Category Archives: Uncategorized

In the world of solar panels, the general approach has been to improve the efficiency of conversion from the electromagnetic flux to electricity.  This is generally attempted in the visible part of the flux spectrum.  However, some Michigan State University researchers have decided on a different approach: harvesting from the ultraviolet and infrared parts of the spectrum.  What’s the result?

A Michigan State University research team has finally created a truly transparent solar panel — a breakthrough that could soon usher in a world where windows, panes of glass, and even entire buildings could be used to generate solar energy. Until now, solar cells of this kind have been only partially transparent and usually a bit tinted, but these new ones are so clear that they’re practically indistinguishable from a normal pane of glass. …

Versions of previous semi-transparent solar cells that cast light in colored shadows can usually achieve efficiency of around seven percent, but Michigan State’s TLSC is expected to reach a top efficiency of five percent with further testing (currently, the prototype’s efficiency reaches a mere one percent). While numbers like seven and five percent efficiency seem low, houses featuring fully solar windows or buildings created from the organic material could compound that electricity and bring it to a more useful level.

The strategy is to cover everything in this material and beat the efficiency challenge by going around the barrier – put up enough of this glass and you don’t have to worry about the efficiency.  You may wonder how efficiency is defined, so I asked Wikipedia:

Solar cell efficiency is the ratio of the electrical output of a solar cell to the incident energy in the form of sunlight. …

By convention, solar cell efficiencies are measured under standard test conditions (STC) unless stated otherwise. STC specifies a temperature of 25 °C and an irradiance (G) of 1000 W/m² with an air mass 1.5 (AM1.5) spectrum. These conditions correspond to a clear day with sunlight incident upon a sun-facing 37°-tilted surface with the sun at an angle of 41.81° above the horizon.^[2][3] This represents solar noon near the spring and autumn equinoxes in the continental United States with surface of the cell aimed directly at the sun. Under these test conditions a solar cell of 20% efficiency with a 100 cm² ( (10 cm)² ) surface area would produce 2.0 W.

Incident energy is the amount of energy at all wavelengths encountered at the specific geographic location.  If the solar cell is transparent, this implies that the visible wavelengths are not harvested – i.e., that energy is lost.  So how much energy is carried on those wavelengths?  Windows to the Universe provides an explanation aimed at science teachers, and a nifty chart:

The peak of the Sun’s energy output is actually in the visible light range. This may seem surprising at first, since the visible region of the spectrum spans a fairly narrow range. And what a coincidence, that sunlight should be brightest in the range our eyes are capable of seeing! Coincidence? Perhaps not! Imagine that our species had “grown up” on a planet orbiting a star that gave off most of its energy in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. Presumably, we would have evolved eyes that could see UV “light”, for light of that sort is what would be most brightly illuminating our planet’s landscapes. The same sort of reasoning would apply to species that evolved on planets orbiting stars that emit most of their energy in the infrared; they would most likely evolve to have IR sensitive eyes. So it seems that our eyes are tuned to the radiation that our star most abundantly emits.

The graph below shows a simplified representation of the energy emissions of the Sun versus the wavelengths of those emissions. The y-axis shows the relative amount of energy emitted at a given wavelength (as compared to a value of “1” for visible light). The x-axis represents different wavelengths of EM radiation. Note that the scale of the y-axis is logarithmic; each tick mark represents a hundred-fold increase in amount of energy as you move upward.

So now we can understand why 5% is their efficiency goal.  With most of the energy unharvested, they have to go for lots of coverage rather than concentrated collection.

This raises two questions for me:

1. How will the removal of UV and infrared energy affect the environment?  If we install these everywhere, are we going to regret it?
2. How will this play with the nascent move towards building with wood?  Coating a wood building in this stuff may not be an optimal strategy, technologically nor aesthetically.  I have to wonder if this will be anything more than a niche product as the monster concrete (environmentally unsafe) and glass buildings become passé.  Or will burgeoning population force the creation of more such buildings, and since this energy collection material can be designed in from the ground up, it’ll become popular?

(h/t Sydney Sweitzer)

A sense for scale.

An update on the Mythryl XML SAX parser project: the validation step of elements is going quite well. The specification called for following the regular expression spelled out by the DTD for each element (see production 39). So I whipped out my recursive descent parser and built a nearly trivial function to translate the DTD specification for each element (beginning at production 46) into a parser structure usable by the recursive descent parser. Then I had to put together a List of the content of each element (nothing more than a summary, released as soon as it’s used) of the XML file and added the validation step in the etag production (the aforementioned production 39).

This all turned out to be quite simple and takes advantage of a mechanism in place and proven. The only question will be how to handle error reporting in a usable manner.

Previous work continues to support the direct use of the BNF as a start for getting the syntax handling rock solid with near-zero effort, allowing concentration on semantics.

In other matters, as I mentioned on Facebook, Cynbe has been diagnosed with lung cancer, as he announced here, and is looking for assistance with the Mythryl project. Please let me know if you’re interested and happen to understand that functional programming is not a reference to C, C++, or Pascal.

While we wait to see if Professor Clarkson will gain access to Kansas voting records, Wired notes that the state of voting machines in general is wretched:

Nearly every state is using electronic touchscreen and optical-scan voting systems that are at least a decade old, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law (.pdf). Beyond the fact the machines are technologically antiquated, after years of wear and tear, states are reporting increasing problems with degrading touchscreens, worn-out modems for transmitting election results, and failing motherboards and memory cards.

States using machines that are at least 15 years old include Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, which means they are far behind even a casual tech user in keeping pace with technological advancements. …

In addition to this problem, a number of voting machine vendors have gone out of business, making it difficult for states to find parts to service their machines. Forty-three states use systems that are no longer manufactured. Some election officials have resorted to scouring eBay for decommissioned equipment they can cannibalize to extend the life of their machines. Georgia was in such dire straits over the lack of parts for its voting machines that it hired a consultant to build customized hardware that could run its Windows 2000-based election system software.

After tallying up problems with old hardware, flawed software & voting standards, decertification, etc, comes the subject of money:

Officials in nearly three dozen states told the Brennan Center they’re interested in replacing their antiquated voting machines but don’t have money to do so. Most states have used up the Help America Vote Act funds allocated to them in 2002 to purchase the flawed machines they now have. The issue with aging voting machines cuts across class lines: wealthier election districts in some states have already found the money to buy new machines, while the poorer districts around them remain stuck with failing machines.

The Brennan Center estimates that the cost of replacing systems would run more than $1 billion. Virginia spent about $12,000 per precinct to replace its voting machines this year, and last year New Mexico replaced its aging voting equipment at a cost of $12 million across the state.

It would be interesting to see a comparison on the costs of replacing and maintaining the machines vs returning to the manual counting style.  Which is more accurate?  Which can sustain an audit which inspires confidence?  I deliberately do not include speed in the list, as I do not consider that a critical component of the election process.

It’s also interesting to contemplate how the loss of election machines may damage attempts to commit widespread voting fraud.  Of course, it depends on the point of corruption – if the voting machines themselves are taking incorrect votes, then their loss damages the causes of the corrupters, while if the corruption takes place at more central servers, then the replacement of the voting machines may not matter.  But if they’re not replaced at all, then do the manually counted votes eventually get entered into the server?  Or do we just see the Secretary of State, on a television show, toting up county reports two weeks later?

As an aside, I recall, from many, many years ago, a former election official telling me that her precinct’s ballots had become inadvertently drenched.  They ended up tossing them into an oven for a gentle drying before driving them to the collection point for the ballots.

I’ll leave the jokes to you folks.

(Meteor Blades @ The Daily Kos also covered the issue of old election machines)

ExtremeTech reported a year ago on the anticipated flip of Earth’s magnetic field:

But the Earth’s magnetic field is shifting. New satellite data from the ESA shows that the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than we previously thought — an indicator that scientists believe is a precursor to a geomagnetic reversal. At the time, there was nothing to worry about — previous geological records suggested that a geomagnetic reversal occurs over thousands of years. Now, however, a new study has analyzed rocks from the previous flip — the Matuyama-Brunhes magnetic reversal of 786,000 years ago — and found that the process completed in under 100 years. [doi: 10.1093/gji/ggu287]

Now archaeology has data to contribute.  Samir S. Patel in Archaeology Magazine (Sept/October, 2015) reports on a byproduct of the research:

During the Iron Age, people [in southern Africa] would, perhaps because of a bad harvest, ritually “cleanse” their villages by burning them down. The fires burned hot enough to melt magnetic materials in the clay. When those materials cooled and solidified, they were remagnetized by the magnetic field, recording its intensity and direction at that moment.

Southern Africa lies within the South Atlantic Anomaly, a particularly weak patch in the magnetic field, larger than the United States. If it grows large enough, according to University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno, it could trigger a reversal of the poles. Understanding how the magnetic field, especially in southern Africa, has changed over time might help scientists better comprehend these processes, since there has not been much good historical data on the southern magnetic field. Because of Iron Age superstition, Tarduno and his colleagues now have a record of the anomaly for between 1,600 and 1,000 years ago.

The findings show that during the Iron Age, the magnetic field was as it is today: weakening, with a big southern dent.

A reader laments concerning Egypt’s use of saltwater against the Palestinians:

Typical short-sighted behavior of so many members of the human species. Sure, destroy more precious arable land.

I’d say this is an example of the problems inherent in specialization.  No doubt the Egyptian military is quite pleased with its solution, as it solves the problem set before them (by the politicians).  Their focus is confined entirely to rendering the tunnels unusable.  The problem of farmland?

Not their bailiwick.

Anastylosis:

an archaeological term for a reconstruction technique whereby a ruined building or monument is restored using the original architectural elements to the greatest degree possible. It is also sometimes used to refer to a similar technique for restoring broken pottery and other small objects.

Found in the Archaeology Magazine article “The Acropolis of Athens“.

Egypt is using water even as it thirsts after it – because it’s using saltwater as a weapon.  AL Monitor‘s Mohammed Othman reports on Egypt’s destruction of Palestinian-dug tunnels – and how it’s doubly hitting the Palestinians:

The Egyptian army has been pumping large volumes of Mediterranean Sea waters since Sept. 17 into the buffer zone that it began building two years ago, along 14 kilometers of the Palestinian-Egyptian border. The move is the latest attempt to destroy the tunnels dug by Palestinians under the city of Rafah over the years of the Israeli blockade.

The operation is causing concern for the Rafah border area inhabitants, who say that it will affect their lives there. Farmer Nayef Abu Shallouf, who owns three acres of land less than 300 meters from the Egyptian border, said all the salt water will leave his land briny and destroy his crops. He told Al-Monitor, “In addition to damaging the soil, sinkholes will appear wherever tunnels were dug, with collapses occurring sooner or later.”

As Mohammed explains, this will destroy precious farmland, forcing the farmers off their land – and into cities already short of space for new inhabitants.

Middle East Eye expands on the driving force of this strategy:

But the story goes deeper: the Egyptian government is trying to economically crush Hamas, an ally of the Muslim brotherhood.

Gaza, and its 1.8 million population, has been surviving under an Israeli economic and military blockade for 9 years, suffering increasing poverty and military attacks, leading the UN to announce, in a new report, that Gaza will be made uninhabitable by 2020.

Local police sources in Rafah told MEE on condition of anonymity that Egypt has destroyed 95 percent of supply tunnels connecting Gaza Strip and Egypt. The tunnels were first constructed immediately after Israel’s disengagement from the Sinai Peninsula, as part of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. But digging got more intense after Israel declared a blockade on Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections.

Sadly, this has consequences for the Egyptians as well:

Over the past months Egyptian military bulldozers have also destroyed many Egyptian homes to create a buffer zone of at between 500 and 1,000 metres on the Egyptian side, and 1,000 metres. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened being gutted.

Or is it political?

… pro-Sisi Egyptian newspaper Al-Bawaba reported that the aim of this project is to control the area by creating a canal of seawater, turning it into a “development” resource by establishing fish farms.

Assuming they are viable, who benefits?  The Egyptian farmers, or the Egyptian military – or some politicians with some pull?  It sounds like the farmers are the last in line for a benefit.

As it probably must in order to keep its hardliners in line, Iran test fired a new ballistic missile, according to AL Monitor‘s Abbas Qaidaari:

Last week, Iran’s Ministry of Defense managed to successfully test-fire its Emad medium-range ballistic missile. According to Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, “This is the first ballistic missile developed by Iran that can be precision-guided until it reaches its target.”  …

The Emad launch was Iran’s first ballistic missile test since the nuclear agreement was concluded. According to the JCPOA, Iran is not allowed to improve and test medium-range ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. Iranian officials do not, however, interpret the rule as a restriction on its missile arsenal, arguing that the weapons are not designed to carry an atomic payload. …

So Iran begins pressing the boundaries.  A nation ancient in prestige and pride vs the Great Satan.  Both sides had best be careful.

Kimberly Mok @ TreeHugger.com waxes ecstatic over the latest work of Vo Trong Nghia:

© Vo Trong Nghia Architects

It’s a gorgeous space, especially when strategically lit up at night to emphasize its bamboo construction. Designed to hold up to 300 people, the conference hall is intended to serve a variety of functions — hosting concerts, meetings, lectures and the like. Though the floor plan is in a simple, rectangular footprint, the space itself is elevated by the use of bamboo members that are bent and shaped into spectacular vaulted forms, which hold up the asymmetrically pitched and thatched roof.

A visual treat – more pictures are provided by Kimberly.  But the practical questions abound – what are the upkeep requirements?  What is the expected lifetime?

AL Monitor‘s Ayah Aman reports on the recent first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt:

Throughout the two days of voting, Oct. 18-19, conflicting figures emerged as to the percentage of voters casting their ballots after the Supreme Electoral Commission announced on the first day of voting that the initial estimated rate of participation was only 1.2% as of the middle of Oct. 18.

This figure raised the ire of the government and official media outlets, which mobilized to urge voters to participate through extensive media campaigns that blanketed official television station airwaves under the slogan of “Inzil” (come down).

Why?

As she headed to cast her vote, Mirfat Hussein, 50, told Al-Monitor, “I am participating out of fear that Islamists and remnants of the old regime would prevail. But I do not expect to be well represented in parliament.”

Along the same lines, a number of young people interviewed by Al-Monitor on the outskirts of Dokki and Agouza neighborhoods indicated that they lacked confidence in parliament and its ability to echo the opinions of the Egyptian people. In that regard, Mohamed Hosni, 20, said, “I do not have a lot of trust in the candidates … and do not expect them to back youth-related issues.”

Hazem Baily, 37, disapprovingly said, “I did not know that there were elections being held in the first place.”

Political activist Safwan Mohammed talked with Al-Monitor about the reluctance of young people to participate, and said, “Lack of participation by the youth in these elections is clear to everyone; the reason simply is that most young political front-runners in Egypt are currently jailed.”

The site Madi Masr provides coverage of various issues related to the elections here.  Villagers in Upper Egypt and the West Delta region have an old concern:

But as the discussion continued, people dropped the political jargon and their focus on “Egypt’s interests” faded away as they turned their attention to local issues. After his initial insistence on the importance of state institutions, Braik then defined the perfect parliamentarian as one who “gets the deed done.”

But what is the deed? And who can get it done?

For most Fayoum voters, “the deed” is getting access to water. Most villages in the governorate have suffered from a severe water shortage for months. They also want better infrastructure and more job opportunities, especially for young people.

People here agree on the key issues to be fixed, but their idea of who can “get it done” depends on their tribal and family affiliations.

I wonder if access to water may someday become a nationwide issue in the United States.  Otherwise, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

For the smaller government crowd, there’s another advantage to solar power: less regulation.  After all, the sun delivers its energy in a form which, at this distance, we can easily withstand with little damage, and collecting it, in the current forms of solar collection, has little impact on the environment.  Oil, the medium of energy in our legacy power system, is a messy, dangerous substance to collect, transport, and refine.

Naturally, there are questions concerning the equipment used to collect solar power, as National Geographic pursued last year:

… researchers say it’s difficult to get quality data across solar panel markets.  The numbers available on the environmental impact of solar panel manufacturing in China are “quite different from those in the U.S. or in Europe,” said Fengqi You, assistant professor of engineering at Northwestern University and a co-author of the May study. “It is a very complicated problem.”

Business continues relating to reality.  Ceres, “a non-profit organization advocating for sustainability leadership,” reports that 68 more companies are signing on to the American Business Act on Climate Pledge.

As key international climate negotiations near, 68 additional companies today joined the White House-led American Business Act on Climate Pledge. Companies making the pledge have set significant greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energy sourcing goals for 2020 and beyond, and are focusing on increasing energy efficiency, boosting low-carbon investing and making sustainability more accessible to low-income Americans.

This second round of business pledges at the White House – in addition to 13 company pledges announced in July – includes 19 businesses that work directly with Ceres, a sustainability advocacy group, or its climate policy coalition, Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP): Autodesk, Best Buy, Bloomberg, CA Technologies, Dell, eBay, EMC, General Mills, IKEA, Kellogg’s, Levi Strauss & Co., L’Oreal, Mars, Nestle, Nike, PG&E,  Starbucks, Unilever and The Walt Disney Company.

It would be interesting to put some solid numbers to these pledges, of course.  For example, is eBay emitting  gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere?  Or does it consider itself to be quite a minor player?  It might reveal some sincerity and, played properly, bring more pressure to bear on competitors who are not yet on the wagon.

(h/t Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com)

A reader reminds me of another local expression of Brutalism:

There’s also the Southdale Library and Courthouse building http://images.publicradio.org/…/20120308_hennepin…

A building of uncertain fate.  From the StarTribune:

Edina’s 42-year-old Hennepin County Southdale Library, which also houses courtrooms and a busy service center, squats like a white box on columns in one of the Twin Cities’ busiest areas, close to strip malls, big-box stores, groceries and chain restaurants.

With the imperious but distinctive building now in need of millions of dollars in upgrades, county leaders are looking into whether it would make more sense to demolish it and sell the land at the high-demand corner of W. 70th Street and York Avenue S.

Inadvertently forgotten remark on this subject:

SSRIs are perhaps less unpleasant than the Ludovico Technique, but I suspect just as fictional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_technique

SSRIs from Wikipedia:

SSRIs are the most widely prescribed antidepressants in many countries.^[2] The efficacy of SSRIs in mild or moderate cases of depression has been disputed.^[3][4][5]

Federico Pistono writes in a NewScientist (3 October 2015, paywall) opinion piece about the unintended, er, consequences of UBI – unconditional basic income:

It’s a simple concept with far-reaching consequences. The state would give a monthly stipend to every citizen, regardless of income or employment status. This would simplify bureaucracy, get rid of outdated and inefficient means-based benefits, and provide support for people to live with dignity and find new meaning.

Perhaps the biggest UBI experiments, involving a whole town in Canada and 20 villages in India, have confounded a key criticism – that it would kill the incentive to work. Not only did people continue working, but they were more likely to start businesses or perform socially beneficial activities compared with controls. In addition, there was an increase in general well-being, and no increase in alcohol, drug use or gambling.

He notes that this is only an initial study, of inadequate size and design – but still very interesting.  I should think one of the eventual study insights will be the recognition by the study participants that they do not have to risk everything in order to try out a business concept – there will always be a way to put food on the table.  I recognize this is contrary to the American mythos of the inventor or businessman who risks all to start a business, succeeds, and is granted great riches and glory – but think about it, just how moral is it to risk your family’s security, possibly its very existence, just so you can start a business?  That, of course, is a question which a perfectly rational person would shake their head to – but humanity is neither rational nor particularly, in general, moral; we are subject to whimsy, to obsessions, to the needs and requirements of a brain out of context.

Pistono’s statement also punctures another old myth – that humanity is a bunch of lazy SOBs who wouldn’t work without the lash of hunger and insecurity across their shoulders.  This old myth, which, it occurs to me, is used to justify the greed at the top of many corporate ladders (and I’ll happily grant this fellow an exception).  Remember that out of context brain?  It requires stimulation and challenge, the chance to explore, whether it be new ways to make textiles or valleys on Mars.  By giving folks a predictable, stable base, they can begin exploring the landscape that interests them the most. From this, I have to wonder about knock-on effects.

1. Creatvity.  A small explosion of creativity may occur as folks use this modicum of security to try to new solutions to old problems, or attempt solving new problems in themselves.  It would be very interesting to watch these experiments and measure the creativity unleashed, and how well it works in Canada vs India.  Which culture is more creative?  Which upbringing constrains innovation?  That could cause some fireworks.
2. Employee stability.  How stable is employment at established companies in these zones?  At larger companies?  Smaller?  How about measuring companies’ hierarchical components and correlating it with employee stability?  If an employee is not constrained by hunger to retain a job, then how much happier must a company keep their employees?
3. Employer reactions.  I know that, years ago, the large automakers in the United States were actually for single payer health systems, because that would allow them to simplify their HR departments.  But how would employers feel about UBI?  They could maybe lower wages, but if employee stability was lower, the costs of training more new employees might not be worth it.

I can easily see a healthier, better educated workforce populace.

For those who’ll rear up and shout about socialism, I have a few observations.  First, we’re a lot wealthier than we used to be; second, change is good (I’ve observed that many 50+ year old men will hunch their shoulders and mutter, “Change is baaaad!” – including me) in general, as we explore the general problem of societal survival in a world undergoing change that impacts us all; and, as the greater context of this opinion piece is robots and the impact on jobs (I’ve written about that before here and here), we must consider how those whose jobs are eliminated by intelligent robotics (if, indeed, that is permitted to happen) will continue to be fed & housed – because idle, hungry hands are devil’s ….

…. which reminds me of my friend Chris Torkildson, who, declaiming that idle computer cycles were the devil’s plaything, wrote a program of deduction for an otherwise idle computer, and fed it a whole bunch of facts.   It was a little stunning when it asked if a platypus was a mammal or a bird.  But idle computer cycles does suggest some necessary questions about how much an app, or an AI, should be paid for its work.

Here is the UBI-Belgium website.

Just a lovely bit of snark over at The Daily Kos.

In order to win the future, it is my belief as a self-stated expert that ALL depositors must hit certain benchmarks by 2014. Your bank will be monitored for progress towards these goals.

Here are the benchmarks:

By 2011, 60% of your depositors must have at least $100,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2012, 75% of your depositors must have at least $500,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2013, 90% of your depositors must have at least $750,000 in their savings accounts.

By 2014, 100% of your depositors must have at least $1,000,000 in their savings accounts.

…

… but this one’s a little odd.  Tech Insider reports on sequestering soot on paper.

[Anirudh] Sharma built a demo device that can pull soot from a burning candle and accumulate it in a modified syringe, which is then used to fill a modified HP inkjet cartridge with a mixture of the soot, vodka, and olive oil. When the cartridge is integrated with an Arduino ink shield, this decidedly low-tech ink can be used to print at a 96 dpi resolution. …

Sharma estimates a 4-year-old diesel engine could produce enough carbon to fill an HP cartridge within 60 minutes. A chimney would take only 10 minutes approximately.

I’m seeing contraptions for positioning this device at the top of chimneys all over Minnesota.  From Anirudh Sharma’s website comes this charming bit:

I was once day dreaming about the awesome days we spent back in Bikaner, a small city in the west of Rajasthan. It reminded me of the heat, travelling in sweat inducing autorickshaws while we used to do our experiments with building our Multi-touch table with low tech techniques. The month of June there was full of sweat, with unburnt smoke rising from unending tur-tur-ing of autorickshaws blackening our skin.

I can imagine that, having putted around Pune, India one day a few years back.

In all fairness, they are not positioning this as a source of sequestration.  Sharma says he was just having fun.

(h/t Derek Markham @ TreeHugger.com)

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog comes up with a chart of Obama-era budget deficits:

and notes,

In the not-too-distant past, talk in the political world of the U.S. budget deficit was all the rage. As the Tea Party “movement” took shape, conservatives quite literally took to the streets to express their fear that President Obama and Democrats were failing to address the “out of control” deficit.

Congressional Republicans agreed. As recently as 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was asked about the radicalism of his political agenda and he responded, “[W]hat I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year.” Around the same time, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued that Congress should be “focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.”

The Republican rhetoric was ridiculously wrong. We don’t have a trillion-dollar deficit; the deficit isn’t the ultimate problem; and it’s not growing.

Which is interesting, but fails to note that the Executive doesn’t make major spending decisions – Congress does.  All the Executive does is propose a budget, which may be ignored by Congress.  Veto threats are the only direct negotiating tactic available to the Executive.  The two red bars indicate when the Democrats also held Congress; the budget deficit is highest in the second year.  Then the GOP takes control of Congress and the deficits fall.

A naive observation, of course; Obama had to clean up the mess left by one of the worst Administrations in recent memory, and the announcement of a continual presence in Afghanistan reflects the magnitude of the disaster of the last GOP Administration.  The chart is virtually meaningless, which Benen implicitly admits:

To reiterate a point that bears repeating, I don’t necessarily consider this sharp reduction in the deficit to be good news. If it were up to me, federal officials would be borrowing more, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.

And I agree.  The Government is not expected to run at a profit.  The Government is not a business.  Its purpose is to govern, with all that implies.  Our crumbling public works is a dangerous situation, and will result in changes perhaps unwelcome by the American public, as noted by my contributing blogger, Chris Johnson.  It would benefit all of us greatly to take advantage of the low interest rates to fund the repair of roads and bridges, plumbing and national parks.

But to the group that believes everything is economic, the chart will be important, even if the interpretation is open to wide debate.  Add in the GOP’s relentless push to increase Dept of War funding without raising taxes, and the cognitive dissonance becomes quite entertaining.

When it comes to enhancing moral choices, one reader has an idea:

So, citalopram for all congresscritters and titans of industry, I say.

Another reader hits the obvious home run:

Which had slipped my mind completely.   I present, without comment (since I’m out of context), from Wikipedia:

In his essay, “Clockwork Oranges,”^{[citation needed]} Burgess asserts that “this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness.” This title alludes to the protagonist’s positive emotional responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will. To induce this conditioning, the protagonist is subjected to a technique in which violent scenes displayed on screen, which he is forced to watch, are systematically paired with positive stimulation ^[16] in the form of nausea and “feelings of terror” caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of the films.

“Brutalist Architecture.”  TreeHugger.com‘s Lloyd Alter celebrates the 40th birthday of Robarts Library:

Brutalist architecture is not very popular these days. The concrete in them has barely cured through, yet they are under threat everywhere. They are solidly built; tearing them down is a difficult job and a huge waste of energy, both embodied and in the process of demolition. Some people even say that they were designed to intimidate; at Slate they recently asked Were Brutalist Buildings on College Campuses Really Designed to Thwart Student Riots?

From Wikipedia:

(“Robarts Library” by Dr.K. – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.)

Quite the thing.  Not too far from here, the University of Minnesota has Rarig Center:

(“Rarig Center Minnesota 1” by AlexiusHoratius – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.)

Perhaps not as horridly magnificent, but it has its quiet sense of having stomped on something as it settled into place.

Ross Andersen’s article for The Atlantic concerning an oddball star, designated KIC 8462852 (this is the link to the academic paper), roughly 1481 light years distant, is being noised across the Net:

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash. …

And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.

When I spoke to [postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

Well, I gotta say, 150,000 stars is peanuts in this Universe – in the Milky Way galaxy, even.  That bit of rhetoric fell flat for me.

But the rest is the stuff of dreams.  Sure wish I was an astronomer working on that team.  Or even the janitor.  About all I can guess at this point is it’s not a Dyson sphere – although maybe we’re catching a glimpse of one under construction.

Now to wait for our wonder to be deflated …

…. appears to be dancing.

This is going to make my hair itch for weeks.  Dan Jones investigates the problems of moral choice and big problems for NewScientist (26 September 2015, paywall) and comes up with a doozylicious problem, at least in my mind.  First, he covers the basics: intuitive moral sentiments are those gut reactions you have learned for local situations – you see it, you act.  These are good when the situation is, ah, local, or better put, when the effects of your action are limited to the local (geographical) area, and, although it’s not stated, an analogous statement about chronological measurements.

And then there is what Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene calls “manual mode”, where the situation calls for deliberate consideration.  The decision may not be quick, but it may more often be correct, especially if the intuitive reaction yields an improper result.  Manual mode appears to be more appropriate for situations where the choice, correct or not, will have a far-reaching affect.

He covers a bit of history, such as the British history of abolition (it involves shame), and then moves on to modern movements, which also utilize shame, which brings us to this:

However, harnessing the power of rational reflection, collective identity and shame may not be the only options for would-be moral revolutionaries. In their book Unfit for the Future, philosophers Ingmar Persson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford argue that our moral brains are so compromised that the only way we can avoid catastrophe is to enhance them through biomedical means.

In the past few years, researchers have shown it might actually be possible to alter moral thinking with drugs and brain stimulation. Molly Crockett of the University of Oxford has found that citalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor used to treat depression, makes people more sensitive to the possibility of inflicting harm on others. Earlier this year, for instance, Crockett and colleagues found that participants who had taken citalopram were willing to pay twice as much money as controls to prevent a stranger from receiving an electric shock (Current Biology, vol 25, p 1852).

I leaned back and wonder, Is this the loss of moral choice?

Of course that raises moral questions in itself – who to treat, how, and at what age? But Persson and Savulescu argue that if the techniques can be shown to change our moral behaviour for the better (who or what defines “better” is another question), then there are no good ethical reasons not to use them. Take the issue of consent, which children could not provide. “The same is true of all upbringing and education, including moral instruction,” says Persson.

But wouldn’t biomedical moral enhancement undermine responsibility by turning us into moral robots? Persson and Savulescu argue that biomedical treatment poses no more threat to free will and moral responsibility than educational practices that push us towards the same behaviour.

Assuming this was practical across a large segment of the population – it’s not, yet – can I agree with Persson & Savulescu that this is no different from moral instruction? I’m finding this difficult.

Education is the provision of known true facts (as best we can know them) and processes to sentient beings in order to facilitate better actions.  In other words, the brain is altered by the impact of knowledge.  However, as sentient, self-aware beings, we have at least the potential to understand why we react as we do to the world, such as understanding how increasing greenhouse gasses causes world wide climate change.  If the administration of a drug would cause a comparable change in reactions as does knowledge, well, how is this working?  The example is interesting, as it suggests an increase in empathy, but I have to wonder if it would a similar impact in manual mode.

Yet, unless one believes in the deterministic model of the universe, I see a difference in that the person subjected to education, general or moral, is still making a choice: a choice to believe, or disbelieve, the evidence, the processes, or even the inclinations of God, and whether or not the result of these actions are beneficial or not for themselves and those they are impacting in the non-local area.  Is this so true of the person with the medicated morality?  As I think about it (with my head-cold bound brain), it seems more and more fantastical to think a medication can change morality.  To be sure, the cited study appears to have modified the intuitive moral mode; would it also affect the manual mode?

Is it coercion?  Is shame coercion?  Yes, and yes.  Which is impermissible?

Another question: if a drug can make us “more moral”, does this imply there is a morality of some certainty, and that it’s known by our bodies if not articulated by our philosophers?  Or is it simply a matter of interpretation: sure, the behavior is modified by the drug, but whether this is more or less moral depends on the interpretation put on the action?

Yep, the hair will be itching for weeks.  Let me know what you think.