Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s no doubt that AI, if achieved, will affect most aspects of society, including literature. But in the area of literary devices? Here’s my thinking. In NewScientist (17 December 2016, link temporarily unavailable), Leah Crane reports on the projected fate of the Cassini probe:

… the Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn, sacrificing itself for the sake of the ringed giant’s potentially habitable moons.

First, I thought this was horribly inaccurate. The flight controllers are the responsible parties. But, of course, this is a literary device, a little conceit, which led me to wonder if Leah is aware of it, or if it’s just an automatic expression, dispensed on command.

But then it occurred to me, if & when AI matures and becomes something like our equal, this expression will move from literary device to literally true. The machine could actually make the volitional decision to plunge to its non-existence in the clouds of Saturn.

(Telepresence for the AI comes to mind. Just for fun. Is it a literary device then?)

And that leaves this literary device an attenuated creature, some of its viscera dematerialized by the advance of technology.

With regard to President Eisenhower, here were two reasons I decided to read his farewell address. The first was simply that I never had done so, and it’s relatively famous. The second had to do with its most famous component, the military-industrial complex. It had begun striking a chord for me recently, and I wanted to know more. Here’s the complete relevant passage from the speech:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military[-]industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific[-]technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Perhaps Eisenhower further pursued this theme in other publications, but I will be bold and claim a certain consonance with some of my thoughts without further research (and if I earn the reputation of being lazy, it is not without warrant). Specifically, I believe his warning has to do with a consistent theme I find myself sounding on this blog: the problems incurred by importing the methods and processes of one societal sector into another. While I’ve gone on at great length here on the subject (for which I excuse by saying I was thinking out loud), I can summarize easily enough. Clearly, Eisenhower is warning that the military-industrial complex, or armaments corporations, may seek undue influence over the policy of the United States. Why? The first reason is no great secret: the prospect of profits in the offing.

But, not so clearly, but implicit, is the confusion of the methods and processes of the armaments corporations with governmental processes. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower says, and it’s clear that a democratic process is his main concern. Shall corporate profits take precedence over democratic processes? Shall the corporation take over a duty of government, bringing its self-interest into play in a function which demands disinterest?

Eisenhower is calling for keeping the rifts between the sectors as clean and well-defined as possible, because he recognizes the incompatibility between corporate and governmental priorities. And that, in general, has been my assertion and my reason for caution amidst all the calls for privatizing this and privatizing that: the methods and processes optimized for one sector, so successfully, may be catastrophic for another.

And, clearly, President Eisenhower understood this and warned us.

And, just as clearly, the lesson is not so well understood.

Peculation, aka embezzlement:

Embezzlement is the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion (theft) of such assets, by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes. Embezzlement is a type of financial fraud, e.g. a lawyer might embezzle funds from the trust accounts of his or her clients; a financial advisor might embezzle the funds of investors; and a husband or a wife might embezzle funds from a bank account jointly held with the spouse. [Wikipedia]

Encountered in The Reverse of the Medal, by Patrick O’Brian.

Suspected peculation, absence without leave or fancied disrespect would rouse her to a volume of sound that seemed to  mark the utmost limits of the female voice; but this was an illusion, for once unchastity in man or woman came to her attention these bound were left far, far behind, the remote babbling of some distant brook.

Fun!

On Lawfare Quinta Jurecic introduces Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats:

While on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats signed on with the minority in the committee’s report on interrogation, along with Senators Richard Burr, James Risch, Marco Rubio, and Tom Coburn. He was one of only three members of the committee to vote against declassifying the report in 2014. Coats opposed the USA Freedom Act and voted against it, writing that the legislation significantly weakened U.S. intelligence capabilities.

Notably, Coats is banned from entering Russia—along with a number of other Senators and government officials—due to his support for sanctions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. At the time, Coats stated that he found Russia’s behavior “unacceptable” and declared his intention to “lead efforts on Capitol Hill to bring Putin to his senses.” During his most recent term in the Senate, he was known as a Russia hawk who routinely pushed for a hard line against Russian adventurism in Ukraine. His position on Russia may cause friction with other members of the Trump team and will likely raise questions during his confirmation hearing given the President-elect’s coziness with the Kremlin. Coats’s previous hedging when asked if he would feel more comfortable with Trump controlling nuclear weapons than Obama may not help his case.

Coats’s connections to the intelligence community and reputation as a more traditional establishment Republican rather than a partisan bomb-thrower have been welcomed by some intelligence officials, who hope that Coats will be able to bridge the gap between the intelligence community and the President-elect.

And an easy confirmation, overall. This may be reassuring to those on the fence about dumping Trump in a hurry. But if Trump later disses Coats then we may see fireworks.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist who calculated the maximum size of a white dwarf, which is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. On his initial presentation of the theory to his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, a man already famed in astrophysics, he was rejected, and in fact Eddington never did accept the proof. Gino Segrè quotes Chandrasekhar in A Matter of Degrees, p. 268 (typos mine) on the incident:

“The moral is that a certain modesty toward science always pays in the end.  These people (Eddington …) terribly clever, of great intellectual ability, terribly perceptive in many ways, lost out because they did not have the modesty to say ‘I am going to learn what physics teaches me.’ They wanted to dictate how physics should be.“

I can’t help but note that this is, incidentally, a blistering indictment of the current GOP. Not only in climate change, but in economics as well, as demonstrated in the Kansas debacle, wherein Kansas, after applying the GOP’s model of how the economy works, has suffered an economic decline not in keeping with its neighbors. The man responsible, Governor Brownback, wants to apply his model to the entire nation.

All I can think is that Brownback would bring the nation down in order to improve Kansas’ performance, relatively speaking.

Anyways, seeing politics even in Chandrasekhar’s observation of scientists’ intellectual errors makes me wonder if I’m taking the political world far too seriously.

debitage:

Debitage is all the material produced during the process of lithic reduction and the production of chipped stone tools. This assemblage includes, but is not limited to, different kinds of lithic flakes and lithic blades, shatter and production debris, and production rejects. [Wikipedia]

Noted in American Archaeology (offline).

Quartz reports on the turbulence of biotech company Theranos:

In 2015, Stanford Business School published a fawning interview with Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, the now-discredited biotech company that claimed to have invented cheap, effective, and revolutionary blood-testing technology.

In the interview, Holmes said her road to success “wasn’t weighted by influences that I couldn’t do it,” and, perhaps most tellingly, said would-be billionaires should avoid backup plans: “I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”

That thinking on Jan. 6 resulted in the announcement of 155 layoffs (paywall)—40% of the company’s staff. Those job losses, The Wall Street Journal reported, come on top of 340 cuts in October, leaving Theranos with about a quarter of the staff it had last August. In a statement, awkwardly titled “Company Re-engineers Operations,” the company said it has “identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans,” and that its rejiggered executive team has “substantial additional regulatory, compliance, and operational expertise.”

Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this doesn’t sound like an obscure legal problem, but rather the reality that Your Solution Doesn’t Work. It might even be A Bloody Fraud. It could even be I Must Be Part Of The Game.

Which doesn’t have anything to do with respecting your customers, nothing to do with social responsibility. Now, I haven’t researched any further, although I’ve heard rumbles about the troubles of Theranos for years. So I suppose I’m just troubled – why not shut the company down and be done with it? Surely it’s not hard to prove the technology does or doesn’t work, it seems to be a well-defined and, if I dare, an unsubtle problem to prove solved.

I’m puzzled.

Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan – discussed here – has some thoughts on robots and the economy. I had talked a bit about taxation of robots on the basis of income. In NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall), he talks about another, even more important facet – voting:

Granting AIs voting rights would raise many tricky questions and moral quandaries, in particular because there are a few billion computing devices on Earth. Even if just 10 per cent were judged to deserve personhood and given rights accordingly, they would massively swell the voting population in democracies.

Aspiring futurist politicians like myself may well wonder whether, instead of spending money to campaign for people’s votes, we should just buy AIs that can vote.

There are other conundrums. In the US, for example, there are concerns over the influence of a few swing states and the electoral college system in determining election outcomes. If a server that a robot uses for its consciousness is in Nevada, but its “body” is in Ohio, where does its vote count? That choice could influence results in swing states and spark legal battles.

And if we allow sapient AIs to vote, does their cross in the box count the same as ours? What happens if intelligent machines clone themselves: will back-up copies and alternate selves all be legal voting entities?

While I think his estimated percentage of intelligent computing devices of 10% is impossibly high (I’m thinking .0001% might be more accurate), his concerns remain riveting.

The most interesting facet of his opinion piece is his assumption implicit in the suggestion that politicians (or parties) should just buy the AIs for their votes. On closer examination, this seems to be a bit fallacious. First, vote buying is illegal.

Second, permitting any entity to vote implies freedom of choice. Therefore, buying such an entity is in itself at least absurd, akin as it would be to slavery, and particularly in the expectation that it’ll vote as programmed.

In fact, if AIs can qualify to vote, I suspect they’ll be like an ideal vision of the citizenry – voting for what they perceive as their self-interest, or for what’s best for the nation (which can be vastly different, but it’s not clear to me that political activists – not to mention citizens – clearly understand that the difference exists). Which? That’ll depend on whether or not their survival instinct is individualistic or group; the first will result in votes thought to correspond to self-interest, the other for the nation.

So long as they perceive the nation will safeguard their long term interests.

His other concerns seem to be somewhat superficial. Backup copies are easily seen as attempting to vote multiple times; variants of an AI again implies freedom of choice.

So, if in fact a reasonable AI technology is developed and they are granted voting rights – two very large IFs – I suspect they’d vote for the major parties, just like everyone else.

Or reproduce like mad and form their own party, if it turned out the AI technology was excessively clannish, culturally speaking.

… but don’t do much about it. The Pew Research Center, in a report on the religiosity of the 115th Congress, notes …

The new, 115th Congress has the smallest freshman class of any Congress in the last 10 years – 62 new members will be joining 473 incumbents.

If you’re a champion of stability and continuity, this is good news. If you were disgusted by the behavior of the controlling members of Congress in the 114th, then this is not so good news, as none of the leaders went down to defeat, although majorities shrank in both chambers. Nor does this imply 62 seats changed hands, as some incumbents retired and their party-affiliation successors won.

Think of it this way: 62 new amateurs are now frantically learning their new jobs – or making plans to leverage their new power to impose fringe views on you.

That’s a nice start to the morning.

The 2014 version of Godzilla finally moves the mesmerizing movie monster of yore out of the downtown areas of Japan and into the United States. Not that this hadn’t happened once before, but that version was fairly wretched.

This one is not.

Adorned with excellent special effects, actual characters, and an eye for dramatic visual shots, this Godzilla carries the burden of its cinematic history effortlessly, not hesitating to reference it, but not letting that history be an anchor on this one. Similarly, the monsters exhibit impressive powers, including Godzilla’s trademark halitosis, but upgraded with Hollywood’s best efforts.

And while perhaps kaiju-movie purists may object, for this viewer it was a bit of a relief to see that humans can actually affect their fate, even as monsters older than God have a go at each other. Perhaps this is the latest message from the series; in previous incarnations, the message was that nuclear weapons and power hold humanity helpless; in this entry, we’re told that, with effort, we can save ourselves.

But it would be more effective if some bad guys, interested in self-enrichment, had gotten their just rewards. This doesn’t happen.

But for those of us who enjoy a good dustup, this surely fits the bill, particularly as the monsters wrestle about in the gloom of burning buildings. Perhaps sublime seems a strange word to use here, but the power and terror are classically, in the Burkean sense, sublime, much like the Balrog of Lord of the Rings, both seen and unseen, letting our imaginations believe in their greater power, just out of reach of our eyes.

And getting there is really fun.

The New York Times reports on how France is working on environmental problems:

More radical is the edict that went into effect on Sunday banning the use of pesticides in public gardens and along public highways. It promises to make public green spaces safer for birds and other small animals, which are especially vulnerable to the poisons used in pest killers.

It will not be easy for the gardeners employed by cities to turn to more sustainable methods. When the city of Lyon abandoned pesticides voluntarily nine years ago, it took quite some time to change the culture, although Lyon is now considered a model.

In 2019, the antipesticide law will expand to include amateur gardeners — a challenge not only for the French with backyard rows of dahlias and daisies, but also for those who nurse roses in their window boxes.

While we avoid pesticides, we do not formally ban them. The very first summer I lived here I had to use a pesticide to save my rhododendron. I suspect some American gardeners would find it very difficult to make the move to no pesticides. And does this include natural pesticides?

And no doubt a few corporations would be a little irritated, although I doubt it’s a huge market.

Yes, living in fear is a new sensation. Samuel Burke, via Brian Stelter on CNN, reports how the tech industry is responding to President-elect Trump’s trigger Twitter-finger:

One incredible thing that’s catching my attention is tech CEOs — talking about Trump — are fearing getting a tweet about their companies at 3 a.m. West Coast time since the president-elect often tweets in the 6 a.m. Eastern hour.

On the one hand I’ve heard from many in the tech community here who say they are eager for a Trump rollback on regulations that could have a positive effect on their business.

On the other hand — multiple tech leaders say they or their PR folks have adjusted their schedules to make sure someone is up at 3 a.m. local time to catch the the tweets out of fear that a Trump tweet could crash their stock and put their company into a frenzy.

The business community loves predictability, and Trump is anything but – and no one filters his Twitter account. While an obvious response might be to hijack his account, I would be more interested to hear if Twitter is suffering more systemic attacks in an attempt to spike the cannon, as it were – Denial of Service, that sort of thing. And was it a foreign enemy – or domestic?

And how would Trump respond to that? Hold a press conference to denounce his loss of free speech rights?

Will he ever grow up and stop using Twitter? I don’t mean this as a slam on Twitter, but in the context of a POTUS and his new-found ability to terrify allies and move markets, all in a very irresponsible manner. Between that and the inevitable crudity of the message that can be expressed in 140 characters, it’s not a good mix.

Sukkot hut:

A sukkah or succah (Hebrew: סוכה‎‎, plural, סוכותsukkot ; sukkoth, often translated as “booth”) is a temporary hut constructed for use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. It is topped with branches and often well decorated with autumnal, harvest or Judaic themes. The Book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describes it as a symbolic wilderness shelter, commemorating the time God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness they inhabited after they were freed from slavery in Egypt.^[1] It is common for Jews to eat, sleep and otherwise spend time in the sukkah. [Wikipedia]

From “Are ultra-Orthodox taking over this secular Israeli city?” on AL Monitor:

“I’ll block the Gur Hasidism from coming here. They don’t have nursery schools here and I don’t have an infrastructure for them. I told the minister of housing not to build apartments here for them. They should only build apartments without balconies for the sukkot huts, and multistory apartment buildings that are not suited for the ultra-Orthodox [who do not use regular elevators on the Sabbath]. Arad has a secular character, and as long as I’m here I’ll do everything to make sure it doesn’t change.”

Seems combative.

The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) is causing chaos in the Iranian political scene as both sides, consisting of President Rouhani’s Reformists and the hard line conservatives, would like to use the JCPOA for their own purposes in the upcoming election – but are having troubles. Hashem Ali writes about it in AL Monitor:

Make no mistake about it: Rouhani is engulfed in a fierce battle that might see him become the first Iranian president since 1981 to not serve a second term. This is what his conservative foes are fighting for, yet their coalition is not delivering — despite the building of solid anti-government rhetoric, exploiting the setbacks of the JCPOA, highlighting the failures of Rouhani’s team since coming to office in 2013 and hitting him over his shaky relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The main reasons behind the conservatives’ failure include their lack of unity and the absence of strong candidates who could defeat the incumbent in the polls.

“While there is no doubt that Rouhani is under tremendous pressure, I don’t see his re-election in danger mainly because there is no serious contender yet,” Adnan Tabatabai, an Iran expert and the CEO of the Germany-based think tank Carpo, told Al-Monitor. Tabatabai added, “Rouhani’s mandate will certainly be weakened, and the complexities of the JCPOA implementation have called his foreign policies into question.”

Oddly enough, I didn’t think the GOP had any strong candidates to challenge Clinton back during the general primary – every candidate seemed fatally flawed. But certainly the Iranian situation differs from the American situation. But Hashem notes this is an opening for someone who’d been dismissed:

Until a few months ago — Sept. 25 to be precise — former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was widely thought to be the main rival Rouhani would face in the May 2017 elections. He started campaigning across the country and was closing the gap, becoming a real threat to Rouhani’s ambitions. Then, in late September, Rouhani appeared to suddenly enjoy some respite when Ayatollah Khamenei publicly gave Ahmadinejad the “advice” not to participate in the elections. But Ahmadinejad does not appear to have given up.

“The former president still wants to run in the elections, despite the [supreme] leader’s advice,” a moderate conservative source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “He is still going around the country, meeting people, launching media attacks on the government. He is trying to impose himself as a de facto candidate.” The source said one reason Ayatollah Khamenei is unlikely to approve of Ahmadinejad’s candidacy is that the controversy accompanying the former president’s return could shake up internal stability.

And does Khamenei want a loose cannon in the MidEast again? Especially with an unpredictable President Trump meddling as well – it could be an explosive combination. Indeed, a more subtle analysis may be impossible with these two.

As noted previously, the JCPOA has not cured the Iranian economy, yet – and the conservatives hate it. President Rouhani faces an additional problem:

… he also needs to address the concerns and demands of his Reformist allies. Since taking office in 2013, Rouhani has rarely delivered on issues raised by his Reformist supporters, including the matter of the yearslong house arrests of former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Other unfulfilled requests include those for a reduction in internet and social media restrictions and for a larger Reformist presence in the Cabinet.

As previously suggested in Al-Monitor, the Reformists have no alternative to Rouhani in the coming elections — but this does not mean that he can automatically count on everyone actually voting. Indeed, many Iranians, if not feeling content, might just decide to stay home rather than stand in long lines to cast a ballot for someone whose policies they do not trust.

That, too, sounds familiar.

The Amazon Alexa personal assistant is doing well in terms of sales – and with its customers, as NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) reports, in a way that was unanticipated:

Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon’s Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to Alexa,” he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is “thank you” – which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.

It’d be fascinating to see an analysis broken down by the vocations/careers of the customers, particularly for those whose marriage propositions were serious. Does that consist mostly of non-engineers, who, not knowing the internals of software, are more accepting of other entities as possible spouses? Or are we seeing software engineers who are building their own spouses?

Or does this have something to do with autistic individuals and how the reactions of Alexa are far more acceptable than a neurotypical human?

Frederik deBoer lances the boil that is our intellectual culture:

It’s my observation that the smart kids that write our culture – not at all restricted to the media or academia, but the larger mass of people who were the high achievers in high school, the people who were in the top reading group and who got National Merit Scholarships, and who now do so much to define our shared cultural assumptions and conventional wisdom – have developed a strange and unhealthy relationship to being smart and having knowledge. Ours is a culture of cleverness, not of knowledge, one that is far more comfortable in assessing wit than in assessing evidence. It is disdainful of the idea that being an intelligent person requires spending hours reading books, slowly absorbing complex ideas, waging war on your own ignorance through attrition. It presumes that you should be well-read but is distrustful of the bookish. (It produces a micro-genre of listicles about the books “everyone” has claimed to have read but hasn’t/has started but never finished.) It places a premium on being smart but is skeptical, even contemptuous, of public displays of the work of getting smart. You want to be the kind of cultured person who knows great books intimately, but if you have Proust on your knee on the subway people will roll their eyes at you. That kind of thing: obviously smart but not, like, all tryhard about it. You are expected to work out relentlessly to train your body and to show everyone that effort, but your intelligence must be effortless, even accidental.

I dunno, maybe I’m not part of that culture – I’m certainly not smart enough. But I do wonder if that culture is slightly overwhelmed with the sheer mass of knowledge it must absorb at breakneck pace. Frederik has further thoughts on the cause of the problem:

It is an artifact of the sickness within American “meritocracy.” Though I am frequently a harsh critic of the coastal striving class, this condition is not something that they’ve done. It’s something that was done to them. This condition was inflicted on them by a socioeconomic system that harms and degrades people and then tells them it’s their fault. It’s the fault of an economy that compels large groups of people to try and climb up a narrower and narrower ladder together until they have no choice but to push others off.

Which sounds like the naturally competitive system humans appear to indulge in effortlessly, honestly speaking. Even within cooperative systems, in my experience, there is an element of competition – who can be kindest, most helpful, that sort of thing. That said, Frederik has a point – there are many more losers than winners, and our system doesn’t really work very hard at making the losers feel OK with that result.

You may have heard that triclosan has been banned from hand soaps. NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) now has some details on a potentially worse situation because of how triclosan functions in relation to bacteria – which is, by stopping them, rather than destroying them.

Now there’s reason to worry over even more serious effects. To see whether antibacterials can affect the performance of antibiotics, Petra Levin and Corey Westfall, at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, exposed Escherichia coli to common antibiotics and triclosan, and measured their survival over 20 hours.

When the bacteria were exposed to the antibiotics streptomycin or ciprofloxacin, plus triclosan, they were 10,000 times more likely to survive than those that weren’t also given triclosan. Further tests found that triclosan protects the MRSA superbug against vancomycin, a crucial antibiotic often used as a last resort in MRSA infections (bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/090829).

We don’t know why triclosan has these effects, but one explanation might lie in the different ways that antibiotics and antibacterials work. Most antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with essential steps in their life cycle, such as making cell walls. Since triclosan prevents bacteria from growing, they may not go through as many life cycle stages, becoming impervious to antibiotics as a result. “A dormant cell has not a lot of active targets, so there’s not much to corrupt,” says Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston.

One of those results which reminds me that reality is far more bizarre than I can imagine sometimes.

And I do mean when? Here’s the points that make me think that it has to be on the collective mind of the House GOP (where impeachment begins):

1. He’s not THEIR leader. Trump never came up through the GOP ranks, holding the usual jobs. He is basically alien to the entire political process, be it either the DFL, old line GOP, and radical GOP.
2. At heart he’s not a politician. Not that the current GOP is in bed with the idea of compromise, but Trump’s background as the boss of Trump, Inc., renders him yet another step beyond the idea of compromise. President Obama could reject legislation with reason, logic, and restraint. What happens the first time Congress overrides a veto? Or even just sends him a bill of which he disapproves?
3. So put 1 & 2 together to see how relations will quickly become strained between the House GOP and Trump. But initially they can do nothing, because of Trump’s popularity with the GOP base. That, and impeachment does require gross incompetence or malfeasance on the part of the President – and they didn’t even dare to ignore that with President Obama, who, for all their loathing, clearly ran a highly competent operation.
4. But if something were to break the popular support for Trump, then he’d become vulnerable. What might cause that? Failures to deliver on promises. His incessant lying. Even just his big mouth saying the wrong thing on a variety of subjects.
5. The presence of Pence, who definitely has his own opinions, both good and bad, independent from Trump, would tend to lead the House to consider impeachment, given the proper incitement.

So what would the proper incitement be? Probably not a blow job (cue an appearance by Bill Clinton.) But while the competence of many GOP House members may seem questionable to partisans of the DFL, I do not think there can be any doubt that GOP House Members take their duty to safeguard the nation seriously.

So this story from Steve Benen caught my attention:

When Rachel [Maddow] asked if the president-elect may have “an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community,” [Senator] Schumer replied, “Whether you’re a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community.”

Just 24 hours later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has some dramatic changes in mind at the agencies that have told him what he didn’t want to hear.

President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said.

The move is prompted by his belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized, these people said.

Quoting sources familiar with Trump’s plans, the Journal reported that the incoming president, who’s publicly mocked and taunted intelligence professionals, intends to “restructure” the Central Intelligence Agency.

What are Trump’s sources of information that supersedes the professionals who’ve done this as a career, often putting their lives on the line? In the absence of amazing answers (and his admiration of the National Enquirer doesn’t count), a fair observer is forced to conclude that Trump cannot tolerate answers that diverge from his view of the world – and therefore he’s going to meddle with the intelligence agencies until they parrot the answers he wishes to hear.

It makes me quite ill. This should be the story of the week. The month. The year.

Kremlin residents must be convulsing with laughter.

But not the GOP. They have one huge potential problem for as long as Trump is President – his emotional needs are apparently more important than national security. How long can they tolerate this potential catastrophe, both nationally and for the GOP, especially with Pence, a former House member with far right wing views consonant with many GOP House members, as Trump’s successor?

Maybe only so long as Trump can convince his army of marks that he can deliver on his promises.

Steve ended with, “Welcome to the Trump Era, America.” It may be a very short era. Perhaps it’s time to wonder how Pence will work out as a President.

Andrew Reynolds’ report on the North Carolina electoral system is encountering some negative feedback from Professor Gelman of Columbia University on Slate. Reviewing previous EIP reports, he thinks their methodology is dubious. His conclusion:

What went wrong here? It all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence—like this similar thing from a few years ago with the so-called Human Development Index.

NewScientist (17 December 2016) reports on a very rare form of solid material:

THERE’S more than one way to cook a quasicrystal. A third example of these weird, rule-breaking solids has been found in a Siberian meteorite – and it’s the only one not to have been first created in the lab.

Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University has doggedly hunted for quasicrystals since he predicted their existence in the early 1980s. The first synthetic one was grown in the lab in 1982, and more than 100 types have been made since.

Before then, we knew of two types of solids: crystals, in which every atom is arranged neatly in a repeating lattice, and amorphous solids, which have no such order. Quasicrystals are not quite crystals because their neat patterns never exactly repeat.

The new one is only the third type found in nature. All three have come from the Khatyrka meteorite in north-eastern Russia. The approximate composition of the first two had been created in a lab beforehand.

It almost sounds like a contaminant situation. But what are they useful for?

But as with the other quasicrystals, nobody is quite sure what it could be used for. Steinhardt has a quasicrystal-coated frying pan in a corner of his office that takes advantage of this material’s hard, slippery nature, but no other practical applications have been found yet.

Hmmmm.

The drought in Iran continues to hit hard, impacting the pistachio crop and the water table, as Maysam Bizaer reports in AL Monitor:

Climate change has caused a nationwide drought in Iran, leading to 85% of the country being classified as arid or semi-arid. The decline in annual averagerainfall and resulting shortage of surface water has forced farmers to dig more wells to pump water from underground reserves. Nearly half of the 750,000 water pumps on Iranian farms are illegal, which illustrates why the unconstrained use of underground water in agriculture is the main source of water waste in the country. …

Ali Ahmadian, a pistachio grower from Kerman, confirmed Jalalpour’s general concerns, telling the Iranian Students’ News Agency on Oct. 8, “Unfortunately, pistachio farms are drying out because of water shortages.” In addition, he identified another, related problem, stating, “The quality of the water has also suffered, because the level of underground water has been going deeper, now at 300 to 400 meters [984 to 1,312 feet].”

Finding confirmation of drought in Iran has proven difficult, perhaps because exact figures may be considered a state secret. However, there are a number of references to drought in the region, including this one from The Art Newspaper:

Nuclear deals aside, a Tehran gallery exhibition will take on one of the biggest issues now facing modern Iran: a drought dating back at least seven years, with water tables falling perilously in parched regions and fabled rivers running dry.

The curators Vida Zaim and Leila Varasteh—who also organised the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s current show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art—put out an open call last year seeking artists’ responses to a problem that has seen Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani press to improve state water management. …

“We are constantly talking about political problems in Iran, but this national catastrophe could be worse than any situation. It’s a subject that is worth focussing on,” Varasteh said. “Thank God the president is taking action, but there has to be more. Too many lakes are drying.” In Isfahan, a centre for traditional Iranian artisans, the famous Zayanderud River has mostly ceased to flow under the historic bridges of the country’s former capital.

Meanwhile, the Tehran Times from June, 2016, notes:

According to statistics, 31 percent of the country’s total land area is suffering mild drought, 29 percent is facing moderate drought, 12 percent is being plagued by severe drought, and one percent is struggling with extreme drought, Fateh told ISNA news agency.

He went on to say that 27 percent of Iran’s population is facing mild drought, 32 percent with moderate drought, 12 percent with severe drought and one percent with extreme drought.

Water stress is an issue Iran is facing for some years now and stems from various reasons ranging from old farming patterns and mismanagement of water resources and to the climate change.

A later article in the Tehran Times  indicates some recovery in the latter half of 2016.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy is scratching his head over a new law proposed by very conservative Rep. Steve King (R-IA). Keeping in mind that the Hobby Lobby exception was carved out for religious objections to abortion …

Here’s H.R. 177, introduced yesterday by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):

Under Article 3, Section 2, which allows Congress to provide exceptions and regulations for Supreme Court consideration of cases and controversies, the following cases are barred from citation for the purpose of precedence in all future cases after enactment: Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, 2573, 183 L. Ed. 2d 450 (2012) and King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2485, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2782, 189 L. Ed. 2d 675 (2014).

Bold is mine. Then he points out this is probably unconstitutional, and then just plain weird. He wonders if it’s theater.

I wonder if this is legislation intended to be overturned to create a precedent of some sort.

Washington State University archaeologists are working on climate change problems using the knowledge domain of their subjects:

Washington State University archaeologists are at the helm of new research using sophisticated computer technology to learn how past societies responded to climate change.Their work, which links ancient climate and archaeological data, could help modern communities identify new crops and other adaptive strategies when threatened by drought, extreme weather and other environmental challenges. …

[Emeritus professor of anthropology Tim] Kohler is a pioneer in the field of model-based archaeology. He developed sophisticated computer simulations, called agent-based models, of the interactions between ancestral peoples in the American Southwest and their environment. …

Agent-based modeling is also used to explore the impact humans can have on their environment during periods of climate change.

One study mentioned in the WSU review demonstrates how drought, hunting and habitat competition among growing populations in Egypt led to the extinction of many large-bodied mammals around 3,000 B.C. In addition, d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky, an adjunct faculty member in anthropology, are investigating how settlement patterns in Tibet are affecting erosion. …

Species distribution or crop-niche modeling is another sophisticated technology that archeologists use to predict where plants and other organisms grew well in the past and where they might be useful today.

Bocinsky and d’Alpoim Guedes are using the modeling technique to identify little-used or in some cases completely forgotten crops that could be useful in areas where warmer weather, drought and disease impact food supply.

One of the crops they identified is a strain of drought-tolerant corn the Hopi Indians of Arizona adapted over the centuries to prosper in poor soil.

“Our models showed Hopi corn could grow well in the Ethiopian highlands where one of their staple foods, the Ethiopian banana, has been afflicted by emerging pests, disease and blasts of intense heat,” Bocinsky said. “Cultivating Hopi corn and other traditional, drought-resistant crops could become crucial for human survival in other places impacted by climate change.”

Fascinating, but I have to wonder if their suggestion to switch to Hopi Corn in Ethiopia is really going to work out. Unless their simulations are extremely detailed and predictive of how local insects and small mammals might adapt to the new food crops brought into their habitat, I suspect these are no more than “well, it fits the broad parameters, why don’t you give it a whirl?”

A few failures like that and the locals will give you the stiff arm, I’d predict.

Just what to make of some Iranian politics is confusing for an eternal neophyte like me. For example, some exiled dissidents wrote a letter to President-elect Donald Trump,which says, in part:

During the presidential campaign, we and millions of Iranians followed your forthright objection to the nuclear agreement reached between the Obama administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We sincerely hope that with your election, the new administration and the United States Congress will have the opportunity for the first time to review the regional and international outcomes of that disastrous agreement without any reservations, as was promised to the voters. …

We ask the President-Elect to send the clear message that the United States will not tolerate the increasing threats of the Islamic Republic of Iran against its citizens and neighbors. The new administration, in collaboration with the Congress, should expand the existing sanctions and impose new ones on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Supreme Leader’s financial empire and direct the U.S. Treasury to strongly enforce them. We ask the incoming administration to develop a comprehensive regime of sanctions against those Iranian officials who have violated the human rights of the Iranian people over the last 4 decades. Iran’s ballistic missile program is a threat not only to the region but to the world; we hope the President-elect will form an international coalition to pressure the Islamic Republic of Iran and force the regime to cease its pursuit of long-range ballistic missile. We believe the United States should confront the Revolutionary Guards’ malicious behavior in the region, in all fronts, and by all available means. The Islamic regime’s Achilles’ heel is that the Iranian people do no longer support it. We ask the new administration to support the pro-democracy Iranians whose goal is to replace the Khomeinist regime of Tehran with a liberal-democratic government.

First, you have to wonder why anyone who’s paying attention would trust anything Trump would have to say. As he demonstrated throughout his campaign, he could be all sides of an issue over a span of years – and not want to admit it.

Second, if Trump were persuaded to do something on a military scale, who would end up in power? Not these dissidents. Trump would probably want to go colonial. Remember his remarks on Iraq’s oil? Don’t doubt that he’d want to suck Iran dry as well. Is this what the dissidents think is good?

AL Monitor’s Rohollah Faghihi notes that none of the major political parties in Iran is happy about the letter:

Iranian conservatives have used the letter to attack Reformists, referring to the signatories of the document as “Reformists living abroad.”

The hard-line Raja News wrote Dec. 25, “The reason behind the writing of this letter in 2016 and the behind-the-curtain pressures in 2009 [in the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election] to apply more sanctions on the Iranian people by the foreign-based Reformists do not need any analysis, because doing business at the price of sanctions on the Iranian people and receiving financial aid to set up anti-Iranian media and sites are part of the projects that they have been engaged in during the past decade, and for sure, the decrease in sanctions against our country will take the bread out of their mouths.”

On Dec. 27, under the headline “30 Traitors,” conservative Sobh-e-No newspaper described the authors of the letter as “the same supporters and active directors of the 2009 protests.” Of note, the disputed presidential election that year led to widespread unrest.

Meanwhile, Reformists have in turn slammed conservatives for linking the exiled dissidents to their camp. They further argue that their hard-liner foes and the signatories to the letter are equally damaging Iran.

Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari, who served as interior minister under former Reformist President Mohammad Khatami, said Dec. 26, “The action of these 30 individuals was [designed] to help the ‘worried ones’ [hard liners opposed to the nuclear deal] current. Reformists assess the JCPOA as a diplomatic action that is supposed to help solve problems, but those abroad who seek to cause trouble for the country, and these 30 individuals’ efforts, are [carried out] in order to portray the JCPOA as ineffective, just like what the ‘worried ones’ are doing inside the country.”

I think by ‘current’ they mean momentum; but it’s apparent that the letter is grist for the Iranian political mills, making the flour for the bread for the people who vote. Question is, which bread will the voters prefer? Will they realize the dangers of dealing with someone like Trump? Or will it be forced upon them if he tries to “tear up” the nuclear deal?