Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Geographic maps are interesting if your interest is geography. If it’s something else?

Population density map of the US also shows the Great Plains really well too. Source: https://t.co/L1gG7y5stv pic.twitter.com/59WVNo470y

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) July 27, 2020

Kuestenmacher appears to be a demographer and map aggregator. This lovely – and hysterical – map illustrates not only how our population is spread out, but could be enhanced to demonstrate how some Senators represent many people, and some Senators only a few – yet each has an equal vote in the Senate.

In an update on candidate Trump’s promise to renew the coal mining and coal-fired power industries, the latest information from President Trump’s Administration is, well, negative:

2018, coal supplied 13%.

This continues to be good news for folks in general, but bad news for coal industry workers. Fortunately, retraining is certainly possible, and there are jobs.

For more information, see this Mark Sumner post on The Daily Kos.

Addendum: WaPo has a different way of looking at the above:

I’m not sure how to reconcile that Coal at 23%.

Are you in control of your use of technology, or is it controlling you? Sunny Fitzgerald has some tips in case you’re discovering the tail is wagging the dog:

I’m aware that late-night screen time impedes restful sleep and mindless morning scrolling can start the day on a negative note. I’d already implemented numerous mental health and sleep strategies: turned off notifications, removed most social media apps from my phone, tried various meditation practices, limited caffeine to early morning hours and more. Yet, since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve frequently caught myself bingeing on bad news. …

Additionally, according to Presnall, content is increasingly designed to “trigger hyperarousal by playing on our more primitive emotions — fear and outrage” which activates the survival centers of our brain. So, we continue looking for answers by clicking on recommended content rather than searching separately for every piece of information. And in doing so, we “reinforce the [artificial intelligence or algorithm behind the platform] to think that this is the type of news we want” — unintentionally attracting more of the same.

Rather than relay Fitzgerald’s tips – you can go to their article for that – I’d like to note how this resonates with my readings on manipulative communications strategies. As Fitzgerald notes from one of her experts, most web sites are deliberately designed to be sticky, sticky to your brain. They want your attention, because then they can pound on you with ads.

All without your realizing it.

Similarly, as Garvey notes in The Persuaders, the goal of commercial ad creators and political messaging operations is to manipulate your behavior, without your knowledge, to do what they want – spend money, vote their way, think their way.

I’m not saying they’re always wrong, even if they are, but, far more importantly, be aware. Regardless of whether you trust the source or not, try to always split off part of your mind to monitor how information is being communicated to you, whether information you know should be present is omitted, and the stylistic signals that someone is being less than fully honest. It’s a process to learn, the signs you can both learn about and learn on your own, and forming the habit can take a lot of effort.

But it lets you be you, and not someone’s thumb puppet.

If you haven’t read the late Rep John Lewis’s goodbye editorial in The New York Times, go do so.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Learning. There is so much of it to do, and so many people think they’re done when they’re done with school.

Don’t be one of them.

That would be the bar exam, necessary in most American states for practicing law. Professor Ilya Somin on The Volokh Conspiracy makes the case, boosted by the problematic risks and logistics of taking the bar exam in the midst of a pandemic:

The standard argument against diploma privilege is that the bar exam requirement is needed to protect consumers from incompetent lawyers. But there is no evidence that bar exams actually achieve that goal, as opposed to serving as a barrier to entry that protects incumbents in the profession from competition. The quality of legal services in Wisconsin has not suffered from its longstanding diploma privilege policy. Bar records indicate that attorneys in that state have disciplinary records similar to those in other states.

Such results are not surprising. The truth is that the bar exam is a test of arcane memorization, not a test of whether the applicant is likely to be a good attorney. That’s why, as my co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, “when it [the exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned.”

For that reason, I have long advocated the abolition of bar exams …

I’m not sure what life would be like without the looming wall of the bar exam for new lawyers. I’m a cautious fan of hurdles, marking an accomplishment, and the societal mythos bestowing on those who make it over the hurdle with both opportunities and responsibilities – such as being an Officer of the Court. I think, sometimes, that I might have benefited from such formalities.

But maybe not. I was completely mystified by the celebration of graduating high school. I was just glad to be gone. I suppose I should have gone to the graduation ceremony for University, but I believe I was quite ill at the time – and didn’t feel like I was part of a community in any case.

But extraordinary exams such as the bar are not exclusively about testing knowledge that can be looked up just as easily; it’s also about putting together the gumption to actually sit and pass it. Much like the despised long hours for doctors during their internships, big, big challenges are necessary for lawyers who may find themselves in charge of matters involving large sums of money – or the liberty and lives of defendants.

It looks like the scientists who work on seeing small things may have hit the bottom of the turtle stack (“It’s turtles all the way down, doctor!”):

A Cryo-EM map of the protein apoferritin. Credit: Paul Emsley/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (via nature)

A game-changing technique for imaging molecules known as cryo-electron microscopy has produced its sharpest pictures yet — and, for the first time, discerned individual atoms in a protein.

By achieving atomic resolution using cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), researchers will be able to understand, in unprecedented detail, the workings of proteins that cannot easily be examined by other imaging techniques, such as X-ray crystallography. [Nature]

Those blobs, above, are individual atoms on the surface of a protein.

OK, so, thinking about it, there is one more turtle to go – visualizing quarks. An electron is a quark, for example. They’re the bits of reality that are really indivisible, as I understand it.

But this is – pun intended – really cool.

I don’t know a thing about neuromorphic processors or the problems encountered in trying to do computer vision with them, yet this caught my eye:

The Intel Loihi neuromorphic processor.

[Yijing Watkins of Los Alamos National Laboratory] and her colleagues experimented with programming neuromorphic processors to learn to reconstruct images and video based on sparse data, a bit like how the human brain learns from its environment during childhood development. “However, all of our attempts to learn eventually became unstable,” said study senior author Garrett Kenyon, also a computer scientist at Los Alamos.

The scientists ran computer simulations of a spiking neural network to find out what happened. They found that although it could learn to identify the data it was trained to look for, when such training went uninterrupted long enough, its neurons began to continuously fire no matter what signals they received.

Watkins recalled that “almost in desperation,” they tried having the simulation essentially undergo deep sleep. They exposed it to cycles of oscillating noise, roughly corresponding to the slow brain waves seen in deep sleep, which restored the simulation to stability. The researchers suggest this simulation of slow-wave sleep may help “prevent neurons from hallucinating the features they’re looking for in random noise,” Watkins said. [Inside Science]

By introducing noise, it seems to me – conceptually – that there’s a reduction in the purity requirements of the processors. That is, it permits a certain amount of fuzziness or abstraction in order to identify some object as a member of this or that category.

The interesting part of the article is the notion that any sentient creature will need deep sleep in order to have a usable cognitive apparatus – and that’s the rough equivalent of sleep.

The funny things you run across in White House transcripts. This is the same one in which alien DNA is mentioned, which falls into the category of shocking but not surprising, but this one is surprising:

[President Trump]: Today, I’m proud to announce one of the most important deals in the history of U.S. pharmaceutical industries. My administration has reached a historic agreement with a great American company — you remember this company; it’s called — from the good, old camera age, the old days — to begin producing critical pharmaceutical ingredients. It’s called Kodak. And it’s going to be right here in America.

So I want to congratulate the people in Kodak. They’ve been working very hard. Members of my administration are present in Rochester right now — Rochester, New York — a good place. And they’re trying to finalize this groundbreaking deal, and they will be announcing this deal. …

With this new agreement, my administration is using the Defense Production Act to provide a $765 million loan to support the launch of Kodak Pharmaceuticals. It’s a great name, when you think of it. Such a great name. It was one of the great brands in the world. Then people went digital, and Kodak didn’t follow. But now, under very extraordinary leadership, they are following and they’re doing something that’s a different field, and it’s a field that they’ve really hired some of the best people in the world to be taking care of that company and watching that company — watching over it. But it’s a breakthrough in bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States.

Given the corruption of the Trump Administration, I have to wonder if Kodak’s using a kick-back scheme to get a needed injection of money.

For the record, Eastman Kodak (KODK) is up more than 300% today as I write this.

And, remember, especially for younger readers, for Trump’s generation, Kodak is a hallowed, iconic name, and there was widespread shock when Kodak imploded due to the advent of digital photography. In that sense, this may simply be Trump’s way of trying to return to the past.

Or maybe he invested in Kodak just prior to this announcement.

Or maybe, just maybe, Eastman Kodak has the capability to do what they’re being asked to do. Old style photography manufacturing did involve a certain amount of chemical expertise, after all. And, honestly, I hope that’s the case here.

But I won’t be surprised if we see Trump in court over this deal, either as President or personally.

On this thread, in case you feel like North & South America are the dens of iniquity, while the rest of the world is in recovery, don’t be so sure:

“Corona is coming back with all its might,” warned Bavarian state premier Markus Söder, according to German news site Merkur.

In France, new cases hit an average of 850 over the past three days — nowhere near the average of 2,582 in April. But the Health Ministry noted that recent progress has been erased, and Health Minister Olivier Véran warned of as many as 500 active clusters.

Remember the portulaca, or possibly pursulane as one reader suggested? Here it is, a month later:

It prospers.

If you simplify reality and assume that every driver has an N chance of having an accident – say, hitting and killing a pedestrian – then it seems likely that increasing the number of drivers and trips will end up killing more people.

And that seems to be the salient conclusion of this National Bureau of Economic Research report:

While ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft provide convenient transportation and flexible job opportunities, a new study suggests that these benefits may also come with a number of costs. Fatalities among automobile occupants and pedestrians, gasoline consumption, and traffic congestion have all risen since the ride-hailing services were launched in 2010, while public transportation ridership has fallen.

There are lots of caveats, of course – correlation vs causation, other factors such as smartphone distractions, and they think accident rates might go down as drivers gain experience.

I doubt it. I cannot help but note that ride hailing does not result in a reduction of trips, but in an increase in trips, speaking intuitively. Contrast this to mass transit, such as buses and subways, where there’s one driver responsible for far more passengers.

Of course there’s going to be more accidents with ride hailing.

Perhaps Uber, Lyft, and all the others should be subject to an additional tax to recover the productivity of those who are killed by them.

Nutation:

Astronomical nutation is a phenomenon which causes the orientation of the axis of rotation of a spinning astronomical object to vary over time. It is caused by the gravitational forces of other nearby bodies acting upon the spinning object. Although they are caused by the same effect operating over different timescales, astronomers usually make a distinction between precession, which is a steady long-term change in the axis of rotation, and nutation, which is the combined effect of similar shorter-term variations. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Hansen’s Star Map And The Precession Of The Equinoxes Circle,” Wally Motloch, Graham Hancock:

From CNN/Politic’s Stephen Collinson:

It also emerged Monday that Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who works in the President’s mask-free West Wing, tested positive for the coronavirus, in a sign of how flaunting basic precautions leaves no one safe from infection even if such steps are politically unpalatable.

[Bold mine.]

That would be flout. Flauting basic precautions would be hubristic. Overly dramatic. Chewing the scenery, even. Nom Nom Nom.

My Arts Editor tells me this is an old standard. I think it’s great.

When it comes to controlling the Presidential pardon power, it appears Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) is ahead of me, according to Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare:

Rep. Adam Schiff’s bill, entitled “Abuse of the Pardon Prevention Act,” would do two basic things. First, for pardons for a “covered offense,” it would require the attorney general to submit to designated congressional committees all Justice Department materials related to the prosecution for which the individual was pardoned and all materials related to the pardon. It would also require the president to submit to the relevant committees all pardon-related materials within the Executive Office of the President. Covered offenses include offenses against the United States arising “from an investigation in which the President, or a relative of the President, is a target, subject, or witness”; offenses related to refusals to testify or produce papers to Congress; and offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (false statements), § 1505 (obstruction), § 1512 (witness tampering) or § 1621 (perjury), if the offense related to a congressional proceeding or investigation.

Second, the Schiff bill would criminalize bribery in connection with the issuance of a pardon. It would do so by amending the criminal prohibition on bribery, 18 U.S.C. § 201, to apply it with a plain statement to the president and vice president, and by making clear that under the bribery statute, the granting of a pardon or commutation is an “official act” and any such act of clemency is also “anything of value.” In effect, this amendment would criminalize the offer of a grant, or the grant, of pardons as part of a corrupt exchange.

Much like my thought, it doesn’t forbid the act a priori, but is an implicit threat that if the pardon power is misused, then it’s criminalized and becomes a matter not for the political arena, but for law enforcement and the courts.

Much less entertaining, but probably for the best.

If only it said
TIM CONWAY.

Have you ever come out of a test thinking you failed it, and were elated when you got a ‘C’, instead?

That’s how I felt about Bride Of The Gorilla (1951). Going in, the poster looked awful, and it didn’t get off to a great start. And, yet, there was unexpected nuance, such as the police commissioner, half European, half native, who attended University and then returned to the area of his youth to serve, and finds himself torn between his training and his Amazonian instincts.

Or the fate that befalls the casual racist at the heart of this sordid tale. Barney is his name (I kept thinking Barney Fife, but this Barney is played by Raymond Burr! Barney is not a good name for anyone), and he’s the supervisor on the Amazonian plantation of the elderly Klaas Van Gelder, and his youthful wife, Dina. She’s faithful to her husband, despite the presence of the handsome, rugged Barney, but Klaas and Barney are nevertheless in a fraught relationship, which terminates one night when Barney tells Klaas he’s leaving his employ, and Klaas, using a few choice words, socks him one. Barney’s return shot throws Klaas next to a poisonous snake, and Barney, perhaps a little overwrought, declines to save Klaas from the creature’s bite.

The next day, Klaas’ body is found, and the local doctor, himself a Dina devotee, performs the inquest, where he ascribes death to a heart attack and snake poison. All clear for Dina and Barney.

Except for the old, native crone, Al-Long, who, unknown to Barney, witnessed the death. But she has no tolerance for European ways; hers is the way of witchcraft. But does she turn Barney into a gorilla, as the poster suggests?

No!

This is more subtle. She curses Barney into thinking he’s turning into a gorilla, while everyone else just sees Barney. Barney Fife? No, no. Just Barney!

Soon enough, the marriage of Barney and Dina is falling apart, as Barney is staying out late, drinking from ponds and staring at himself, listening to things he’s never heard before, and, generally, being a pain in the ass.

Like I said, this is a ‘C’ all the way, but so much better than expected. The acting is professional, some of the cinematography was quite good, and if the story sometimes seems over the top, it could have been far, far worse.

All in all, a morality tale – not quite believable, but better than expected.

If you’ve ever wondered about the internal deliberations of SCOTUS, especially in this year of the pandemic, Joan Biskupic has a report on CNN/Politics that may interest you. Here’s one tidbit:

Roberts’ June decision saving the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program surprised advocates on both sides and even took some colleagues aback when he had first cast his vote many months earlier in private session, sources told CNN.

Roberts had generally supported Trump’s immigration policies, and in 2016 had privately voted against a related program for parents, rather than children, who had come to the US without papers, sources said. (That case, United States v. Texas, produced a 4-4 vote behind the scenes, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and no resolution on the merits.)

But the new reporting reveals that unlike Roberts’ 2012 move to uphold Obamacare and separate 2019 action to ensure no citizenship question on the 2020 census, Roberts’ action on DACA was not a late vote switch. He put his cards on the table soon after November oral arguments in the case and did not waver, sources told CNN. Roberts believed the administration had not sufficiently justified the rescission of the program benefiting some 700,000 young people and had then developed after-the-fact rationalizations.

Or this Georgia legal code decision:

Roberts’ winning streak extended to a Georgia copyright dilemma, heard in December, when he was able to turn his dissenting opinion into the prevailing view during the drafting process. He captured the majority from Thomas, who had initially taken control of the case once votes were cast in their private session after oral arguments.

The Georgia case decided in April, testing whether a state can copyright its annotated legal code, was not a high-profile one. But it offered an example of the rare but consequential vote-shifting that can occur behind the scenes and make a difference in the outcome of a case and law nationwide.

The court ruled that federal copyright protections do not cover annotations in a state’s code, based on the general principle, Roberts wrote, “that no one can own the law.”

SCOTUS watcher Professor Josh Blackman on The Volokh Conspiracy draws a conclusion:

Wow! “Guided by” As if Roberts was Kavanaugh’s “sherpa.” How demeaning of the Junior Justice? Whoever leaked this fact was trying to make Roberts look powerful, and Kavanaugh look weak. And that “guided by” line looks even worse in light of Kavanaugh’s separate concurrence …

But Robert doesn’t always look powerful, at least to Blackman. Regarding remote deliberations:

Indeed, Roberts encouraged his colleagues to be “brief.”

The chief justice thought there would even be sufficient time after justices had taken their turns for a round of open questioning. For that final round, he said, if anyone wanted to ask a question, he or she could try to break in. He encouraged them to be brief. The chief recognized that several justices might jump in at once. If that happened, he said, he would call on one of them to speak. If he mistakenly called on a justice who was not trying to break in, he had a fix for his colleagues: Try to ask a question anyway. [Biskupic]

This final leak does not make Roberts look powerful. It makes him look petty, and unconcerned for his colleagues. He made these decisions unilaterally, without taking into consideration the views of the other Justices.

Roberts motivations are various and not necessarily harmonious: conservative temperament, concern for legacy, dislike of Trump, perhaps internal divisions, and a liberal wing that has the capability of embarrassing the Chief Justice with ascerbic observations.

Both pieces are interesting reads.

Restful on the eyes, it is.

I think it’s already gone.

While discussing dinner plans with my Arts Editor:

ME: We could go to Mac’s [a local fish ‘n chips joint].

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: We’d be eating outside in this 20 MPH wind.

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: “Oh, noooooo! My fish is flying away! I ordered the cod!”

ARTS EDITOR: …!

SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts once again brings bewilderment upon the right-wing fringe movement that believes religion trumps all in the case of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et al:

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court’s liberal wing in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had “abandoned his oath.”

“What happened to that judge?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

“Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing church doors to their flocks,” Cotton added in a statement. [The Hill]

It’s starting to border on amazing that conservative lawmakers react with shock whenever a conservative justice refuses to adhere to their ideology. In this particular case, it’s not even a decision against the heart of the Nevada church’s case – it’s a decision to deny emergency injunctive relief, which basically means giving the church permission to conduct business as usual while its case proceeds in a lower Court.

That’s all.

No reasoning was presented for the majority opinion, so I can only guess that the majority has noted that churches have been a major vector for the spread of Covid-19, while movie complexes and casinos have not yet proven to be. I expect the latter may change, but at the moment why allow a church to possibly menace society while its case works its way through the court system?

Churches services are not essential services, no matter how red-faced priests, pastors, and faithful get about it. There are other options. Don’t confuse a potentially dangerous religious service configuration with a freedom of religion issue, like Justice Kavanaugh manages to do in his dissent:

For example, courts should be extremely deferential to the States when considering a substantive due process claim by a secular business that it is being treated worse than another business. … Under the Constitution, state and local governments, not the federal courts, have the primary responsibility for addressing COVID–19 matters such as quarantine requirements, testing plans, mask mandates, phased reopenings, school closures, sports rules, adjustment of voting and election procedures, state court and correctional institution practices, and the like.

But COVID–19 is not a blank check for a State to discriminate against religious people, religious organizations, and religious services. There are certain constitutional red lines that a State may not cross even in a crisis. Those red lines include racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and content-based suppression of speech.

I’m sorry, but if your religious service objectively endangers my health and life, you bet it better be suppressed. Kavanaugh tries to draw a red line, but I’m afraid the scuffing feet of Covid-19 has erased it – dispositively.

I see this as simply a ginned up issue to keep the base in line, rather than, once again, sober governance. Hysteria tends to be the Republicans’ stock in trade these days, and I’m getting tired of it. Cotton especially. He seems to be a ninny and a dick.

Good for Chief Justice Roberts.

The things you stumble across in RetractionWatch. Remember this cool bit of amber with something avian in it? The paper has been retracted by Nature, but not due to fraud:

We, the authors, are retracting this Article to prevent inaccurate information from remaining in the literature. Although the description of Oculudentavis khaungraae remains accurate, a new unpublished specimen casts doubts upon our hypothesis regarding the phylogenetic position of HPG-15-3.

When your epistemic bubble keeps telling you the government is evil and the private sector can do no wrong, you get shit like this:

[Serena Bumpus, regional director of nursing for the Austin Round Rock Region of Baylor Scott and White Health in Texas,] has fielded calls from nurses all over the country — some as far afield as the United Kingdom — wanting to know how they can help. But Bumpus says she does not have an easy answer.

“I’ve had to kind of just do my own digging and use my connections,” she said. At first, she said, interested nurses were asked to register through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry; but then the system never seemed to be put to use.

Later she learned — “by happenstance … literally by social media” — that the state had contracted with private agencies to find nurses. So now she directs callers to those agencies. [WaPo]

This was a prime role for the government to fill, and it appears to have been completely abdicated in Texas by the dollar-worshipping leaders of government. Think about it: she learned about it by accident.

That is unacceptable. But you can guess there’s more than one instance of that out there. The private sector has no experience and no motivation – but profit – with this situation.

This is the result of decades of preaching about the evils of government by the right, and the assertions, some very, very silly – I know, I read them when they were initially published – that the private sector can do darn near anything the government can do, ten times better and without corruption.

All of these are turning out to be lies. If my dear reader has bought into these assertions, this is the time to sit back in your chair and contemplate how they went wrong. Or go here (one of my personal prisms). Methods optimized for one sector of society rarely transfer to another. We’re seeing that in practice right now – especially the Southern states run by Republicans.

In the same paper referenced here on 5G technology inducing coronavirus, James Heathers (via RetractionWatch) notices a wee slip by the paper’s authors:

Remember, 5G causes 720 FACTORIAL different diseases.

I think there are about 13,000 diseases in the ICD-10.

That is a lot less that 720! which is – and you'll like this…

2.6e1746

As there are 10^82 atoms in the universe, this just might be shite. https://t.co/m0XcFbL2HC

— 🏴James Heathers 🏴 (@jamesheathers) July 23, 2020

Which makes me wonder, A) who are these jokers who wrote this paper, and B) who are the clowns who accepted it and published it?

At least it’s been retracted, eh?

Venereology:

Venereology is a branch of medicine that is concerned with the study and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. The name derives from Roman goddess Venus, associated with love, beauty and fertility. A physician specializing in venereology is called a venereologist.^[1] In many areas of the world, the specialty is usually combined with dermatology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the credentials of the authors of a withdrawn paper, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells.”