Category Archives: Uncategorized

A reader has more interest in emissions than cosmic radiation:

The emissions graph was even more interesting.

So I’ll take this opportunity to glance at the NOAA Mauna Koa monitoring station again:

Continued reaction to burning hydrogen in Minnesota:

Not sure how much worse it could be than it already is. Glad that studded tires are allowed on bicycles.

The real question is whether there’s a stud on your bicycle. Heh. Another reader:

I don’t think even 212º warm is warm enough on those minus 20º days. Some water vapor will freeze directly to the pavement, going right from gas to solid.

Quite possibly. Remember this?

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp5UoSNW5G8
So I wonder how much H₂O would be produced by a typical vehicle on the highway. Are we going to see cars with little bladders attached to their tailpipes? Or would this happen?

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMSmWs8evzg

A reader writes about rising insurance rates:

To say nothing of the fact that rates would have gone up anyway, even without the ACA. When in the last 10 or 20 years, have annual health insurance ever not gone up significantly each year? I also suspect collusion: Humana’s CEO threw such a hissy fit when the federal government did not allow Humana to merge with Aetna, that he and Humana then claimed they were losing money on the ACA and would not participate next year. That, despite the fact that Humana just had its most profitable year, ever, IIRC.

So yeah, how about some actual data, some actual calculations, some actual thinking about how to fix the problem, instead political whining?

It’s too bad all those pissed off voters supporting Trump are not directing their anger at some of the real culprits, like large corporations and the 0.1% wealthiest who have effectively bought our government, who now take hundreds of times more income than they did a few decades ago (compared to negligible gains for most people), and Wall Street banksters. If those people had some real fear of being called out, harassed and tarred and feathered, I bet things would change a lot faster than they will now. But this is how they stay in power — by having the angry masses misdirected into thinking it’s other citizens’ fault (the poor, the immigrants, the “colored”, the liberals, the non-“Christian”, etc.). Never mind the man behind the curtain.

Yes – and by having nation-wide chains. The fact is, if the CEOs had to live in the towns they served, rate increases would have to be justified – or the CEO would become a very lonely person. As with industrial pollution, it’s harder to have a social impact on those who think their purpose in life is to make money when they live half a continent away – rather than just across the street.

American citizens nearly can’t avoid the simmering controversy over the Clinton emails. Not any that might be within them, mind you, but the controversy that they’ve been hacked and released via Wikileaks.

Which leaves me, with 35+ years experience in software, with the question – how do you verify these are the real deal, and not just the paranoid delusions of some smart folks?

Oh, there are ways, of course. The easiest is to obtain official access to the alleged source server and start verifying each email. Once you have that access, it’s not hard to verify quickly and accurately. Assuming, of course, that no encryption technology has been employed, that they haven’t been deleted.

And that you can gain that access. Suppose someone releases emails indicating a felony has been committed. Is this good enough reason for the issuance of a warrant permitting the local gendarmerie to seize and examine your computer? Beats me – but I’d be wondering if this was a fishing expedition involving a fictitious email, employed as an excuse to examine the contents of the email of some target.

So now we learn that Russia, so recently called upon by Mr. Trump to continue to hack the Democratic National Committee, has itself been hacked by a Ukrainian group named Cyber Hunta. NBC News reports:

A Ukrainian group calling itself Cyber Hunta has released more than a gigabyte of emails and other material from the office of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides, Vladislav Surkov, that show Russia’s fingerprints all over the separatist movement in Ukraine.

While the Kremlin has denied the relationship between Moscow and the separatists, the emails show in great detail how Russia controlled virtually every detail of the separatist effort in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which has torn the country apart and led to a Russian takeover of Crimea.

And unlike the reported Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Ukrainian hack reached deep into the office of the Russian president.

“This is a serious hack,” said Maks Czuperski, head of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council (DFRL), which has searched through the email dump and placed selected emails on-line.

So what do we know? We know a Ukrainian group has released emails that show the Russians are responsible for the separatist movement in the Crimean region. But do we know they’re authentic? After all, this is the holy grail of Cyber Hunta.

Just as I wonder whether these supposed leaks of Clinton emails are authentic mail, or of someone’s fan fiction, I must grant equal skepticism towards the Ukrainian hack. I have no love for the current Russian government, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Cyber Hunta is honest in their assertions that this is, indeed, what it purports to be.

But where’s the supporting evidence? How do I know?

One problem is I know too much, as a software engineer, as to how these things are put together; and then again, I don’t know enough about the cleverness of the software engineers involved; and yet I’ve seen some purportedly clever people do some really stupid things, so again I know too much. Welcome to the roller coaster. Without more technical information, I’m sort of at sea here.

But long range, what does this portend for the citizen at large? To my sensibilities, either a procedure which guarantees the trustability of the source of the released material must be produced & publicized so that we can trust, say, Wikileaks – or the general citizen might be best advised to ignore these leaks as blatant attempts to manipulate public opinion.

With a general consensus to ignore such leaks, perhaps we can regain a sense of public equilibrium. They might become white noise, or they might disappear from public forums. Not that this espionage will stop – but espionage in the interests of swaying public opinion is a far different thing from espionage to acquire private information, such as chemical formulas. That has been going on since before alchemy came on the scene, and it’ll always continue.

But we’re at that queer moment in history, where the dangers of the leaks, the potential fallaciousness of the leaks, has not fully impacted us, and therefore long-term, nation-wide consensus on how to deal with such unverified leaks has yet been reached – and we’re left wondering just how these leaks about Clinton and Russia will impact each in the long run.

Several years ago I and my then-girlfriend (now wife and Arts Editor) went to a Minnesota Fringe Festival show that staged some of the works of Jack Chick, the Christian  fundamentalist tract writer. The show took several of his tracts and turned them into plays.

As I recall, virtually everyone in the audience roared with laughter at the ridiculous antics and stereotypes on display, mostly warning of the sinful habits of non-white, non-protestant, drinking, cussing, gambling, fornicating folk, and their eventual spirals straight to a fiery hell.

Virtually everyone laughed, I said. Everyone but my wife.  She sat in her seat writhing in embarrassment at the hypocrisy of the message being presented.

She grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, and she said when these same stories were enacted at the churches she attended, they were often done in the exact same way, bigoted, judgmental humor and all.  After all, fundamentalists like to laugh, too.  But illustrative of the wide cultural chasms that Americans often have to deal with, the liberal city-dwellers viewing the Fringe Festival production saw the stories as nothing more than a way to poke fun at the absurdity of Chick’s tracts, while for some Americans in the religious sector, these are still sources of wisdom, to be considered serious messages from God.

Well, now Jack Chick is gone, as reported by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State:

Americans United gets numerous messages from our adoring fans in the Religious Right, many of which are of the snail mail variety. Some of our biggest admirers take it upon themselves to send us little cartoon pamphlets promising damnation if we don’t change our evil ways.

These evangelistic brochures tackle a range of topics, including gay rights, evolution, abortion and the supposedly satanic nature of Halloween. Given the quirkiness of the cartoons, we tacked some of them up on a wall outside an AU’s staffer’s office.

These pamphlets, known as “Chick Tracts,” were created and published by a fundamentalist evangelist named Jack Chick. Chick died last week at the age of 92 and he will be missed – mainly by some of the people who send us mail.

Here’s a sample tract from chick.com, for those interested. I’d been aware of Chick for years, but kinda put him in the same category as the Church of the Subgenius – a little too weird to believe. Just scanning Jack’s biography on Wikipedia, I see this:

He was a believer in the King James Only movement, which posits that every English translation of the Bible more recent than 1611 promotes heresy or immorality.

Being agnostic myself, I can only wince. I guess I can see the logic, since once you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, you can use circular logic to rationalize anything. But I’ll still wince.

Or, in other words, the forgotten pictures from our North Shore trip.

jalousie window:

Source: modernize.com

… is a window composed of parallel glass, acrylic, or wooden louvres set in a frame. The louvres are joined onto a track so that they may be tilted open and shut in unison to control airflow, usually by turning a crank. [Wikipedia]

Seen on our walk today. I’d never heard the word jalousie before.

A lovely walk down Iglehart, between Fairview and Cleveland, in St. Paul, MN, yielded a few pictures.

And my favorite.

A reader wrote quite a while ago a rejoinder concerning my earlier comment on male behaviors, and I’ve been too busy to read it:

The ‘default’ rate of aggression is subject to many variables – personal temperament, cultural expectations, upbringing, prevailing and local economic conditions, to name a few.

It’s undoubtedly influenced by the presence/absence of civilization, and how a given culture defines civilized behavior.

Culture can moderate aggression, but even that varies with economic conditions, even within economic classes in the same culture.

There’s also a lot of variance within a given culture at different times. Changes in tolerance for domestic abuse within the U.S. in the past half-century is one example.

In mating terms, there will be temperamental variance in populations. Some will seek to spread seed as wide and far as possible, ala Genghis Khan, an evolutionary strategy that is inevitably paired with aggression.

I would predict men employed in aggressive occupations – military, law enforcement, football – will also have higher rape rates. That’s not to say it’s a conscious strategy, but in evolutionary terms it’s a self-reinforcing one.

Men who are temperamentally nurturing pursue a different strategy, by focusing on fewer offspring and maximizing their potential, and will reflect lower rape rates.

This isn’t a strict binary, of course – some men are capable of being both aggressive and nurturing, and that is reflected in adultery rates.

Ultimately the strategies that work best from an evolutionary standpoint are the ones that get perpetrated, and the most effective strategies vary with prevailing conditions.

Up to the last paragraph I agree with little comment. However, in the last one I think there’s some room for disagreement, or more accurately, elaboration. I think the problem is the definition of “work best” – what does the author mean, or even better, what does this mean in global abstract terms?

If those which seem to work best result in the rape of women, what does this mean for human culture? Will the currently comprehensive versions go away as the consciousness of women, periodically assaulted and sometimes extinguished, folds up and goes away? Or are males violently subordinated? (See A WORLD BETWEEN, by Norman Spinrad, for a random association event.)

I can see the readers point that, by definition, the best reproductive strategies survive for reuse. However, I am not yet convinced of the tacit point that self-conscious intelligence is a successful survival strategy; and whether our successors evolve into less intelligent beings, or less individualistic, or whatever, the entire plasticity of this process over time tends to make me wonder about the stability of reproduction strategies over time as well. Of course, I merely speculate; I have no data to back this up.

In a whimsical sidestep in the Dakota pipeline saga, as the protesters were driven back, their places were taken – by buffalo. HuffPo reports:

“The only reason we are moving back is because they are armed with batons, tear gas, riot gear, weapons, rubber bullets,” the activist says. “That’s what it takes for them to push us back. They carry weapons just because they’re scared.”

As he begins a sentence saying, “This land means everything,” he abruptly shouts, “Look at all those buffalo!” as the camera pans to the herd. He can also be heard shouting, “Tatanka,” a word referring to the American bison in the Lakota language. (American bison are commonly called “buffalo” colloquially, though they are technically not true buffalos.)

Some outlets have characterized the bison as coming out of “nowhere.” But journalist Ryan Redhawk, who runs the Facebook page Standing Rock Rising, told The Huffington Post that witnesses said the animals were previously fenced in and people involved in the protest efforts let them out. Sacheen Seitcham of the Westcoast Women Warrior Society told HuffPost that someone appeared to be herding them, but she didn’t know who.

It has wonderful symbolic value for the protesters, particularly the Indians; no doubt it just pissed off the company workers and law enforcement who have to deal with another source of encumberment and danger.

In other news, the above HuffPo article also references a Reuters article on a claim by American Indians that it’s all their land anyways:

Native American protesters on Monday occupied privately owned land in North Dakota in the path of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, claiming they were the land’s rightful owners under an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government.

The move is significant because the company building the 1,100-mile (1,886-km) oil pipeline, Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners LP, has bought tracts of land and relied on eminent domain to clear a route for the line across four states from North Dakota to Illinois. …

Protesters on Monday said the land in question was theirs under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which was signed by eight tribes and the U.S. government. Over the last century, tribes have challenged this treaty and others like it in court for not being honored or for taking their land.

“We have never ceded this land. If Dakota Access Pipeline can go through and claim eminent domain on landowners and Native peoples on their own land, then we as sovereign nations can then declare eminent domain on our own aboriginal homeland,” Joye Braun of the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a prepared statement.

Given the shameful manner in which treaties here (and in Canada!) have been abrogated over the years, I can only hope they win this claim. It’s not clear if this is an actual suit in court or not.

QuHarrison Terry sounds the alarm for the consequences of losing the Internet on (ironically?) LinkedIn, an Internet-only company:

These attackers want to disable everything. Companies like Dyn are being targeted nationwide in an effort to stop internet access throughout the entire country.

Don’t believe me?

You can literally watch cyber warfare live right here, and see where attacks are coming from and who is being targeted.

While we don’t know who is responsible for the attacks and why they are doing it, we can only imagine an apocalyptic scenario of life without the internet.

Some of his imagination at work.

You decide no more work is getting done today, so you head home. Trying to call an Uber, you are stopped by an error message. Without a car, you walk to the bus stop, on the way noticing all the traffic lights are out and the roads are packed with angry and confused drivers…

An eery feeling passes through your body.

Hours have passed and there is no news on what is happening. It’s not until a neighbor fires up an old radio that you hear the internet is down and will be back up shortly. Broadcasters tell you to remain calm and to stay home.

An entire day passed and broadcasters continue to tell you very little. Fearing the worst, you head over to the grocery store to stock up on food, only to run into 500 hundred other people with the same idea. The manager of the store is yelling, “You must present cash at the door. We aren’t accepting any cards.” The tension of scared civilians is thick when all of a sudden a car drives through the window of the store–it’s the tipping point the crowd needed to burst into the store. Chaos ensues. People fight over rice and water.

The link he makes available is to NorseCorp. I did a little research and they appear to have a spotty history, but I’m unsure as to their current status or reputation. Their blog is a broken link. Their online depiction of real-time Internet attacks is fascinating – but is it trustworthy? Here’s a screenshot:

Source: NorseCorp.com

I poked at it a little bit and decided I’m not technically up to speed on security anymore. Last time I was active, we called them ruggies and estimated their average age to be 15 and living in the upscale part of the Twin Cities – back in the 1980s.

Things have changed, haven’t they?

Dr. Louis Profeta writes about the medical profession on LinkedIn:

Listen, no matter how we like to hold up ourselves as the pillars of compassion, the keepers of the public well-being, we are just one profession out of countless others that keep our world moving. We are no more heroes than the social worker visiting homes in the projects, the farmer up at 4 to feed the cattle, the ironworker strapped to a beam on the 50th floor. We are no more a hero than the single mom working overnight as a custodian, trying to feed her kids. We are no more heroic than countless others who work in jobs they perhaps hate in order to care for and support the people they love.

Maybe I’m wrong in telling the group that medicine is just a job, but I am damn sure we in medicine are all wrong if we think our job is somehow more special and valuable than the bartender’s.

Elon Musk announces the replacement of traditional roofs with solar panels that look like traditional roofs, and TechCrunch has a report:

Standard roofing materials do not provide fiscal benefit back to the homeowner post-installation, besides improving the cost of the home. Tesla’s product does that, by generating enough energy to fully power a household, with the power designed to be stored in the new Powerwall 2.0 battery units so that homeowners can keep a reserve in case of excess need.

The solar roof product should start to see installations by summer next year, and Tesla plans to start with one or two of its four tile options, then gradually expand the options over time. As they’re made from quartz glass, they should last way longer than an asphalt tile — at least two or three times the longevity, though Musk later said “they should last longer than the house”.

Tesla has also released a YouTube of Elon bumbling along in traditional nerd fashion.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRqSkR4ENAg

Quite endearing, actually.

Not addressed are questions concerning installation. Not the technical aspects, but the business aspects. Is Tesla going into the installation game? That could cause a lot of resentment among the small roof installers. Or will they be a supplier with some training for installers? That, I should think, would make small business into an ally in Elon’s quest to convert the world from fossil fuels to electric.

I don’t know offhand what the environmental costs of manufacturing the solar cells, but I assume Elon and 3M have tried to ensure the cost is not too high.

Bacteriophages are viruses adapted to living and replicating within bacteria. Because of their position, they don’t typically engage in gene-transfer with anything beyond other bacteriophages and its host bacteria.

Typically.

NewScientist (15 October 2016) reports on the detection of a gene in a virus from an arachnid, and, well, here it is:

[The virus named] WO, however, faces an unusual challenge: its targets are Wolbachia bacteria living in the cells of insects, spiders and some other animals. That means that for it to attack new targets, WO has to escape not only from its existing Wolbachia host, but also from the eukaryotic cell. The virus particles must then evade the eukaryote’s powerful immune system.

Many viruses of eukaryotic cells [i.e., non-bacterial cells] co-opt genes from their hosts to help them do this. To see if WO could do the same, microbiologists Sarah and Seth Bordenstein at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, sequenced its genome. They found several genes closely related to ones present in eukaryotes, including the gene for latrotoxin, the poison used by black widow spiders. It kills by poking holes in cell membranes, making it a plausible tool for a virus needing to escape from a eukaryotic cell (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13155).

Interesting. I wonder about the likelihood of the Wolbachia bacteria ever invading human hosts. And whether or not the virus makes enough latrotoxin to seriously damage the human host. A virus is very small, but it uses the machinery of the cell it has invaded to reproduce – and, in this case, produce the latrotoxin. Perhaps if enough viruses were active at the same time…

But Wolbachia is interesting for other reasons. The High-Tech Society is also on this subject and contributes an additional interesting tidbit:

Wolbachia is currently being studied as a way to repress the virus spreading capabilities of mosquitos, after studies showed that it prevents the spread of dengue and zika virus in infected mosquitoes. Being able to edit it before infecting mosquitoes would offer scientists more control over the effects, and more repression of viruses like Zika. WO also spreads freely among wolbachia, meaning that spreading it to even a small population could eventually result in large scale results.

National Review is a conservative publication that has, no doubt, been a miserable institution ever since the GOP primaries started. They backed Cruz, a highly questionable candidate for a truly conservative publication, and then he went and lost. They loathe Trump, the selection of the “conservative” party members, to the point where they’ve published an article by David French entitled, “If only by comparison to Clinton and Trump, Obama looks better in American voters’ eyes.”

The first time I read it (only part way), it irked me.

The second time, my engineer mind came out and I wanted to solve it. The article was obviously wrong. But it was time for bed.

Now, hours later, I just feel sad for David. Whether or not French is writing with his convictions or just for the bucks, it’s clear that he knows how to put words together, but not how to write from the heart. What do I mean?

There are two ways to evaluate something. You can evaluate something with a pre-determined conclusion in mind, or you can let the facts lead you to the logical conclusion. It’s not so surprising that a writer for an ideological publication might walk down the former path, but I think it holds dangers far greater than most people acknowledge. Briefly, to begin with, it leads to false conclusions based on false or incomplete reasoning.

AND THEN those false conclusions and bad reasoning are incorporated into the next discussion, where more are generated on top of the first, and soon the ship of argument needs to be brought into drydock to have the stubborn barnacles removed. If it makes it. More likely, they’re left on the hull where they’ll befoul all the reasoning that follows them. It’s slack thinking that may please the editor or publisher, but does nothing for the reader.

So David indulges in easy writing that is certain not to challenge those who most want to believe the worst of Obama. From the cited article:

But what about Obama? Economic growth in the last eight years lags behind post-war averages. So does GDP growth. So does job growth. Debt has grown more as a percentage of GDP, and for most of Obama’s two terms, median income has actually fallen. His signature domestic achievement — Obamacare — is unraveling before our eyes. His domestic record is far from the worst. But it’s not close to the best, either.

His foreign policy, meanwhile, has been nothing short of a disaster. Every American enemy is stronger than when he took office. Jihadists hold more territory now than they did before, and they strike allied cities across the world. Russia invaded the Ukraine and continues to advance its interests at the West’s expense. China is growing increasingly aggressive. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has put American troops back in harm’s way in Iraq and has engaged American forces in combat in more countries than that nasty neocon warmonger George W. Bush ever did.

On the surface, this may seem shipshape – but it’s actually just fluff to reassure the choir faithful (my Arts Editor reminds me that choirs are only sometimes faith-filled). On the domestic front, to take just one point, comparing economic growth to post-war averages is a futile exercise. As anyone with two sticks to rub together knows, there’s more to starting a fire than rubbing those sticks – there’s tinder, moisture, and, to be abstract, that entire concept called context. For the question of evaluating the economic recovery, context includes a myriad of variables that have changed since those averages began, such as the cost of transport (key to the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas), taxes, infrastructure, overseas competition, even the weather. From where did Obama start? Was Congress cooperative or antagonistic? Governance is a team game, after all, and, as those who’ve been paying attention for the last few years, a large part of the team refuses to acknowledge the leadership of the team captain.

In short, the comparison is utterly meaningless. His other points on the domestic front are equally questionable, suffering from lack of real analysis to simple hyperbole. The ACA is not unraveling, it’s simply suffering teething problems.

In foreign affairs, again, it’s necessary to penetrate more than a millimeter. First, we must recall that we, at least on the surface, have no desire to be a colonial power, and that means that sometimes powers arise in foreign lands that we cannot initially influence. Just as I would not blame the Bush/Cheney Administration for “permitting” the attack on the Twin Towers, I also am not willing to give any sympathy to an attempt to tar Obama with the responsibility for the rise of ISIL. Indeed, seeing that it arose from the smoking remains of the War on Iraq, a neocon-instigated war, there are more legitimate directions to point fingers. All that said, the territory held by jihadists is daily shrinking, and while they no doubt may still reach out and cause death and misery, as in France earlier this year, they have discovered the West is resolute, not dissolute, as their ideology dictated, and the American military continues to strike fear into their hearts. The real question isn’t why Obama permitted the rise of ISIL, but what are the behaviors of the local leaders that cause such dissatisfaction? Or is it in the hearts of all men to seek power?

Because we’re talking about the responsibilities of writing, then let me ask, not in an ideological or combative manner, but in an inquisitive rhetorical manner, Why did French not mention al-Quaeda as part of foreign affairs? Its iconic leader was killed by Obama’s order after a concentrated effort to find him. Or what of Libya? Colonel Gaddafi, long time Libyan strongman, and the man held responsible for the bombing and crash of Pan Am Flight 103, was executed by Libyan rebels with the key support of the American military, under Obama’s direction. Are either of these developments negatives? And yet they are not acknowledged. “… nothing short of a disaster.” These are not fluff questions, but substantive issues that he, as a writer, should confront.

But why?

He’s a writer working for an ideological publication, writing for an audience with certain expectations.

That’s the counter-argument, isn’t it? Do your job, French, and don’t rile the audience.

Here’s the problem: the front and center requirement, as alluded to in the counter-argument, is this: cosset the audience. Make them happy, send them to bed with smiles on their faces, or, if it suits the publisher, anger in their hearts. Lead them around the way they want to be lead around.

And that leads to the central question: Where’s the truth? Not what I would call the prescriptive truth, that truth designated by National Review as the goal of every article, the foundation of the two paragraphs I quoted above. This is also known as the ideological truth, the same as that aforementioned ideological truth of ISIL, which is leading to its downfall.

But the truth that every writer, fiction or not, should hold dear to their heart – the belief that writing should honestly lead readers to truth. Put it in bold and think about it! Yes, inform the reader – not off the cuff, but to the best of your ability – or, better yet, experts at that analysis. Put those facts together. And then what’s the logical conclusion? In the end, the reader should be inspired, should have their world view widened, should think about the subject a little differently.

And if they’re shocked by your truth, yet find your logic and reasoning irrefutable, then maybe – MAYBE – you’ve done your job.

And, because you pursued the truth, rather than the ideology, then the ideology might become better. Ideology does not define truth; truth leads to ideology. When that flows in the wrong direction, then the ideology simply becomes a machine to relay and amplify mankind’s desires. And, as there is little regulation once reality is discarded, soon those desires become base.

(Given the dysfunctionalism of today’s GOP, I might say that David is a microcosm of the larger problems of conservatism, a political movement that has explicitly discarded reality in that reality collides with the precepts of its ideology. This has not served it well.)

SO, AS A writer, how does one deal with these hard subjects if cheap comparisons are out? In this particular case, I think you have to look at the options available to the President, and then evaluate those roads not taken. Would they have led to a better future? Hard stuff to do, sure. But better than what David wrote. David is supposed to be the expert, but even I, barely an enthusiastic amateur, found it trivial to rip those two paragraphs apart.

David, your writing was awful; you did a disservice to your devoted readers. And neither they nor you probably even realized it. Sure, you got the words in the right order, you’re easy on the eyes, and you don’t sound like Trump, but the analysis was, at best, lazy. And, yes, you’re right – the cliche involving the word dishonest crossed my mind, and it’s not unworthy.

And, David, as you are a writer, I must, with reluctance, serve up the worst insult of all. I did not finish reading your article. Because if the bungled analysis I encountered immediately was that bad, then the rest of the article was not worth my time. And – it’s not worthy of the ideology.

Do better, David.

A reader notes that this is not just a game for individuals:

Prolly organized by a private firm or firms that do “reputation management”. UC Davis hired a firm like that to scrub Google after the pepper spray incident with students.

And here’s an article on that, from the Sacramento Bee:

UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.

The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.

Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”

Others sought to improve the school’s use of social media and to devise a new plan for the UC Davis strategic communications office, which has seen its budget rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.

Scrubbing out unpleasant aspects of the truth, perhaps? I’m sure they’d argue it was lies or badly twisted truth, but it seems to me that should be met with rebuttals, not an eraser. From this perspective, it just makes them look worse.

A reader responds to Conover’s analysis of CEO compensation’s effect on health insurance costs:

Well of course the compensation for just one executive in one year at a healthcare insurance company is only a small number per covered live, since they insure millions of people. But it’s very appropriately emblematic of the situation: add up all of the excessive compensation for all employees (e.g. most of the management, or the whole company, if you believe them completely unnecessary). One could throw in dividends paid to stock holders as well. Regardless of how conservative an estimate one makes, it does start to add up. It does ALL add to the cost of health care, since not one cent you pay to an insurance company that they do NOT then pay to doctors, clinics, etc. is money effectively wasted. And since that overhead is well over 30% for most insurers, it’s billions of dollars nationwide.

It’s also emblematic in the picture of greed. If executives at healthcare insurance companies get paid so much, it’s clear they don’t give a flying frog about the health and well-being of the 99%. They’re simply in it for greed and more greed. Tar and feather them all, I say.

Digg has this election’s best political ad.

I’d vote for him. Her. Yes.

http://digg.com/video/gerald-daugherty-ad-texas

SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito discussing his family history at the University of Buffalo Law Center:

When Alito’s father immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, he worked in a factory after graduating top of his high school class. He said he would never have gone to college if it weren’t for a $50 scholarship someone gave him.

“I don’t know who provided it, but I’m grateful to that person because it changed the whole history of our country,” Alito said.

A bacteria can fell us, a trivial scholarship can provide that first step up the ladder.

On Lawfare Sarah Tate Chambers gives some good coverage to banks around the world, SWIFT, and how the technology behind the digital currency bitcoin is playing into the banking future:

However, some financial groups are looking to systems beyond SWIFT to secure their transfers. After 18 months of preliminary work, Visa has invited a small number of European banks to join in a project that uses a blockchain for interbank transfers. A blockchain is a distributed ledger born in the Bitcoin system that allows a network of computers to contribute to it as well as verify it, negating the need for a central authority. Visa’s project also uses smart contracts, self-executing computer protocols that carry out or enforce contractual obligations. This combination allows for simultaneous transfers with heightened security.

Rather than creating its own system, J.P. Morgan Chase is using Ethereum, a publically accessible blockchain-based platform, to develop its own project, Quorum. While running off of a public system, Quorum limits access to transactions to those who need to know the details, known as permissioned blockchain technology.

Four big banks—UBS, BY Mellon, Santander, and Deutsche Bank—have banded together with ICAP, a broker, and Clearmatics, a London-based blockchain company, to explore blockchain transfers. Rather than using bitcoin, they created their own cryptocurrency, the Utility Settlement Coin (USC), which can be exchanged between banks and is the equivalent of its paired real world currency. USCs will be backed by cash in a central bank. They have proposed the project to central banks with an expected roll-out date of early 2018.

I’d never heard the term ‘smart contract’ before. While Wikipedia has a definition, I thought this discussion by Ledger Labs‘ head of operations Josh Stark on CoinDesk was more interesting:

They are defined variously as “autonomous machines”, “contracts between parties stored on a blockchain” or “any computation that takes place on a blockchain”. Many debates about the nature of smart contracts are really just contests between competing terminology.

The different definitions usually fall into one of two categories. Sometimes the term is used to identify a specific technology – code that is stored, verified and executed on a blockchain. Let’s call this type of definition “smart contract code”.

Other times, the term is used to refer to a specific application of that technology: as a complement, or substitute, for legal contracts. Let’s name these “smart legal contracts”.

Using the same term to refer to distinct concepts makes answering even simple questions impossible. For instance, one question I’m often asked is simply: what are the capabilities of a smart contract?

If we are talking about smart contract code, then the answer depends on the capabilities of the language used to express the contract and the technical features of the blockchain on which it operates.

But if we are asking about using that technology to create a binding legal agreement, or an effective substitute for a binding legal agreement, the answer depends on far more than the technology. This answer depends on existing legal doctrine and how our legal, political and commercial institutions decide to treat the technology. If businesspeople don’t trust it, the legislature doesn’t recognize it and the courts can’t interpret it, then it won’t be a very practically useful “contract”.

This remark suggests that either I don’t fully comprehend the nature of blockchains, or Josh is being sloppy as well:

Blockchains can run code. While the first blockchains were designed to perform a small set of simple operations – mainly, transactions of a currency-like token – techniques have been developed to allow blockchains to perform more complex operations, defined in full-fledged programming languages.

Because these programs are run on a blockchain, they have unique characteristics compared to other types of software. First, the program itself is recorded on the blockchain, which gives it a blockchain’s characteristic permanence and censorship resistance. Second, the program can itself control blockchain assets – i.e., it can store and transfer amounts of cryptocurrency. Third, the program is executed by the blockchain, meaning it will always execute as written and no one can interfere with its operation.

He later mentions storing programs on the blockchain, so perhaps I’m just ignorant. Ah, yes:

Smart contract programs can themselves hold balances of cryptocurrency, or even control other smart contract programs. Once they are created, they can act autonomously when called to perform an action. For this reason, many prefer the term “smart agent”, analogous to the more general concept of a software agent.

So this is interesting and making more sense. And Josh wrote a good piece. His speculation on a new kind of contract was thought-provoking:

The most widely discussed opportunity of this type is machine-to-machine commerce. The growing ecosystem of smart devices – particularly those that are in some fashion autonomous – will eventually need a way to engage in basic commercial interactions with one another. For instance, a washer that buys its own detergent or a car that can pay to recharge itself.

These transactions still require a minimum level of trust to be commercially viable, but are ill-suited for legal contracts, which are comparatively expensive and require the involvement of legal persons like a corporation or human. Smart alternative contracts might enable an entirely new type of commerce carried out between our computers, cars, phones, and appliances.

In this particular example, I could see dishwashers sold with a lifetime supply of detergent – perhaps not requiring legal attention in and of of itself, as it’s part of the deal for the dishwasher. But that doesn’t invalidate Josh’s larger point.

In the news recently, we find Kater the Alchemist, natal name and identity unknown.  Starting as a graffiti artist, he has his first one-day gallery show  “Nightmare on Kater St.” this coming Saturday, October 29, from  5-10 p.m. at the Riverview Business Plaza, 320 Chester St., St. Paul  MN.

Hue asked if I thought this was worthy art.  My response:  “Oh, yes.  Extremely worthy art.”  See pictures and read about the artist here and here.  Then go see the show.

Jason Urbanus covers some recently World War I discoveries, mostly in terms of more bodies discovered, in an offline article, “A Last Day, Reclaimed,” Archaeology, November / December 2016 pp 48-53. In the midst of the deadly chaos of trench warfare, the medical personnel retained some sense of humanity:

As bodies were transferred to the cemetery, their personal military identification tags would have been kept by the hospital staff. Archaeologists have discovered that in some instances a death certificate, recording a cause of death, had been placed in a glass bottle and buried with the deceased. Many of these documents have become faded and illegible over the past century, but they are evidence of an attempt to keep some kind of identification with the soldiers.

Struggling against the madness of that war.

(Emphasis mine.)

I asked what impact C-Suite executive salaries have on insurance rates, and it turns out that Chris Conover on Forbes took a shot at answering the closely associated question: if the CEOs’ compensation were confiscated and used to pay down insurance rates, what would be the impact?

How much money might the average plan member save if only we could confiscate the allegedly “eye-popping” (former industry “insider” Wendell Potter’s characterization) CEO compensation paid to executives of the nation’s largest health insurers?

The answer? Peanuts.

I went to the proxy statements of all 9 health insurance and managed care companies appearing on last year’s Fortune 500 list (this year’s list will not appear until May). As stock investors are well aware, the summary compensation table lists all components of compensation provided to each of the firm’s executive officers. These include salary, bonuses, stock awards, other non-equity forms of incentive compensation and other types of compensation such as health insurance, retirement and similar fringe benefits. Not all firms have yet reported their 2015 compensation levels, so I used 2014 figures and divided these by the latest membership figures I could find in annual reports etc.

The results are instructive. Average total CEO compensation at Fortune 500 health insurers amounts to 42 cents per member!

Which is fascinating, if accurate. And makes the central question of the motivation for the jump in rates that much more interesting. A reader did point me at a FB posting of some salaries, but I was unable to verify the source. Instead, I dug this up from MedCity News, which includes a quote from the aforementioned Wendell Potter:

Wendell Potter, former public relations executive for Cigna, where CEO David Cordani raked in a $14.5 million salary in 2014, said, “There’s no doubt that one of the reasons why Americans pay more for health insurance and for healthcare than people in any other country in the world is because of this high executive compensation.”

So who’s right? On the one hand, the guy actually doing math is more impressive than the PR guy who’s just waving his hands. On the other hand, does the math actually make sense?

I’m somewhat astonished – although without facts, it’s difficult to know if it’s a justified astonishment – at this CNN report out of Oregon that the occupiers of a federal wildlife refuge were found innocent of nearly all charges (the last charge, of theft, was not resolved). I’m a little puzzled – ok, really puzzled – how folks can occupy a federal facility, without permission, while heavily armed, and NOT be convicted.

But, like I said, I don’t have all the facts. I am looking forward to hearing someone who sat through the trial, or at least studied the transcript, explain why the jury could not find them guilty. Having sat on a jury roughly a year ago myself, weighed the evidence, and found the defendant not guilty, I do understand that sometimes the evidence is not what you might want, and that the particular requirements of the charges are not meant. You’re left feeling something illegal happened, but exactly what does not match the charges – and you can’t make up your own. So you find them not guilty.

I shan’t speculate further, since I suspect we all know the possible problems with the system.

Or, possibly, this is the beginning of the end of the American system.