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More here.

(h/t Amanda at LifeBuzz, via Arts Editor Deb White)

Warmer than here in Minnesota?  Natonal Geographic is monitoring it:

Scientists have measured what is likely the highest temperature ever on Antarctica: 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 Celsius).

The measurements were made last Tuesday at Argentina’s Esperanza Base, on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to the meteorological website Weather Underground. The previous hottest known temperature on the continent was 62.8°F (17.1°C), recorded at Esperanza Base on April 24, 1961.

Some raw information on Antarctica temperatures and the general problem of gathering data in such an extreme place is available from Oak Ridge National Lab:

Recording Antarctic station data is particularly prone to errors. This is mostly due to climatic extremes, the nature of Antarctic science, and the variability of meteorological staff at Antarctic stations (high turnover and sometimes untrained meteorological staff).

Result summary?

The annual series shows a warming over the past 40 years but most of this warming occurred before 1970. Table 1 lists the warming trends and their significance based on the t-test for each month of the year. Table 2 lists the anomaly series for 1957-1999. An increase in the annual surface temperatures is shown over this period (1.53C per century), with the largest trend apparent in the winter months, as found for northern hemisphere polar regions (Weller, 1998). This can be compared with the Jacka and Budd (1998) finding of a continent-wide warming of 1.2C per century. The greater variability in the winter season is indicative of a lower significance of the change than in the other seasons. A decrease in Antarctic surface temperatures is found for some months (April and May).

Surface temperature trends are seen to rise quite steadily up until 1991. In that year Mount Pinatubo (Philippines) and Mount Hudson (Chile) erupted, and it has been suggested (Jacka & Budd, 1998) that these eruptions have had a major influence on the general lowering of temperatures after that year.

A complex and difficult undertaking.

On a less sober note, over at the Daily Kos Pakalolo contrasts the report with the Senate GOP.  This reminds me of the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News as he denied his party had lost – ideology over reality.  Andrew Sullivan was on the case back in 2012:

This looks like it was scripted by Ricky Gervais. I watched with my jaw slowly dropping lower and lower (which was hard since I was smiling so widely as well). James Poniewozik calls it “one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen on cable news”

Having just typed “2012”, I’m a little dismayed as the GOP categorization of ideology over reality started at least with Rep Newt Gingrich, who served as House Speaker 1995 – 1999, resigning abruptly after losing five seats in the midterm elections – a collision with reality.  So this is wenty years of something I would categorize as near-insanity.  It’s certainly been entertaining (which I appreciate – really!), but at some point you have to wish there’d be a little maturity, a little understanding that your refusal to accept reality could result in a lot of people getting hurt.  It’s quite one thing for former Rep Bachmann to compare Obama to the Germanwings suicide, because, offensive as it is, few take her seriously, and the details of the Iranian deal need deliberate analysis by foreign policy experts – not the cacklings of someone whose claim to fame is founding a caucus and precious little otherwise.  But when a sitting Senator writes a book denouncing the findings of honest (but who needs to add that they’re honest?) climate change scientists as a mass conspiracy and hoax, well, now you have a problem because if the good Senator is wrong, every moment spent being obstructive rather than working on the problem may cost lives; wait long enough, and there will be substantial change to our lifestyles, our life expectancies – even our national security.

And that’s not the conservative thing to do.  Not that I labor under the delusion that the GOP is ‘conservative’.  They are reactionaries, but that’s not the same thing as being conservative.

… think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  At least in the sense of memory manipulation.  Jessica Hamzelou in NewScientist (14 March 2015) reports scientists can implant false memories in mice.

[Karim] Benchenane’s team used electrodes to monitor the activity of mice’s place cells [neurons that fire in response to being in or thinking about a specific place] as the animals explored an enclosed arena, and in each mouse they identified a cell that fired only in a certain arena location. Later, when the mice were sleeping, the researchers monitored the animals’ brain activity as they replayed the day’s experiences. A computer recognised when the specific place cell fired; each time it did, a separate electrode would stimulate brain areas associated with reward.

When the mice awoke, they made a beeline for the location represented by the place cell that had been linked to a rewarding feeling in their sleep. A brand new memory – linking a place with reward – had been formed.

It seems so reasonable, but assuming this can be scaled up to human memory, it’s a trifle unsettling, especially if an electrode could be replaced with an electric cap.

Or a remote device.

I suppose I could talk about how memories are notoriously unreliable; pictures and videos are much  more trustworthy.  But then think about how they can be modified.

Reality is becoming far too plastic for my tastes.

For those of us who live on the instant, here’s a recent measure of Obama’s approval:

The fascinating question, for me, is what will be the long term analysis?  In twenty years, scraping away the barnacles of the petty partisan politics of today should give a much clearer view of whether continuing the Bush-era policies of bailing out the financial industry, stopping wars, starting wars, and transforming healthcare were negatives or positives.  And, of course, coming to a tentative deal with Iran regarding its nuclear ambitions.

But who can resist a chart of a snapshot?  Here we see Obama’s recent run at getting his head above water in the approval ratings game has come to nought.  With the tentative Iranian deal now publicized, I expect it’ll get worse on the next poll as the GOP’s superior PR game will, at least temporarily, persuade a portion of the electorate that we are now doomed (here’s the preemptive shot over the bow by former Rep. Bachmann).

The Iraqis win back Tikrit, home town of Saddam Hussein, with a little help from some allies:

The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city. Al-Abadi said those tactics would now be replicated in other areas.

Brett McGurk, the U.S. deputy special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, tweeted that the coalition’s airstrikes had destroyed numerous ISIS shelters.

“We will continue to support courageous Iraqi forces operating under Iraqi command as they work to reclaim their territory from #ISIL,” McGurk tweeted.

The key to victory in Tikrit this time, the Prime Minister said, was surprise. But help from the coalition of Shiite militiamen and volunteers also played a part.

The militia members, estimated to number around 20,000, are backed by Iran. The offensive marked the first open participation of Iranian advisers on the front lines in Iraq.

The Iraqis of Tikrit are Sunnis Muslims, as is ISIS; the government forces are, for the most part, Shiite, as is Iran; some reports suggest the inhabitants of Tikrit may suffer for it, especially as they are a minority within Iraq.

But the ability to work with Iran against  a common foe shows that America and Iran are not irreconcilable, despite the apparent wishes of the GOP.  I haven’t noticed a great deal of publicity concerning this temporary alliance in the United States, and I’m guessing that Iran will not emphasize it, either, as it won’t serve their purposes.  Time will tell.

Governor Jerry Brown of California calls for mandatory water cutbacks of 25% in comparison to a baseline of 2013 usage:

With new measurements showing the state’s mountain snowpack at a record low, officials said California’s drought is entering uncharted territory and certain to extend into a fourth straight year. As a result, Brown issued sweeping new directives to reduce water consumption by state residents, including a mandatory 25 percent cut in urban water use.

On Wednesday, Brown attended a routine snow survey at 6,800 feet in the Sierra Nevada, near Echo Summit on Highway 50 along the road to Lake Tahoe. The April 1 survey is an annual ritual, marking the end of the winter season, in which automated sensors and technicians in the field strive to measure how much water the state’s farms and cities will receive from snowmelt.

The measurements showed the snowpack at just 5 percent of average for April 1, well below the previous record low of 25 percent, which was reached last year and in 1977.

California’s mountain snowpack is crucial to determining summer supplies, normally accounting for at least 30 percent of total fresh water available statewide. The poor snowpack means California reservoirs likely already have reached peak storage and will receive little additional runoff from snowmelt, an unusual situation.

Snowpack 5% of normal may be indicative of climate change, rather than chance deviation.  Brown certainly seems to think so:

“I would hope that we don’t see this in some punitive way, but that we see the challenge,” Brown said. “(The) reality is that the climate is getting warmer, the weather is getting more extreme and unpredictable, and we have to become more resilient, more efficient and more innovative. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

California residents curious about water resources may use the Water Education Foundation website to learn more.

Of interest is the Colorado River:

California is entitled to 4.4 million acre-feet of water annually from river. Most of that water irrigates crops in the Palo Verde, Imperial and Coachella valleys, located in the southeastern corner of the state, but the Colorado also is a vital source of water for urban southern California.

And water stored in aquifers:

About 30 percent of California’s total annual water supply comes from groundwater in normal years, and up to 60 percent in drought years.

Aquifers do not necessarily recharge quickly, so they cannot be regarded as eternal.  They can also become contaminated by pollution and other sources, although I do not know whether California supplies are vulnerable.

Water is also transported within the state to supply population centers.  Given the large population, the drop off in usable precipitation (that which runs off into the ocean may not be usable) and recent inclination towards drought, and the State is looking at quite the challenge.  The Colorado River usage itself may not be sustainable, as suggested by a recent government study:

It is widely known that the Colorado River, based on the inflows observed over the last century, is over-allocated and supply and demand imbalances are likely to occur in the
future. Up to this point, this imbalance has been managed, and demands have largely been met as a result of the considerable amount of reservoir storage capacity in the system, the fact that the Upper Basin States are still developing into their apportionments, and efforts the Basin States have made to reduce their demand for Colorado River water.

Concerns regarding the reliability of the Colorado River system to meet future needs are even more apparent today. The Basin States include some of the fastest growing urban and industrial areas in the United States. At the same time, the effects of climate change and variability on the Basin water supply has been the focus of many scientific studies which project a decline in the future yield of the Colorado River. Increasing demand, coupled with decreasing supplies, will certainly exacerbate imbalances throughout the Basin.

This is an interesting insight into Iraqi psychology, insomuch as such a thing can exist in such a fragmented country:

Ghayyath al-Kateb, a writer and social researcher, sees the Abu Azrael phenomenon in the context of Iraqi mythology. “This extraordinary and legendary hero is a product of Iraqi thought throughout the ages. Iraqi mythology, across multiple eras, has seen the emergence of many superheroes, the most prominent of which was Gilgamesh, who appears in the epic tale named after him,” he said.

Before Abu Azrael,​ Adnan al-Kaissie was a popular hero among Iraqis in the 1970s. Pictures of the professional wrestler, a media favorite, filled Iraqi homes and streets. Everybody wanted to be like Adnan.

According to Kateb, it is the nature of Arabs, and Iraqis in particular, to create legendary men who accomplish great things. Because of this tendency, political parties in Iraq have tried to exploit the Abu Azrael phenomenon. A number of government ministers and officials have met with him. The local media reported that Transport Minister Bayan Jabr received him March 16.

This probably explains Saddam Hussein’s survival at the top – a willingness to believe in the importance of the role of the strongman, which he certainly fulfilled.

She may have retired from the House of Representatives, where she founded the Tea Party caucus and did …. exactly what else?

Anyways, the Minneapolis StarTribune reports her latest headline grabber:

Bachmann likens Obama to ‘deranged’ Germanwings co-pilot

Make of it what you will.

A multitude of factors will affect the water supply of the world: pollution, climate change, politics, and geoengineering is just a partial list.  As the world population continues to grow, most of these factors will also grow, exacerbating the situation:

• Pollution contaminates water;
• Climate change causes some bodies of water to grow, while others shrink; and just as importantly, the composition of that water can change;
• Politics can result in the control of the supply of water flowing from one entity to another to be manipulated to achieve political goals
• Geoengineering, the building of dams, levees, and other structures to control a water supply can have side effects seen and unseen: think of the Aral Sea, a victim of Soviet hunger for cotton, and now a drought.

And water is one of the two most critical substances for survival, so when supplies become constrained, tensions can build.  A facet of this situation in Brazil has already been covered in an earlier post, where NewScientist reports that the prospect of dams on the Amazon may be reduced as scientists predict that the mere act of building dams may result in their becoming ineffective.

In Iran, on the eastern border with Afghanistan, the situation is degenerating, not improving.  As reported by Bloomberg’s Golnar Motevalli, one of Iran’s largest lakes is rapidly disappearing, leaving the locals in deep trouble:

A decade ago, the three lakes comprising Hamoun’s wetlands covered 5,600 square kilometers, the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. They served 420,000 people, two cities and 935 villages, EPO says. Today, only a few shallow patches of water remain.

The drying has almost doubled seasonal dust and sandstorms from 120 days a year to 220 days, increasing respiratory, heart and intestinal illnesses and rates of cancer, according to a 2014 report published by EPO and the United Nations.

It’s a fate mirroring that of Urmia, 2,100 kilometers to the west. Once the Middle East’s largest saltwater lake, it’s now 20 percent of its former size. Salt-infused winds blowing across barren sections are causing “serious” local health problems, according to the UN Development Programme.

Iran links the Hamouns’ problems to Afghanistan, urging its war-stricken neighbor to control irrigation of the Helmand River that starts in the Hindu Kush mountains and traverses agrarian provinces before reaching the border.

An Iran government report about the Hamouns says increased irrigation, diversion of water for crops, population growth and largely U.S.-funded projects including the Kajaki Dam started reducing flows to Sistan-Baluchestan in the 1950s.

Efforts to reach a water-management pact on the border date to the 1970s. Talks revived in the mid-2000s, a few years after after the Taliban government was deposed. They stalled again in 2008 when Afghanistan refused to endorse a UN-backed proposal from Iran to save the Hamouns.

It’s an explosive region within Iran, and now its water supply is imperiled.  It’s difficult to blame the Iranian government with the chaos that has infested Afghanistan for decades.  There’s little the United States, or indeed anyone but the two involved parties, can do, beyond mediation.  Perhaps that could be an opening for Obama or his successors: find a way to help in this area.  Unremitting hostility is not always a workable strategy.

(h/t Mohammad Ali Shabani, AL Monitor)

Or so says New York Times columnist Aaron E. Carroll (Professor of Pediatrics):

We’re eating too many calories, but not necessarily in the same way. Reducing what we’re eating too much of in a balanced manner would seem like the most sensible approach.

And, superficially, it seems right: after all, we do tend to gorge.  Yet, having a wife with a weight problem and having watched her not eat her head off, this is all entirely too simplistic and disappointing.  Speaking as a software engineer, you can’t just measure what goes in one end and comes out the other, even making allowance multiple destinations (exercise, defecation, etc) for those calories; you have to ask if the processing is a constant or a variable, and in at least this column Carroll is treating it as a constant.  Yet evidence is just beginning to accumulate that the stomach flora can influence how calories are processed (covered earlier here), and the amount of sleep can influence how your gut is working as well, discussed here (paywall) and here.

So, sure, eat less if you’re feeling tubby.  But don’t expect that, or even regular exercise, to fix you up.  Keep an eye on the research if this concerns you.

As the saga continues, Wal-Mart now enters the fray:

In the statement, Walmart CEO, Doug McMillon says, “Every day in our stores, we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have on our associates, customers and communities we serve. It all starts with our core basic belief of respect for the individual. Today’s passage of H.B. 1228 threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold. For these reasons, we are asking Governor Hutchinson to veto this legislation.”

And the Arkansas governor obliges:

The first-term Republican governor said he wants his state “to be known as a state that does not discriminate but understands tolerance.”

Cristian Farias at TNR believes the Arkansas law, as originally passed, is more extreme than the Indiana law:

In the event the victim of discrimination brings suit against the business, the locality would likely join the action, since it’s interested in enforcement of its nondiscrimination edicts. But at that point, the new Arkansas law would require the locality to show that nondiscrimination toward gays and lesbians “is essential to further a compelling government interest.” The italicized language is exclusive to Arkansas, and presumably would lead courts to afford great deference to the religious beliefs of the business owners vis-à-vis the customers or the municipality’s interest in a nondiscriminatory environment.

The bill’s definition of “substantial burden” on religion also seems broader because it specifically singles out any action designed “to prevent, inhibit, or curtail religiously-motivated practice consistent with a sincerely held religious belief”—these are the oft-cited wedding-vendor scenarios. And “religious belief” itself is defined nebulously as “the ability to act or refuse to act . . . whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.” It’s not hard to imagine the range of attitudes that fall into this definition—including a flat denial as “God told me it’s wrong for me to serve you.”

This is the old hierarchy problem: what takes precedence, government or religion?  Well, of course government does; but religion claims a special place in the minds of humanity, or so it claims: an all wise entity (or entities) not subject to the whim of man, but instead commanding them.  But, of course, not everyone gets the same message; indeed, messages are conflicting.  Thus the clashes, ranging from today’s tragedies in the Middle East to the various wars, insurrections, etc in Europe in most any age range before 1900 that you care to pick.

So the US government has the ticklish problem of not stepping on religious beliefs while still running a coherent system.  A thought experiment: my sect practices human sacrifice.  The government prohibits murder and even suicide and the courts have ruled the government has a compelling reason to prohibit those sacrifices.

So this is another, interesting push at the envelope.  Can businesses pick their customers dependent on religious sensibilities?  Hobby Lobby has a foot in the door, and now the religious fundamentalists are trying to assert a new right.  Much to their surprise, though, they’ve discovered their allies do not automatically follow along in all things; Big Business does not wish to risk the talent upon which their success rests, and they’ve moved to make it clear this is not acceptable.

My sense is that a good court would overturn this law.  “Religious sensibilities” may seem common-sensical and logical to the sect members holding them, but everyone not a member of that sect may find them bewildering – and at some point that will include right-wingers who find themselves kicked out of a restaurant because they’re whatever-they-are.  This leads to distrust, based on religious differences, and in a nation that depends on ignoring religious differences, by not permitting them to rule our reality, by actually not even knowing – or caring – what sect you worship within – well, this cannot be permitted.

(Updated 7/27/2015 to fix an incomplete – and incoherent – sentence)

Continuing the thread, it turns out we’re pumping so much oil we don’t know where to put it:

Never before has the U.S. had so much oil spurting up out of the ground and sloshing into storage tanks around the country. There’s so much oil that the U.S. now rivals Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer.

But there has been some concern that the U.S. will run out of places to put it all. Some analysts speculate that could spark another dramatic crash in oil prices.

Oil is down a little bit today.  Sources for oil can be found here and here.  Of course, prices vary by location; and so do costs.  If the price drops below the cost, then the more expensive sources will shut down until it becomes economical to restart, per standard theory; of course, the costs of stopping and starting must also be figured into such decisions.

Not to mention strategy, politics, and pride.  I don’t see Russia stopping production just because it might cost more.

“got”.  There are plenty of synonyms and it’s plumb-ugly.  Only good for dialog.

As the thread continues, Governor Mike Pence defends Indiana’s RFRA in the WSJ.

I am happy to state that I am not a migraine victim; my wife is currently fighting one off, as is, I’m sure, my sister, my brother-in-law, possibly my nephew, and indeed half of my friends. NewScientist  (7 March 2015) reports in “Not just a headache: How migraine changes your brain” (paywall) by Helen Phillips that at least migraines do not lead to mental declines:

To find out what’s really going on, these changes needed to be monitored. Do regular migraines cause more areas of stroke-like damage? And to what effect? Kruit and his team rescanned most of their volunteers nine years later. Interestingly they found the number of spots had slightly increased over time in women with migraine, but not in men, but they didn’t correlate with migraine frequency, severity, or treatment. Neither did the spots seem to have any bearing on cognitive functions like memory or attention. Another long-term study in France found no link between migraines and cognitive decline, all the way to age 80.

And relief may be on the way:

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and other techniques that deliver small electrical currents through electrodes on the forehead are already proving effective in some cases of migraine, as well as for chronic pain conditions and depression.

These treatments seem to work by steadily altering and normalising oversensitive brain circuits, though at present it’s not clear how. One big advantage is that they are well tolerated compared with other therapies, including drugs and botox – which is approved for migraine treatment by the US Food and Drug Administration.

For all of us, this is hopeful news.  I do recall as a teenager occasionally having horrendous headaches; but, as I recall, eating a meal usually cleared them up, and I called hunger headaches.  I wonder if they were just a form of migraine.  And one more little tidbit:

Work with children is adding weight to the idea that migraine is a progressive brain disease, which may appear in different ways at different stages of life, beginning with some kind of genetic susceptibility. One startling suggestion is that infant colic, the uncontrolled crying and fussiness often blamed on sensitive stomachs or reflux, may be an early form of migraine.

There’s a family story about Dad sitting up with me one night, out on the porch, watching thunderstorms roll in over Puget Sound while I screamed and fussed and whatever with the colic.

First, let me just say that I’m delighted to see World Press Review continuing.  I was a long time subscriber until the print edition was stopped many years ago; I had been aware the editor took it digital, but did not keep up with it.  Now operating as WorldPress.org, it continues to reprint interesting articles from anywhere in the world.

This January article by Andrew Topf suggests the Russian government retains its imperial ambitions:

We are already seeing this to be the case. As Oilprice.com reported on Tuesday, Putin is set to absorb South Ossetia—Georgia’s breakaway republic that declared itself independent in 1990. Under an agreement “intended to legalize South Ossetia’s integration with Russia,” Russia would invest 2.8 million rubles (US$50 million) to “fund the socio-economic development of South Ossetia,” according to Agenda.ge, a Tbilisi-based news site. The situation is analogous to Crimea because, like Crimea, South Ossetia contains a significant Russian-speaking population with ties to the Motherland.

When the current oil price fall started, I muttered to my wife that this was the start of an unannounced war on Russia.

(Source: Macrotrends)

Russia’s primary export is oil, and dropping the price 50% really put the hurt on them.  She didn’t necessarily agree with my conspiracy theory.  But it looks like Russia is maneuvering in this cool war:

The current move on South Ossetia is a way for Russia to assert its energy independence in the face of Western sanctions and low oil prices. It comes as Russia has announced plans to divert all of its natural gas crossing Ukraine to a route via Turkey. As Bloomberg reported last week, Gazprom will send 63 billion cubic meters through a proposed link under the Black Sea to Turkey—after the earlier South Stream pipeline, a $45-billion project that would have crossed Bulgaria, was scrapped by Russia amid opposition from the European Union. By sending the gas to Turkey and on to Europe via Greece, Gazprom is in effect sending Europe an ultimatum: Build pipelines to European markets, or we will sell the gas to other customers.

The proposed land grab in South Ossetia, combined with the snub to Europe by shifting its gas to Turkey and bypassing Ukraine, is a classic Putin power play. “Russia is preparing to absorb a province of neighboring Georgia, and delivering an ultimatum to Europe that it could lose much of the Russian gas on which it relies,” Steve LeVine wrote in Quartz. “Putin has argued that the West is simply intent on ousting him and weakening Russia. … Faced with these perceived attempts to undercut him and his country, Putin suggests that he has no choice but to pull around the wagons and stick it out. This could go on a long time.”

The drop in oil prices has been caused partly by the Saudis, which then clouds the issue: just who’s under attack?  Or is it necessary to wonder: perhaps the the US and Saudi Arabia have multiple targets: Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

The death of another blogger in Bangladesh:

On Monday, the 27-year-old Rahman fell victim to the same brazen act that killed Roy, hacked to death by two men with knives and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel agency.

A sobering thought, even for a rank new blog such as this one.  Even more horrifying was this continuation:

Of the three involved in the Monday morning attack, two were quickly caught by bystanders.

In confessions to police, the pair — both students at Islamic schools — said they didn’t know what a blog was, nor had they seen Rahman’s writing.

They said they were acting on orders from another person who told them killing Rahman was a religious duty, Police Commissioner Biplob Kumar Sarkar told reporters.

I would say this is brain-washing, beyond dispute.  And heart-breaking – the murderers are now ruined men; probably incapable of critical thought, as a result of their upbringing; if they are freed through miscarriage or violence, they only have a future in a violent cult that denies its own holy books claims of peace.  And they’ll be at the mercy of the man who ordered them to commit this heartless act.  And the man who ordered this hit will no doubt die from violence, if not from Bangladeshi police, then from a rival who deems him a … blasphemer.  Which leads to the motivation of the crime: he was an outspoken skeptic.

He used to write under the pseudonym “Stupid Man” on a blog but switched to posting on Facebook after 2011.

On Facebook, he is credited for a series, “Jaw-crushing answers to insulting comments of atheists.”

There, he posted questions that critics of Islam often raised and then answered them. But he paired the answers in such a way that they highlighted the contradiction within Islam.

As an agnostic and skeptic myself, it is discouraging to hear of another being killed because his beliefs do not mesh with some fundamentalist fanatic’s view of how society should be ordered.  No doubt the fanatic will die at another fanatic’s hands, and the violence will continue to swirl.  It makes my heart heavy.

The previous death was reported by CNN here.  The Center For Inquiry, a notable organization devoted to secularism, has a statement condemning the murder.

We are Washiqur.

Continuing this thread, The Atlantic weighs in on the legal interpretation of the Indiana law:

There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993.* Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana’s law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.  If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

Of course, it’s all about the interpretation; the fact that experts disagree does not indicate one side is lying.  But given the movement of business to leave Indiana, I suspect that interpretation is more likely than the claims that this is just like all the other laws.

(h/t Kevin Drum)

Sue Branford and Maurício Torres (NewScientist 7 March 2015) in “Dambusters” (paywall) cover the latest events in the Amazon Basin.  Key information:

According to official satellite data, 22 per cent of the forest has been felled. But this is an underestimate as it fails to account for selective logging, which the satellite images don’t detect. After several years of marked declines in forest clearance, which won Brazil international plaudits, the level of deforestation has risen again.

As we all should have learned in school, there is a cycle of evaporation -> rain -> evaporation called the water cycle.  In the Amazon the forest is a key part of this cycle:

While this may be a result of natural climate variability, Antonio Nobre, a senior researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, says that the disruption is linked to deforestation. Recent research has shown that Amazon vegetation, particularly large trees, play a central role in maintaining the hydrological cycle. “In a single day a large tree in the rainforest can pump over 1000 litres of moisture from the soil into the atmosphere. If this is scaled up for the whole forest, it means the Amazon forest transpires 20 billion tonnes of water a day,” he says. Cut down the forest and you destroy the flying rivers.

So do trees make evaporation more efficient?  That’s not clear in the article.  The “flying river” is a nickname coined by a Brazilian scientist for the clouds formed from this evaporation that delivers rain to the south.  But:

São Paulo, the industrial heartland of Brazil, is in the grip of the worst drought in living memory. The clouds from the Amazon that make the basin itself so wet and also deliver rain to the south of the country – dubbed “flying rivers” by one Brazilian scientist – have failed to materialise.

And so on to the chase.  The forest of the Amazon has been under attack for decades by slash and burn farmers, by miners, by developers – many of whom are operating illegally against Brazilian law, and all of whom are impacting local tribes, most in a negative manner as the forest they have existed in for centuries are now torn from them simply because they do not conform to modern notions of ownership – although the authors of the NewScientist article do cover the efforts of the Munduruku to take ownership of their bit of it.  I think most folks would consider this to be … evil-doing.  Not that the perpetrators see it that way, but then English colonialists hardly ever felt badly about killing American Indians, either.  Here’s the thing: I think you can identify true “good guys” by the their activity patttern: they are cooperative.  They have a sense of justice and they are aware that in order to achieve justice, they must work with each other, compromise.

The other side, what I find myself calling the bad guys tonight, cannot do that: they are motivated by unmoderated greed.  Not that the good guys don’t have a spot of avariciousness in whatever they use for a soul, but it’s moderated and used for positive purposes.  But if you look at criminal gangs, evil regimes, and even fiction: the bad guys tend to destroy each other.  Working together tends to deny the greed which they feel.  So:

if deforestation continues, the viability of the large dams may be compromised. Until recently most scientists thought that cutting down trees near dams increased the amount of water flowing into them. But a recent study by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San Francisco, California, came to a very different conclusion. It found that by 2050, when on present trends at least 40 per cent of Brazil’s Amazon forest will be gone, there will be a significant decline in river flows and energy generation (PNAS, vol 110, p 9601). This would make the reliability of the dams as an energy source highly questionable. …

Along with growing doubts from scientists, another factor is creating the perception that the authorities’ love affair with Amazon hydropower may be waning. Historically, one of the biggest drivers of dam-building has been a cosy relationship between big engineering companies and their political allies. “Energy planning in Brazil is not treated as a strategic issue but as a source of money for engineering companies and politicians,” says Felício Pontes, prosecutor for the Federal Public Ministry in Pará.

But many of the companies are now caught up in a massive corruption scandal involving bribery and money laundering by the state-owned oil company, Petrobrás. Investigators are examining the contracts for the Belo Monte dam, and a leading executive of one of the companies, Camargo Corrêa, which has been funding viability studies for the São Luís do Tapajós dam, has been arrested.

So, in order to build a dam, they have to destroy that which makes the dam economically viable, transgressing against folks who’ve lived in these areas for centuries; and in the process of deciding who gets to do what, the government and the companies indulge in corruption.  As the scientists take in the new data and come to (always contingent) conclusions that this project will self-destruct, it is becoming less likely that hydroelectric power will be implemented on the Amazon.

The IndyStar is getting irritable about the Indiana legislature:

Update!  Washington State governor Jay Inslee bans taxpayer funded travel to Indiana:

“I find Indiana’s new law disturbing, particularly at a time when more and more states and people in America are embracing civil rights for everyone. Washington will join other states and cities in opposing this law and I will impose an administration-wide ban on state funded travel to Indiana.

“Indiana’s law appears to legalize private discrimination. Washington state fought against this very thing in a case Attorney General Bob Ferguson brought against a florist.

“We in Washington stand for equality. I applaud those companies and organizations that have spoken out against the law and said they would not locate or expand operations in Indiana. I want to invite all those organizations, and anyone interested in a state that promotes equality and opportunity, to come visit Washington. We are open for business, and open to all people.”

(h/t Sydney Sweitzer)

Update!  Connecticut may have beaten Washington to the punch!

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed an executive order on Monday barring state spending on travel to Indiana and any other state enacting legislation that protects religious freedoms but ultimately discriminates against gays and others groups.

Malloy, the incoming chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, called Indiana’s new religious objections law “disturbing, disgraceful and outright discriminatory.”

REASON’s Robby Soave suggests the travel boycott may be hypocritical:

Malloy is speaking, of course, about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s decision to sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which critics believe would provide cover to Christian businesses that wish to discriminate against gay people. I wrote last week that most boycotts are hypocritical (since the boycotters inevitably fail to sanction all immoral actors), but this one is especially hypocritical: Connecticut also has an RFRA in place, albeit one with some meaningful differences.

I pointed out this hypocrisy to Malloy’s office and asked for clarification on the extent of the travel ban. I received an email from one of the governor’s press people informing me only that “We will have more information this afternoon.”

If Connecticut is going to prohibit government-subsidized travel to RFRA states, perhaps they should respond in kind and prohibit travel to Connecticut? (A libertarian can dream, I suppose.)

And it’s not hypocritical to criticize Connecticut without analyzing all the relevant information?  That strikes me as an intellectual error.  But he’s saved – he thinks – when another blogger suggests Connecticut is even worse:

The Federalist‘s Sean Davis argues that Connecticut’s RFRA is actually more expansive than Indiana’s. The Indiana law prohibits the government from substantially burdening religion; Connecticut’s law does not inclue [sic] the word “substantially,” meaning that all government-enacted burdens on religion are illegal—in theory, at least.

I’m not a legal theorist or practicioner, so I’ll not pretend I can tell the difference between the two statutes.  However, I do wonder if Connecticut’s RFRA was passed during the current session, or if it’s the responsibility of some other Connecticut legislature – and governor.  Treating a grouping of people – a state – as a single entity, of a single mind, does not have the heft of a trustworthy argument.  Perhaps Connecticut will repeal their RFRA tomorrow and thank Indiana – or Robby – for pointing out their flawed law, if indeed it is.

(Updated 7/27/2015 – added missing link to previous entries in the thread)

A few days ago I described my current project, and this morning I had one of those early morning thoughts that rings clear as a bell, probably because my critical faculties aren’t online yet.  I’ll bring it up anyways; I think it not only holds true for me, but for a lot of software engineers.

I’ll start with an analogy: physicists, especially theoretical physicists, aspire to mathematical descriptions of phenomena which are not only accurate and tractable, but also elegant.  I am not a mathematician, so I’m not quite sure what makes for elegant mathematics, but I can say that, within programming, there are elegant programs and there are hacks.  I don’t know that anyone’s ever defined an elegant program, but I’m sure a number of these qualities might be ascribed to it:

• Immediately comprehensible;
• Documented (somewhat redundant with the first point);
• Abstracted such that modification of one part of the program only positively affects all other parts;
• Extensible, which is to say adding new capabilities is easy and does not require working on parts not directly applicable to the problem to be solved;
• Others that don’t come immediately to mind

Extra points if it’s

• Scalable; which is to say, if you pump more data through the program, or sometimes even change the data’s topology, the program’s consumption of resources (memory, CPU cycles) does not grow even more vigorously; we often talk about the complexity of a program, measured by “order of”, symbolized O().  So if your amount of data is symbolized with the number n, then we hope to do no worse than O(n).  Order of, say, O(n^2), in which doubling the amount of data would result in the amount of time and/or memory used is SQUARED rather than doubled, is definitely a bad program, resulting in a program that runs in an unacceptable amount of time, or actually crashes due to consumption of all available memory; O(log n), on the other hand, is doing quite well; nirvana is O(1), i.e., your algorithm is insensitive to the amount (or topology) of the data.
• Performs well; this is allied, yet sometimes opposed to, the Scalability point.  For example, sometimes you can really make a program fly by profligate use of memory, which then makes you vulnerable to that user who applies a great deal more data to your program than you ever expected.

So I bring this all up to better explain the project I mentioned earlier.  I am well aware of yacc and lex, the standard parsing tools.  I view them as inelegant to the point where I don’t use them, because they are not part and parcel of any other language than themselves; instead, they are used to generate C source code, which then must be sometimes massaged into usefulness, and even if not, there are other problems, such as the use of global variables, a key source of inelegance; and I’ve come to regard the mixture of languages in a single program to be a hack in itself.  I am well aware of “the right tool for the right problem” philosophy, but I take the position that we all have only so many neurons available, and using them on multiple languages is a waste and a kludge when it should be eminently possible to create a language that can resolve all of these problems.

So this is an evaluation of this intuition, you might say.  Does a language from the functional paradigm (Mythryl) have the capability to take code that looks like a BNF and result in a parser that is easy to build, expand, and fix, while running well in terms of performance and scalability?  I have some concerns on the last point, but they’re not worth going into at the moment; better to wait until I’m at least testing partial functionality.

And for those wondering, I have nearly all of the BNF for the XML specification in place.  I have discovered, unsurprisingly, that recursive and mutually recursive BNFs cannot be handled with BNF-like code, so there’s a minus.  OTOH, they can be handled and with only some small disturbance to the general feel of BNFs.

I have, BTW, ignored the question of whether or not BNFs are really readable.  They are, to my knowledge, the most common method for specifying something requiring parsing.  Reading one easily takes some practice; but then, nothing easy is worth doing, said JFK.

Or is it wrong to mix politics with programming?

Given the importance of algorithms in today’s society, this is not exactly a jest.

Continuing this thread, Indiana TV station RTV6 reports more business unrest:

The CEOs of Emmis Communications, Anthem, Cummins, Eli Lilly & Co., Dow AgroSciences, Angie’s List, Indiana University Health, Roche Diagnostics and Salesforce sent the joint letter to Gov. Mike Pence, House Speaker Brian Bosma and Senate President Pro-Tem David Long on Monday afternoon. …

The letter says the companies are “deeply concerned” about the impact the law is having on their employees and the reputation of the state.

“All of our companies seek to promote fair, diverse and inclusive workplaces,” the letter reads. “Our employees must not feel unwelcome in the place where they work and live.”

The letter ends by asking lawmakers to immediately enact new legislation that “makes it clear that neither the Religious Freedom Restoration Act nor any other Indiana law can be used to justify discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Governor Pence, considering a Presidential run, appears bewildered, reports Tim Swarens at the IndyStar:

I asked the governor if he had anticipated the strongly negative reaction set off by the bill’s passage. His response made it clear that he and his team didn’t see it coming.

“I just can’t account for the hostility that’s been directed at our state,” he said. “I’ve been taken aback by the mischaracterizations from outside the state of Indiana about what is in this bill.”

In defense of the legislation, he noted that 19 other states and the federal government have adopted RFRA laws similar to Indiana’s. And he pointed out that President Barack Obama voted for Illinois’ version of RFRA as a state senator.

The governor also criticized the news media’s coverage of the legislation. “Despite the irresponsible headlines that have appeared in the national media, this law is not about discrimination,” he said. “If it was, I would have vetoed it.”

Yet, those justifications, cited repeatedly by the governor’s supporters in recent days, have done little to quell the controversy.

Pence reportedly will submit a “clarification” bill to supplement the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but this is the sort of unsettling controversy which will leave independent voters wondering if he’s really ready for the national stage.  Meanwhile, another legal scholar, Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, suggests this is a tempest in a teapot:

Are the claims made against the new Indiana law accurate? Not really. This law, like other RFRAs, merely requires that state laws meet a demanding, but hardly insurmountable, test before infringing upon the religious practice or conscience of religious believers. If the law imposes a substantial burden on religious belief, the law must yield unless the law serves a compelling state interest and is the least burdensome way to advance that interest. Here’s more background on how these sorts of laws work.

Business leaders rarely reach the C-Suite based on charisma or other irrational reasons; instead, they tend to be hard-headed rationalists. They’re certainly not always right, but they also don’t always move in concert (here’s a report on a pro-union business owner, for example).  If business leaders of especially large businesses, such as Eli Lilly, are expressing concern and making, at least, contingency plans, then that suggests their legal departments have conducted their own analyses of the bill in question and have come to conclusions at variance with Mr. Adler and others.

Naturally, most small businesses are geographically constrained and cannot make threats of this sort; indeed, they may feel that complaining about this law would redound on their bottom line, and so they are remaining mum.  The fact that these businesses are willing to incur the costs of moving out of Indiana is deeply indicative of their concern for their employees.  It may be going too far to suggest this is a large split between the GOP (who currently controls the Indiana government) and Big Business, given that BB is hardly a homogenous entity, but it’s certainly a tremor indicating deep religious conservatism may not be congruent with a business constrained to working in the real world and unable to tolerate irrationalism.

(h/t Gwennedd @ The Daily Kos)

Fascinating title:

The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria

Totally misled.

Sometimes a science story isn’t significant to me, it just catches my attention.  Catherine de Lange reports on the observations of shaking hands in NewScientist (7 March 2015) in “After handshakes, we sniff people’s scent on our hand” (print: “Shake hands, sniff palm, read signals“) (paywall):

YOU won’t believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you will lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour, revealed by covert filming, suggests that humans use bodily smells to send signals, much as other mammals do. …

After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, both men and women sniffed their shaking hand for more than twice as long as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their other hand twice as long as before (eLife, doi.org/2jz). …

One surprise was just how much the volunteers smelled their hands. “When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats,” says Sobel. “It’s like blindsight – you see it all the time but you just don’t think of it.”

Now I’ll just sit here and squirm a bit.