Category Archives: Uncategorized

CNBC reports on a local company’s analysis of kids and college:

More than two years into the pandemic, nearly three-quarters, or 73%, of high schoolers think a direct path to a career is essential in postsecondary education, according to a survey of high school students.

The likelihood of attending a four-year school sank from 71% to 51% in the past two years, ECMC Group found.

High schoolers are putting more emphasis on career training and post-college employment, the report said. ECMC Group, a nonprofit aimed at helping students find success, polled more than 5,300 high school students five times since February 2020. …

Even before the pandemic, students were starting to consider more affordable, direct-to-career alternatives to a four-year degree, said Jeremy Wheaton, ECMC Group’s president and CEO.

The rising cost of college and ballooning student loan balances have played a large role in the changing views, but “they [students] are more savvy than we give them credit for,” Wheaton said. “They are aware of the jobs that are in high demand.”

But is that the way to run a society? Kids are rarely aware of their potential, even encumbered as it may be by upbringing, environment, hormone-driven bodies, and other barriers to achievement.

But, then again, those jobs in high demand are, in part, critical or close to critical to society. Who’s to deny them the opportunity to serve society in such a capacity?

Nor is college necessary at age 18; in fact, in some may consider it a detriment, given the fact that the brain is not yet completely wired in virtually everyone at that age. However, I wonder about the importance of stress, such as the stress of college, in facilitating the proper wiring of the brain. It seems unlikely that the wiring aspect of brain development is immune to outside influences.

In the end, we may see universities reaching out with special packages emphasizing the liberal arts / civic responsibilities that may not have reached these adults back in high school – if, in fact, they were taught at all.

And that’ll be yet another node of the culture wars.

Leftover pics from last week.

That first one is a trifle pale, but I like the composition.

Not quite so good.

Perhaps a bit coquettish.

And on to the shameless display, above.

It’s been a bit of a scramble in the arena of selling cryptocurrencies to the general public, public relations-wise, over the last month. WaPo covers a couple of points:

Yet that digital coin, a type of crypto known as a stablecoin because it aims to keep its price at $1, has been in free-fall this week. TerraUSD, or UST as it is known, was priced as low as 30 cents on Wednesday and was trading around 40 cents Thursday evening (crypto trades around the clock).

It isn’t clear yet what sent UST into a tailspin. But the cratering of what had been the third-largest stablecoin by total market value points to a wider reckoning for a hype-fueled asset class that is deflating as dramatically this year as it inflated in 2021.

It gets worse.

A sell-off over just the past seven days has erased more than a quarter of the value from the global crypto market, according to CoinMarketCap. Most dramatically, UST’s sister coin, Luna, lost almost all of its value in the past week, all but wiping out most people who had invested in it.

And they’re not supposed to be investments for most people. They’re supposed to be currencies. Yes, words matter. The fact that Luna can fall to zero suggests it, and its brethren, are not immune to manipulation.

But here’s what worries me:

If that’s not emotional manipulation, I don’t know what is. At best, it’s foolish. At worst? Use your imaginations.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, in regard to declining to endorse any Republican candidates in the upcoming primary elections:

How do you find points of agreement when you can’t reach common ground on facts so basic that they could be used in a field sobriety test?

Yet another measure of the rightward dash of the GOP.

All I can think is that Anguirus, the dude on the right, was on testosterone shots. I mean, he never had a chance. – Words of famous Godzillaologist.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955) is the follow up to Gojira (1954), the original Godzilla movie, and is an inferior sequel. A pilot employed by a fishing outfit to guide big fishing trawlers to big schools of fish runs into engine trouble while out working, and manages to set the seaplane down in a bay of a relatively rocky island. As his partner comes to his rescue, Godzilla hoves into view on the island, and is engaged by a giant ankylosaurus, later to be named Anguirus.

The distraction of Godzilla permits the aviators to escape in the rescuer’s seaplane, but, to the dismay of the Japanese authorities who thought Godzilla had perished in Gojira, Godzilla is sighted closing in on Japan. Near Osaka, Godzilla’s attraction to light is used to lure him back out to sea, but an unfortunate accident involving escaped convicts and an oil refinery spoils the plan, and Godzilla stomps up on shore to enjoy his bonfire. His pleasure is disrupted when Anguirus emerges from the sea as well, and attacks again, but this time Anguirus has overreached, and Godzilla wins the day, returning to the sea covered in glory. Blood. Whatever.

Next sighted in some rich fishing grounds, the fishing company and the Japan Self Defense Forces combine their resources to hunt the recalcitrant kaiju. Will they succeed? Or will Godzilla run rampant?

And what about the love subplot?

While Godzilla remains mysterious, it’s not the terrifying What’s he got against us? mysteriousness of Gojira. It’s more along the lines of Oh, not Godzilla again. Who the hell knows what it is this time. Who has the can of RAID bug spray? Maybe that’ll OOPS —

Anyways. The jet pilots seem a little incompetent, while Godzilla appears ill-equipped to deal with fake avalanches, so why is he on an icy island, rather than his usual stomping grounds of Tokyo some South Pacific island where the living’s good? The romantic subplot is sort of nice, but I’m not sure how it ties into Godzilla’s activities, so it was a little distracting.

In sum, it’s disappointing. The terror of Gojira is lost, replaced by a puzzled frown.

Pyrogeography:

Pyrogeography is the study of the past, present, and projected distribution of wildfire. Wildland fire occurs under certain conditions of climate, vegetation, topography, and sources of ignition, such that it has its own biogeography, or pattern in space and time. [Wikipedia]

Pyrogeographer is used in an unlinkable article in Discover (May/June 2022), and it was just too cool to pass up.

Horizontal gene transfer refers to the physical movement of genes from one organism to another. I had always assumed it was a unicellular trait, because … well, because. So this surprised me:

Many snakes make meals of frogs, but some appear to be transferring their DNA into the amphibians as well. A genetic analysis suggests that parasites shared between snakes and frogs may facilitate the movement of genetic material from one species to another.

The “horizontal” transfer of DNA between species was long considered a rare event that took place only between microbes, but there is growing evidence that the process has been going on all over the tree of life. [“Frogs have acquired DNA from snakes with the help of parasites,” Jake Buehler, NewScientist (30 April 2022, paywall)]

So parasites not only suck on your resources, but they gift you with genes you may not want.

Nifty.

Here’s some lovely irises, just popped today:

“What would be completely unexpected, yet organic, at this point?” “I can’t think of a thing.”

Late Night (2019) is a fairly conventional take on the stresses of putting on a talk show, ranging from the writers responsible for the jokes, right to the pinnacle – the talking head. It sails through the expected elements: stale jokes, lack of diversity, complacency and jealousy of position, and what happens when the show’s personnel are suddenly slated for replacement.

Sprightly, it has some laughs and some good acting, and is … unmemorable. For me. I suspect other audiences might love it.

But not me.

I noticed yesterday, via an Erick Erickson’s post, a prospective split in the GOP, but didn’t have time to address it because the lawn needed mowing. This involves the Georgia GOP primary battle for nomination to the governor’s seat involving incumbent Brian Kemp and former Senator David Perdue (R-GA), who was defeated in his reelection bid by now-Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA). Because Governor Kemp didn’t arbitrarily, and no doubt futilely, refuse to validate the 2020 election results in Georgia, Trump is determined to run Kemp out of the GOP, using the vehicle of the aforementioned Perdue. But:

I’ve confirmed with both sides, Vice President Mike Pence is himself formally endorsing Brian Kemp and will be in Georgia the day before the May 24th primary election. on May 23, Pence will campaign in Georgia for Kemp. …

With Pence for Kemp, it puts him directly at odds with President Trump. We probably will not see Perdue attacking Pence for the endorsement, though perhaps Trump will say something.

Via Professor Richardson, I learn from Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of others on the Pence side of the split:

But many of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics have rallied to Kemp’s side. That includes former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who plans to soon stump for Kemp in Georgia, and former President George W. Bush, who recently donated to his campaign.​

Both of whom qualify as old-line Republicans, but while the endorsement of a former President usually carries some weight, Bush is little more than a footnote to most Republican voters these days. It’s not just his Administration ending on the low note of the Great Recession, but his failure to convert into yet another MAGA-ite.

Erickson notes Kemp’s commanding lead in the primary:

Kemp has never been behind in the polls. Initial polling in the race had Kemp under 50%, but for the last three months, every public and all the private polling I’m aware of has had Kemp above 50%, meaning he will escape a runoff. Likewise, President Trump has largely downplayed the race and set expectations for a Kemp victory.

And that last line is a doozy. This is Trump’s conception of loyalty, noted time after time by many observers, and it’s not surprising, given Perdue’s debate performance in his Senatorial reelection bid in 2020 – staring vacantly while Ossoff verbally dumped his sins on his head. A former businessman, he doesn’t really understand being a politician, and shouldn’t have permitted Trump to persuade him to challenge Kemp. Perdue supposedly had prestige as a former Senator, even if he lost to political novice Ossoff, but his utter loyalty to Trump was the key for Trump to endorse him. That uncompromising loyalty marks the amateur, the unwillingness to think for oneself. Perdue never had a chance.

But Bluestein’s comment concerning MAGAites in Georgia reminded me of something important:

The event announced Friday illustrates a growing proxy fight in Georgia between establishment forces backing Kemp and the Trump loyalists who want to remake the state Republican Party in the former president’s mold.

This is really the issue that distinguishes the Trump cult from the traditional American parties and politics, isn’t it? Rather than rallying to a collection of principles and goals, the Trump base rallies to … Trump. Whoever he is, whatever he does, that’s where the loyalties lay.

If he leads them over the cliff of treason, as on January 6, 2021, then that’s where they go. They have no external guideposts, not even their religious beliefs, to stop most of them.

This situation really discourages fruitful discussion, doesn’t it? I mean, you can’t really talk with someone about conservative principles and fossil fuels when it’s all about Trump, and all he does it make up fake statistics about cancer and wind power. We saw him in office, as is common with all mendacious politicians whose focus is gaining and holding power, and his positions shifting and uttering supposed plans – it’s Infrastructure Week again! – as he perceived them to be best oriented to attract his base.

And without discussion, without honest criticism – or praise, are you listening to me you professional pundits? – how is anything supposed to improve?

But that’s the autocratic form of government, isn’t it? All about some self-centered person for whom the metric is How much attention am I getting? rather than Is the nation improving? And while admitting that the second question is far harder to answer than the first, that doesn’t make it invalid. It only makes it far more challenging – and interesting.

Bluestein’s description is an insight into the importance that Kemp – himself saddled with a dubious ethics illustrated by his failure to recuse or even resign as Secretary of State for Georgia when he chose to run for the governor’s seat in 2018, thus tainting the voting system – win, and win with a commanding margin, in the primary over Perdue.

And then we’ll see how Stacey Abrams, former member of the Georgia Legislature, does in the gubernatorial race rematch.

The first picture of the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius *, from the Event Horizon Telescope:

Credit: EHT Collaboration

OK, so it’s a trifle blurry, but what it represents is very cool: A black hole that is the mass of 4 million stars the size of our Sun. More information here.

Remember those tulips from a couple of days ago? They’ve developed:

And some cousins have popped up:

Steve Benen provides a useful summation of what I’ve been predicting over the years, continuing to occur:

Nearly a decade later, however, Toomey is no longer seen as a conservative stalwart. On the contrary, in some GOP circles, he’s actually a boogeyman. The Hill reported the other day on Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, where the former president tried to generate support for celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who’s running to succeed Toomey.

Trump … took aim at former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick, Oz’s primary challenger in the Senate race, saying he is similar to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who is retiring from the upper chamber after his current term and was one of the seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump last year.

…

To drive home the point, consider how much company Toomey has. The Texas Tribune reports today, for example, that the Bush name has lost its political clout in the Lone Star State as the GOP moves further and further to the right. In North Carolina, Pat McCrory was a deeply conservative governor, who’s now seen as a “RINO” Senate candidate.

A decade ago, Mitt Romney was his party’s “severely conservative“ presidential nominee, and now he’s persona non grata for much of the right. Even John McCain’s name in Arizona is now “invoked as an insult“ by conservative Republicans.

And Romney’s partner in that race, Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI), hard right zealot, future Speaker of the House, and boy wonder of wonkhood (since expelled for not being actually wonky enough), has been virtually run out of the Party. If he has any influence, I have not heard of it. He joins a horde of Republicans who’ve left the Party, ostensibly over Trump, but really over what he represents. The Party has been sprinting right, as I’ve been expecting.

But I don’t like Benen’s conclusion:

To fully appreciate Trump’s impact on GOP politics, look no further than the conservative Republicans who’ve been deemed too liberal by the party’s base.

The key question here is to ask, Could only Trump have pushed the Party that far right?

I contend the answer is No.

The Republican Party combination of toxic team politics, in which straight ticket voting is de rigeur, single issue voting, the disappearance of the Party gatekeepers, and the emphasis on winning elections, while scanting the question of competent governance and moderate politics, made the soil fertile for anyone with the wit to realize the party was vulnerable.

But then add in the catalyst of religious zealotry, and the poison of all the previously mentioned features is augmented: God wants you to to vote only Republican, God hates abortion / gun control / business regs / taxes, God favors extremists over those damn compromising moderates – the last seen long ago in the phrase,

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Memorable, but a dark omen of the future for the Republicans, as this was written for Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) sometime in the 1960s. Returning to my point, Trump reportedly didn’t even want to win, but use the campaign to suck money out of the conservative movement.

The Get Out Of Jail Free card of the Biblical figure of Cyrus, to which anyone who caught the imagination of the evangelical base could be connected, simply made Trump, who allegedly was fabulously rich, which is an important point for the prosperity church segment of the evangelicals, the focal point of a movement that needed a believable leader and had been discarding potential leaders for decades, names such as Falwell, Gingrich, Romney, Ryan, Bush, Allen West (R-TX) – all had a flaw, whether they were too honorable to break the rules and bring the evangelicals their desperately desired power, or too inept at communications, or were the wrong sect, or the wrong color, or couldn’t be extreme enough.

Trump, despite being a master of communication with his base, may be slipping. His crowds are reportedly shrinking, and sometimes he gets booed.

So Benen may blame Trump, but I blame a Party that self-destructed over a couple of decades, following Gingrich’s advice to put victory at the polls over everything else, be it ideological rigor or electoral cheating. Trump was just the lucky guy – if being the most disgraced President in US history can be considered to be lucky – to benefit from Gingrich’s cursed advice.

The question that leaps to mind is whether there’s a politician waiting in the wings who can outdo Trump. Names such as DeSantis, Hawley, Cruz, and a number of others come to mind, but they all have flaws. Meanwhile, the younger generations seem to view the evangelicals and Republicans with great doubt, although the Democrats are not without their own potentially fatal missteps.

Where will it end?

A technical artifact or an example of pareidolia:

A friend sent it to me, and it’s from NASA’s raw image collection:

This image was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 3466 (2022-05-07 07:58:16 UTC).

Fun! How long would it take to get the helicopter Ingenuity there to fly down that hole?

It appears Bitcoin is struggling a bit since the last time I checked in:

1 Year chart of Bitcoin value in US$ from CoinMarketCap.

Yeah, that’s down more than 50% from the year’s high. That cannot be comforting to the speculators who went big on Bitcon Bitcoin a few months ago. Michelle Singletary, a financial columnist for WaPo, is not a fan of holding large amounts of 401K money in cryptocurrencies.

But perhaps the best part of Singletary’s column was the reader “ArlingMay” who wrote, in part:

Call them “cryptoassets” or “cryptobets” but please don’t’ [sic] call them currencies. That label misleads the gullible.

The reader remarks were dominated by cryptocurrency haters, but I did like ArlingMay’s thought. I’m a skeptic myself, but I keep feelers out for attempts to dominate a forum in order to induce false estimations of an issue, but that one struck me as both earnest and true.

In any case, the volatility over a year of Bitcoin’s value is a strong indicator that Bitcoin does not qualify as a ‘currency,’ in my estimation. I still cannot figure the unique utility of Bitcoin, and I lean towards Erick Erickson’s view on the matter.

Convenient news about yesterday’s supposition that at least some conservative voters, this time in Nebraska, won’t put up with candidates with dubious sexual reputations:

Donald Trump failed to deliver a victory Tuesday in a Nebraska GOP primary for a gubernatorial candidate accused of groping multiple women, NBC News projects, handing the former president his first loss of this year’s election season.

University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen won the party’s nomination after a heated contest, defeating a state senator and self-funding businessman Charles Herbster, whom Trump campaigned for last week even after eight women — including a Republican state senator — accused Trump’s favored candidate of inappropriately touching or kissing them against their will. [NBC News]

Certainly, I’m speculating that it was the allegations, made plausible by volume and source, that repelled Nebraska conservative voters – or maybe the independents and Democrats flooded the primary as well, although the lack of other primary surprises makes this unlikely.

But that may be the limit at the moment. In West Virginia, the number of seats in the House was reduced by one due to the recent Census, pitting two GOP House members against each other in a primary. Who lost?

The acceleration to the right keeps increasing:

NEW: Republican candidate for Michigan Governor, Ryan Kelley, just came out against democracy: “Socialism—it starts with democracy. That’s the ticket for the left. They want to push this idea of democracy, which turns into socialism, which turns into communism in every instance.”

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) May 8, 2022

Mr. Kelley, meet Mr. Stalin. Give ‘im a hug. Bedmates should always get a hug.

While watching a comedy skit featuring a comic with a prosthetic nose, my Arts Editor remarked:

He’s really milking that nose.

It’s just a bad visual.

Forecasting the future is a favorite past time of political professionals and pundits. One possible approach is to use the results of special elections at the state level, which occur with fair regularity as elected officials die unexpectedly, win other seats, retire due to illness, and other such life events.

Of course, using special election results can be a minefield. Turnout is commonly light and filled with ideological zealots, rather than casual citizens. The weather and even traffic conditions can skew votes, as can the quality of the candidates and their fund-raising abilities.

In the end, it’s those seats that change hands that attract my attention. Oh, there goes one now!

In this case, this is probably due to the quality of the Republican candidate, a deduction which does not necessarily exempt this special election, necessitated by the movement of the former seat holder to the Michigan State Senate, from use by the crystal ball.

First, why I suggest this is a candidate-quality result. The Republican is Robert Regan, whose advice to his daughters if they find themselves being raped went national:

... panelist Amber Harris, a Republican strategist, told the group that it is “too late” to continue challenging the results of the 2020 election, suggesting Republicans should instead move on and focus on future races, to which Regan replied: “I tell my daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.’ ” [WaPo]

And if that seems ambiguous, this is not:

The problem of passwords has been around for a long time. Its grandparents are such things as the recognition passwords used by the military in the field for centuries, with cousins including learning to recognize the clothing common to the enemy so they can be cornered and captured.

But I digress. Passwords have been a problem for me ever since I started logging into computers: learning them, having someone break them, re-learning them, changing them, and again. Social media and multiple, multiple sites demanding them just made it harder. And, now, Big Tech thinks they’ll be solving the problem:

Apple, Google and Microsoft announced this week they will soon support an approach to authentication that avoids passwords altogether, and instead requires users to merely unlock their smartphones to sign in to websites or online services. Experts say the changes should help defeat many types of phishing attacks and ease the overall password burden on Internet users, but caution that a true passwordless future may still be years away for most websites.

The tech giants are part of an industry-led effort to replace passwords, which are easily forgotten, frequently stolen by malware and phishing schemes, or leaked and sold online in the wake of corporate data breaches.

Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the more active contributors to a passwordless sign-in standard crafted by the FIDO (“Fast Identity Online”) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), groups that have been working with hundreds of tech companies over the past decade to develop a new login standard that works the same way across multiple browsers and operating systems. …

“This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS,” the alliance wrote on May 5. [KrebsOnSecurity]

Maybe. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I have no clue as to the technical approach. But fixes that fix everything are frequently disasters.

And, of course, you must have a smartphone to participate.

I wonder if this is an early sign of the Internet apocalypse. Between trying to solve a hard problem by requiring someone own yet more high technology, and the addictive hell hole that social media often becomes, I wonder if we’re nearing the end of the Web Age.

Probably not. There’s always a youngster ready to take the place of a bruised and bloodied oldster.

But I’ve been musing on the thought that the absolutism noted by a number of pundits, from myself to Andrew Sullivan to Erick Erickson to, well, anyone distrustful of ideological zealots, has been accentuated by the leveling of the playing field. This idea is closely allied to the much observed loss of gatekeepers, the editors and others of newspapers and magazines who acted as default censors, operating under the valid excuse of limited resources. Never perfect and sometimes with their own extreme biases, nevertheless they kept the boat of civic discourse on something approaching an even keel, and, if they didn’t, a public outcry or angry publisher could get them fired.

Today? No editors, no censors, and the cursed cry of No compromise! echoes from all political factions, because most of us haven’t the foggiest idea of what it takes to successfully govern a democracy, and most of us think some Divine creature or another is on our side. Hubris, one of the most common human flaws these days.

So I do wonder how many folks are doing what Cliff Stoll did 30 or more years ago, declaring the Internet anti-social and walking away from it. I wonder if he found a way to live with it, or went hard core. I see he contributes to a channel on YouTube, so he must have found a compromise.

But my point is that if the Internet just gets too hard, people will learn to do without it. Is this the breaking point? Or are too many people dependent on it for their income to abandon it?

Nature has an article on the dissolution of plastic – from the abstract:

Here, we use a structure-based, machine learning algorithm to engineer a robust and active PET hydrolase. Our mutant and scaffold combination (FAST-PETase: functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase) contains five mutations compared to wild-type PETase (N233K/R224Q/S121E from prediction and D186H/R280A from scaffold) and shows superior PET-hydrolytic activity relative to both wild-type and engineered alternatives¹² between 30 and 50 °C and a range of pH levels. We demonstrate that untreated, postconsumer-PET from 51 different thermoformed products can all be almost completely degraded by FAST-PETase in 1 week.

I’m not reading the actual paper, not being a PhD level chemist, but skralyx on Daily Kos remarks, hopefully knowledgeably:

If you’re concerned about the release of CO₂ by such a process, that’s justified, but there’s more to this story!

Not only can this process be used to degrade PET, but in fact to reconstitute it. Once you break the polymer down into its components, you can let bacteria in the wild reduce them to CO₂ and water. OR you can re-polymerize them, which is a nifty way of casting aside any impurities like dyes or product residue and regenerating “virgin” PET. This is a recycling program where you don’t have to worry too much about the state of the discarded plastic.

So maybe some good news here.

The title says it all:

Doomed to disappear within a couple of days, I’m sure.

This WaPo article on the supposedly pro-choice Republican Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) reminded me about some further thoughts I’ve had on the assertions of Erick Erickson, quoted in the initial post of this thread. First, Senator Collins:

Professor Richardson, who is working from a The New York Times article, to which I have no access:

Supply chain issues have also driven up prices, both because of shortages and because the ten shipping companies that dominate the global trade have jacked up prices so astronomically that U.S. importers have asked the U.S. government to intervene (this year container companies will pocket $300 billion in profits, up from $23 billion before the pandemic).

Well, that explains a helluva lot. Way too much, in fact. Profits, that is.