Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mediaite reports on Trump’s hasty use of political capital:

CNN reported Wednesday on a senior administration official admitting that the White House intentionally misled reporters ahead of President Donald Trump‘s congressional address in order to get generate positive press coverage as part of a “misdirection play.”

Multiple reports Tuesday indicated that Trump would embrace a more moderate tone on immigration and would announce that he was willing to negotiate granting millions of illegal immigrants legal status. Most of those reports, cited to a “senior administration official,” came immediately after anchors lunched with Trump. Some of those outlets then just attributed the claim to the president himself.

But when it was time for Trump to actually give the speech, he said nothing of the sort. CNN’s Sara Murray complained the next day about “the bait and switch that the president pulled when it came to immigration yesterday. He had this meeting with the anchors, he talked about a path to legal status.”

Multiple news organizations are now reportedly wondering why they should ever trust Trump again. My feeling is that the Trump Administration has, at the very best, a very flawed conception of planning. They have four years ahead of them, if they’re lucky, and they just lost any last hope they had of gaining positive coverage from the mainstream press – all for a momentary uptick in positive coverage.

Are they that desperate? Or do they really believe their own fantasies that the mainstream press is about to roll over and die? About all they can really expect is that they won’t lose anyone in their base – they’ll probably not hear about it, and if they do, they’ll figure the press deserved what they got. After all, by wide report, his base thinks he’s doing wonderful and don’t understand why he’s not receiving plaudits from the press.

I gotta say, Patrick Stewart and Colbert doing a parody of Waiting For Godot was awfully damn good right up until they tried to make it into a Trek parody.

Godot always struck me as being a bit about being Godless. I wonder if a similar play could be written about being too … Godful.

Great skill!

I’ve been noticing occasional comments in various media about how Steve Bannon, White House senior aide, sees himself as a Leninist out to destroy the (sometimes administrative) state. However, the interest seems to be mostly along the lines of drawing mildly useful parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Anastasia Edel does here in Quartz.

But is that an end in itself? Certainly, it’s not hard to believe – some do seem to think that all 300 million of us running around without rules can make it fly with no end. But I’m doubtful in the Bannon case. I’m going to spin a little story which, while not backed by irrefutable research, does fit the facts as are currently advertised. Let’s start with beginnings.

Bannon was the Executive Chair of Breitbart, a web site notorious as an “alt-right” site – or, less euphemistically, a site devoted to white nationalism, even white supremacism. We can assume, therefore, that he’s a white nationalist. Now, who lives next door to a white nationalist in the metaphorical neighborhood?

That’s right. The white slaveowner.

And what happened to the American slaveowner? They were deprived of their most important possessions – their slaves, who did much of the work needed in the South – first by law in the North, and then by force in the South, when they attempted to secede from the Union in order to preserve their foul power over people, purely on the basis of skin color. (See here for a meditation on the true soul of the supremacist of any color.)

And what deprived them of their position on the mountain top? The common answer is the North, but I would fine this down a bit. The tool used to spike the cannon of foul oppression was … the Federal Government. It proved to be, once a succession of incompetent generals were finally cleared from the ranks, an efficient tool for coordinating the necessary efforts, and more importantly, to focus the intellectual repudiation of the entire pile of rubbish used to prop up the American White Nationalist movement of the latter half of the 1800s.

If I may speculate, for Bannon, the Federal Government is more than a symbol of the North, it’s the tool used to “oppress” (I can barely type that without laughing at him) Bannon and all of his fellow White Nationalists, all the way to that murderous wretch, Dylann Roof. And now Bannon, ensconced at the heart of the thing he hates, now works to eviscerate it, while keeping his other bugaboo, the Islamic world, at bay. So he suggests a bloated military budget be inflated yet again, while destroying the various departments that might bind his efforts, especially that of Education, and the EPA. The first, because education is his foe, as a white nationalist, while the second is more likely to infringe on his “right” to do anything he so wishes. He even has tentatively assaulted the Judiciary, although that is a bastion difficult to breach; it may yet bring him down.

But he has little to lose in the effort. White nationalists and supremacists are barely on the bottom rung of society, unless they hide their tendencies; and rare is one that achieves conventional success.

So there’s your bed-time speculation for the day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be proven wrong. But understanding where he may be going with this is as useful, if not more so, than drawing parallels with Lenin’s approach, which worked well in that world – but that world is not this world.

[EDIT: 6/5/2017 fix typo]

General Mattis, Secretary of Defense, is proving to be quite conventional, Lawfare reports:

The White House said on Monday that President Trump will propose a $54 billion increase in military spending, to be financed primarily by cuts in the budgets of other agencies, including the State Department.   White House officials said that “foreign aid” will face a significant decrease.   Secretary of State Tillerson should strongly and publicly resist cuts to the State Department budget.   As the press has reported, Defense Secretary Mattis supported full funding for the State Department when he was in uniform, and it is even more important that he do so now.

In 2013, when he was CENTCOM Commander, Mattis said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it’s a cost benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of an apparent American withdrawal from the international scene.”

Based on reports of top White House aide Bannon wanting to destroy the administrative state, this must be a little annoying. After all, you don’t want your foreign enemies clambering over the walls while you’re busy eviscerating your domestic enemies for good, so you increase defense funding, while removing funding for all those other agencies you dislike.

That might get in the way when you try to implement your white nationalist policies.

Mattis remains a reassuring pick.

This is one of those stories that makes you bite your lip. From SFGate:

In a victory for gun advocates, a federal judge said Monday that California appears to have violated freedom of speech with a law allowing public officials — including legislators who voted for gun-control laws — to prevent online posting of their addresses and phone numbers.

The issue arose in July when a pro-gun blogger posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of 40 lawmakers who had supported firearms restrictions that were signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. The restrictions included a ban on possessing guns that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition and a requirement of background checks for buyers of ammunition. The law also required that the buyer’s address and phone number be put into a state database.

The blogger, “Publius,” who obtained the legislators’ information from public records, declared in his posting that “these tyrants are no longer going to be insulated from us.”

After several lawmakers received threatening phone calls and messages, the legislative counsel’s office contacted WordPress, the blog’s online host, and demanded removal of the information within 48 hours. The office cited a state law, passed in its current form in 2005, that allows state officials to have their addresses and phone numbers removed from the Internet if they fear for their safety.

The judge suggests the plaintiffs are likely to win, and I can see why: the author of free speech cannot be held responsible for the actions of others unless the free speech alleges fallacies, such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater that is not afire. Despite the blogger’s unfortunately aggressive turn of phrase, no doubt brought about by decades of anti-government paranoia propaganda from the right-wing, there is little to criticize. Unfortunately, that paranoia has produced a divided citizenry on the subject, and therefore suggesting that the emergence of a leftist authoritarian government that could not be thrown off by an armed citizenry could still be thrown off by a united citizenry would not be an effective argument.

But, certainly, the threats, illegal as they are (and I certainly hope the perpetrators are caught, convicted, and locked up, if only for being idiots who don’t understand how we should be a cordial society), are meant to intimidate our representatives – an attempt to sway them from following their best judgment in making public policy, which is their job.

Their first step should have been to bring suit against the new law. Standing should be no problem, and then a Constitutional question can be plopped into the lap of a judge.

The right question. Not this nightmarish problem.

But they should have taken another path and tried to supply an answer to the problem California is presumably trying to solve – how to stop gun violence. Giving in to their base natures in this manner betrays their side and makes the debate – the search for a proper course – that much more difficult.

NewScientist (11 February 2017) reports on a fascinating new finding with regards to cancer:

When older cells naturally stop dividing, they become “senescent”. These kinds of cells also pump out a slew of chemicals that cause inflammation, which can damage surrounding tissue. Senescent cells have been linked to a growing list of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and heart failure.

Marco Demaria at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands wondered if senescence might be responsible for the long list of side effects associated with chemotherapy. “Most people have fatigue, and most of the time this becomes chronic,” he says. “Some people have muscle weakness, nausea, dizziness, problems with their bones or heart damage for example.” Such side effects can occur for months after treatment has finished.

To explore the effects of senescent cells, Demaria and his colleagues genetically engineered mice so these cells would fluoresce. They then gave the mice cancer, and one of four common chemotherapy drugs: doxorubicin, cisplatin, paclitaxel and temozolomide.

Chemotherapy increased the number of senescent cells in the mice. “We saw senescence everywhere: in the liver, lung, heart, skin and fat,” says Demaria.

In another trial, they gave the mice a drug known to kill senescent cells, and the mice didn’t show the health problems shown by the first group. Unfortunately …

“If we had a drug that we could use in humans, we could lower the toxicity and improve the efficacy of chemotherapy,” says Demaria. At the moment, there isn’t an appropriate drug that could be trialled in people. The drug given to the mice can cause a fatal shortage of blood platelets in humans.

But at least there’s a target. Chemo-fatigue is a fairly awful side effect.

Misophonia:

Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound,” was proposed in 2000 as a condition in which negative emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions are triggered by specific sounds. It is also called “select sound sensitivity syndrome” and “sound-rage.” [Wikipedia]

Seen in “Why the sound of noisy eating fills some people with rage“, Tiffany O’Callaghan, NewScientist (11 February 2017):

Olana Tansley-Hancock knows misophonia’s symptoms only too well. From the age of about 7 or 8, she experienced feelings of rage and discomfort whenever she heard the sound of other people eating. By adolescence, she was eating many of her meals alone. As time wore on, many more sounds would trigger her misophonia. Rustling papers and tapping toes on train journeys constantly forced her to change seats and carriages. Clacking keyboards in the office meant she was always making excuses to leave the room.

I hope he has nothing in his teeth.

The Robe (1953) is the predecessor to the previously reviewed Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and dramatizes the plight of the Roman tribune responsible for executing Jesus, the fictional Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton). Troubled by the unexpected guilt caused by the crucifixion, he suffers a breakdown. His emperor, Tiberius, chooses to send him in search of the robe of Jesus, to destroy it and thus his guilt. Instead of destroying it, it cleanses him of his guilt, and he transitions to Christianity, a choice which has its own price.

The decision to follow Marcellus is a smart choice, as it permits insight into the Roman court, which begins with the Emperor Tiberius and later transitions to the terrible Caligula. The primary lesson we learn is the preoccupation with personal advancement and catering to one’s personal desires will lead to strife as no one is considering how to really preserve the State, not least this nasty bit of work, Caligula. Marcellus himself is a sot and a gambler with little regard for anyone besides his future wife, Diana.

In contrast, the Christian sect comes across as humble. No one is scrambling for power, glory, or even wine. Marcellus impulsively gives a little boy his donkey; the little boy then gives the donkey to a crippled boy, no prompting needed. A crippled woman glows with happiness, despite her condition, at the word of Jesus. A reprimand of the villagers by the leader for taking advantage of Marcellus for his ignorance concerning the price of cloth is not delivered with a whip or even a raised voice, but simply a reminder of how their teacher, Jesus, would have requested merely a fair price for any clothe he would have sold. Thus we gain a vivid lesson in how the film makers (or, more likely, the author of the novel on which this is based, Lloyd C. Douglas) see the advantages of the philosophy espoused by Jesus, and the self-destructiveness of the Roman state.

In mitigation of the above, the fact that the Christian village must rely on the sword of Marcellus himself when the Romans unexpectedly attack is a suggestion, specious as it might be in a movie, that the philosophy of Jesus may be lacking in the all-important department of self-sustainment. But is it fair to criticize a philosophy based on the message of a fictional story that’s been run through the Holllywood ringer?

Probably not.

OK, for all that, this flick is a bit of a clunker. Burton’s performance is a trifle brittle. If it had changed as he converted to Christianity, it might have been more convincing, but the changes were … minor. I was unconvinced. Then the use of violence to rescue Demetrius from the torture chamber of Caligula once again throws doubt upon the philosophy of Christianity. It’s a long movie, 135 minutes in an era that didn’t make long movies. Most of the other acting performances are highly competent, but not particularly moving, with the exception of Jay Robinson, whose Caligula is madcap genius. I can still hear his shrill, evil voice in my head.

Is this a movie to be Recommended? No, for it didn’t pick me up and swirl me about. The story is truly predictable, and it drags on and on. But there are plenty of facets to enjoy, from the vistas (I would have liked to see this on the big screen) to Michael Rennie as Peter (perfect casting)  to Caligula to the actual crucifixion scene, when the Romans are playing dice as the men on their crosses are dying. If you have some time to burn and don’t mind a predictable story, then this may be worth your attention.

Concerning excess heat, a reader wonders about materials science:

There are substances which absorb heat and then give up photons later, which can then be converted into electricity. I wonder if that would be an option?

I believe those are called thermoelectric materials.

The thermoelectric effect refers to phenomena by which either a temperature difference creates an electric potential or an electric potential creates a temperature difference.

According to Wikipedia, they are being used, or at least researched, only for niche applications. I wonder if the requirement of a temperature difference would be a limiting factor in terms of the required scalability.

A few years ago, I had considered suggesting the use of thermoelectric materials for the design of the next generation of credit cards. That would obviate any attacks from a distance, resulting in a requirement that in order to break a credit card, one would have to possess it. In combination with a potent encryption scheme, they might be unbreakable. But the credit card companies chose to go with a computer chip on the card instead.

I wonder how many ways that can be broken.

As Turkey sinks into the religious state morass, Europe has been caught off-guard. As Zülfikar Doğan reports in AL Monitor, Turkey’s Religious Affairs Department, Diyanet, and the Turkish imams under its supervision strongly supported President Erdogan during the attempted coup. Their next mission?

The issue of spying imams led to diplomatic tensions first between Turkey and the Netherlands, and then with Germany and Austria. The crisis escalated when the German police searched the residences of four Turkish imams on Feb. 15.

In a report submitted to the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission investigating the coup attempt, there were references to intelligence information provided by imams posted abroad. Diyanet-appointed imams collected intelligence from 38 countries, primarily about the Gulen movement.

Reports submitted by the spying imams covered all Gulenist activities, the names of their adherents and their photos in European, Central Asian and African countries. After the Diyanet reports to the parliamentary inquiry were leaked to the media in December 2016, the first reaction came from the Netherlands. Diyanet reports revealed that official Turkish religious personnel were collecting intelligence about Turkish expatriates praying in 145 mosques in that country. Yusuf Acar, the religious affairs attache of the Turkish Embassy in The Hague, was accused of guiding local imams. The Turkish government was asked to recall Acar, and it did.

Germany and Austria had related incidents. However, it appears Erdogan is convinced there are Gulenists everywhere.

Media organs close to the government said the spying imam crisis was a ploy of Western countries to support and protect the Gulen movement.

It will be interesting, in twenty years, to find out if Erdogan’s paranoia is justified. Right now it appears he’s thrashing about and harming strategic relations, slowly falling into the image of so many dictators who worried more about their power than their nation.

Concerning statins research, a reader writes:

PCSK9 drugs are available for humans now. And they work. They’re common in Europe and have caused cardiac surgery rates to fall by at least one third. But US medical insurance won’t pay for these drugs. Ask me how I know. Spoiler: I’m married to a man who has had quad-bypass surgery and can’t tolerate statins. Yet his insurance refuses to pay for the PCSK9 drug that his cardiologist – the top doctor at the U of M – has prescribed. The cardiologist’s nurse told us that her heart breaks when a patient dies even though there’s a medicine that could have prevented it. I only hope that my husband isn’t one of them.

I wonder if the author of the article missed some information on economical PCSK9 drugs. I’m also interested to hear that reducing PSCK9 is a viable option even after a patient has suffered heart damage.

I am most happy to see this comment from Garrett Epps, a Constitutional law professor at the University of Baltimore, in The Atlantic concerning the recent checking of papers of passengers deplaning from a domestic flight by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents, as I’ve been quietly grinding my teeth ever since I heard about it:

After days of research, I can find no legal authority for ICE or CBP to require passengers to show identification  on an entirely domestic fight. The ICE authorizing statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1357, provides that agents can conduct warrantless searches of “any person seeking admission to the United States”—if, that is, the officer has “reasonable cause to suspect” that the individual searched may be deportable. CBP’s statute, 19 U.S.C. § 1467, grants search authority “whenever a vessel from a foreign port or place or from a port or place in any Territory or possession of the United States arrives at a port or place in the United States.” CBP regulations, set out at 19 C.F.R. § 162.6, allow agents to search “persons, baggage, and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof.”

I asked two experts whether I had missed some general exception to the Fourth Amendment for passengers on a domestic flight. After all, passengers on flights entering the U.S. from other countries can expect to be asked for ID, and even searched. Barry Friedman, the Jacob D. Fuchsberg professor of law and affiliated professor of politics at New York University, is the author of Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission, a new book-length study of intrusive police investigation and search practices. “Is this remotely constitutional?” he asked. “I think it isn’t. We all know generally the government can’t come up and demand to see identification.” Officers need to have statutory authority to search and reasonable suspicion that the person to be searched has violated the law, he said. Andre Segura, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me that “I’m not aware of any aviation exception” for domestic passengers.

Definitely an authoritarian’s way. After some talk about consensual conduct, he moves on to his own conclusions:

I am vowing here and now not to show papers in this situation. I know that it will take gumption to follow through if the situation arises. What will be the reaction of ordinary travelers, some with outstanding warrants or other legal worries? Should we expect heroism of people who just want to get off an airplane?

Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that a regime of liberty includes “freedom from bodily restraint or compulsion, freedom to walk, stroll, or loaf.”

A shadow is falling over that freedom, both for aliens and for citizens. Its loss will be devastating.

The shadow will exist only so long as citizens let it. Remembering that law enforcement personnel are also citizens, not an enemy, but may need to be gently reminded to remain within Constitutional limits despite hectoring from political appointees. Calmly insisting what is wrong is wrong is the best path.

A light going over of a restoration … of power.

Found here.

Just how effective would a travel ban on the countries despised by the Trump Administration be? Nora Ellingsen on Lawfare condenses the Department of Homeland Security‘s findings:

First, the report found that country of citizenship, more generally, is not a reliable indicator of terrorist activity. By DHS’s count, foreign-born terrorism subjects in the United States originated from 26 different countries, and no country accounted for more than 13.5 percent of foreign-born suspects. In other words—and these are my words, not those of DHS—the travel ban will not be effective not, or not only, because Trump chose the wrong countries, but because trying to single out any country or countries for a travel ban is inherently a misfire. It is trying to fight terrorism by singling out a factor that doesn’t, in fact, offer a significant correlation with terrorist attacks—and that makes very little sense.In addition, the assessment challenges the administration’s claim that the affected countries have a history of “exporting terrorism” to the United States. In fact, these countries aren’t actually exporting very many people at all. As CNN reported, the seven countries in question were originally removed from the visa waiver program under the Obama administration, making immigrating to the United States a less accessible option for their citizens. As the DHS assessment lays out, individuals from these countries don’t move to the United States in large numbers; each of the seven countries accounts for a small percentage of the US visas granted in their region (the Middle East, North Africa, or Sub-Saharan Africa). Each country accounts for less than three percent of its region’s total U.S. visas granted, with the exception of Iran, which clocks in at seven percent. Notably, the assessment reviewed only publically available data on how many U.S. visas were actually granted to residents of the affected countries prior to the ban, perhaps highlighting the need to actually utilize State Department databases before drafting the next Executive Order.

Finally, the assessment draws an important distinction between the countries on the list that face a significant terrorism threat that is reasonably contained within their borders and those who struggle with terrorist groups that also target the United States. Of those seven countries, the assessment indicates that most aren’t harboring terrorist groups actively targeting the United States. According to the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism 2015, groups in Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan are regionally focused; only organizations based in Iraq, Syria and Yemen currently pose a threat of attacks in the United States.

Yeah, it does sound like the Trump Administration doesn’t really care about facts. Which really endangers all of us in so many ways, if you think about it.

The Polar Bears International website is all about … well, one of the most frightening animals around, at least to me. Over on Treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer summarizes some of what she found on PBI:

Source: Wikimedia

The Norse poets from medieval Scandinavia said polar bears had the strength of 12 men and the wit of 11. They referred to them with the following names White Sea Deer; The Seal’s Dread; The Rider of Icebergs; The Whale’s Bane; The Sailor of the Floe.

The Sami and Lapp refuse to call them “polar bear” in order to avoid offending them. Instead, they call them God’s Dog or The Old Man in the Fur Cloak

Nanuk is used by the the Inuit, meaning Animal Worthy of Great Respect. Pihoqahiak is also used by the Inuit; it means The Ever-Wandering One.

I just remember a long-ago National Geographic story about a polar bear finding a beached pod of whales … and it killed every single one of them. By chewing around their blowholes, causing them to bleed out.

But while the names are delightful, what really caught my attention was back on the PBI site:

“The only way to save the bears and their sea ice habitats is to control temperature rise through greenhouse gas mitigation.” -Dr. Steven C. Armstrup

And this is really an example of sloppy thinking, a matter of dictating how when we’re talking about what. First, we identify that we want to save them. What sort of habitat do they need? Maybe thousands of kilometers² of ice, with seals and whatever else they eat. That requires … historically normal temperatures.

Now, how we get there should not be set in granite. Sure, I agree greenhouse gas mitigation is the most likely approach – but that’s not set in stone. I mean, I keep thinking about all this heat in the atmosphere … and I recall what it can be converted into.

Energy.

So what if someone came up with a way to suck the excess energy out and store it for later use? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

It’s not to beat on Dr. Armstrup. It’s just as an engineer I’ve seen – and been responsible for – sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy solutions, missed solutions, and expensive mistakes. It may seem harmless to improperly state a problem, but words create furrows in our brains, and not everyone can step out of a long, straight furrow that never crosses the “best solution” furrow.

I was briefly on statins several years ago, for six months. It made me very absent-minded; I never made it to the painful muscles stage. But I had always wondered about the functional of cholesterol in the blood. Michael Brooks finally tells me in NewScientist (11 February 2017):

A fatty biomolecule synthesised primarily in the liver, cholesterol forms cell walls and the myelin sheaths that protect neurons in the brain. It plays a part in biological processes from cell signalling to making vitamin D, and may even help fight infections.

So it has its uses. Michael Le Page, in the same issue of NewScientist, reports on a target for gene editing – basically, get a treatment and go off of statins forever:

In 2005, it was discovered that a few people naturally have very low cholesterol levels, thanks to mutations that prevent their livers from making a protein called PCSK9. “They have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and no apparent side effects whatsoever,” says Gilles Lambert at the University of Reunion Island, who studies PCSK9.

The PCSK9 protein normally circulates in the blood, where it degrades a protein found on the surface of blood vessels. This second protein removes LDL cholesterol from the blood: the faster it is degraded by PCSK9, the higher a person’s cholesterol levels. But people who lack PCSK9 due to genetic mutations have more of this LDL-removal protein, and therefore less cholesterol in their blood.

Drugs were developed to reduce PCSK9, but they turn out to be expensive and cumbersome to use.

But gene editing provides a radical alternative. Using the CRISPR technique, the team at AstraZeneca have disabled human versions of the PCSK9 gene in mice.

They did this by injecting the CRISPR Cas 9 protein and a guiding RNA sequence into the animals. The RNA guide helps the Cas9 protein bind to a specific site in the gene. It then cuts the gene at that point, and when the break is repaired, errors that disable the gene are likely to be introduced.

There was an even bigger fall in cholesterol levels in the mice given the CRISPR treatment than in those injected with the antibody drugs.

They still see human trials starting in about a decade.

Corrigendum:

An erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. An erratum is most commonly issued shortly after its original text is published. Patches to security issues in a computer program are also sometimes called errata. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author’s error. [Wikipedia]

Seen in this article on Retraction Watch:

On February 9, ten days after the article came online, corresponding author Garret Stuber at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote a detailed comment on PubMed Commons, explaining that the “research community” had brought four figure-related errors to his attention. After investigating the concerns, Stuber discovered that the problems emerged after the peer-review process, “while revising the manuscript to comply with Nature Neuroscience’s final formatting guidelines.” In his note, he outlined the specific duplication issues that arose, which he says he plans to detail to the journal in a formal corrigendum letter.

I’m experiencing some numbness in my right hand, which my Arts Editor believes is the result of carpal tunnel syndrome. This seems vaguely familiar, and I believe I experienced the same problem about 25-30 years ago. Back then, I recall I reined back my typing and may have tried using a wrist splint. I’ve recently noticed my mousing technique has worsened – I need to work on not being quite so lazy. At work I’ve moved my mouse to my left hand; I should probably explore a similar option at home, although my computer area is really setup for right hand mousing.

So I may be taking a break, or at least lessening, my blogging activities. Just to explain that I’m not walking away, hopefully this will go away as it did way back when. And I need to work on more proper technique.

Ever think about the problem of measuring sea level? Turns out it’s quite the horrendous problem – but that may be changing, according to Laura Spinney in NewScientist (11 February 2017, paywall):

Earth’s geoid from DeepEarthScience (2013)

If Earth were a perfect sphere, we might use GPS measurements: these calculate the user’s distance from the centre of the GPS satellites’ orbits. But Earth looks more like a rugby ball, with a radius 21 kilometres longer at the equator than at the poles. It’s a lumpy rugby ball too, with a depression of about 100 metres to the south of India, for example, and a peak of about 100 metres over Indonesia.

These lumps are in Earth’s geoid, or gravitational surface – a plane that you would move across if you did no work in the vertical dimension, like a marble rolling over a table. They occur because gravity is stronger where mass accumulates, as in a mountain or denser rocks. The geoid largely determines where the surface of the sea lies. If you were to swim from India to Indonesia, you would move 200 metres away from Earth’s centre.

Agreeing on a vertical standard, therefore, boils down to agreeing on a model of the geoid – and with the latest satellite measurements, we’re getting close to doing that. In 2002, NASA and the German Aerospace Center launched the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, and seven years later, the European Space Agency launched its Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission. GOCE orbited until 2013, while GRACE is still in orbit, and the two now have enough data to make a geoid model accurate to within a few centimetres. “The gravity field is smoothed because the satellite is far from the Earth’s masses,” says Rummel, who led the GOCE mission, “But it can be complemented by terrestrial gravity measurements.” Together, the two provide the millimetre accuracy required for, say, building bridges.

I hadn’t thought about this so much. So are there any plans?

The technical capability that underpins a geoid-based global standard of height is there – but is there the political will to agree on it? Perhaps. The US, Canada and Mexico have announced that they will switch to a unified geoid-based height system in 2022, and a meeting in Prague of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in 2015 passed a resolution to support the adoption of a single global reference frame. “We agreed,” says Ihde. “Now we have to put it into practice.”

And …

[Ecuadoran peak] Chimborazo beats Everest by a whopping 2 kilometres.

I sense outrage on the horizon.

I think we’re beginning to see the end result of the formation of the echo chamber of the extreme right. One data point is just a data point, but now a second data point is beginning to form, and I’ll call it a theme. The first data point? GOP shock and bewilderment that constituents like the health care benefits of the ACA and allied programs. Some GOP lawmakers have had the courage to try to weather the storm, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas:

Cotton paused the event at that comment to make clear he was not trying to accuse vocal critics at the event of being illegitimate or paid, as Trump and Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz have done.

“I don’t care if anybody here is paid or not. You’re all Arkansans,” Cotton said. “Thank you for everyone coming out.”

As the event continued, dozens of people lined up at microphones to ask questions. Cotton ultimately extended the event by about 30 minutes while questions ranged from accountability for Trump, Obamacare, the refugee program, Trump’s proposed border wall and many other policy areas. [CNN]

Plaudits to Senator Cotton. Working along the spectrum, we find Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who couldn’t withstand the cognitive dissonance of discovering what her handlers have to say vs what her actual constituents have to say:

Fielding questions from her constituents for a whole 45 minutes wore down Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Tuesday, causing her to flee and the audience to roar.

Ernst was in the tiny town of Maquoketa, population 6,062, for a roundtable with veterans. When she arrived at city hall, slipping through a side door, she found 100 people crammed inside the room, CNN reports, with dozens more filling the hallways and atrium. The microphone being used by constituents repeatedly cut in and out, frustrating people in the room who couldn’t hear what was being said, and Ernst only took one question from a non-veteran, a man who asked her about the Affordable Care Act. When she uttered the words “health savings accounts,” Ernst was met with a chorus of boos.

The meeting came to a jarring end after only 45 minutes, despite a long line of people waiting at the microphone to ask more questions, causing the crowd to boo and jeer. [The Week]

While Senator Ernst appears to have a weak stomach for dissent, or too much appetite for ideology, Representative Gohmert of one of the reddest districts of Texas is a shivering coward on the subject:

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona urged members of Congress to host town hall meetings after Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert citing her shooting as a reason he was not going to schedule one.

“To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage,” Giffords said in a statement. “Face your constituents. Hold town halls.” [Politico]

These and many other GOP lawmakers are facing crowds critical of decisions to repeal and (maybe) replace the ACA. This suggests a behavior with anti-survival characteristics – believing what you want to believe is true, rather than what is true on the ground. So what’s this second data point now forming? Steve Benen points me to it: NRA President (and immortal vampire) Wayne LaPierre’s remarks at CPAC:

“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” he said. “The leftist movement in this country right now is enraged. Among them and behind them are the most radical political elements there are: Anarchists, marxists, communists and the left of the—the rest of the left-wing socialist parade. They hate everything America stands for: Democracy, free market capitalism, representative government, individual freedom. They want to tear down our system and replace it with their collectivist top-down global-government-knows-best-utopia.”

LaPierre claimed that billionaire George Soros is paying protesters, that crime is on the rise, that gangs are infiltrating the military and law enforcement and that the media “theorized” Trump would be assassinated before Inauguration Day.

LaPierre wrapped up by attacking the media and insinuating violence against the “violent left” if it brings “terror” to communities. [Talking Points Memo]

LaPierrre has manipulated the membership of the NRA through fear for years, transforming it from a respectable organization in my youth into something a lot of non-shooters just shake their heads at and wonder. I am not a shooter myself, but in my younger days I took Dr. John Lott’s research on the detrimental effects of gun control on public safety quite seriously; I have not kept up with that controversy, and a quick Google search seems to indicate it keeps bubbling on.

But back to my point: LaPierre even had the gall to make this statement last year, as Media Matter notes and fact checks:

The leader of the National Rifle Association insisted he wasn’t “crazy,” “paranoid,” or “nuts” before ranting to NRA members in an “urgent” video message where he made claims at odds with reality, including claiming that his widely ridiculed prediction that President Obama would come for Americans’ guns “came true.”

During a six-minute get out the vote video, NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre described America after eight years of Obama as president in hellish terms unrecognizable to anyone who actually lives here, claiming that the president has “laid waste to the America we remember” causing the country to “completely unravel.”

After describing a calamitous America, LaPierre claimed, “I told you exactly what [Obama] would do. The media said I was nuts. But in the end, America knows I was right.” You decide whether LaPierre was right:

• LaPierre said his prediction that Obama “would come for our guns and do everything in his power to sabotage the Second Amendment” “came true” following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, when Obama “exploited a horrible tragedy to launch a blizzard of gun bans, magazine restrictions, and gun registration schemes against law abiding gun owners all across the country.” (Nothing proposed by Obama would have violated the Second Amendment as understood in the Antonin Scalia-authored Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller. The background check bill that was voted on in the Senate after the massacre specifically prohibited the creation of registries.)

And etc. Quite a list of things that I don’t recall ever happening. So we see in the earlier statement an attempt to keep up the bubble from which he profits; when Trump was elected, he was faced with an unexpected problem – how to retain his power when the Big Bad Federal Government Controlled by Liberals …. isn’t. So we get the beginning of a theme – let’s only talk among ourselves, construct our own reality, and if that benefits me, why, it keeps us all safe, doesn’t it? But you have to wonder how many members are sticking around. Sure, those who only get their news from NRA publications will stick – their information environment is too heavily skewed to expect any other behavior. But what about everyone else? Turns out it’s hard to say, as the NRA numbers are confidential. Here’s The Trace on the subject:

The precise size of NRA’s membership — the core of the group’s perceived political muscle — has long been a mystery. In January 2013, Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre boasted before Congress that he served 4.5 million members. Speaking at an NRA convention a few months later, he upped that figure to 5 million. On January 5, in a statement responding to President Barack Obama’s executive actions on guns, the group described itself as “more than 5 million members strong.”

But the truth of those numbers is a matter of debate — the NRA has never allowed an outside party to authenticate its membership, and independent estimates predict a much smaller number. Circulation audits of American Rifleman and other NRA-published magazines that are sent to every member come in at around 3 million. One former board member told the Washington Post in 1998 that when the NRA counts its size, it includes many deceased lifetime members.

So, talk to yourselves, not to anyone outside the tribe. The GOP is getting some shocks now. Will the NRA? Today’s liberals are well known for their law-abiding ways, so gangs of liberals roaming the countryside just makes me giggle. And what will be the next data point on the theme? Perhaps what I fear is another economic crunch caused by out of control spending on defense. Trump has already sounded that horn with his call for going to the “top of the pack” in terms of nuclear weapons. (For those of you who were wondering, most experts say we’re already there and can go off and do something else instead.) A very expensive and dangerous distraction. Given that I think we’re heavily overspending on defense already, and both parties seem to want to increase spending yet again (another example of fear-based manipulation, I think), we may find out the hard way that overspending on defense is a path to recession. But will we recognize it? Or is that bubble too big?

This unsettling proto-totalitarian tendency, reported by Pat Rynard on Iowa Starting Line, an Iowan political news source, fits right in with the GOP’s desperate need to reshape society into its extremist image:

The party affiliation on your voter registration card could block you from employment at Iowa’s state universities were a newly proposed bill by Senator Mark Chelgren to become law. Senate File 288, proposed by the Ottumwa legislator, could bring about a Soviet-style purge of liberal-leaning college staff in Iowa. Chelgren wants to impose an ideological litmus test in order to create a “partisan balance,” based on how Iowa has voted in past elections.

The legislation proposes that a “person shall not be hired as a professor or instructor member of the faculty at such an institution if the person’s political party affiliation on the date of hire would cause the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by ten percent the percentage of faculty belonging to the other political party.”

Source: Gallup

Politics simply should not play a direct a part in education as this. I would have to ask State Senator Chelgren if he’s really so certain that his conservative ideas are that much inferior to those that might be held – but not even taught – by the professors at the State universities of Iowa? After all, we’re talking about the marketplace of ideas – not the gargling funnel of ideological rectitude. Students may evaluate ideas on their merits and choose accordingly.

Of course, the blood of the GOP may be running a bit cold. While the GOP currently holds a slight lead over the Democrats, it’s down from historical highs, and I think, given the GOP’s continuing slide into extremist ideology, more members will leave the party for the Independents ranks. And, of course, the Trump disaster is front and center – driving away the doubtful, even as extremist elements pour in and, in some cases, assume positions of authority. While Mr. Bartlett may have missed the subtle point that losing the popular vote doesn’t mean losing the electoral vote, he may still end up correct that Mr. Trump will be the end of the current incarnation of the GOP in one tremendous thud, and that it will be rebuilt by those much like his moderate, serious self.

The demographics of the two parties also contributes to the temperature of the GOP blood, as these charts from 2016 show. The left chart is interesting in that it shows nearly 60% of GOP voters are age 60+, suggesting the cohort that couldn’t manage a winning Presidential run, popular vote variant, is going to start dying off soon. The Democrats and sympathizers are at roughly 50% in the same category. Meanwhile, down in the critical youngest bracket, the Democrats are doing better than the GOP. Normally, I’d shrug and note that as voters get older, they become more conservative. However, given the extremism of the GOP, I suspect the youngest generation will generally be repulsed by the GOP; it is, in an important sense, a return to a static past, and that just will not do for the youngest generation in general, except for those raised in out of touch, static areas. And you’ll have to be extreme from the get-go to survive, given the herd of RINOs that runs around in that pasture.

And, as noted by many commentators, the diversity of the Democrats is their strength, and that clearly shows in these charts.

So, Senator, are you so afraid of some healthy competition that you’ll try to rig the rules? You do realize, of course, that this has the potential to damage your institutions of higher education, so I have to ask – do you value higher education? Do you want to get the most that you can out of it?

Or is your dedication to ideology going to triumph over your love of State and Nation?

(h/t Scout Finch on The Daily Kos)

Nålebinding:

Nålebinding (Danish: literally “binding with a needle” or “needle-binding”, also naalbinding, nålbinding, nålbindning or naalebinding) is a fabric creation technique predating both knitting and crochet. Also known in English as “knotless netting,” “knotless knitting,” ^[1] or “single needle knitting,” the technique is distinct from crochet in that it involves passing the full length of the working thread through each loop, unlike crochet where the work is formed only of loops, never involving the free end. It also differs from knitting in that lengths must be pieced together during the process of nålebinding, rather than a continuous strand of yarn that can easily be pulled out. Archaeological specimens of fabric made by nålebinding can be difficult to distinguish from knitted fabric. [Wikipedia]

Heard on the latest episode of Bones.

While I was driving home from an unconnected activity it occurred to me that the news that a number of major news organization were shut out of a White House news briefing, while of course the mark of an amateur effort at the White House, might be used against them as well by the victim organizations, which are “… CNN and other news outlets, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Politico and some others …”

How so? Glad you asked. Simple. State the truth, put it right on the front page, and then provide links to certain rivals who do have the material. Say, Breitbart, or white supremacist site Stormfront – perhaps there’s a few more.

And let all those folks who are on the fence see what sort of reprehensible organizations, organizations whose cousins started wars and tried to eliminate whole peoples using the flimsiest of excuses, not only support Trump, but actually have personnel in the White House.

9 out of every 10 will be so sickened they’ll end up disapproving of Trump. Maybe even 95 out of 100. Speaking of, here’s today’s Gallup Poll on the subject:

Looks like his approval is back down to 41% and dropping.