Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Into the mailbag today came another example of the sort of mail you should never forward. If I could easily do it, I’d eliminate the pictures – but most of the email is pictures, not only of the unwritten material, but written material as well. Analysis follows the entirety of the mail this time.

http://nflarrest.com/

NFL arrest record by team since 2000

Team # of Arrests Since 2000

Minnesota Vikings 42
Cincinnati Bengals 40
Denver Broncos 36
Tennessee Titans 33
Miami Dolphins 28
Kansas City Chiefs 28
Jacksonville Jaguars 27
Tampa Bay Buccaneers 27
Cleveland Browns 26
San Diego Chargers 25
Indianapolis Colts 24
Chicago Bears 23
Seattle Seahawks 20
New Orleans Saints 20
Washington Redskins 18
Oakland Raiders 18
Baltimore Ravens 18
Carolina Panthers 18
Green Bay Packers 17
Pittsburgh Steelers 17
Atlanta Falcons 16
San Francisco 49ers 16
Detroit Lions 15
New England Patriots 15
Buffalo Bills 14
Dallas Cowboys 13
New York Giants 13
Arizona Cardinals 12
New York Jets 11
Philadelphia Eagles 10
Houston Texans 9
St Louis Rams 8

Total 656

If we’re not predisposed to be upset at the NFL, then what can we see here?

1. They’re all black. Along with Colin Kaepernick, whose crimes include giving nearly a million dollars to charity in this year alone, as well as Black Lives Matter, the black community’s willingness to speak out concerning injustice has made it a prime target. If this was all about the alleged evils of the NFL, then we should include such athletes as Fran Tarkenton (financial fraud, even if he avoided conviction and admitting to it), Tommy Kramer (DUI), or Justin Strzelcyzk (trying to outrun troopers).But it’s not. The NFL has refused to knuckle under to President Trump’s demand that the American flag be held sacred. It’s not sacred and it’s not healthy to consider it to be, as I discussed here, previously. So we can interpret this as a hit-job on the NFL, but the fact that only black athletes are referenced indicates that it’s meant to play on the racial fears that many folks have.
2. The numbers are out of context. Is 656 a big number? Since 2000? Let’s do the math:

   656 ÷ 16 =41

   So 41 arrests (not convictions) per year. No doubt some arrests don’t make it to trial, some are found Not Guilty, and of course now we’re thinking about how the author of this post managed to neglect this critically important information. Maybe we’re talking about just DUIs and a little rowdiness in the bars.

   And, more importantly, what percentage of players are involved? Do these numbers include coaching staff, admin, etc, or is it limited to just the players?

3. And are all of your colleagues, current and former, completely innocent? Condemning the NFL for having some employees who don’t always follow the rules is hypocritical. I know that a person who used to work at one of my employers was arrested for allegedly attempting to hire a hitman to kill his wife. Should I condemn that employer? Should I condemn my entire industry? How about the cops arrested in Baltimore for planting evidence? Time to condemn all cops? Utter nonsense in all three cases.
4. Are the facts correct? Some I was able to confirm, but I was also able to confirm that “Dante Stallworth” is actually “Donte’ Stallworth”, there was indeed a manslaughter conviction, and I was unable to confirm that President Obama invited him to the White House. The point is not that this appears to be a lie, because my research was relatively shallow. The point is that whoever wrote this up chose not to make it easy to confirm these claims, probably because the details can muddle this person’s hidden agenda. As an example, Stallworth’s punishment was more than just 24 days in jail:
   

   … he received a sentence of 30 days in the county jail, plus 1,000 hours of community service, 2 years of community control, and 8 years’ probation. He has also received a life-time suspension of his Florida state driver’s license. [Wikipedia]

   Context is once again lost.

5. The entire slant of this mail is un-American. One of the finest themes of the United States is redemption, the opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and live a better life. This mail has nothing of that in it, now does it? A few arrests, oh, quick, let’s condemn the NFL! This is not the type of mail I would expect from any reasonable patriot, because it denies the chance to learn from one’s mistakes – to do better.

In the end, this is a fairly clumsy attempt at manipulative mail. A few “outrageous” numbers get thrown out, an unsubtle attempt to stir up racial hatred (we all did catch that attempt to muddy President Obama), and a pointer at a website of official data, as if that means anything at all.

Look, I have my own problems with the NFL, first to do with the treatment of Kaepernick, a  highly rated, Super Bowl-experienced quarterback with excellent stats who can’t get a job – and the Vikes could sure use him.

Second, the entire concussions leading to dementia thing really bothers me. Is it ethical to be a fan of a sport which can leave its participants in dire straits on a regular basis?

But this assassination of the NFL is inappropriate, and its attempts to paint all the black players as criminals is divisive. It’s really an attack on the American polity, a recognition that when we work together we’re stronger than anyone else – and so that engenders this sort of attack mail by folks who don’t like America. And that’s why we should ignore and rebuff such sordid attempts to manipulate us.

[10/17/2017 Added missing word.]

Apotheosis:

1. The highest point in the development of something; a culmination or climax.
   ‘his appearance as Hamlet was the apotheosis of his career’
2. The elevation of someone to divine status.
   ‘death spared Pompey the task of having to account for the apotheosis of Caesar’

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Heard on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last night. I was surprised to realize I didn’t have much of a concept of it.

Greg Fallis brings us a little Japanese history:

On the 9th of July in the year 869 (or, to use the Nipponese calendar, the 26th day of 5th month, 11th year of Jōgan) a massive earthquake took place off the coast of Honshu, followed by a devastating tsunami. A history of Japan written about three decades later describes the event:

[A] large earthquake occurred in Mutsu province with some strange light in the sky. People shouted and cried, lay down and could not stand up. Some were killed by the collapsed houses, others by the landslides. Horses and cattle got surprised, madly rushed around and injured the others. Enormous buildings, warehouses, gates and walls were destroyed. Then the sea began roaring like a big thunderstorm. The sea surface suddenly rose up and the huge waves attacked the land. They raged like nightmares.

In the aftermath of the destruction, coastal communities began to erect ‘tsunami stones’ marking the furthest extent of the inundation. The stones served three purposes; they were historical markers, they were memorials to the dead, and they were a warning to future generations.

And then adds the Trump Administration.

Right, this is where we return to Trump and Twitter. I think we can view Comrade Trump’s tweets as a form of tsunami stone. They comprise a historical record of his thoughts and behavior. In the future I hope they’ll serve as a memorial to the social and environmental policies the Trump administration are in the process of destroying. And I hope they serve as a warning, both to us in the next election and to future generations of voters.

Source: A Trinity College (CT) course on the subject of Japanese disasters

I appreciate the thoughtfulness and importance of Greg’s remarks, but I fear Twitter, like the entire Internet, is too much of the mist to serve the purpose. Those Japanese stones … I’ll tell you what. Go read Greg’s full post, it’s good. But those stones, selected, carved, moved, and erected through great and collective effort, are tangible symbols of the worries and concerns of people who were genuinely concerned about the welfare of their collective descendants. They didn’t come up with family stories and pass them down in uncertain fashion until they petered away. They took big fucking rocks, invested the time and effort to chip messages into them, and then erected them for all to see.

And, see, I don’t think the United States really has that sense of community, in both space and time, any longer. The right has split away into raging madness, chipping off human beings through the RINO process, there’s reports of oddball evangelical cults trying to engender the End Times, and denialism, at least on the right, appears to be an accepted philosophical norm. Behind it all lurks a theocratic movement which, if successful, would fundamentally destroy the greatest democracy in the world in service to a supernatural creature for which there is no evidence. Meanwhile, the left is too busy being superior to have much of an impact on the opinions of everyone else, and is even spawning the anti-democratic antifa movement. Add to the mix divisive efforts to stir up racism (I’ll be addressing that later today), and its a depressing mix.

Even if something as brutal as the tsunami Greg cites were to be inflicted on the United States through the incompetence of the Trump Administration and the GOP members of Congress, and their fundamental desire to deny reality in service to an incongruent vision, would we be capable of learning and reform? And how would we pass that warning on to future generations in a form shocking and visible?

Carve it into Mount Rushmore? A vision of Trump being overwhelmed by a wave of water?

Continuing the thread on Kaspersky anti-virus software, Dr. Herb Lin on Lawfare has some more information:

… how widely deployed is Kaspersky software on non-U.S.-government computers? This includes personal computers of U.S. government employees, of course, but also the work and/or personal computers of many in the private sector. What kinds of information have been taken from those computers? And what is the potential for mischief or malfeasance with that information being compromised?

Taken together, these questions speak to an even more serious compromise: the fact that the Russians are able to mine and are mining the documents, one by one, on the computers of every single Kasperksy user. Kaspersky software is used by 400 million individuals and is the most popular European security software vendor. I suspect the information derived from that scale of operation is much more significant than what they got from one user, important though he may be.

I personally find this to be a staggering thought, despite the fact we’re talking about computers, those elementals of multiplication. 400 million people are using software masquerading as a security construct, but is instead a personal spy looking over all of their shoulders – put that thought in your head. Jam it in with a hammer. The only mitigating factor is that the amount of information being stolen is a virtual flood, but software capable of filtering out the chaff has no doubt been developed and employed to find the nuggets of gold among the water & sand. (I was going to work Mata Hari into my metaphors as well, but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.)

OK, if you’re feeling a bit paranoiac now – if you’re checking your Windows registry to see if you’re using Kasperksy – then you’re ready for the next thought.

Turn the concept around. I mean, now that you’re properly paranoid, who are you going to trust? Does your anti-virus software come with a personal promise from the company’s CEO stating that the software is not a Trojan Horse? How about the same promise from the engineers at the company? (How about those engineers at third party software suppliers that the first company bought from?) What does your software warranty say?^[1]

Trust on the Internet is, of course, a big topic, and one I haven’t tried to keep up with it lately. But I’ve noticed a lot of it appears to assume that the software in question is, prior to delivery, pristine and ideally suited for its purpose.

But this Kasperksy incident highlights, for me, an underappreciated element. There are relatively few people qualified to study a chunk of software and certify that it accomplishes its putative purpose while having no hidden agendas – not only must they know algorithms and languages, as well as understand the user requirements, a lot of software is written in difficult to understand ways^[2] – when the source is available at all. It’s not like inspecting and testing a hammer.

It justifies my own ill-defined reluctance to place critical data anywhere near a computer, whether a 5.25 floppy drive or in the Cloud^[3]. I’m starting to wonder about the trend to put everything online. While it may be convenient for online maintenance by software engineers, having critical installations such as electrical automation systems^[4] available via the Internet continues to strike me as madness.

So will we see the beginning of a trend towards moving data offline? I know folks more intimate with these incidents are urging same, such as my friend Steve Yelvington^[5]. But will these be taken seriously before a truly damaging incident takes place?

And that leads to the question of what should be automated? Can a principle be promulgated towards making decisions concerning what legitimately should be handled by computers – such as very difficult mathematical calculations – and what should be avoided due to safety concerns?

That may be the question for the future.

¹Does software come with warranties yet? Being a Linux engineer, I don’t expect to see a reasonable warranty since I didn’t pay for this stuff in the first place.

²While it’s tempting to suggest such code reflects the state of a programmer’s sanity, I shall relent and admit to it being the inexperienced. In most cases.

³When it comes to the Cloud, I can only think of the old bit of humor: There is no Cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer. Which always makes me jumpy, because it’s true. We’ve returned to time-share systems.

⁴This I know from a short stint at Siemens Energy Automation Systems. The only job that actually gave me nightmares.

⁵Various Facebook posts. I feel certain Steve has more authoritative sources.

Shooting pictures with your cheap, elderly smartphone is a less than promising endeavour, but we both took a few anyways. Here they are to give you a flavor of traveling across North Dakota and Montana.

Deb has the newer camera, so just for comparison we have shots of the same subject. My camera first:

And here’s Deb. You can see her camera’s superiority fairly well. Yep that’s the start of the blizzard.

And just for fun, here’s another from Deb’s camera of the same subject, but at a different angle. It emphasizes our future in a couple of months. I hope my swollen knee has recovered by then.

Back to my camera. I just liked the blue light in the foreground. But my camera also picks up the snow.

This must have been a sizable lake. But I’m a bad photographer – I don’t notice where I’m located. Nor did the camera, worse luck.

Or maybe we stumbled onto the set for a very early prequel of the Star Wars series:

Here we see the skeletons of two Walkers as they evolve towards their destiny.

Horrid. Ah! Hear David Attenborough’s voice.

Here we see a family of Walkers at the beach, wearing fashionable swimwear rather than their usual heavy armor. Perhaps we’ll see them mating at dusk, their favorite time for amorous activities.

Moving on then … here’s a couple of random pictures to clear the palate before a finale. These are probably food for the Walkers.

Stop that!

And just a little color in Washington. Maybe I should have just skipped this one.

Finally, Deb & I present a couple of pics of abstract art, as presented through the window of the speeding train.

And something vaguely van Gogh.

We hope you enjoyed that taste of the bleak North Dakota farmland.

Kakistocracy:

For this one, I direct you to this post by Dartagnan on The Daily Kos. It’s a really lovely word which I shall have to work into conversations. Although Dartagnan is a little abrasive in his application.

Remember Congress passing a bill to sanction Russia for its various misdeeds against the wishes of President Trump?

Maybe he forgot.

Foreign Policy reports a couple of Senators are irate:

On Wednesday, leading senators from both parties — Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin and Arizona Republican John McCain — criticized the Donald Trump administration for not meeting a deadline for implementing new sanctions on Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors.

“The delay calls into question the Trump administration’s commitment to the sanctions bill which was signed into law more than two months ago, following months of public debate and negotiations in Congress,” they said in a statement. …

Cardin, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, were the chief sponsors of the sanctions legislation in question, which passed the Senate by a 98-2 vote. The measure was part of a legislative push to give Congress more control over Russia sanctions, and to increase the scope of U.S. economic pressure on Moscow.

Some may say this is the risk you run when those responsible for making the law are separate from those charged with implementing the law. However, I think the Trump Administration is running a long-term risk – pissing off Congress. Congress is a body with a reputation for being jealous of its rank and powers, and if Trump is perceived as ignoring the laws made by Congress, they’ll remember.

They’ll remember if they ever see the Articles of Impeachment on their desks.

It’s not wise for Trump to give them reason to vote against him when push comes to shove. He’s accomplished a lot of firsts, although most of them would be considered blots on his record, rather than highlights. But a successful ouster would be the ultimate black spot for Trump. If he’s listening to advisers who are suggesting he ignore this law, he might be better served by sending those advisers down the same path so many of his people have already taken.

Right out the back exit.

Source: Missoulian

We recently took a vacation trip to Seattle, and we chose to take a train for the outbound leg of our trip, specifically the Amtrak Empire Builder, which has a daily run from Chicago to Seattle, via St. Paul and a number of other stops, going through Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and finally Washington. At Spokane, the back half of the train disconnects and connects to another engine to go to Portland, Oregon.

From St. Paul, where we embarked, the trip is about 36 hours, starting around 10:20 pm in the evening, at least for the Sunday – Tuesday run. We rented a family room, which cost us about $700 with a month and a half gap between buying the tickets and actually traveling. Tickets rose in price as the departure date approached. That price also covers meals, which were actually rather nice, including omelettes, pancakes, burgers, steaks, chicken, etc. The Dining Car has far less capacity than the entire train, so if your party is less than four, you almost always find yourself talking to strangers. We enjoyed that experience. As one of our lunch companions pointed out, this is the slow, relaxing way to travel, and if you can self-entertain in the environs of the train, so much the better. At $700 for us, the price is comparable to plane tickets before considering the superior meal service offered by the train. I wish I knew if it is more environmentally friendly than air travel.

The compartment itself stretches the width of the train car, so we had windows on both sides of us; it was perhaps 4 ft deep. I’m sure the Amtrak site would have more precise information.

We had hoped to experience fall colors, but the trip across North Dakota was dull, and Montana and Idaho was blizzard and then dark. Only in Washington did we get color. By then, my Arts Editor was struggling as she could not sleep; I was more resilient, fortunately, although for a day or so after we disembarked I had minor bouts of vertigo.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with train travel – it was our first experience – we have a few photos of the interior.

Here’s the bathroom facilities, which are shared among all in this particular car. They are much like those on an airplane, in good but not great repair. A shower is also provided (no picture), fairly small in itself, but encased in a room with enough room to disrobe and dress. My Arts Editor tells me that worked out quite well for her.

Here’s the comfortable bench on which I spent several hours catching up on my reading. (Just kidding. I never catch up.) For sleeping, this folds into a bed, which could comfortably contain two slim, intimate sleepers. There was also an upper bunk, although we declined the option, as neither of us wanted to stumble down the steps in the middle of the night.

The bench does not stretch across the entire width, but it was wide enough for me to sprawl comfortably.

On the south side of the room were two chairs, facing each other – although if one of the passengers has long legs, there may be a problem. In this picture, the two chairs have been folded into the sleeping configuration, once again with an upper bunk (not shown). In this way, it’s practical to have four or perhaps five travelers in this room – if two of them are fairly short.

This is another view of facing seats, daytime configuration.

And this is another view of the bench and the northern window, along with the shallow storage locker.

Finally, I mentioned Montana had a blizzard (or maybe it was just light snow). It made for this fun view on the southern window.

I’ll post a few more pictures over the next few days. If you’re wondering if we’d travel by train again, given that Deb couldn’t really sleep, probably not; but I wouldn’t mind it, since I rarely get to simply sit and read.

And no wi-fi service, which I perversely think of as a good thing. Some Amtrak trains have it.

Luthier:

A luthier (/ˈluːtiər/ LOO-ti-ər)^[1] is someone who builds or repairs string instruments generally consisting of a neck and a sound box. The word “luthier” comes from the French word luth, which means lute. A luthier was originally a maker of lutes, but the term now includes makers of stringed instruments such as the violin or classical guitar. A luthier does not make harps or pianos, as these require different skills and construction methods because their strings are secured to a frame. [Wikipedia]

This word was mentioned by my Arts Editor during lunch today.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com has more news on this recent sub-thread concerning electric jets. I found his report on the strategy of Zunum to be of more interest than the propulsion itself:

The first story, reported by Fast Company and others, suggests that Zunum—a Seattle-based start-up recently out of stealth mode, and backed up by Boeing and JetBlue—is gunning for hybrid-electric passenger flights as early as 2022, and 100% battery electric flights not so long after.That’s a pretty astounding ambition. Key to it, though, is understanding that Zunum isn’t trying to just superimpose electric propulsion over our current inefficient, centralized hub-and-spoke model for passenger air travel. Instead, Zunum is developing smaller, nimbler aircraft with between 10 and 50 seats that are capable of utilizing America’s network of regional airports to service point-to-point trips of 700 miles and less, slashing journey times in half and offering competitive pricing of somewhere around 8 cents per passenger mile. The model, they say, is capable of delivering an 80% cut in emissions on regional air travel.

So just why do we have a hub and spoke system right now, anyways? Kevin Bonsor’s answer on How Stuff Works:

The hub-and-spoke system became the norm for most major airlines after the U.S. federal government deregulated the airlines in 1978. Under the direct-route, or point-to-point, system used prior to deregulation, airlines were forced by the federal government to fly directly between two small markets. This resulted in many flights that were routinely half empty, which resulted in airlines losing money. Today, most airlines have at least one central airport that their flights have to go through. From that hub, the spoke flights take passengers to select destinations.

It would be interesting to see a graph of the efficiency of flying passengers as passenger count varies for a generic fossil fuel jet, and then the same graph for these projected, small electric jets.

If you want a more technical approach to the subject of hub and spoke vs point to point, MS&E 135 @ Stanford has some material, which I did not read thoroughly, but I do take their points concerning the vulnerability of the hub & spoke model to weather incidents – and how a  point to point system can work around it.

I see President Trump has made today’s rescue of a family held hostage by the Taliban all about himself:

An American woman, her Canadian husband and their three children have been freed from captivity by Pakistani security forces, nearly five years after being taken hostage by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network in Afghanistan. …

“This is a country that did not respect us, this is a country that respects us now. The world is starting to respect us again, believe me,” Trump said appearing to reference Pakistan and that country’s role in bringing about the the recovery of the four hostages. [CNN]

The sad thing is that he’s probably more or less right. A world leader as erratic and, to be honest, ignorant and inexperienced as Trump must be treated with far more caution than, say, a far more respected leader such as Obama, because the latter is far more predictable and temperate, while Trump has repeatedly demonstrated flares of temper inappropriate to a leader that controls a nuclear arsenal. It’s true that Trump backs down just about all the time, but it’s still a stomach-churning worry to wonder if he’ll go after you if you don’t cooperate.

If you’re worried that the clashing horns of Kim and Trump might lead to a nuclear exchange, then you won’t want to hear Debra MacKenzie’s report on the breakdown of the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine in NewScientist (23 September 2017, paywall):

But beyond that headline news lies a less well-known, but potentially more disturbing, story. A series of seemingly minor technological upgrades have been destabilising the foundations of deterrence, sparking a new nuclear arms race with unforeseeable consequences. “The danger of an accident leading to nuclear war is as high now as it was during periods of peak crisis during the cold war,” says Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

The rules of deterrence as formulated in the cold war depend on guaranteed retaliation to any nuclear strike. If an enemy can knock out your ability to retaliate by launching a surprise first strike on your nuclear missiles – called a counterforce attack – deterrence fails (see “Will they, won’t they?”). …

Just because the US may now be more able to take out another country’s nuclear deterrent doesn’t mean it plans to, of course. But in the game of deterrence, what matters is perceptions. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington DC, thinks the US would be very unlikely to try a first strike. It would not find and destroy all of Russia or China’s mobile land-based or submarine missiles, and those that survived would be used to retaliate. “But many experts [in Russia and China] are deeply, genuinely worried about the survivability of their nuclear deterrent, and even if such fears are exaggerated they can drive escalation.”

The growth in US missile defence systems is also stoking these fears. These undermine deterrence by, in theory, allowing a country to launch a first attack safe in the knowledge that it can intercept any retaliatory strikes. In May this year, apparently in response to accelerated nuclear missile development by North Korea, the US conducted the first successful test – against a simulated ICBM – of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system it has been developing since 1999.

In response, China made angry accusations that this would “start a new arms race”. Last year the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made the same charge, naming US “high precision weapons” – an apparent reference to the super-fuse – plus missile defence as the reason.

I’m not a military historian, but the perpetual arms race can often lead to destabilization when some countries fall too far behind the leaders. Of course, considering these facts in isolation is a mistake; it’s feasible to make the argument that America’s vulnerability in the cyberwarfare sector balances the nuclear weapons advantage -except cyberwarfare only has an outside chance of destroying the world.

So against this backdrop, reports that President Trump thinks the United States has fallen behind in the nuclear weapons department are particularly startling.

President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve. [NBC News]

I suppose it’s a graphic example of taking data out of context. I don’t know what was on the slide mentioned above, but here’s a graph from the Arms Control Association:

And here’s some context, same source:

What this doesn’t measure, of course, are relative technological achievements. If that were factored in, apparently the United States would be towering over Russia and China.

And while Trump would consider that good, I’d have to wonder if that tends to destabilize world peace.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com relays his discussion with the owner of the Mayton Inn, a provider of electric charging stations, concerning her experiences:

Unlike some locations, which restrict access to hotel or restaurant guests, The Mayton has made their charging stations available free to use by any member of the public. I ask Deanna about this and she’s very frank with her answer:

“Why would I restrict it? The cost is next to nothing. Nobody would pay attention if I did try to police it. And folks are likely to come in and have a drink as a goodwill gesture anyway.”

I can confirm that I validated Deanna’s point, staying for an extra hour over a pint of delicious ESB in order to charge our plug-in hybrid for the journey home. …

Overall, this is just one more example among many that the scare stories about a lack of charging infrastructure are overblown, at best, and complete nonsense at worst. The infrastructure is there. You see the results of it every time you flip a light switch. It’s simply a question of providing access. As more businesses install Level 2 charging as a perk for customers, employees and guests, I suspect range anxiety will rapidly become a thing of the past.

Of course, we’ll still need truly fast, scalable charging infrastructure for the occasional road trip—and there’s work to be done there. But pressure on those stations will be greatly reduced by the fact that most of us will be setting off with a “full tank”, even if we’re on the road and have stayed overnight at a place like The Mayton.

The less anxiety, the more quickly the technology will be accepted.

THE FALL season is busy trampling us under foot. In response, some plantings are putting up a valiant defense, while others are having a last orgasmic growth spurt, soon to be followed by dank death. Or at least slothful sleeping.

Ever wonder how to measure and localize the anti-vaxxers? Here’s the map for you:

Courtesy Professor Chris Vargo of the University of Colorado-Boulder. The above is just a snapshot; follow the link for a real-time interactive map of Tweets with anti-vaccination content, expressed as a percentage of total Tweets. He used this to write up a paper on ScienceDirect. From the Highlights section:

• 272,546 tweets contained anti-vaccine beliefs from 2009 to 2015.
• Anti-vaccine tweets in five states were higher than the national average.
• Anti-vaccine tweet volume increased with news coverage of vaccine-related events.
• Anti-vaccine tweets clustered geographically based on census characteristics.
• Monitoring social media is beneficial to curtail anti-vaccine beliefs.

An article from CU Boulder Today on the subject has some interesting information:

In Colorado, Fort Collins ranked particularly high for the prevalence of anti-vaccine tweets. Regions around the country with high affluence and/or a large number of new moms were most likely to be hotbeds of anti-vaccine Twitter users, the study found.

“The debate online is far from over. There is still a very vocal group of people out there who are opposed to vaccines,” said study co-author Chris Vargo, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information. “Half of the talk online that we observed about vaccines was negative.” …

Between 2010 and 2015, the study found anti-vaccine tweets became, overall, more common nationwide. As the number of households that made over $200,000 annually increased or the number of women who had delivered a baby in the past 12 months increased, so did the amount of anti-vaccine tweets.

Within states, sentiment varied widely from city to city.

For instance, in Denver, 24 percent of tweets over the course of five years were anti-vaccine while in Fort Collins, 59 percent were.

As affluence increases, so does the likelihood that you think you know better than the experts. So does money make you smarter, like Trump seems to think?

I suppose the long time persistence of anti-vaccination tweets may indicate centers of the people having those beliefs, but I’m not sure how well Twitter works as a proxy for monitoring such beliefs – perhaps it’s just one person with a bit of an obsession for some areas.

The Observer reports on a recent international conference on antibiotic resistance. Much of it is old-hat, but this is an effective paragraph:

The danger, say scientists, is one of the greatest that humanity has faced in recent times. In a drug-resistant world, many aspects of modern medicine would simply become impossible. An example is provided by transplant surgery. During operations, patients’ immune systems have to be suppressed to stop them rejecting a new organ, leaving them prey to infections. So doctors use immunosuppressant cancer drugs. In future, however, these may no longer be effective.
Or take the example of more standard operations, such as abdominal surgery or the removal of a patient’s appendix. Without antibiotics to protect them during these procedures, people will die of peritonitis or other infections. The world will face the same risks as it did before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

“Routine surgery, joint replacements, caesarean sections, and chemotherapy also depend on antibiotics, and will also be at risk,” says Jonathan Pearce, head of infections and immunity at the UK Medical Research Council. “Common infections could kill again.”

One of the contributors to the problem is over-population, at least to my mind:

The position is summed up by Lance Price, an antibiotic researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC. “Superbugs are gaining strength because we continue to squander these precious medicines through overuse in human medicine and as cheap production tools in animal agriculture.”

And why did we need to use antibiotics in agriculture? Because it spurs growth and keeps more animals healthy – ideal for a predatory population that is out of control. But ideal only in the immediate context; disastrous in the greater context brought on by the introduction of the time element and the ability of microbe populations to adapt to the antibiotics.

I’ve been meditating on the vulnerabilities unique to religious folks, and sort of deciding not to follow that thought too far, when I ran across something from centuries ago. In NewScientist (23 September 2017, paywall) Michael Brooks has published an extract from his book about Jerome Cardano, who in 1526 was working in the nascent field of probability. I thought this passage was telling:

It was as a student, during one of many nights in the local tavern playing dice and cards, that Cardano realised his time could be spent much more lucratively if he thought about stakes and the likelihood of certain numbers coming up when rolling several dice at once. Especially since everyone else was working under the assumption that dice rolls were determined by the Almighty and thus couldn’t be predicted.

It’s a lovely summing up of how belief in a supernatural being can unexpectedly leave the believer vulnerable, not only to those with a better view of reality, but even scam artists.

Alphasyllabaries:

Chinese is the only major language with nothing like an alphabet. Unlike Thai or Japanese, it doesn’t even use consonant-vowel sequences written as a unit – alphasyllabaries – but consists of many and varied characters. The typewriter jokes derive from 19th-century social Darwinists who saw Chinese as more primitive than Indo-European languages, and the opposite of English, with its neat set of 26 characters. And printers long complained about the incompatibility of Chinese script with movable type, forgetting it was invented in China 400 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced it to Europe. [“A typewriter like no other,” Douglas Heaven reviewing The Chinese Typewriter: A history, by Thomas S. Mullaney, NewScientist (23 September 2017)]

Into the dull and illogical bin tumbles The Whistler (1944). An important and successful industrialist, fresh from his latest conquest, is not feeling well. His doctor prescribes a vacation, but on his way to the ferry that’ll take him to Duluth (I kid you not), he falls badly ill and the taxicab driver takes him home, instead.

To his own home.

Mistake #1.

The taxicab driver is part of a healthy, sociable, bubbling community of people, including a medical clinic for the poor, so the taxicab driver takes the industrialist there. That doctor gives a prognosis for the industrialist that is terminal, but in the meantime the industrialist, who has neither family nor friends, finds himself falling for the nurse, who happens to be engaged to the junior doctor. Persuaded to return to the clinic for a followup, the doctor prescribes a trip to Maine, and the industrialist decides to augment his treatment and proposes marriage to the nurse, who’s been waiting on loverboy-doc for four years and is getting itchy, so she …. oh …. accepts. After all, he’ll be dead in six months.

Mistake #2.

Loverboy-doc isn’t particularly nice about it.

Mistake #3. I mean, the rich guy’ll be dead and then he can marry the grieving widow – she promises him – and become rich himself.

In Maine, they rent an out of service lighthouse that is out in the middle of nowhere, and life rapidly sours for the nurse – after all, rich husband isn’t dying on schedule, he’s even getting better, and there’s nothing much to do at the lighthouse, miles from town. However, the taxicab driver just up and comes out with them, so he’s around for comedy relief. Then loverboy-doc shows up and proclaims all is well, and all he can think of is her.

Industrialist tells loverboy-doc exactly how he’d kill him if, you know, it came to that. This comes after observing a necking session out on the rocks of the coastline, so he’s feeling a bit peevish about the wife. The plan involves alleged sleepwalking and the windows at the top of the tower – and the rocks below.

In about the only clever bit, loverboy-doc asks the taxicab driver to get window locks from the hardware story, because he says the industrialist was sleepwalking and nearly tumbled out, but it’s Saturday night, meaning the store is closed Sunday. During the inevitable confrontation on Sunday, loverboy-doc gets brained, but when the industrialist tries to toss him out the window, it doesn’t work – the taxicab driver, without locks, decided to be safe and nailed the windows shut. Before the industrialist can find another way to make it all look like an accident, the cops show up, industrialist is arrested, and that’s the boring story. Bad pacing, bad behavior by people purportedly part of a good community, mediocre acting – it doesn’t really work out.

And the title? It refers to the narrator, who really adds nothing to the story.

Ho-hum.

Back in the Mideast, it looks like maybe the Saudis have caught on to the tricks of manipulating President Trump. From Jack Detsch in AL Monitor:

The Donald Trump administration’s approval of a long-delayed, $15 billion missile-defense sale to Saudi Arabia is widely seen as a way to thwart a rival Russian bid.

The State Department announced that it had approved the sale of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) on Oct. 6, barely a day after the Saudis signed a preliminary deal for Russia’s S-400 system during King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud’s visit to Moscow. US experts say the Saudis would have great difficulty operating both.

Deploying both systems would mean “having two maintenance systems that can never cross paths, and having two spare parts pipelines,” said Dave Des Roches, a former Defense Department and White House official who now works at the National Defense University in Washington.

“They would be seriously challenged to employ those two systems simultaneously,” Des Roches told Al-Monitor. “They would have profound institutional challenges in fielding the S-400, THAAD and Patriot [air and missile defense system] at the same time.”

You have to wonder if Trump or one of his appointees (Tillerson, perhaps, given that the State Department is cited as giving approval) saw the news, realized profit was slipping away, and decided to shitcan any national security concerns that might have been holding up the deal.

While I won’t go so far to say Once a businessman, always a businessman is a good general rule, it does appear to apply to Trump. He betrays no notion of the role of government in society.

If you count Obama and Clinton as part of the Democratic leadership, the delay in their individual responses to the Weinstein revelations – Weinstein being a big Democratic donor – is quite disappointing. CNN reports it took five days for Clinton to issue a statement:

On Tuesday morning, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic party’s 2016 vice presidential nominee, sat down for an interview on CNN’s “New Day.” Asked about the allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, the deposed Hollywood mogul, Kaine said: “Any leader should condemn this. These allegations are low-life behavior.”

By that definition, the last two Democratic presidents as well as the party’s 2016 nominee are not leaders.

If the Democrats are reaching for the position of moral authority – an easy grab, given GOP behaviors – they appear to be dropping the ball at the very top, although the other Democrats are scrambling to disassociate themselves from Weinstein via statement and donating the money he gave them to various charities.

But it remains disappointing.

Remember the painted ladies we photographed earlier this summer? This makes them look sick:

A lacy, cloudlike pattern drifting across a Denver-area radar screen turned out to be a 110-kilometre-wide wave of butterflies, forecasters say.Paul Schlatter of the National Weather Service said he first thought flocks of birds were making the pattern he saw on the radar Tuesday, but the cloud was headed northwest with the wind, and migrating birds would be southbound in October.

He asked birdwatchers on social media what it might be, and by Wednesday had his answer: People reported seeing a loosely spaced net of painted lady butterflies drifting with the wind across the area.

Schlatter said the colours on the radar image are a result of the butterflies’ shape and direction, not their own colours.

Midwestern radar stations occasionally pick up butterflies, but Schlatter believes it’s a first for Denver. [thestar.com]

Wow.

[Via Walter Einenkel on The Daily Kos]

A reader helps me realize my idea:

I dunno. Would Godzilla be so delicate about it?

Shibley Telhami offers up a definition of terrorism vs mass killings in Lawfare that I found interesting but muddled:

Regardless of the legal distinctions, I suggest that there is a prevalent sense that terrorism occupies a higher order of immorality, and offer reflections on its origin and justifiability.The definition of terrorism includes both ends and means, but moral judgment is principally based on the means. People can morally sympathize with the motives behind some ends of terrorism—freedom, self-determination, etc.—while rejecting the means. With “hate crimes,” on the other hand, both ends and means are objected to, by definition. “Mass murder” is at least as morally objectionable as terrorism, and sometimes more. Yet “terrorism” adds an irrational stigma that elevates moral objections.

There is a similar stigma associated with “suicide terrorism.” All terrorism is morally objectionable based on its targeting of civilians/noncombatants. The “suicide” part adds little value to the moral objections.  Without the objectionable targeting of noncombatants, sacrificing the self for a higher cause is celebrated by almost every society. Yet for some, this form of terrorism seems to occupy an even higher level of immorality.

I would look at acts as having two parts – the goal, and the activity that is implemented to move the state of the world closer to that goal, which is to say, many actions are merely part of a larger campaign; although none by themselves is adequate to the goal, as a cumulative effect they will accomplish the goal, at least in the minds of the planners.

So we can classify goals into at least two categories. First, there are those which are putatively political in nature, whether it’s the assertion that a different party should be in power, the revolt of the oppressed in order to relieve themselves of an oppressive regime, etc. At their heart, they are about who will control the community, even unto definition of community, and they can be thus classified as apparently social. I say apparently because these sorts of actions may mask the personal ambitions of one or more people, who intend to use them to implement those ambitions with little regard to the impact on the community. These are moral judgments.

The second category of goals is the explicitly selfish, where society’s state is not considered or is deliberately and negatively impacted. This can contain such diverse goals as buying a refreshment to deliberate Acts of War up to and including insanity.

The activity implementing the goal will also have a moral dimension; whether it is unmodified by the goal is up for debate.

To my mind, terrorism is that collection of goals and activities implementing goals wherein the goal is of the first category, i.e., an attempt to influence a society for a political goal, while the activity is of a negative moral dimension – in this case, mass killings of civilians.

Thus the Twin Towers and the various incidents in Europe over the last few years are terrorism, as well as the Oklahoma City bombing (an anti-government goal) and the tragedy at the AIM church in Charleston. The Unabomber was a serial but not mass-killer, but we could argue that is terrorism as well, if we expand the definition of the necessary activity slightly.

On the other hand, without any information as to the Las Vegas shooter’s motivations, we must conclude it was some internal, selfish motive, and simply call it a massacre; ditto the Valentine’s Day massacre, Ted Bundy, etc.

Getting back to Shibley, he says ‘Yet “terrorism” adds an irrational stigma that elevates moral objections.’ I’m not quite sure how to take this, but I think irrational may be a strong word, if only within my informal attempt at systematization. Terrorism, in my definition, implies a certain coordinated, shared idea among a group with greater resources than a single person. Is it irrational to fear them more than mere greed-borne violence, or that originating in essential malice? I would have to question that thought.

But, in the end, Shibley’s concerns are somewhat beside the point in the eye of the political hurricane, especially that of Trump. Politicians often have little but words, and they seem prone to use them to advantage, rather than to convey truth. For his community on Lawfare, I am sure they are valuable; but will those who truly need to understand them even hear of them?