Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s Alive! (1969) is, I fear, dead on arrival. Featuring stilted dialog, overwrought acting, a flashback sequence devoid of dialog and encumbered with awful music and the occasional deliberately blurry scene (the whole flashback cost me a significant portion of my lifetime), a protagonist with no sympathetic characteristics (and, in fact, I initially had him tagged as the antagonist), and a monster so absolutely awful that it’s worse than the skeleton monster in the deliberately bad (and recommended) The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001). Add in a plot hole involving how the hostage of the antagonist can easily sneak into the cage of some recent prisoners, yet they cannot follow her out (what?), and this movie is only worth alcohol and laughter.

Yet, to be fair, the true antagonist of the movie, a farmer and exhibit owner (where did he get the monkey in the middle of New York?), is actually not bad. From his predilection for sadism, both emotional and physical, across his ever so slightly misshapen face, to, finally, his absolutely wretched hair, he is both evil – and believably evil. He’s no Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi, and sometimes his acting gets away from him, yet this was a character I’d really rather not run into in a dark alley.

Oh, but the killing of the first protagonist … oh oh oh … so awful.

As a software engineer, I find this remark from Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare incredibly dispiriting:

A case in point is this report from The Register.  Readers may recall that a month ago, reports surfaced of a theft of more than $81 million from the Bangladeshi central bank.  And it seems that but for a small error, the theives might have gotten away with more than $1 billion.  The attack itself came in through the SWIFT system — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommuncation, headquartered in Belgium. We were assured, however, that there were no vulnerabilities in the SWIFT system itself.  According to SWIFT the hack must have started in the local banks.

Perhaps so.  But today we learn that SWIFT itself has failed to take even the most basic security steps to protect its network.  Two-factor authentication is the simple system where when you log in, you use a password but then you also have to present a second factor to authenticate yourself.  Usually this is some sort of random pin.  Or it can be an approval from your mobile device.  Everyone uses it these days — its how we log in to Google mail and its also how we log in to post on Lawfare.

Apparently, however, SWIFT was not so swift.  Only now, after the Bangladeshi attack (and others on banks in the Phillipines and Vietnam) will the bank move to expand its use of two-factor authentication.

Viscerally, I just want to get rid of them. Yes, take your pick between SWIFT and computers. Getting rid of either would take care of the problem.

Surely SWIFT had availed itself of the services of any of a number of a security-focused corporations? This sounds like the sort of thing where someone is very publicly fired.

The Moccasin Plant.

My Arts Editor tells me I did well.

And comes up with some lovely compositions… here’s the entryway. The Haralson apple tree was bountiful last year; this is its vacation year.

Purple centers on white line part of one of the paths…

Our neglected orange azalea is in the foreground, with the purple iris providing a delicate counter punch. We’ve learned that azaleas prefer acidic soil and have begun offering it acid enhancers.

Against the Western Wall beat the Clematis, not yet in bloom, while between them and ourselves stand the Golden Irises, a slender redoubt against transgression.

Meanwhile, a band of chives stalks innocently by…

And, out front, the ferns preen proudly, giving their all in advance of the inevitable summer burn-off. Delicate Virginia bluebells purse their pretty mouths for the hurried kiss of the pollinators, a mere moment to propagate before they return to dust, hoping for another resurrection in eleven months.

It turns all purple.

Tonight my Arts Editor and I finished watching The Italian Job (1969), starring Michael Caine and Noel Coward. Briefly, this is about a newly released British criminal who wishes to hijack a shipment of gold in the city of Turin, Italy. We follow along as he runs into the Italian Mob and his own men in their attempts to get the gold; and, once acquired, they run into the age-old conundrum of how one holds onto the slippery stuff – so we are left with a cliff-hanger.

While I’m aware this film has a rabid following, I fear I was somewhat less than enamoured of it. It is the idiosyncratic Brit film of oddball quirks, such as the crime boss Mr. Bridger (Coward) who directs the operations of the syndicate from within a prison, where all the guards treat him like royalty – and he has a fetish for the Queen. Several other characters exhibit a certain Joie de vivre, which serves the film well. And, honestly, I love quirks. But parts of the film lead down dead-ends, such as Caine’s girlfriend, suddenly ejected from the caper (and the film) for no particular reason, never to be seen again. Or why does this gold go through Turin on a predictable schedule?  Or … hey, why the gold? (Maybe I missed that part.)

There are striking scenes, of course. As owner of a modern MiniCooper, the three classic MiniCoopers were, of course, attention grabbers, and when each is induced to plunge down a mountain-side, this was viewed with true sadness, even if it did serve a worth plot-driven reason. And the Italian Mob scene, with gunmen blanketing the side of a hill, was quite a vista. But the Italian Mob turns out to be punchless, for all their glamour, and another dead-end for the heedless viewer to wander down and then spin around.

So, in the end, while there was some pleasure … it does not blow the doors off.

We were tramping about in the garden, and I love these colors.

On Treehugger.com Katherine Martinko covers the evolving controversy over healthy food in the UK:

The debate about dietary fat has reached a crescendo in the United Kingdom, where a new paper has been released by a group called the Public Health Collaboration. The paper, titled, “Healthy Eating Guidelines & Weight Loss Advice for the United Kingdom,” is not an official study, but rather a campaign document drafted by people from mixed backgrounds – dieticians, cardiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, GPs, and athletes.

This Public Health Collaboration (PHC) group takes issue with the official government-supported stance on what good nutrition should be. Their paper challenges three main points that are encapsulated in the UK’s Eatwell Guide…

I see this entry impacting this thread of mine because of the infusion of the private sector into public health, as Katherine notes:

Journalist Nina Teicholz is another supporter of saturated fats, as explained in her hugely controversial yet fascinating book, “The Big Fat Surprise.” Teicholz argues that saturated fat has been unfairly vilified for decades by a world that is fraught with poor science, loads of industry money, political clout, and bloated egos pushing for specific results that always feature the demonization of fat.

In the phenomenon of cheap, easily accessible publishing we see the conundrum of understanding which advice is in conformance with facts and what conceals an agenda. Add into the mix the simple fact that we’re talking about a difficult subject, and I think many folks are bewildered by a government study that is now under active attack as being incorrect from an independent group.

The problem of conflicting goals is brought to the fore in this instance. The government is supposed to give good advice, but in those countries with capitalist economic systems, we often hear accusations of corruption by corporate entities pursuing profit; what is interesting is that often those with the accusations have their own agenda of replacing capitalism, without highlighting the possibility that their favorite replacement may also have conflicting goals – and may, like its capitalist cousin, also attempt to corrupt the government entity.

But back to the point at hand, how does the public know the independent group also has no hidden agenda? Public Health Collaboration has the requisite web page that explains what it’s doing – but how do we know it’s truthful, how do we know their “solutions-based reports” (I’d be more reassured by “scientific study summaries”) have merit? I have no interest in demeaning this organization; this is a problem in general. Will there be an attempt to measure how their recommendations pan out? And not in the sense of how they influence the UK public, but whether or not a scientific study of the impact of their recommendations on some group of people has a substantial impact on their health? And how do you do that in general?

Can you see Peeper?

The Swiss are considering the idea of UBI, reports Bloomberg Markets:

The country will vote June 5 on whether the government should introduce an unconditional basic income to replace various welfare benefits. Although the initiators of the plan haven’t stipulated how large the payout should be, they’ve suggested the sum of 2,500 francs ($2,500) for an adult and a quarter of that for a child.

It sounds good, but — two things. It would barely get you over the poverty line, typically defined as 60 percent of the national median disposable income, in what’s one of the world’s most expensive countries. More importantly, it’s probably not going to happen anyway. …

The proposal is opposed by the government, which says the stipend would mean higher taxes, create disincentives to work and cause a skills shortage. The economy is already hamstrung by the franc’s strength, with businesses warning they’ll move production to less pricey locations to reduce costs.

And reportedly 60% of the Swiss public oppose it. It’s interesting that the government opposes it because it might create a disincentive to work; I have to wonder how much of that assertion comes from the pessimistic view of humanity brought to the table by the Calvinists, who originated in Switzerland. To my mind, it may not be a view in accordance with reality, since the viewpoint is from a reality that is far out of date, or it may vary from country to country. Zero Hedge reports that the campaign is driven by concerns about robots:

The main argument of the supporters of this initiative is that it would support the people that will, or already do, lose their jobs to automation and technological progress; a defensive move against “the rise of the robots” as they put it. They also claim that such a measure will give people the opportunity to grow, to learn and to pursue skills or professional goals that are now rendered prohibitive by their current meaningless and mundane jobs, that they are forced into in order to simply pay their bills. “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” asked the pro-UBI campaign in Geneva, with a poster that officially made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest.

However, the robots are also in favor of UBI as reported on the blog for Basic Income 2016:

Over at Lawfare Benjamin Wittes not only continues to express his dismay at the imminent Trump nomination, but channels the dismay of some fairly important people:

I’m talking, of course, about the men and women who make up our professional national security bureaucracy.

Normally, such people are studiously apolitical. They’re public servants, after all, and they accept that they—as career officials—serve the institutions for which they work irrespective of whether the political leadership is Republican or Democratic. Some of them have opinions which they’ll share if asked. Some of them make a point—a discipline, you might say—of not having opinions.

That is in normal times.

I have not sure I have ever seen this cadre of professionals more unsettled than they are, as a group, today. It is not uncommon to hear people asking themselves whether they could continue in their current roles under Trump. It is not uncommon to hear people ruminate about whether the right course would be to resign or to stay and act as a check—which translates roughly to being an obstructionist of some sort or another. These are the murmurings that General Michael Hayden was channeling when he declared of Trump’s plans to target terrorists’ families: “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”

A Trump presidency would raise these issues not just for the military, but for the Justice Department, for the State Department, and particularly for the intelligence community, which wields a set of powers that are incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. Nobody knows this better than the men and women who administer those powers and are daily bound by the constraints imposed to prevents abuses of them. How will those people react when they, like Graham, are faced with Kagan’s choice of getting right with the leader or getting run over?

Mr. Wittes doesn’t pursue the follow-on question: if Trump is elected President, what is the future of the national security apparatus post-Trump, 4 or 8 years later? If this group of key workers choose to leave their posts, who then fills them? What if the neo-conservatives responsible for the Iraq war and other follies then become the occupiers of such positions? Will we see more fiascoes, reminiscent of the Bush II administration?

What if, instead, they chose to dig in their heels and disobey illegal orders? They’d be sacrificing their careers for the protection of the nation, in my eyes. Whether disobeying an allegedly illegal order would damage their employment prospects is an interesting question, and if the answer, in their eyes, is Yes, then how do they handle? As Wittes notes, Senator Graham has already begun to back down, and he’s one of the more outspoken critics of Trump; what does someone without the public profile do?

An interesting series of questions which I hope we never have to answer.

With a little dianthus in the foreground.

NewScientist (7 May 2016) reports on what happens when it rains. Feel like sneezing when it comes down? There’s a reason for that:

Rain cleans the air, right? Wrong. On ploughed fields at least, rainfall flings up millions of microscopic organic particles – the remains of dead plants and animals. As well as affecting air quality, this rainfall-induced haze may help to seed clouds and generate more rain. …

So how does rain get particles aloft? Once rainfall starts to puddle, it dissolves organic matter from the soil. “Splashing of subsequent raindrops creates air bubbles, which rise upwards and burst, ejecting a fine mist of organic matter, which then dries into tiny solid spherical balls,” explains [Alexander Laskin]. Light or moderate rain is best; if the rain is too heavy it hits the puddle too hard and doesn’t generate as many air bubbles.

Sure wish the article had discussed the Dust Bowl event in this context.

NewScientist’s print edition (7 May 2016) puts its foot in it on p. 31:

The sun’s habitable zone shifts to the outer solar system. Jupiter’s moon Titan might just warm up enough for life to evolve.

That’s Saturn, folks, and they managed to wash their foot off for the online edition.

… or, more accurately, harvesting the fog. Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com has the lowdown on how farmers finally take the tease out of fog:

If you live halfway up a mountain in rural Peru, and if you have no access to running water, farming can be a difficult task. In a town called Villa Lourdes, villagers receive deliveries of fresh drinking water three times a week from Lima—and they used to have to schlep a good deal of that water up the hill to irrigate their crops. That’s until a different, all together more elegant solution presented itself:

Fog.

Using ‘Atrapanieblas’—large nets erected on the hillside—farmers like Maria Teresa Avalos Cucho take advantage of the daily fog to capture condensation, harvesting between 200 and 400 liters a day from each panel—which is then stored in tanks, and gravity-fed to the crops below.

Which is fascinating and certainly worthy of approbation, and yet I have one niggling little thought: what is the unexpected side effect? What depends on the fog and now is thirsting after something for itself? I’m certainly not condemning the effort, for as Sami points out, the alternative is to truck the water in – or abandon the village. But this is a change in an interconnected system, and it’s not clear to me whether humans are an insignificant part of this system – or a big part that may, through this innovative solution, be causing an even bigger problem down the line.

We could draw analogies with other technologies, such as irrigation, which is a wonderful idea when our impact is relatively small – but now we reroute entire rivers to feed formerly arid valleys, leaving other parts of our own country dry and gasping, damaging eco-systems and perhaps ourselves. It’s not so much a question of scalability as it is fitting in: how can we be part of this world without overwhelming it and, ultimately, cutting our own throats?

Yesterday we had the pleasure of seeing The Jungle Book (2016). I’ve neither read the books of Rudyard Kipling nor seen the previous (1942) Disney version of the movie, nor any of the other related movies, shows, etc, so I can say with virgin eyes that this was a interesting, even gripping movie of the young Indian boy Mowgli and his frenzied attempts to survive the vengeance of Shere Khan, the Tiger. He leaves his home in the jungle, risking all as he breaks the law of the pack, heading towards the man-village and the purported safety it offers. His adventures can be heart-stopping or amusing, and the good friend he makes turns out to be a good friend, indeed, even if I did not believe that bear could climb a sheer cliff wall.

The melding of CGI with live action is excellent – while once in a while I felt an action didn’t quite follow the laws of physics, and of course that giant monkey was way out of bounds, once you get beyond talking animals (and you really should) the movie seems quite believable in terms of visual impact.

Overall, I’ll recommend it. I haven’t decided if I’ll ever isolate the themes, but one appears to be the importance of diversity.

BTW, popcorn at the Chanhassen Cinema is rather tasteless and overpriced.

Not a simple typo this time, but rather an omission in an otherwise interesting article on depression and immune systems in NewScientist (7 May 2016, paywall), Jessica Hamzelou writes:

One side effect of the [interferon alpha] is that between 30 and 40 per cent of those who take it go on to develop depression. The drug can have an effect similar to experiencing a stressful life event, says [Carmine Pariante] – some who take it will develop depression, while others will be resilient.

Pariante’s team monitored 58 people who took the drug for six months for hepatitis C. The researchers took blood samples before and after this period, and assessed the participants’ mental health using questionnaires.

By the end of the period, 20 of them had experienced a major depressive episode, with symptoms such as persistent fatigue, sadness, hopelessness, and loss of appetite.

When Pariente’s team looked at the blood samples, they found that these individuals had altered patterns of gene expression before they even started taking the drug. These people seemed naturally to make more proteins that are involved in inflammation, oxidative stress and the death of neurons, and fewer proteins involved in brain cell growth (Neuropsychopharmacology, doi.org/bfqn). “Overall, this has a toxic effect on brain function,” says Pariante.

So, is 20 out of 58 beyond those treated with a different regimen? I’m left wondering if that would be the expected percentage given that the patients have a very serious illness and some, quite likely, will be pre-disposed to depression in any case. Tell me!

Regarding the energy grid a reader writes,

All we need is energy storage, aka batteries, and we don’t need any fossil fuels at all, even for back up.

The problem is that not all energy storage solutions fit the bill. The requirements of “back up” are that it fires up and comes online fairly quickly, so a lot of energy storage solutions will fail that requirement. Fossil fuels tend to give up a substantial portion of their energies fairly quickly; batteries also do, but their energy density is not yet sufficient to the task at hand.

So I view this ‘all we need‘ phrase as a bit … misleading …

I’m putting this project on hiatus. While I’m not nearly done, it’s not clear that Mythryl will survive long term, and I no longer feel like I have things to learn from implementing an XML SAX parser. It’s been fun and instructive, but until someone pops up and says they’re willing to move Mythryl forward, I’m putting this project on ice.

Related to this thread, another cache of ivory has been burned, this time by the government of Kenya, as noted by many news outlets. npr.org reports:

On Saturday morning, it hosted the most spectacular burn event yet: The tusks of nearly 7,000 elephants — 105 metric tons’ worth — were set alight in 11 separate pyres in Nairobi’s National Park.

The tusks, taken from elephants that were poached as well as from those that died naturally, were collected from Kenya’s parks and confiscated at its ports.

The haul represents the bulk of Kenya’s entire ivory stockpile. In addition, a 1.5-ton basket of rhino horn was set on fire. All told, more than $300 million worth of contraband went up in flames.

“Kenya is leading the way in saying that ivory has no value, unless it’s on an elephant,” says Robin Hollister, an engineer and pyrotechnics expert, as he adjusts the knobs on an air compressor.

To my mind this is a dubious remark, so I went looking for why elephant ivory is desirable. In 2012, The Atlantic pointed a finger at China and its burgeoning middle class. Author Rebecca Rosen:

Germany continues to make progress in using renewables, according to Bloomberg:

Clean power supplied almost all of Germany’s power demand for the first time on Sunday, marking a milestone for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Energiewende” policy to boost renewables while phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels.

Solar and wind power peaked at 2 p.m. local time on Sunday, allowing renewables to supply 45.5 gigawatts as demand was 45.8 gigawatts, according to provisional data by Agora Energiewende, a research institute in Berlin. Power prices turned negative during several 15-minute periods yesterday, dropping as low as minus 50 euros ($57) a megawatt-hour, according to data from Epex Spot.

This has consequences:

Merkel’s unprecedented shift to clean energy has squeezed margins at coal and gas plants while driving up costs for consumers in Europe’s biggest power market. The increased flows of clean energy have also put pressure on the grid to the point that the country is considering excluding certain regions from future onshore wind power auctions if local grids are already struggling to keep up with large volumes of renewable energy supplies.

“If Germany was an island, with no export cables, this would be technically impossible because you always need to have some thermal generation running as a back up supply for when the wind or solar drops off,” [Monne Depraetere, an analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance] said.

Which is a reminder that we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but not necessarily eliminate them completely. They need to become a minor component of our energy strategy, not the main support system.

And in the United States?  Courtesy the US Energy Information Agency:

In 2015, renewable energy sources accounted for about 10% of total U.S. energy consumption and about 13% of electricity generation.

(h/t my retired climate scientist friend)

A reader remarks about cancer in this thread:

Parasites cause cancer? I had no idea. I’m curious as to which parasites have been identified and which cancers they cause.

Nor had I ever heard of this. But, from the Centers for Disease Control, comes this press release from last year:

Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have discovered cancer cells originating in a common tapeworm may take root in people with weakened immune systems, causing cancer-like tumors. It is the first known case of a person becoming ill from cancer cells that arose in a parasite – in this case, Hymenolepis nana, the dwarf tapeworm.

The report, in the Nov. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, raises concern that other similar cases, if they occur, may be misdiagnosed as human cancer – especially in less developed countries where this tapeworm and immune-system-suppressing illnesses like HIV are widespread.

“We were amazed when we found this new type of disease – tapeworms growing inside a person essentially getting cancer that spreads to the person, causing tumors,” said Atis Muehlenbachs, M.D., Ph.D., staff pathologist in CDC’s Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch (IDPB) and lead author of the study. “We think this type of event is rare. However, this tapeworm is found worldwide and millions of people globally suffer from conditions like HIV that weaken their immune system. So there may be more cases that are unrecognized. It’s definitely an area that deserves more study.”

Definitely not what I was expecting to read, but entirely plausible.