Unsightly Mental Blemishes

… is that you then draw questionable conclusions, questionable further questions, and other such adventures in FallacyLand. So consider this:

Yeah. Russia, with a population of 144 million, or very roughly one tenth of its neighbor China, has no deaths.

Really?

And I have heard nary a word on the subject.

I wonder if epidemiologists are adjusting for possibly bad data out of Russia.

Meanwhile, Italy, with a population of 60 million, is nearly at 3,000 deaths, which is very near China’s totals. Again, how trustable is this data?

Jeroboam:

1. A wine bottle holding 3 liters (approximately 0.8 gallon) of sparkling wine.
2. A wine bottle holding 4.5 liters (approximately 1.2 gallons) of still wine. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “America’s germaphobes were ready for this — and have been for too long,” Karen Heller, WaPo:

Baker suffers from health anxiety disorder, also known as hypochondriasis. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is its frequent companion. Germs are the mortal enemy. Tony Shalhoub’s detective character in “Monk,” with his phobia of unclean surfaces and bountiful supply of sanitary wipes, is the disorder’s poster child.

Baker’s home is never without end-times supplies of bleach, hydrogen peroxide and the twin set of germ weaponry in our newly confined world order, dainty bottles of hand sanitizer and jeroboams of disinfecting wipes.

Senator McConnell (R-KY), leader of the Senate but in trouble in his reelection race, is looking for a bit of leeway from his probable opponent:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign called on a potential Democratic opponent — former Marine Corps pilot Amy McGrath — to stop running political advertisements during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Amy McGrath’s decision to blanket the airwaves with deceitful ads during the coronavirus outbreak is tasteless and shameful,” said McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden. “As Kentuckians adjust their daily lives and schedules to help stem the outbreak, the last thing they need to see on TV is negative political advertising. The McGrath campaign must stop airing all of their advertisements.”

McGrath has been running advertisements in Kentucky since July, when she first announced her campaign for U.S. Senate. Recently, she has been running national ads on MSNBC and Fox News in an effort to boost her already prolific fundraising totals. [Lexington Herald-Leader]

Meanwhile, in Ohio …

Dr. Harriet Hall, M.D., nails something I’ve often implied but never have discussed or generalized in the article “In Praise Of Uncertainty“, (Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 44, Issue 2, paywall):

I have often thought that certainty is the root of all evil, or at least the biggest problem facing humanity. A few years ago, two women came to my door. I didn’t talk to them long enough to find out which religion they were proselytizing for, but I was intrigued by their approach. They asked if I knew what the biggest problem facing the world today was, and I answered that it was certainty, people who were absolutely sure they were right about something. They agreed with me, saying, “I know just what you mean.” They didn’t realize I was talking about them.

Uncertainty is the admission that acquiring absolute and exact knowledge about the world is a difficult thing. Uncertainty, more importantly, is the acknowledgment that being strongly wrong can lead to profound disaster, whether we’re talking investing, engineering, the mind of the divine, or marriage.

It’s the boat labelled I Know God Loves Me that sets sail ill-prepared and sinks tragically. It’s the car with the bumper sticker I Know Better that hits the innocent child while the driver, secure in his superior knowledge, chitters away on the phone. It’s the pride and disdain that we all hate, and yet so many of us practice ourselves.

It’s why I’m an agnostic, not an atheist. It’s why I view all knowledge, and all of my opinions, as tentative and contingent on future knowledge, subject to verification.

It’s really at the center of this report by Steve Benen on the pride of the incoming Trump Administration cabinet and staffers:

Donald Trump’s presidential transition period was an unusually chaotic period. To be sure, the crash-course process is difficult for even the most prepared and well-organized operations, but the Republican’s team struggled more than most. As Inauguration Day approached, the incoming administration simply wasn’t prepared to govern.

That was not for lack of effort on the part of the outgoing Obama administration. The week before Trump took the oath of office, Obama’s team prepared an exercise in which the incoming team was presented with a series of hypothetical scenarios — including one in which the world faced a deadly viral outbreak — and how the U.S. federal government would have to respond. …

In theory, the session should’ve helped prepare the Trump administration for the crisis that’s currently unfolding. In practice, it didn’t quite work out that way. …

Another element to this was the Republican officials’ belief that Obama’s team had nothing of value to offer them and made little effort to learn from the outgoing officials before taking office.

While the Politico article on which Benen’s opinion piece is based is somewhat less condemnatory, it still makes clear the attitude of the incoming Trump Administration officials: high and mighty, coming off their bizarre win over Clinton, certain … oh so certain … that they knew better than Obama’s professionals.

We’ve seen how that has worked out, haven’t we? That is, if my reader hasn’t confined their reading to conservative Trump-rah-rah sites.

Hall really wraps up the entire philosophy of uncertainty with a bow and presents it as the position superior to those believe they possess the truth – or, at least, willing to sell themselves that way. And I like it.

DARPA, the American agency Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, progenitor of the Internet and GUIs, among other things, is still at it. It would seem they’ve taken notice of reproducibility issues, as Nature reports:

In 2016, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) told eight research groups that their proposals had made it through the review gauntlet and would soon get a few million dollars from its Biological Technologies Office (BTO). Along with congratulations, the teams received a reminder that their award came with an unusual requirement — an independent shadow team of scientists tasked with reproducing their results.

Thus began an intense, multi-year controlled trial in reproducibility. Each shadow team consists of three to five researchers, who visit the ‘performer’ team’s laboratory and often host visits themselves. Between 3% and 8% of the programme’s total funds go to this independent validation and verification (IV&V) work. But DARPA has the flexibility and resources for such herculean efforts to assess essential techniques. In one unusual instance, an IV&V laboratory needed a sophisticated US$200,000 microscopy and microfluidic set-up to make an accurate assessment.

The key here is Biological technology. This sort of thing is already being done for hardware and software:

Engineers expect their work to be subject to an IV&V process, in which the organization conducting the research uses a separate set of engineers to test, for example, whether microprocessors or navigation software work as expected. NASA’s IV&V facility was established more than 25 years ago and has around 300 employees testing code and satellite components.

I’m not entirely clear as to whether they refer to what I think of as QA (Quality Assurance), which consists of a collection of engineers and testers who try to make sure the software does what it’s designed to do without going off the rails. The description of this process sounds more advanced:

The synthetic-biology focus of DARPA’s Biological Control programme is well suited to merging biological research with reproducibility studies. The programme aims to bring engineering principles of design and control to biology. By definition, this requires the adoption of best practices from the engineering community — such as IV&V — to improve the likelihood that technologies can advance.

Awardees were told from the outset that they would be paired with an IV&V team consisting of unbiased, third-party scientists hired by and accountable to DARPA. In this programme, we relied on US Department of Defense laboratories, with specific teams selected for their technical competence and ability to solve problems creatively. To get comfortable with the concept of IV&V, investigators needed reassurance that replicating teams would not steal ideas or derail publications. They also needed to get used to their results being challenged even before peer-review submission, and they needed reminders that cooperating with these teams was a programme requirement.

It sounds fascinating. I hope they rotate the scientists through the various teams, both to vitiate hard feelings and to properly give all the team members to opportunity to learn all the techniques. In my experience, no one knows everything, and sometimes it can be quite an eye-opener to see how someone else solved a problem.

Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society reports on the latest budget request from the President, including a puzzling – or sad – reduction in funding:

The President’s Budget Request (PBR) for NASA’s next fiscal year was released on 10 February. And while the $3 billion increase for the lunar return effort garnered headlines, the PBR touches every program within NASA’s expansive portfolio, including planetary science, an area of particular interest to The Planetary Society.

Overall, NASA’s Planetary Science Division fares well in the FY 2021 budget request, with a few significant caveats. The promised start of a planetary defense mission to find and characterize hazardous near-Earth objects failed to materialize in the proposal. And 2 productive Mars missions—Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) and Mars Odyssey—face steep cuts that would dramatically reduce the quantity and quality of science data returned by the rover and functionally end the Odyssey mission.

The Mars Science Laboratory is the Curiosity rover. Landing on Mars on August 6, 2012, it has been exploring continuously since, and carries, according to its Wikipedia page, 14 instruments.

Mars Odyssey is a Martian orbiter that reached Mars and achieved orbit on October 24, 2001; at nearly 19 years of service, it is the oldest Martian vessel. It studies Mars for water resources, its radiation environment, and its geology. At least one of its experiments has terminated due to damage from the environment.

Here’s the thing. Sure, these are older missions. However, getting to Mars is a chancy business, so when a mission successfully reaches the target, it should be leveraged for every bit of scientific data that can be wrung out of it before the harsh environment knocks it down.

In other words, this is an investment. If the current Administration is going to characterize itself as being run by businessmen, well, they’d better try to pretend they know what that means. Throwing away a beach head that cannot be easily reacquired once our forces have left, if I may employ a military metaphor, isn’t what a good businessman does.

Yeah, it’s great that other research areas are getting increased funding, but how about these missions that are already there and are cheap to run? That’s economizing, even if you have to increase the NASA budget to cover those other targets, politically motivated or not.

This won’t become a political football – NASA’s not that important to the American future or psyche in the current political climate. But it does symbolize the foolishness that pervades this Administration.

A new poll is out suggesting incumbent Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) is losing traction to challenger, former astronaut, and husband to former Rep Gabby Gifford (D-AZ) Mark Kelly (R-AZ).

Arizona’s Electoral College votes could be in play in November, according to a Monmouth (“Mon‐muth”) University Poll of registered voters in the state. Joe Biden has a slight lead over President Donald Trump, while Bernie Sanders is basically tied with the incumbent. In tomorrow’s Democratic primary election, Biden has a 20 point lead over Sanders. The poll also finds that the Arizona U.S. Senate race could start off with a Democratic edge as well, with Mark Kelly having a 6 point lead against Martha McSally. [Monmouth University Poll]

For a state which acquired a ferocious reputation in 2016 when a traditionally Republican paper endorsed Clinton and was bombarded by hate mail, I’m fascinated to see Biden has a lead over Trump, as well as Arizona’s other Senate seat now being in danger. Remember, McSally ran for, and lost, the seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ); she only occupies the other seat due to an appointment by Governor Doug Ducey (R-AZ). Kelly, whatever his policy proposals, is both an automatic hero and seems like an easily approachable and affable candidate. It’s my guess that he’ll win, possibly by as many as five points – and McSally will be washed up. A result that wouldn’t bother me, given her disrespect for the press.

In 2016, the state went for Trump by less than 4 points. Could the eleven Arizona Electoral Votes be in play? There are still a number of months to go before the Election of the Geriatrics takes place, but this may be worrisome for Republican officials. If government efforts to ameliorate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are ineffective, Trump may begin losing the elderly conservative vote. People don’t like losing their friends to something that didn’t have to be as bad as it might be.

But let’s hope it doesn’t go that far.

Suing some dude pretending to be an insulting cow on Twitter should disqualify the litigant from serious consideration of anything, much less holding public office and dispensing advice to the citizens of the nation – and, yet, Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) just keeps on being a nutcase:

Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California on Sunday contradicted health experts’ recommendation that Americans practice “social distancing” to curb the spread of coronavirus, instead urging “healthy” Americans to continue patronizing businesses during the pandemic.

“If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easily,” Nunes said during an interview on Fox News as many cities announced new restrictions on bars and restaurants to limit gatherings.

“Let’s not hurt the working people in this country … go to your local pub,” he added.

The suggestion directly contradicts recommendations put forth in recent days by government agencies and public health experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been urging “social distancing” — defined as “remaining out of places where people meet or gather” and “avoiding local public transportation” — even if you don’t have any symptoms of the virus as a way to slow the spread of the disease. [CNN]

Sheesh. Why does the 22nd District of California keep reelecting this clown? Is this guy a medical professional with a concentration in public health? No, he’s an Ag guy.

Typical amateur behavior: thinking you know more than folks who’ve somberly studied the problem for years. I hope he takes his broken-down car to a ten year old for repairs. Practice what you preach, Rep Nunes, eh?

Embargo Watch has been around for a decade and more. From author Ivan Oransky’s first post way back when:

If you’re unfamiliar with embargoes: You’ve probably noticed that every major news organization — including mine, Reuters  — seems to publish stories on particular studies all at once. Embargoes are why.

A lot of journals, using services such as Eurekalert.org, release material to journalists before it’s officially published. Reporters agree not to publish anything based on those studies until that date, and in return they get more time to read the studies and obtain comments.

That would seem to be a good thing for science and health journalism, much of which is reliant on journals for news because it’s peer-reviewed — in other words, it’s not just a researcher shouting from a mountaintop — and punctuates the scientific process with “news events.”

Vincent Kiernan doesn’t agree. In his book, Embargoed Science, Kiernan argues that embargoes make journalists lazy, always chasing that week’s big studies. They become addicted to the journal hit, afraid to divert their attention to more original and enterprising reporting because their editors will give them grief for not covering that study everyone else seems to have covered.

But even if embargoes are a necessary evil, they’re not uniform, and how each organization deals with them provides case studies in some of the chinks in embargoes’ armor.

As a fan of obscure facts, it’s interesting to see what other people think is worth blogging about.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare has little patience for President Trump’s antics, especially when it comes to important pieces of legislation related to surveillance:

President Trump took a brief break from his busy schedule of bungling the federal response to coronavirus and modeling disasterous presidential leadership in a crisis to, once again, make a fool of his attorney general.

At 10:44 am on March 12, with the Dow Jones having shed nearly 2,000 points since the markets had opened, the president tweeted:

Many Republican Senators want me to Veto the FISA Bill until we find out what led to, and happened with, the illegal attempted “coup” of the duly elected President of the United States, and others!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2020

Trump did not mention Attorney General Bill Barr in issuing this veto threat concerning the bipartisan compromise bill to reauthorize expiring FISA authorities. He didn’t need to. The day before, on behalf of the Trump administration, Barr had issued a statement that described the bill as follows: …

Where AG Barr states that he’s been working carefully with Congress on the issue and approves the result. See the link if you enjoy careful lawyer talk, but that is what it says.

This is all about keeping the base all stirred up about an alleged witch hunt. Keep shouting out the lie, deny the Mueller report found anything, keep attention focused on some minor issues which may have needed correction, but were, by the government’s own admission, not disqualifying of the actual Page investigation. It’s all about outrage and victimization.

And that’s not how to run a government.

Over on Stratecherry Ben Thompson discusses a number of technical aspects of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it’s causing, COVID-19. Among other things, he gets into a bit of information composition theory, which is a some jargon I just made up:

The Internet, though, threatens second estate gatekeepers by giving anyone the power to publish:

Just as important, though, particularly in terms of the impact on society, is the drastic reduction in fixed costs. Not only can existing publishers reach anyone, anyone can become a publisher. Moreover, they don’t even need a publication: social media gives everyone the means to broadcast to the entire world. Read again Zuckerberg’s description of the Fifth Estate:

People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences.

It is difficult to overstate how much of an understatement that is. I just recounted how the printing press effectively overthrew the First Estate, leading to the establishment of nation-states and the creation and empowerment of a new nobility. The implication of overthrowing the Second Estate, via the empowerment of commoners, is almost too radical to imagine. [From an earlier post by Thompson -HAW]

The current gatekeepers are sure it is a disaster, especially “misinformation.” Everything from Macedonian teenagers to Russian intelligence to determined partisans and politicians are held up as existential threats, and it’s not hard to see why: the current media model is predicated on being the primary source of information, and if there is false information, surely the public is in danger of being misinformed?

The Implication of More Information

The problem, of course, is that focusing on misinformation — which to be clear, absolutely exists — is to overlook the other part of the “everyone is a publisher” equation: there has been an explosion in the amount of information available, true or not. Suppose that all published information followed a normal distribution (I am using a normal distribution for illustrative purposes only, not claiming it is accurate; obviously in sheer volume, given the ease with which it is generated, there is more misinformation):

And then Thompson gets on to discussing how he thinks true and false information fill out the area under the bell curve – see right. What impressed me, however, was his omission of perhaps the most important part of any diagram of this sort – the absorption rate of consumers of this information.

Look, in computer science we often talk about data sources and data sinks. The former term should be self-explanatory, but it means the source of the data to be processed: files on disks, data coming from a network link, etc. A data sink, on the other hand, is the processor of that data: how it’s analyzed, transformed, and stored (each of those steps may be omitted, depending on requirements)^[1].

Now, what happens if your data source is providing data faster than your data sink can process it? It’s a complex problem which, depending on the requirements again, can result in queueing data on disk to just throwing away data on a random basis.

In either of the above diagrams, it would be very helpful to have an estimate of the data processing capability of an individual. Long time readers of this blog know that I have a minor fascination with bell curves (and maybe that’s why I’m driven to comment on Thompson’s post), but in this case I don’t see data processing having a bell curve.

Rather, I think the naive supposition would be that it’s a straight horizontal line. Our capacity to process doesn’t increase just because there’s more information out there.

But, worse yet, it may actually decrease, depending on what you’re measuring. True, a simple definition won’t yield much change, but what if you change it to primary information absorbed? I suggest that distraction by the increasing volume of information, since we’re not single-minded computers^[2], would actually decrease our ability to absorb information. Call the loss absorption of meta-data, if you like. I have experienced this myself as I’ve found long-form journalism sometimes difficult to process when I know I can get scatter-shot tidbits off of Facebook and the like.

But, worse yet, for the conscientious, the awareness of false information drives a requirement that we somehow verify the information that is candidates to be processed! That, in itself, takes time and energy from the actual processing – sometimes vast amounts. This changes the net amount of true information that we can absorb.

I think that would have made Thompson’s chart much more interesting.

¹ I’m sure I’ve dropped out a few steps, as my training is from a long time ago and I’m absent-minded, so be nice if you’re going to bust my chops.

² I suppose we could draw an analogy with thread-programming, but why bother? I’m not aware of every single issue with thread programming, as my exposure to it is only in the highly obscure language Mythryl.

Technically, The Pale Horse (2020) is a two part TV series by the BBC, but I’m calling it a movie because that’s how it felt. As a standalone movie, it was nicely done: excellent acting, good cinematography, fun little plot.

At this point, I must admit I’ve never read The Pale Horse, the Agatha Christie novel on which this movie is based, but my general experience with Christie is that she’s a rationalist. She has no problems placing supernatural elements in her books, but by the time the story comes to a close, they have been cleverly explained by one expedient or another. Christie’s interests were not in supernatural horror as a naive element, but as an element of deceit. Ultimately, Christie was interested in people making bad decisions, and what drove them to it.

But the tendency of this movie to explore the dreams of the lead character, Mark Easterbrook, as a major driver of his actions was a little too disturbing, especially in an ending that is entirely too difficult to credit to Christie. It’s true that the movie follows one of her themes, which is the decay of the upper classes of the Great Britain of her times, but it goes off the rails when Easterbrook is either literally sent to his personal Hell – or at least dreams it. It’s quite the jarring ending, no matter how you feel about the rest of it.

But the professionalism of the production was still encouraging and made for an enjoyable – mostly – afternoon view.

Trying to be a proper skeptic and a reader of Skeptical Inquirer, it’s natural for me to wonder at a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) remedy for Covid-19, but others might not. I hadn’t heard of any, much to my surprise, until I ran across this post tonight by Dutch microbiologist and science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik on Science Integrity Digest via Retraction Watch:

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has led to an enormous amount of preprints and rapidly-approved papers of variable quality. A recently published paper in Pharmacological Research called “Traditional Chinese Medicine for COVID-19 Treatment” caught my eye. The title suggested that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) could be used to treat patients that had fallen ill with the viral disease, but a quick read showed that the paper promised much more than it delivered. Here is a critical review.

The paper starts off with a description of the COVID-19 outbreak and how Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) might bring new hope to treat the disease. It describes the successful treatment of a COVID-19 patient with plant-based mixture called qingfei paidu decoction (QPD). At first glance, this might be a welcome alternative treatment for a novel disease that is quickly growing to be a pandemic, and for which there are no good treatments or vaccines available. But with great claims, we need to see great data, and this is where the paper does not deliver at all.

Want more technical information? Visit Bik’s blog post at the link above. The executive summary is that the paper does not use a proper technique for evaluating the medicine under evaluation, is terribly vague when it should be precise, and a few other errors.

Naturally, many people think there’s a lot of money to be made from a cure, although governments from here to Monte Carlo might declare such a cure to be a public good and pay the inventor enough to cover costs – or make them rich, because who knows how governments would operate these days if presented with such a situation.

But what many don’t realize is that there’s a lot of money to be made with fake cures and vaccines. Just like fly-by-night contractors, dishonest medicine vendors will sell you their verified-by-God cure and then disappear, or refuse to return your money – if, in fact, you do survive long enough to file a complaint in court. See this post on disgraced Evangelical preacher Jimmy Baker.

So if you hear of some TCM, complementary, or other less-than-evidence based cure for COVID-19 that doesn’t really have a good stamp of approval from an accepted authority on it, skip it.

Restaurants do seem a natural for this role:

Dear Friends,

As we all know, spring break is upon us and Governor Walz has closed schools temporarily in an attempt to control the spread of COVID 19 as well. We believe this is the right decision, but also understand that it may present challenges to families in the communities we serve. We’d like to help.

If you are concerned about ensuring your children have lunch, stop by Granite City Food and Brewery-St. Cloud. Every kid can receive a free lunch that contains a turkey sandwich, chips, and applesauce. Completely free, no other purchase is necessary. Just ask for a Manager and we will be happy to make it happen.

Valid at Granite City Food and Brewery in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

We are all in this together,

– Your GCFB-St. Cloud Management Team

Link added by me. I occasionally dine at the Granite City in Rosedale, and I hope they are offering something similar. Kudos!

Right now it looks like this outside in the garden:

But we’re off and running with the tomato plants. Well. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Here’s the shelf we used last year, bare, but with grow lights in place.

And here are the tubs of potential tomatoes.

Now to kick back and wait for them to stick their little heads out of the peat.

drum drum drum drum HURRY UP!

I’m always impressed by how often I foul up by failing to consider possible negative consequences to what I perceive to be a positive course of action. So when this NASA decision concerning evaluation of proposals was mentioned by an old friend, I began to wonder:

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is strongly committed to promoting a culture that actively encourages diversity and inclusion and removes barriers to participation. One important way of achieving this objective is to ensure that the review of proposals is performed in an equitable and fair manner that reduces the impacts of any unconscious or implicit biases.

To this end, and motivated by a successful study conducted for the Hubble Space Telescope, SMD is conducting a pilot program in ROSES-2020 to evaluate proposals using dual-anonymous peer review (DAPR). Under this system, not only are proposers not told the identity their reviewers, the reviewers are not told the identity of the proposers, until after they have evaluated the scientific merit of all of the anonymized proposals.

Certainly there’s almost immeasurable merit in anonymizing proposals in order to negate bias, conscious or unconscious, in reviewers. The loss of contributions from talented minority members who are not, as a group, considered competent has been demonstrated many times over.

But there is also merit in considering the history, negative or positive, of teams who have had proposals accepted previous to this NASA program, or related programs. Experience has to count for something, even if NASA supplies project managers. And some science is difficult to evaluate, or at least so I suspect, even if I am just a simple-minded programmer who, despite his degree in Computer Science, probably hasn’t committed a single science-thingie in my lifetime. But NASA seems determined:

NASA will appoint a “Leveler” to be present in the panel room for all discussions. The Leveler is not a reviewer or a panelist, but is an individual trained to ensure that the panel deliberations focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal and do not deviate into a discussion of the identity, qualifications and experience of the PI and team.

Here are some specific points:

1. Levelers are present to keep the panel discussions focused on scientific merit. Unlike the chairs, they are not listening for issues pertaining to the science, rather they are focused on the discussion itself.
2. If the discussion veers to comments on the proposing team, their past work, their validity, or their identities, the Leveler’s job is to refocus that discussion.
3. Levelers have the authority to stop the discussion on a proposal.

I wonder if NASA has instituted any attempt at measuring what they’re gaining through better inclusion of minority contributions – as well as losing. A difficult metric, I fear.

Jupiter as you’ve never seen it before!

Ok, an experiment showing Jupiter in ultra-wide-angle fisheye from North to South. Uses @NASAJuno imagery. Bunch of things to tweak but it's not too bad pic.twitter.com/MGOHj9HXnz

— Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) March 15, 2020

I actually like this animation less for its cuteness and more for how it shows scale. Too bad it doesn’t include 486958 Arrokoth (aka Ultima Thule), the second and final target of the New Horizons probe.

Warp speeds to scale because why not
Also hey @startrekcbs @jonathansfrakes @Brentspiner, Star Trek was one of the sci fi that made me want to do space science, and here I am! 🖖 pic.twitter.com/VbVBTmsgJn

— Dr James O'Donoghue (@physicsJ) February 11, 2020

As noted above, Pluto’s semi-major axis is roughly 39.5 Astronomical Units (AU), where 1 AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Yeah, I’m not exactly sure how to characterize the semi-major axis – average distance won’t be quite right, but close enough for us civilian-types. 486958 Arrokoth? 44.581 AU. I suppose the animation would get a little too squeeze.

I always wonder why the actors of the show, any hit show, are referenced, but hardly ever the scriptwriters – the storytellers who provide the backbone memorable tale. Without them, the actors would simply be flailing about.

I feel compelled to praise Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, who appeared on The Late Show with Colbert Thursday, and made the very important point that being personally irresponsible with our health means we’re endangering our families, friends, and strangers. Here’s the last segment:

There are two prior segments which are also worth viewing.

I’ve made this point before, including in this critique of a fairly immature petition here:

Let us honestly assess reality: we are not independent islands, inviolably separate from each other. Along with voluntary bonds which we often assume with each other through association, contract, and other forms, there are also the involuntary bonds over which we have no control, as we share the resources of this reality, amongst which we can enumerate air and water. Because of these involuntary bonds through which pathogens travel, we are vulnerable to the illnesses of the age: mumps, measles, etc. — their names are legion.

When I say the Fourth Amendment applies to everyone, I mean that I and my progeny have an equal right to protection under the Amendment, and that protection, in my case, is from easily propagated disease. Here we see the tension to which I alluded: I do not wish to become infected with a pathogen which can cause severe damage or death, yet is easily negated. The author of the petition does not wish to accept the vaccination. The tension comes in the fact that we have unavoidably shared resources (air, water. etc.) through which many pathogens travel to infect a new victim.

This isn’t like buying a couch or a toothbrush – our individual decisions can affect, positively or negatively, many other people. Not only is this of immediate significance, it also plays into the debate concerning the proper nature of our health system.

It’s worth considering.

This is how you tell if a corporate entity is part of the community, or merely preys on it under the guise of capitalism:

Just to get the word out there. With all the school closings and families relying on the lunch for their kids that are now out of luck. Billy’s on grand ave [St. Paul, MN] is offering free lunch for kids until this calms down. No other purchases needed, just feed your kid. [Facebook posting]

If you’re company isn’t helping out in the face of disaster, whether imminent or post, then they may be a predatory corporation.

Kudos to Billy’s on Grand.

Panspermia:

For generations, some astronomers have speculated about whether our planet was pollinated with an alien seed. This theory, called panspermia, suggests that primitive life can travel from world to world on space rocks, kick-starting evolution in each new environment.

This all sounds more like science fiction than science, but there are also good reasons to think panspermia is possible.

With the recent discovery of the alien space rock ‘Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov, some astronomers are rethinking how far life could travel to trigger a “Second Genesis.” Could life spread across the galaxy? If alien asteroids and comets commonly travel between stars, then the interstellar version of panspermia may be more possible than astronomers imagined. [“Could Alien Life Travel on Interstellar Asteroids and Comets like ‘Oumuamua?“, Eric Betz, Discover]

A reader remarks on my review of Dark Star:

You found a lot more meaning and more in that film than I did. Seemed more like a semi-tongue in cheek film made by a bunch of stoners who couldn’t quite keep their not-very-funny jokes together long enough to deliver real laughs. I saw it in college, and was semi-amused because it was so camp and so bad.

I think it the consistency of its awfulness. Sure, other films can be bad, but the dreadfulness of the entity relationships was so distinctly terrible and, well, noir, that I thought there had to be a little more here than met the eye.

Or maybe I just made it all up out of whole cloth.

Even then, I think the only reason we watched it was because it had a myth (true? false?) of having been the place where some of the crew who did Star Wars amazing special effects got their start.

The late Dan O’Bannon co-wrote the screenplay, was editor of the movie, played Sgt Pinback / Frug, and worked on special effects. He also contributed special effects to Star Wars, as well as the legendary chest-bursting scene in Alien. Ron Cobb did design work on both movies; incidentally, he also designed the Ecology symbol, later incorporated into the Ecology flag. Greg Jein did model work for Dark Star and various Star Trek franchise episodes.

Of course, many folks in the United States have an interest in the results of the next big election in November 2020, from the House to the Senate to the Presidency, as well as the state and local elections. I’ve talked about the 35 Senate races here, myself. But the Presidency is a little harder, since the mathematics of the Electoral College is confusing as votes are allocated two to a State plus the number of House members it has, making for wildly differing results depending on where votes are won – as President Trump demonstrated by losing the popular vote by several million votes, but winning the Electoral College.

Still, it comes down to what we call the mood of country: perceptions of policies, ideologies, dislikes & demonizations, likes and canonizations, perceived levels of competency, misleading statements from foreign entities, and a dozen other factors, which are then put together into a single vote (at least until Ranked Choice Voting goes national) by the voter. And while we wait for that final judgment day in November to come around, we have more than just polls to examine to forecast the future, and I’m not talking goat guts.

Special elections, those elections called to fill local or national elective offices prior to the big day!

As it happens, the Democrat’s propaganda machine likes to update me from time to time on these, and the first one of which I’ve taken any notice was last Tuesday, a special election to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Merrimack 24. As it happens, in New Hampshire a district may send more than one representative to the legislature, with Merrimack 24 sending four. What happened in 2018?

They sent four Republicans.

2016? Ditto. In fact, it repeats back to 2012, where Ballotpedia stops.

But when one of the 2018 class passed away, a special election was called, which ended up pitting Kathleen Martins (D), an educator, against Elliot Axelman (R), an EMT. Democratic propaganda demonized Axelman, and it’s difficult to find much on his web site, beyond keeping taxes as low as possible and 2nd Amendment absolutism – neither of which fills me with feelings of wellness, as they are religious tenets of the current brand of Republican Party, but neither are alarmingly extremist, more naive than anything. Martins is even more bland.

Enough suspense, eh? Democrat Kathleen Martins beat Axelman, breaking the Republican lock on Merrimack 24, 1000 to 961. Yeah, the numbers are small enough that it only takes a small swing in sentiment for Martins to lose next time.

But consider this Ballotpedia tidbit as the greater context to this election:

In fact, the Republicans have held the chamber after the 2010, 2014, and 2016 elections; the 2018 elections signaled quite a change in the voter’s mood. Whether this means Martins will hold onto her seat is impossible to forecast, but the 2018 election behavior suggests that the Republicans have, at least temporarily, lost their grip on the sentiments of New Hampshire voters.

New Hampshire only has four electoral votes. Nevertheless, President Trump, in what I suspect is a calculated political ploy, has repeatedly claimed, without presentation of substantive evidence, that he in actuality won those four electoral votes, but the state was swamped with illegal votes that were not detected. These allegations were investigated and found to be without basis in fact. Whether this ploy will sway New Hampshire voters in November is to be seen, but I suspect President Trump, if he and his team continue to underperform in the realm of disaster response, will find it harder to find an inhabitant of New Hampshire who’ll take any such claims seriously in 2020.

Today, the jumpy market whiplashed us with a nearly 10% jump after the big 10% drop of yesterday. At this point, I wouldn’t even care to guess what Monday will bring – but those who pay attention to events over the weekend may be able to hazard a guess. But I think Max Boot’s observation of how Trump will likely manage the response is spot-on:

He did not even declare a national state of emergency — something he has previously done for the southern border and cybersecurity. An emergency declaration could give Trump broader powers to mobilize the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the military, among other resources, but Politico reports that Trump is concerned it “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” Actually, it’s Trump’s failure to take decisive action that is agitating Wall Street, with stocks in free fall the morning after his speech. Trump is heightening, not ameliorating, pandemic panic. [WaPo]

Trump’s propensity to make things look good suggests he doesn’t understand that judging work on its own merits is actually a thing. He could have rebuilt much of his shattered reputation if he had simply attacked this problem with vigor and honesty, but I suspect there was never a possibility of that happening. For Trump, it’s disaster and coverup, disaster and coverup, all through his business life and now his political life – but with a much larger audience.

And don’t forget what his immediate audience thought of him at the 2016 election:

Trump’s home town vote in 2016.

For the investor, this suggests a continued roller coaster: big losses one day, big gains another. Those will with balls of brass will try to profit, and many will succeed. I hate heartburn, so I won’t be among them.

But I will be looking for a bottom by watching Trump and public opinion. If it appears he’s given up and will let others deal with the problem, then predictability concerning the governmental response may finally become a reality.

Until then … keep your seat belts tightly fastened.