Unsightly Mental Blemishes

… leads to this:

Keep that hand back when your opponent attacks!

Arrival (2017) tackles the difficult subject of realistically deciphering the script of aliens who suddenly appear in our skies. Depicted against the background of a world that is undergoing a collective nervous breakdown, and military leaders who are increasingly panicky, the American team battles fatigue, pressure, and what seems to be incipient madness of both themselves and their military escort while desperately learning a script with no connection to any Earthly script, which has facets to it never seen before.

The steps they have to take seem what might happen in reality, and they are only lightly touched on, as they are only faintly related to drama. This approach to solving the problem – without a Rosetta Stone – seems both reasonable and difficult to perform, but lends a good touch of reality to the entire performance.

I appreciate one of the central tenets of the movie, the idea that language shapes our thought patterns and even, to some extent, our abilities (which I’ve just discovered is called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). However, the particular ability enabled here (which I shan’t reveal, despite it’s playing a part in the apparent madness of the lead character) annoyed me as it seems plainly ridiculous to me.

My Arts Editor disagrees with me.

Regardless, I think this movie had us on the edge of our seats – not so much for the action as for the intellectual stimulation. The aliens are deliciously depicted in the Burkean manner of sublimity, which is to say we’re always sure there’s more to them than we’re seeing. And if the sudden end action of the aliens bothers me, I can always put it down to Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Recommended.

Evolution continues on despite the opinions of humanity – especially when it comes to poisons. NewScientist (25 February 2017) reports on the growing ability to tolerate arsenic:

For settlers in the Quebrada Camarones region of Chile’s Atacama desert some 7000 years ago, water posed more than a bit of a problem. They were living in the world’s driest non-polar desert, and several of their most readily available water sources, such as rivers and wells, had high levels of arsenic, which can cause a variety of health problems.

The arsenic contamination here exceeds 1 milligram per litre: the highest levels in the Americas, and over 100 times the World Health Organization’s safe limits. There are virtually no alternative water sources, and yet, somehow, people have survived in the area. Could it be that arsenic’s negative effects on human health, such as inducing miscarriages, acted as a natural selection pressure that made this population evolve adaptations to it? A new study suggests this is indeed so.

The body uses an enzyme called AS3MT to incorporate arsenic in two compounds, monomethylarsonic (MMA) acid and dimethylarsinic (DMA) acid. People who metabolise arsenic more efficiently convert more of it into the less toxic, more easily expelled DMA.

Mario Apata of the University of Chile in Santiago and his colleagues looked at variations in the gene coding for AS3MT in nearly 150 people from three regions of the country. They found higher frequencies of the protective variants in people from Camarones: 68 per cent there had them, as opposed to just 48 and 8 per cent of people in the other two. “Our data suggest that a high arsenic metabolization capacity has been selected as an adaptive mechanism in these populations in order to survive in an arsenic-laden environment,” the researchers conclude (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, doi.org/bz4s).

Too bad about the murder mysteries, though.

Burnt Offerings (1976) stars a house looking to suck up the souls of everyone who comes to live there. Even the unsympathetic family that comes to summer at it.

And it wins.

Fin.

Pan is the innermost known moon of Saturn, with a period of about half a day. The Cassini probe recently took a pic of this oddly shaped chunk of rock:

March 7, 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

But I like this one better.

March 7, 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Makes me ache to go out and actually see it. Where’s the tourism bus?

Ever wonder about the effects of a pandemic other than the deaths? NewScientist (25 February 2017, paywall) mentions the estimated monetary effects:

As global economies become more interconnected, contagious diseases and their knock-on effects spread more rapidly. “Nowadays the biggest risk from epidemics is economic,” says Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University. The 2003 SARS epidemic killed 800 people, for example, but cost the world $54 billion in quarantine measures and lost trade and travel. The World Bank estimates that a flu pandemic as bad as the one in 1918 would lop 5 per cent off world GDP and cause an $8 trillion recession. The faster we respond to an epidemic, the less expensive it will be. So we must be prepared – and that costs. Who will pay?

Probably not the United States. NBC News reports Trump’s anticipated funding of the Prevention and Public Health Fund:

Bird flu has started killing more people in China, and no one’s sure why. Zika virus is set to come back with a vengeance as the weather warms up and mosquitoes get hungry. Yellow fever is spreading in Brazil, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are evolving faster than doctors can keep up with them.

And the new health care replacement bill released Monday night by Republican leaders in Congress would slash a billion-dollar prevention fund designed to help protect against those and other threats.

The Prevention and Public Health Fund accounts for 12 percent of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2010 Affordable Care Act set it up specifically to try to lower health costs by preventing diseases before they happen. …

Not only would the proposed American Health Care Act explicitly cut the fund, but President Donald Trump has said his 2018 budget would chop domestic spending and funnel more cash to the Defense Department.

It worries federal, state and local health officials, who have seen their budgets steadily cut over the past 15 years.

Penny-wise, pound foolish. The main article is a survey of the possible next sources of a pandemic and how we will try to respond. As one of the richest nations in the world, the United States is the one that stands to lose the most – and can most afford to put up the cash to prepare for it.

Being more or less disconnected from pop culture, I’m sure all my readers know of this guy, but since my sister just introduced me to one of his performances, I must say Trevor Noah is marvelous, with both great content and superb technique. In this video, pay attention to his command of accent, and how he imagines the voice of Barack Obama was constructed with the help of Nelson Mandela.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mV8OQVqfdg

A reader remarked on missile launch systems before the more recent North Korean launch of 5 missiles:

Wild ass guess on liquid fuel rockets: easier to build, more control over thrust amount and direction might make them more accurate and/or easier to direct to location. Solid fuel is light it and forget it — basically a contained explosion until it all burns up. And often, they explode if not made just right — or even during the making.

Clarification on “easier to build”: liquid handling systems, pumps, plumbing, etc. all complicated to build, but are mostly “knowable” problems of managing liquids. If you use relatively stable things like hydrogen peroxide and kerosene, it’s even reasonably safe (liquid oxygen gets harder, hydrazine is probably entertaining). But solid fuel, while conceptually simply is a bugger to get right: stable mixtures which burn at just the right rate without going boom or burning through the shell (see Challenger). Mixing up that glop without it igniting is a challenge, too.

But I’m not a rocket scientist.

I do recall, during the breakup of the Soviet Union, talking to someone who stated that many Soviet Union missiles had gone stale, meaning that their liquid fuel launch systems had actually deteriorated. They consisted of two separate containers of material; launch consisted of mixing them and, I think, standing back. One of the materials had a very limited lifetime, apparently.

A despicably long time ago, my reader had a rejoinder on the topic of Obama’s mistakes impacting Clinton’s failure:

I mostly agree with you on Obama trying to avoid a greater divide by not prosecuting the misdeeds done by the Bush administration. And maybe that’s the calculus that put him firmly on the side of the banksters. But that specific subject did not have to come up during the campaign for it to be a deciding factor. People felt screwed by the establishment in 2008 and 2009, and remembered that FEELING well in 2016, even if they could not connect the dots to the bank bailout. Trump played into that feeling, and here we are.

Clinton very well described her policies, and on a policy basis, most voters, even most Trump voters, actually agreed with her. But they were not “hearing” policy talk from Clinton. Al they were “hearing” was she was part of the establishment that screwed them the past 8 years. It almost did not matter what she said, because the disaffected voters were not ready to hear it. (I think she could have gone radical, but even then they may not have listened.)

I apologize for forgetting about this reply. I have a couple of thoughts on this matter:

1. The voters had an opportunity to vent their anger in 2012, but … well, at least didn’t enough to toss Obama out of office. There’s certainly many factors in play here – Romney’s Mormonism played against him in a party dominated by evangelicals, as would his government experience (yep, you read this right), as his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts would mark him as part of the establishment – that particular inclination working against Clinton four years later. Not to mention his remark about so many voters latched on to the government teat – that would chase away most potential liberal votes. But Obama did win, and left office four years later on a high note.
2. Clinton, for all her being of the establishment, is not (and I suppose was not is more accurate, as I doubt we’ll see her in a political role ever again) much of a politician. Trump was a far more polished politician than Clinton, although in a mold to which we’re unaccustomed – which is to say, promise everything to the disaffected, discredit the traditional, independent sources of dependable facts when they go against you, and always lie when the lie benefits you, even if you’re caught in it. I despise that particular model. But Clinton’s Deplorables remark was disastrous, no matter how prescient it’s proving to be; her hyper-intellectual approach didn’t play well in a country in which many people put their religious convictions ahead of, even in place of, their intellectual attainments. Starting from a position of dominance twice (2008, 2016), she failed twice. In a way, she campaigned as if she lived in the country she wants to live in, where rationality and intellect are dominant. That’s not what we have, even though she won the popular vote – we have a dismayingly large number of folks who are gullible, who are desperate, and who either did not do the research on the candidates, or didn’t mind having a liar for a President.

My oh my. I wonder how they calculate stability values.

I see on USAA that they believe digital wallets are the wave of the future, and provide a primer:

The digital wallet in your smartphone may soon replace credit and debit cards as the benefits and simplicity of paying with your phone make reaching for plastic or cash inconvenient.

A digital wallet — often called a mobile wallet — is accessed through an app on your smartphone or other mobile device and enables you to digitally store and access items typically found in a physical wallet.

Among their advantages:

By assigning virtual device account numbers to cards, mobile payments are secure and do not use actual debit or credit card numbers when making a purchase. Fingerprint or passcode authentication adds an extra security layer.

But will you have a smartphone? Andrew Sullivan wonders:

Since I wrote about digital addiction, I’ve been constantly and understandably asked what might be the antidote. Well, here’s one: the dumbphone. Nokia is now making the once-beloved 3310 model again — and the new ones look pretty cool. You can call and text but you’re not carrying around that addiction device called a tiny mobile computer. They’re a fraction of the cost of a smartphone — and have a variety of uses, as this great review in The Atlantic explains. You can use it in places where a smartphone might be easily damaged; or as a replacement for the home landline; as a way to stay in touch while staying sane. Sadly, the new ones aren’t yet available in the U.S. — but the demand, I suspect, could be huge. Think of them like the extraordinary revival of vinyl for music — a return to the actual pleasure of a simple activity, a reminder that change isn’t always for the better, that the past is always retrievable in the present. We don’t have to be trapped in our culture. We can choose to defy it. Increasingly, it seems to me, we must.

The Nokia offering will constitute experimental closure: will the utility offered by the smartphone outweigh the distraction that comes with it?

I can’t wear lipstick even?

If you want a lovely bout of creepiness, Die! Die! My Darling! (aka Fanatic 1965) is not a bad choice. Legendary actor Tallulah Bankhead is Mrs. Trefoile, the matriarch, the strait-laced, devout, bitch queen of a vanishingly small family in the British countryside, mourning her dead son, Steven. With her are a nephew (I think) and his wife, Harry and Anna, who function as servants, along with feeble-minded Joseph (an under-utilized Donald Sutherland).

Into their midsts comes Patricia, who was Steven’s fiancee before his death a couple of years ago, paying her respects to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. It only seems the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, to Mrs. Trefoile, a betrothal is as good as an actual marriage, and an actual marriage is, well, forever. So God tells her, at least. Soon questions as personal as Pat’s virginity come up, and when she’s caught wearing a red blouse, well, it’s clear that she needs to have the error of her ways corrected before she can leave.

This delves into some conventionally creepy territory as we watch Mrs. Trefoile trod the paths of religious madness in her peculiar ways. But rather than your usual movie religious fanatic, we also get to see her moments of self-doubt, and her moments of madness. Is her devotion to reading the Bible a defense against the waves of insanity breaking in her mind? Why does Steven’s sexual purity matter?

And Patricia is not the stereotypical female victim. Stabbed, starved, beaten, even shot, she lays plan after plan for escape, showing admirable spirit in the face of a madness unresponsive to any sort of reason.

But between the sexual urges of Harry and the inexorable demands of her own religious compulsion, soon the old lady is faced with a bitter climax from which even she cannot find solace with Steven, for Pat, truth or lie, has told her a bitter thing. And over the edge she goes.

Quietly well acted, and with only the slightest touch of the British brittleness that has annoyed me in other movies of this era, it’s hard to find fault, from the performances to the technical aspects to the story. In particular, we liked how well the story hung together, with only one very small plot hole – and even that can be easily reasoned away. However, the underuse of Donald Sutherland was disappointing.

While a movie of this sort is not to everyone’s taste, if you like a good creepy movie, then this is Recommended.

And if you like a touch of irony in your movie, consider this: our religious fanatic is played by one of the most notorious libertines of Hollywood. Reputed to throw wild parties in which she’d show up completely nude, Bankhead’s credited with the quote, “I’ve tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw.” I wonder if she giggled a lot while reading the script.

Andrew Sullivan’s latest missive on New York Magazine includes some coverage on the latest craze showing up on a few college campuses. I’d heard about it showing up at Cal State – Northridge when a group of Armenian students shutdown a lecture by a Turkish scholar, as reported here (and by many others) by the Cal State Northridge Sundial:

Scholar George Gawrych got through no more than five sentences during his presentation on his book about Turkish army officer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk before students raised their voices in protest Thursday at the Aronstam Library in Manzanita Hall.

Over 20 protesters stood up from their seats, turned their backs on Gawrych and repeatedly chanted “Turkey guilty of genocide” and “genocide denialist.”

Gawrych waited briefly as other attendees voiced their opinions to let him speak, until he began walking up and down the aisle trying to get the protestors to face him.

I wrote it off as an isolated incident by a group frustrated by either Turkish obstinance or bad history. But now it appears it was a precursor to a more general movement (I’m not sure how many incidents may be tied to it, so I have no estimate on size), as Andrew analyzes:

Source: Middlebury College

Here’s the latest in the assault on liberal democracy. It happened more than a week ago, but I cannot get it out of my consciousness. A group of conservative students at Middlebury College in Vermont invited the highly controversial author Charles Murray to speak on campus about his latest book, Coming Apart. His talk was shut down by organized chanting in its original venue, and disrupted when it was shifted to a nearby room and livestreamed. When Murray and his faculty interlocutor, Allison Stanger, then left to go to their car, they were surrounded by a mob, which tried to stop them leaving the campus. Someone in the melee grabbed Stanger by the hair and twisted her neck so badly she had to go to the emergency room (she is still suffering from a concussion). After they escaped, their dinner at a local restaurant was crashed by the same mob, and they had to go out of town to eat. …

“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, that’s my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.

And, as university students and professors (a few were part of the semi-lynching at Middlebury), they should have an allegiance to the free and open exchange of information which is at the very heart of Western higher education. Instead, they have indulged in intellectual and physical violence, attempting to inflict their views by force.

This is surely grounds for ejection from their institutions.

But, on a very fundamental level, this also allies them with the white supremacists. Not on the common level of violence – that’s too general.

No, I’m talking that other, dishonorable trait, which I talked about before.

Laziness.

In essence, these folks are attempting to inflict their view on the world, not through the hard work of research and logic and communications, but quickly, if uncleanly, through some simple violence. For them is not the way of hard work. They want this to be quick, without having to actually justify through reason anything they’re doing.

I can understand the frustration that views they oppose don’t simply disappear, but humanity is not a rational species – it’s merely capable of being rational. By engaging in irrational behaviors themselves, they succeed only in encouraging their critics and opponents to do the same. By abandoning their allegiance to truth and reason, they encourage their opponents to do likewise.

And that’s just not good for anyone. Just as the current GOP dash to the right is destroying the GOP – and possibly the world – this incident shows the left is fully capable of madness as well.

At least it wouldn’t be if the press was more aggressive about doing its job. A recent remark from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has brought into sharp relief, at least for me, that the role of the President is not temporary King or truth master or even much of a decision maker. What did he say? From the MSNBC Twitter account:

Spicer quotes President Trump on jobs report: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now”

I.e., candidate Trump proclaimed that unemployment stood at 40% during the campaign, but now President Trump accepts that it’s 4.7% … with some jubilation, even.

Look, for all the noise out there, our society operates best on truth. Thus we have the judiciary, fact checkers, and multiple checks and balances, all there to expose the truth.

And so when Trump, as a candidate, claimed the unemployment rate was 40%, that was a scandal – and he should have been told to put up or shut up. And some tried, but he ignored them and was permitted to get away with it by his core group of supporters. The same goes for his violent crime statistics, his accusations against the FBI, and other such claims.

We keep our sources of facts and truth, if you will, separate from the politicians who stand to benefit, or suffer, from them, because politicians, just like the rest of us, are fallible folks who should not be tempted. Then we staff them with dedicated, non-partisan experts, because whoever is in charge – and the rest of us! – needs the best information possible.

When the truth is not held sacred, buildings fall down and your family members die ghastly deaths. Think not? Remember the Soviet Union, where ideology was more important than truth.
Source: Wikipedia

So how does this tie in with the role of the President? It defines the role for what it is not: a truth-giver. The person occupying that is not here to make up numbers and tell them to us. In fact, those numbers are independent of that role because we can, because we should, use those numbers to evaluate the President’s performance. When Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) suggested that the citizens of the United States should get their information directly from President Trump, he displayed his complete ignorance of the structure of the government, not to mention the foibles of mankind, and he should be censured and removed from his position for such a failure.

In recognizing that removal from the President’s role (which, to be accurate, occurred in the time of Washington, et al), the recognition of the independence of these critical agencies, we also recognize that the role of the President in making Executive decisions is narrowly demarcated; the President can make some regulations, but Congress makes the law, and the Judiciary executes the law – or not, as it sees fit under its responsibilities. The President is constrained because of the potential power – and influence – the President can possess.

So when Spicer made that hideous remark, the press corps shouldn’t have chuckled, as reported. They should have given him the finger and walked out in a fury, announcing it to the world via their front pages. Because the behavior of President Trump is worthy of impeachment. As Americans, we should be hiring the best to be President, but here we’ve hired someone who’s working on being the worst.

And that’s simply not acceptable.

And for those of us interested, here’s one of those independent fact agencies which Trump denigrated when he was a candidate: The Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yeah, you decide. No riots in the streets. Some quiet desperation in the some towns. Work to be done. Or did Trump’s magic wand fix everything.

A reader reacts to the review of The Killing:

Next up, Kubrick’s “Lolita.” As to the religious undercurrents in “The Killing,” well, it was a genre picture, and noir is ultimately a religious film genre. The bad guys always pay in noir. Kubrick himself was raised as a secular Jew, and when the subject of religion came up (mostly in regard to 2001’s “spirituality,”) he gave many different and somewhat conflicting answers. According to Stephen King, Kubrick hung up on him when King said he believed in God.

I do not see film noir as necessarily religious genre, as I’ve never restricted the concept of evil to the religious realm. I see noir as morality tales (itself a religious genre, but I’m busy ripping out these things by the roots, might as well get all of them), illustrative examples of how bad decisions can doom people – or bad circumstance (so it becomes a lesson to the powers-that-be to fix the circumstance). Incidentally, most of the noir I’ve seen doesn’t have any religious elements, and even in The Killing I had to stretch a little bit, although otherwise it was mere caprice that did the bad guy in.

Insofar as Lolita goes, I may be terminally ruined in that regard. Having seen it on stage, by The Four Humors, wherein the lead female role was played by a 6 ft, 280 lb guy with no makeup, not shaved in three days, and in a shirt a size too small …. well.

Source: City Pages

And thanks for the historical note on Kubrick.

Gotta say I like this idea. NewScientist (25 February 2017) reports on the idea of Paula Jofré of the University of Cambridge for tracking the evolution of stars over generations using ideas from biological evolution:

This post is just an excuse to put this gorgeous image on the blog.

Stars move around the galaxy’s spiral arms and disc, making it difficult to figure out where they came from. But if they were born in the same cluster, stars should have similar chemical signatures.

Astronomers use chemical tagging to try to identify stellar siblings even if they have drifted apart. But Jofré and her colleagues thought they could take this a step further by taking a page from evolutionary biology.

“This is an invitation for astronomers to think in a new way about the history of stars and interpret their past,” Jofré says. “A lot more information could be extracted.”

Combining traces of 17 chemical elements as stellar “DNA”, the team categorised 22 stars in our galactic neighbourhood.

Using this approach, the team assembled a tree with three branches associated with stars of different origins. They tentatively argue that the thicker part of the galaxy’s disk forms new stars more rapidly than elsewhere in the Milky Way, which is consistent with other research. They also found that some stars may have even originated from another galaxy that collided with the Milky Way long ago.

Of course, DNA is relatively stable during the lifetime of an organism, while stars actively consume & transform their constituents. However, I see in the academic paper arXiv:1611.02575 this statement:

In astrophysics the chemical pattern obtained from spectral analysis of FGK type stars [stars belonging in the classifications of F, G, or K] can be interpreted as stellar DNA , as it remains intact for the majority of their lives (Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn 2002). The mechanisms for change in chemical abundances can also be identified. There is enrichment of the ISM [interstellar medium], which is relatively well understood due to advances in nucleosynthesis and SNe yield calculations (McWilliam & Rauch 2004 ; Matteucci 2012 ; Kobayashi & Nakasato 2011). Differences in chemical abundances of stars can also be the result of environmental processes bringing gas and stars from extragalactic systems and dynamical processes. Dynamical processes are a result of perturbations from nearby non-axisymmetric features such as the bar, spiral arms, molecular clouds, or merger activity. This can lead to radial migration, which is a change in the angular momentum that conserves the orbit’s eccentricity or heating, which is a change in the eccentricity that conserves the angular momentum (Sellwood & Binney 2002 ; Minchev & Famaey 2010).

So being able to trace where a star was born vs where it’s located now could be quite interesting. Seems academic? Some theories of mass extinction events involve the solar system crossing the plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Paul Gilster discussed it on Centauri Dreams back in 2007:

Muller and Rohde used a huge fossil database of marine organisms developed by the late John Sepkoski Jr. (University of Chicago), one whose data extend back to the time of the ‘Cambrian Explosion,’ the period when so many forms of multicellular life emerged. But while Muller and Rohde pondered alternative explanations for the cycle, two University of Kansas professors have come up with a theory involving the Sun’s position in the Milky Way, one that has gone on to win Muller’s approval.

The Solar System moves up and down as it orbits the galactic core (see image at left). Mikhail Medvedev and Adrian Melott, taking that motion into account, factor in the motion of the Milky Way itself, hypothesizing that its leading, north side generates a shock wave that exposes the Earth to high-energy radiation every 64 million years or so. Here’s Melott on the matter:

“I did notice that not only did these time scales appear to be almost the same, but the drops in biodiversity coincide with the times when the sun is on the north side of the galactic disc. I already knew the north side of the galactic disc was the direction toward which the galaxy is falling.”

Here‘s a 2015 article from The Atlantic on the subject as well. So you can see that what may first appear to be ridiculously useless academic research may actually have useful results. If in a few million years. And maybe sooner.

As Lawfare notes, the judge is sensitive to meta:

Documents the FBI creates when it processes a FOIA request can be withheld from future FOIA requests in certain sensitive cases, D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled on Monday. …
After he received the “no records” responses, [Ryan] Shapiro FOIA’d his own FOIA, seeking the search slips and processing notes the FBI created in response to his earlier requests.

The court said the FBI could legally withhold those documents on a case-by-case basis. In this instance, the court decided the documents could be withheld because Shapiro had filed so many FOIA requests that he might have been able to use the processing documents to piece together protected information.

“The search slips at issue,” Judge Moss wrote, “are part of a complex mosaic relating to ongoing FBI operations, involving one of the FBI’s domestic terrorism priorities, which has been the subject of a staggering number of FOIA requests seeking information about many specific individuals and organizations.”

So if you’re OK with the FBI concealing information about ongoing investigations, this ruling makes sense. And I’m OK with it.

It’s also interesting to see there’s a “… staggering number of FOIA requests …” connected with terrorism topics. Sometimes you have to stop and think about all the responsibilities of a good government like ours should be. I suppose you can guess there’s a lot of bad governments that don’t bother with rights like this.

I recently ran across some unknown terminology in connection with buildings, that being embodied energy. From an Australian Government publication:

Embodied energy is the energy consumed by all of the processes associated with the production of a building, from the mining and processing of natural resources to manufacturing, transport and product delivery. Embodied energy does not include the operation and disposal of the building material, which would be considered in a life cycle approach. Embodied energy is the ‘upstream’ or ‘front-end’ component of the life cycle impact of a home.

Apparently the importance of embodied energy is somewhat controversial, which surprises me as it seems to be a measurable quantity that can be characterized as to source and impact on the environment, although in some cases the characterization will change over time or location. Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com presents some thoughts on the subject:
Embodied energy, the energy “baked in” to materials, is a controversial subject. Some experts do not think it very important, since adding a little embodied energy in the form of insulation will save many times as much energy over the life of the building. Others believe that a long life cycle is far more important, so if more durable materials have a little more embodied energy, so be it. Most don’t even bother thinking about it at all. (More explaining on TreeHugger here) …

In Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, the embodied energy and carbon from making bricks and tile is “responsible for 58% of the capital city’s air pollution — much more than cars, power generation and other industries combined.”

Brick kilns are a major source of air pollution not just in Bangladesh but across South Asia and China, together accounting for 75% of the global consumption of clay bricks. More than one trillion bricks are produced annually in these countries, resulting in 1.4% of global GHG emissions. To avoid the continued compulsive use of such resource-intensive building materials, actionable change must occur. [Prashant Kapoor]

He also explains why the more efficient the building is, the bigger the problem becomes. “The reality is that as energy consumption is driven down, the relative importance of embodied energy increases.”

And it is important, because as the human population continues to increase, more buildings will be constructed, and thus embodied energy needs to be carefully analyzed as to its character (i.e., source) and how its use will improve the building.

Sometimes it’s necessary to make a point by going outside the box, as Judge Owens does here in a dissent on the 4th Circuit:

I agree with the Fifth Circuit in Asadi v. G.E. Energy (USA), L.L.C., 720 F.3d 620, 621 (5th Cir. 2013), and Judge Jacobs’ dissent in Berman v. Neo@Ogilvy LLC, 801 F.3d 145, 155-60 (2d Cir. 2015), and therefore respectfully dissent. Both the majority here and the Second Circuit in Berman rely in part on King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480 (2015), to read the relevant statutes in favor of the government’s position. In my view, we should quarantine King and its potentially dangerous shapeshifting nature to the specific facts of that case to avoid jurisprudential disruption on a cellular level. Cf. John Carpenter’s The Thing (Universal Pictures 1982).

My bold.

Adam Feldman analyzes SCOTUS statistics on Empirical SCOTUS, and notes a slow-down:

The Supreme Court tackles fewer cases by the year. SCOTUSBlog’s statistics as reported by First Mondays Podcast show that the Court has also been slower in writing signed opinions this term than in recent terms. What is leading to these changes? One clear anomaly from the Court’s norm is the length of time the Court has been without a ninth Justice. While this vacancy is the longest in recent memory it is not the longest historically. Still the Court’s workload seems to be declining over time and without other clear rationale aside from the Court’s composition to explain the downward trend.

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

The Federal Judiciary Center provides statistics on the number of cert petitions and cert grants every term. As the following figure shows petitions to Court have risen over time but recently declined a bit from their height in 2006.

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

At the same time the number of granted petitions has dropped from 159 in 1981 to as few as 63 in 2011.

Adam proposes no particular reason, and in truth it’s hard to do so. We could speculate that there are fewer cases worth taking a look at; a related view would be to suggest that the Roberts court (which he joined and began leading in 2005) wishes to examine only cases with true national significance. The graph doesn’t necessarily support or falsify such a proposition.

But I suppose only the Justices really know.

Sometimes when you’re looking for something, you find something else. In my case, I was looking for information on yellow peas, and Wikipedia handed me this:

Split peas were used for an unusual non-culinary purpose during the Second World War. Great efforts were made to optimise the manufacture of the British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft, speeding and cheapening manufacture while maintaining or enhancing performance. Flush-headed rivets were used on a prototype for the smoothest possible surfaces, but this made it more difficult, expensive, and slower to produce than using the usual dome-headed rivets. Rather than the cumbersome alternative of comparing actual rivets, split peas were glued over all the flush rivets to simulate dome heads. This reduced the speed by 22 mph (35 km/h), which was unacceptable. Split peas were then progressively removed to determine which rivets really needed to be flush; the results were applied to production aeroplanes.

Don’t tell your kids about this until they’re firmly hooked on the green stuff.

Last night around 11:30 an almighty clatter came from the computer room, and I rushed in and shut my primary development and composition system down. This morning the repair guys said it’s the power supply. While I have other options for composing material for UMB, I find them less convenient than my development system, so there may be a slowdown in production.

In other news, my right hand is no longer experiencing numbness – all hail the wrist supports. I’m still being cautious, of course.

I’ll try to just treat this as a chance to catch up on my reading. Only 10 books on the stack…

On Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver notes the release by WikiLeaks of a collection of CIA documents obtained through a breach. This caught my eye:

As has been widely reported, this morning Wikileaks released a trove of documents, the first installation (Year Zero) of a series of planned releases it is calling “Vault 7.” According to Wikileaks,

the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

Several hundred million lines of code? That’s … a lot. I work on a very large system, and I’m told it’s not more than 40 million. Maybe they use really bad programmers, which seems doubtful. Nicholas warns that Wikileaks does tend to exaggerate, so perhaps that’s all this might be. But it is breathtaking.

Unless it’s assembly code. Yeah, that’s it – the CIA does its thing in a very inefficient manner.

Nyah.

Cheongsam:

The cheongsam (from Cantonese Chinese: 長衫; Jyutping: coeng4saam1;/ˈtʃiːɒŋˈsæm/,^[1] /ˈtʃɒŋˈsæm/ or /ˈtʃɒŋˈsɑːm/) is a body-hugging one-piece Chinese dress for women, also known as qipao (from Mandarin Chinese: 旗袍; pinyin: qípáo; Wade–Giles: ch’i-p’ao; IPA: [t͡ɕʰǐ pʰɑ̌ʊ̯] ( listen)), and Mandarin gown. The stylish and often tight-fitting cheongsam or qipao (chipao) that is best known today was created in the 1920s in Shanghai and made fashionable by socialites and upper class women. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the comic 9 Chickweed Lane.