Civil War, from the very speeches of the rebellious politicians, was about slavery. In the end, so are the monuments.

So we’re not unique in our practice of helping comrades when they’re hurt. NewScientist (22 April 2017) notes that ants do it, too:

Megaponera analis, a species found in sub-Saharan Africa, feeds only on termites. It sends armies of 200 to 500 individuals to raid their nests. However, the raiders often sustain serious injuries. Ants that lose limbs are severely handicapped immediately after the injury. But if they are carried back to safety they adjust within a few hours and can run almost as fast as uninjured ants.

“At first, they kept tripping over, because they thought they [still] had six legs,” says Erik Frank at the University of Würzburg, Germany. “Inside the nest, they were safe to adapt and change their locomotion.”

Frank and his colleagues observed 54 raids by these ants in Comoé National Park in Ivory Coast, using infrared cameras to see inside their nests. On average, three ants were carried back after each raid. Most had a termite clinging on to them, and some had lost a limb. …

Frank thinks that several traits of this species made this behaviour likely to evolve: they hunt in groups, they have a high injury rate, and they have very small colonies, which means each individual is valuable.

There is something reassuring about ants assisting their wounded, even if it appears to be a numbers game. It does make you wonder about why we help our own, even in the era of massed armies. I suspect it has to do with a social contract – people won’t venture out for war if they know they’ll just be left on the field of battle when an arm gets blown off. The commitment, so strongly expressed by many military forces, to bring back the hurt, even the dead, is a reassurance to the potential soldier – and may take the place of other bonds present in smaller, more homogenuous groups, who might be motivated to fight by religious or xenophobic reasons. In more heterogenuous societies, the appeal to a more primal urge will be more effective.

No doubt you’ve all heard the news – the GOP House members took a deep breath and trod the first step down the path of destroying the ACA in order to replace it with their own structure (known as the AHCA). It’s worth looking at how they did it – much like the confirmation of Justice Gorsuch, IJ, literally hundreds of years of tradition were discarded in the effort, and this should concern American citizens regardless of their Party loyalties. Here’s Steve Benen on MaddowBlog on the process:

If House Republicans were scrambling to vote on a bill that overhauls the health care system before receiving a CBO score, that alone would be astonishing. But no one should lose sight of the fact that the Republicans’ American Health Care Act has also faced no meaningful scrutiny from lawmakers themselves: there have been no public hearings, no testimony from experts, and no public debate.

Adding insult to injury, the legislation that’s scheduled to receive a floor vote in about five hours wasn’t circulated to members yesterday or published online for Americans to review. Take a moment to consider why Republican leaders in the House wouldn’t want anyone – the media, industry experts, voters, or even their own GOP colleagues – to be able to read the legislation in advance.

It would not be unjustifiable to call this a secret law. But perhaps some readers will believe that amounts to ad hominem, since the law will eventually be examined … we hope.

So take a look at the facts, as enumerated by Steve. No evaluation by themselves or by the independent experts, the CBO, a fierce belief the American electorate wants this, when every poll disagrees, all of which translates to a terrible disconnect with reality. In another article, Steve argues that an obscure clause in the new law will result in potential negative changes – he uses the word “gutted” – even for those of us with employer-supplied insurance. Thus, every American citizen should consider this “GOP victory” and recognize it for what it really is – a ghastly misuse of the sacred offices of the legislature.

I do not use the word sacred easily, understand, but in the context of the American government, that’s how they should be considered. The occupants pass legislation which leads to laws, the laws by which we live. All due consideration should be given, much as the Democrats did for the ACA (which, you may or may not recall, was only passed after long debate over many months – not after an afternoon of debate over a document written up over a few nights). It is their task to sniff out the collateral damage of legislation – not pass it pell mell in hopes that a fool of a President will sign it and then pretend it’s better than what it’s replacing.

So, when I see this blatant disregard for good policy making, all in hopes of scoring political points, then this is what I’d like to see:

Every single legislator, regardless of party, regardless of this legislation’s ultimate fate, who voted for this with no chance to evaluate it, to see the CBO scoring, should be replaced. My prescription for those replacements? That they pledge to observe good citizenship when it comes to legislation, and that means due consideration for the public welfare. Republicans or Democrats, that’s what the replacements need to do.

And this should happen immediately, if possible, through recalls.

My Representative is Betty McCollum, and she didn’t vote for it. How about your’s? Did she or he just betray their responsibility?

Here’s the list of Reps and their votes from WaPo.

I suggest you look your Rep up. Maybe it’s time for you, dear reader, to consider leading a recall effort, or a replacement effort. I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat, you owe it to your nation to give strong consideration to this effort, regardless of how you feel about the ACA. The disastrous way the House of Representatives is run calls for your deepest, most sober consideration of these suggestions.

As they went to sleep last night:

Ouch. No, wait. That’s “artsily out of focus.” Yeah.

Finally returning to this dormant thread, Scott Chamberlain is starting to goggle at the depths to which the management of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (FWSO) has sunk, particularly in regards to some promotional pictures released by management. I’ll leave most of the pics on Scott’s Mask of the Flower Prince:

But wait.  Others on social media are calling out that something isn’t right with that picture.

In fact, this is what that original picture looks like, uncropped:

In fact, its an edited version of a photo that appeared last year. The key difference?  A number of audience members in this shot are wearing green. As in, they are wearing green shirts in support of the musicians.  But the photo that the FWSO has used in its Facebook ad has been cropped to remove many of them… and some audience members have their green shirts Photoshopped… into different colors.

It appears to be a win at any moral cost situation for FWSO management / board, doesn’t it? They’ve taken a position – that musicians simply make too darn much money – and turned it into an anchor around their own necks. Of course, I don’t know how FWSO musician pay compares to other top flight orchestras across the nation, adjusted, of course, for geographical location. But when you move into the terrain of falsification, of fraud, you really leave that important issue behind. Now the paramount issue becomes the moral and ethical lapse of management, and the important follow-on question:

Can you ever trust these chappies again?

I don’t know what Scott thinks, but I think it’s time for the replacement of FWSO management / board. Even if they blame this on an over-zealous rogue employee, they still have to go – because the cumulative implied incompetence, as the leaders of the organization, makes them unworthy of their positions.

And note how this is an illustration of the positive power of the Internet. Too often – such as yesterday’s Google scam – we hear how the Internet is used to take advantage of people. Here we see how the cumulative power of massed eyes picked up on an immoral tactic. And apparently is jamming it right down their throat.

I hope next Scott writes on this issue, it’s to report a whole lot of resignations.

parthenocarpic:

Some “seedless” fruits just have very small seeds, and still require pollination. But completely seedless – or parthenocarpic – fruit like the edited tomato do not require pollination at all. [“Gene editing opens doors to seedless fruit with no need for bees,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (22 April 2017)]

The Iranians have held the first televised debate between the candidates for the Presidential election, coming later this year. While we Americans may think our politics can get convoluted, I think the Iranians have more kinks and folds than we do. For one thing, Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Guardian Council add additional centers of power which must be placated. Alireza Ramezani reports how the public reacted to the first debate in AL Monitor:

[Current First Vice President Eshaq] Jahangiri’s booming popularity is widely attributed to his attacks against Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a conservative candidate, who has been Tehran’s mayor since 2005. Ghalibaf, who is running for president for the third time in 12 years, was criticized during the debate over his management of Tehran municipality and his hard-line political approach.

According to the online poll, conducted by Tabnak news website and republished by Aftab Online on April 30, 42% of respondents believe Jahangiri took the most advantage of the debate. About 34% said Rouhani was the best, while 15% voiced support for Ghalibaf. Other candidates, including Ebrahim Raisi, the custodian of the holy shrine of the eighth Shiite Imam and believed to be favored by the supreme leader; Mostafa Mirsalim, representing the conservative Islamic Coalition Party; and Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, a marginal pro-Reform competitor got the least attention from the public, the poll showed. …

Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, claimed in an interview with Fars News Agency on April 30 that the Reformist leadership would be shifting from Rouhani to Jahangiri in the days running up to the May 19 vote. …

Some observers believe that the conservatives have made their claims about Jahangiri to sow division among Reformists. But there are signs that they are pursuing another strategic goal. The hard-liners know they have little chance to win this year’s election. Thus they may be after replacing Rouhani, whose stances have repeatedly been criticized by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with Jahangiri, a politician who ultraconservatives believe would take a softer position against them. In other words, Jahangiri might be a pro-Reform candidate who can be managed more easily.

The potential selection of Jahangiri as an alternative to Rouhani is not a new idea. Conservatives have been discussing this prospect for months. In November, a person with close ties to the right-wing parties told Al-Monitor that Jahangiri could be a “preferred candidate” if a conservative candidate has no chance of winning the vote. “It depends on how [Khamenei] predicts his own health conditions,” the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in a reference to Khamenei’s alleged prostate disease. He was implying that the supreme leader prefers Jahangiri to be in office in case his health conditions get worse in the next few years.

So if Khamenei expects to die soon, he may prefer a different candidate win? And former President Khatami has also gotten into the act, endorsing Rouhani again. How this is all going to play out should be quite interesting; and I don’t get a feeling as to whether Jahangiri’s early lead introduces stress into any relationship with Rouhani, or if this is strictly business.

Over dinner we noted the following.

• An oculist brings things to a sharp focus.
• An occultist obscures things.

So, a lack of a ‘t’ brings clarity to all.

OK, OK, and a lack of a ‘c’. But it loses its zip.

Spidroin:

Spider silks are the toughest known biological materials, yet are lightweight and virtually invisible to the human immune system, and they thus have revolutionary potential for medicine and industry. Spider silks are largely composed of spidroins, a unique family of structural proteins. To investigate spidroin genes systematically, we constructed the first genome of an orb-weaving spider: the golden orb-weaver (Nephila clavipes), which builds large webs using an extensive repertoire of silks with diverse physical properties. [“The Nephila clavipes genome highlights the diversity of spider silk genes and their complex expression,” Paul L Babb, et al, Nature]

On Lawfare Jane Chong, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes lay out the known facts about the Russian intervention in the American Presidential election and then construct seven theories which are consistent with the facts. I like #3:

Theory of the Case #3: The Russian Operation Wasn’t Really About Trump at All

Before turning to more menacing possibilities, let’s pause to consider a theory somewhat orthogonal to the axis of ascending menace along which we have arrayed these theories: Perhaps the true explanation of the Trump-Russia connection is that the Russian operation wasn’t really about Trump at all—but was really about Hillary Clinton.

There’s reason to believe that the Russian objective here was not specifically to get Trump elected President; like the rest of the world, the Russians seem to have believed that Clinton was going to win. The goal may well have been to injure her legitimacy and popularity as much as possible, weaken her domestic legitimacy, and retaliate against her perceived interference in Russian internal affairs when she, as Secretary of State, supported anti-Putin protesters. In this scenario, Russian support for Trump was largely ancillary to this effort to hurt Clinton.

There is some public evidence to support this theory. Earlier this month, Reuters reported on two strategy documents prepared by Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, the Kremlin’s primary foreign policy think tank, one of which emphasized Clinton’s likely win and argued Russia should shift from pro-Trump propaganda to messaging designed to undermine the legitimacy of her predicted electoral victory and ensuing presidency.

It’s attractive because I don’t see the Russians comfortable with Trump’s erratic behavior – but I do see them disliking the Clinton opposition to their plans. She had the experience, training, and outlook to recognize threats and do something about them. Trump? He’s a real-estate developer with a mouth and not much brains.

Continuing this thread this morning, I see the CO₂ concentrations, as measured by the NOAA monitoring station at Mauna Loa, continue their usual pattern:

Here’s the full data graph,  just for fun:

Just something to think about.

John Schilling on 38 North provides an overview of cyberwarfare with North Korea, and how it might be most effective:

A successful attack, then, will likely be aimed at something other than the missile itself. Note that the highly-publicized “Stuxnet” attack did not target Iran’s (probably nonexistent) nuclear weapons, but the uranium enrichment facility that would be used to manufacture them. North Korea positively brags about its computer-controlled milling machines; these can, in principle, be hacked to produce parts that aren’t exactly what the designer intended. Ovens used to temper and anneal alloys might also be computer-controlled, and subtle changes to the temperature profile can lead to parts that are visually perfect but will fail under load. There are numerous possibilities, and while most will not be practical to exploit, perhaps some will be vulnerable. North Korea’s factories might, perhaps, be “hacked” to produce defective missiles.

So how about that missile that blew a few days ago?

What we would not expect to see, from any plausible cyberattack, would be missiles exploding on the launch pad. The parts of the missile with the potential to explode, are most likely not controlled by software. And if we could somehow tailor built-in defects in the hardware that precisely, we wouldn’t want to. If the missile explodes within sight of North Korean engineers and cameras, they’ll have too many clues as to what went wrong. Similarly, while there are plausible attacks that could result in a defective guidance system or an improperly-calculated trajectory, anyone delivering such an attack would prefer the error be small enough that the missile is well out of sight before it goes visibly off course.

If we are seeing North Korean missiles fail very early in flight, as has been the case in two recent incidents, we should probably be looking for something other than a cyberattack. And we don’t have to look far. Consider the Vanguard rocket, intended to be America’s first satellite launch vehicle, which on its first flight ascended four feet, fell back to the launch pad and exploded—and then exploded six more times in seven launches over the course of a year. The first Atlas ICBM reached 10,000 feet before tumbling and exploding in mid-air. The next six flights suffered four more failures, though at least some of those flew far enough that the explosions weren’t visible to the crowds of spectators. The Titan ICBM, intended as a counter to Atlas’s unreliability, destroyed the launch pad on its first two tests, succeeded on the third, and then went on to a string of downrange failures.

Larpenteur Ave, St. Paul, today:

The snow isn’t vivid, but it’s there.

Paleoburrow:

A few years earlier, and about 1,700 miles to the southeast, another Brazilian geologist happened upon a different, equally peculiar cave. Heinrich Frank, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, was zipping down the highway on a Friday afternoon when he passed a construction site in the town of Novo Hamburgo. There, in a bank where excavators had eaten away half of a hill, he saw a peculiar hole.

Local geology doesn’t yield such a sight, so Frank went back a few weeks later and crawled inside. It was a single shaft, about 15 feet long; at its end, while on his back, he found what looked like claw marks all over the ceiling. Unable to identify any natural geological explanation for the cave’s existence, he eventually concluded that it was a “paleoburrow,” dug, he believes, by an extinct species of giant ground sloth.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as paleoburrows,” says Frank. “I’m a geologist, a professor, and I’d never even heard of them.” [“Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna,” Andrew Jenner, The Crux]

He didn’t get the part for Punch ‘n Judy.

It’s a Danish monster movie! Reptilicus (1961)  (I believe we saw the American version, cut for TV; there’s also a Danish version, which may differ slightly from the English version, according to Wikipedia) kicks off the very earnest fun by finding blood and reptile parts in in the effluvia brought up by a drill operation looking for oil. Returned to the Danish lab in Copenhagen, the small parts begin to regenerate under the care of the scientists. Eventually, amidst a storm of sarcastic comments from my Arts Editor and yours truly, they have a tail that continues to slowly grow.

Then, during a violent electrical storm presumably ordered up by Victor Frankenstein, the tail suddenly exhibits a growth spurt reminiscent of those experienced by thirteen year old boys, and the resultant monster, merely glimpsed by the scientists, gendarmerie, and comic relief (I kid you not!) – in a rare good decision by the movie makers – kills one of the scientists (it’s so hard to find good gratitude these days) and escapes to the sea. Despite the best efforts of the military, it comes back ashore, where the last good decision is dropped and we get to view the monster in all his amateurish armor-plated glory.  In the most memorable scene of the movie, it kills the father of an innocent fishing family, eating him alive.

A human makes the pills go down easier!

My Arts Editor shrieked something about Monty Python at this juncture, while I just giggled madly as the victim, outlined in a neon light, went down the gullet.

The movie lurches along from there. At one point, depth charges are used to jolt it out of the sea after it had been barbecued, but this causes panic in the scientific community, as they fear that blowing it into, say, N pieces might result in N monsters – that regeneration thing, doncha know. Eventually, the monster begins to spout neon-green slime (the movie makers seemed to really like the neon palette) which is apparently an acid; however, no one actually runs from it, so we decided it must merely be rough on folks’ aesthetic senses.

After a good ravaging (or perhaps ravishing, depending on your point of view) of Copenhagen, the military is faced with the problem of “Now we have it trapped, what do we do with it?” After all, explosives are Right Out. Naturally, it’s the off-the-cuff remark concerning drugs that carries the day, and the ladies step forward to make up the poison (a gallon’s worth), while the general himself shoots it into Reptilicus’ mouth in an amazing shot. And so all’s well that ends well, so long as you don’t live in Copenhagen.

Except there’s that foot blown off Reptilicus during the depth charging.

We did not see the MST3K version, but I understand they did a fine job with Reptilicus. I strongly suggest you watch this with a fortifier of some sort in hand. Or several.

NewScientist (15 April 2017, paywall) interviews Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian, who recently received the honor of having element 118 named after him. I found this Q&A interesting:

How much higher will the periodic table go?

There has to be a limit, and I think it will come from relativistic effects. When the positive charge of the nucleus increases, the velocity of the electrons increases too, bringing them closer to the speed of light. We are already close. For example, the innermost electrons of element 112 travel at seven-tenths of light speed. Bringing the velocity of the outermost electrons even closer to light speed may change an atom’s chemical properties, breaking periodicity.

That’s an interesting thought. But he also mentions another topic that fascinates me, if only because I’m so ignorant:

What are you looking forward to now?

To see closer to the top of the “island of stability“. Theorists predict that there should be some superheavy atoms, with certain combinations of protons and neutrons, that are extremely stable. We have a “continent” of stable elements that ends with lead, element 82. As we go heavier than lead, we have a “peninsula” created by the likes of thorium and uranium, which are radioactive and so decay over time into lighter elements. Superheavy nuclei are highly charged matter. The repulsion of positively charged protons prevents the formation of large nuclei and this moves us into the deep water of the “sea of instability”, where elements break down ever faster. It looks like the end of the material world, but I don’t think it is.

The island of stability is a controversial idea. You think it could exist?

If it didn’t, we could not synthesise elements heavier than element 112. Their lifetimes are extremely small, but if neutrons are added to the nuclei of these atoms, their lifetime grows. Adding eight neutrons to the heaviest known isotopes of elements 110, 111, 112 and even 113 increases their lifetime by around 100,000 times. This is because we are heading inland on the island of stability and I feel we are now on firm ground, but we are still far from the top of the island where atoms may have lifetimes of perhaps millions of years. We will need new machines to reach it.

Since I have no concept as to why some elements are radioactive and thus decay relatively rapidly over time, this doesn’t entirely make sense to me.

My lovely Arts Editor directs my attention to Steve … the low Earth orbit phenomenon. From Smithsonian.com:

Image: Raymond J. Stinson, Alberta Aurora Chasers

Facebook is a place to share dramas and dog pictures, hit “like” and watch weird events unfold live. But for a group of amateur skywatchers, the social network is also a place to share information about what people spy in the sky. And thanks to a group of Canadian aurora enthusiasts, an entirely new type of atmospheric phenomenon has been documented.

It’s called Steve, and its origins are a bit more exciting than its straightforward name would suggest. The Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group first spotted the phenomenon last year, reports Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, and has been collecting photos of Steve sightings. The name Steve reflects their confusion about the phenomenon’s origins, Dvorsky writes, and reminded someone of the movie Over the Hedge “in which a character arbitrarily conjures up the name Steve to describe an object he’s not sure about.” …

[Eric] Donovan [of the University of Calgary] was able to pinpoint Swarm data taken while a [Swarm] satellite flew through the Steve phenomenon, according to an ESA press release. The data didn’t show a proton aurora. Instead, it showed something that had never been observed before: a temperature spike of over 5400 degrees Fahrenheit in a spot about 186 miles above Earth’s surface combined with a gas ribbon over 15 miles wide that was flowing west more slowly than the other gases that surrounded it.

An upcoming paper supposedly will give an explanation – or at least a hypothesis.

In response to my puzzlement about a piece of rigging on the USS Constellation we encountered while on vacation, a reader writes:

Check out Baggywrinkle – just an idea about your ‘shaggy ropes.’

And, indeed, that must be it. Wikipedia:

Baggywrinkle is a soft covering for cables (or any other obstructions) to reduce sailchafe. There are many points in the rig of a large sailing ship where the sails come into contact with the standing rigging; unprotected sails would soon develop holes at the points of contact. Baggywrinkle provides a softer wearing surface for the sail.

The lower specimen appears to be an exact match to what we saw. Thanks!

A friend points me at this article in Quartz on the scholarly work of Professor Carlo M. Cipolla of University of California, Berkeley in 1976 on stupid people. He identifies 5 laws of human stupidity, and #3 sparked a thought (no, not that thought):

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.

The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid. …

However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

So … I can’t help but wonder how Law 1 (“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation“) can possibly hold, right? After all, the life span of a stupid person should be substantially shorter than that of the average competent person.

But we all know of really stupid people. No, I’m not talking about Trump voters, although no doubt a few of them, according to to Cipolla’s First Law, are just out and out stupid. But we all know folks who consistently make bad decisions. The kids playing Nerf Wars while driving and ending up dead, for example. So how do they survive?

Why, we’ve all enabled it, haven’t we? Remember the Zero-risk society? It all seemed like such a great idea – minimize risk at all times, put the responsibility on the manufacturers for the safe use of their products, keep workplaces exceedingly safe. I suppose it’s a side-effect of the idea that all life is sacred. Well, all human life, anyways. And dog life.

Don’t forget Cat life. Yeah, that’s a dirty look.

So through the indiscriminate valuation of human life, we end up with stupid people persisting far longer in the population – and annoying the rest of us – than they might otherwise do. That suggests the obvious solution:

Stop the absurd driving of risk to zero.

Maybe offer high school classes in not being stupid, but leave it at that. Someone wants to run their radio in the bathtub, hey, great. Just make sure your Last Will and Testament is filled out. Maybe hospitals shouldn’t be required to treat idiots who accidentally shoot themselves.

Policy changes of this order may drive mortuary business to new highs, momentarily, but it’ll certainly result in a reduction of stress for the rest of us.

But then we’d have to stop being so stupid.

It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?

See also: “The Marching Morons,” by C. M. Kornbluth.

Achieving the dream leaves we slightly whacked.

Get Out (2017) is a movie of the moment: it plays with today’s psychosocial currents of American society to create moments of tensions, revelation, and stress-relieving humor.  From a poke at the vagaries of smartphone technology to the continuing racial tensions bedeviling the shared American mind, the film slowly reveals a plot worthy of the Stepford Wives.

Chris is a young black man in love with Rose, a young, flighty white woman, and it’s time for the Meet the Parents moment, featuring her parents, Missy, a psychologist, and Dean, a neurosurgeon, as well as her obnoxious and usually drunken brother, Jeremy. The jabs are friendly and light, although sometimes they seem slightly … off.

During the night, Chris goes out for a smoke and encounters Missy on his way back in.  They talk, then Chris wakes from a nightmare of falling through a chair and away from reality. It’s jarring, disturbing and unnatural.

The next day, a mob of family friends shows up, friendly and happy – until the oddball comments start. Not offensive, but not what’s expected. They all play their parts, one might say, right to the hilt.

And then it gets weird, starting with a silent auction. There’s one thing being auctioned:  A large photograph of Chris. But why is it fetching such a high price? It isn’t clear.

Placed in the horror genre, the film does not indulge in the many trappings of today’s horror movie; it’s more like the better Hitchcock films – Film Noir for the modern day. There is violence, but the gore is implied. There might be horror in the background, but Chris is no helpless victim. He’s clever and decisive. And just when all the bets appear lost, a guardian angel appears to take the breath of the audience away.

Like most horror films, if you think too hard about it, the plot holes become apparent. That’s rather the essence of horror films, isn’t it? But this is definitely a better one, eschewing shock value and messy, empty showmanship. Rather, it explores the psychological and social aspects of a desire to live, which is common to us all.

This film is really a lesson in what happens when stunning science meets amorality, taken to its illogical extreme.

Recommended, if you like horror or Hitchcock.

NewScientist (15 April 2017) notes the Nicaragua canal appears to be a go, despite ecological concerns:

Map: Fresh Fruit Portal

It will carve a 273-kilometre channel through the small Central American country to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean – even though the Panama Canal, 1000 kilometres to the south, already does the job, and received a massive upgrade less than a year ago.

Why the duplication? Proponents of the canal say it will ease congestion that the upgrade can’t address, and create new economic opportunities for Nicaragua. By shortening journeys, it could even help stem the rise in the shipping industry’s share of global carbon emissions, which could reach 17 per cent by mid-century. …

Unsurprisingly protests ensued, delaying construction. The project has enraged Nicaraguan ecologists. Its most outspoken critic is Jorge Huete-Perez at the University of Central America in Managua, a former president of the country’s Academy of Sciences. Huete-Perez told New Scientist the canal would cut through biosphere reserves and destroy 4000 square kilometres of rainforests and wetlands. He also warned it would decimate coastal coral, mangroves and beaches where sea turtles lay their eggs – as well as inundating the villages of several indigenous forest tribes. “The canal project represents the worst nightmare for Nicaraguan conservationists,” he says.

Fears are perhaps greatest for Lake Nicaragua. Spanning almost half the width of the country, it is the nation’s chief source of fresh water. More than 100 kilometres of it lies on the canal’s route, requiring a trench three times the lake’s existing depth to be built. That will “irreversibly alter the aquatic environment of Nicaragua,” says Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz in Germany.

But while it’s a fascinating project, I must admit this part of the report really grabbed my attention:

There may be one last, slim hope for opponents of the canals: an altogether different way for ships to get between oceans. Engineers in South Korea say it might be easier, and more environmentally friendly, to span the relatively flat Kra isthmus with a railway sturdy enough to carry ships weighing up to 100,000 tonnes (not much smaller than the Panama Canal now takes). The Korea Railroad Research Institute, which has pioneered the idea of these so-called “dry canals”, suggested earlier last year that it could be built for a quarter of the cost of the Thai canal. A similar project has been proposed in Honduras, just north of Nicaragua.

Dry canals bring fascinating visuals to mind, although it appears no one has put evocative pictures online. Hofstra University reports they’re a hot topic these day in Central America, with 7 either proposed or actual operational dry canals, although from the description most of them are not on the scale of the proposed Nicaragua dry canal – they mention road connections and the like. Putting an entire ship on a railroad car – of magnificent proportion – just boggles the mind a bit. But how to power the passage – a railway engine seems both inadequate and inglorious. I envision two trackways with suitable separation, capstans of marvelous size, and some manner to connect the powerplants of the ships themselves to the ropes using the capstans, and then each ship might be able to power the others passage.

No doubt some killjoy will point out a flaw in my scheme.

Epigraph:

Epigraph may refer to:

• An inscription, as studied in the archeological sub-discipline of epigraphy
• Epigraph (literature), a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component
• Epigraph (mathematics), the set of points lying on or above its graph

[Wikipedia]

I realized the other day that I really had little idea what epigraph might mean, and it turns out it’s a three banger.

In the previous post I noted the possible candidacy of Tommy Tuberville, former football coach of Auburn, for the governorship of Alabama. This appears to have come to a halt, as AL.com reports, despite his overwhelming confidence:

“I think I could make a difference if I do decide to run (for governor of Alabama) because it is all about sales, organization and leadership,” Tuberville said in February. “Some people say you haven’t been in politics. I’ve been in a big part of it. This whole country is politics now.”

Which strikes me as a little naive. If the political scene is so bad, why does his experience with it make him a good candidate? Nor does he really say the right things, such as having studied government at a respected institute. And while I don’t make that a necessity, I worry about candidates and winners who can’t see beyond the frontier of their own experience of the world. As noted throughout this blog, using techniques from other sectors is not a guarantee of success in a sector foreign to the techniques original context. That’s a simple, commonsense observation which seems to escape most advocates of moving free enterprise into other sectors.

And which sector, by the way, would a football coach be considered a part of?