Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Another step towards a whole lot of really small Bolos is announced by the DoD:

In one of the most significant tests of autonomous systems under development by the Department of Defense, the Strategic Capabilities Office, partnering with Naval Air Systems Command, successfully demonstrated one of the world’s largest micro-drone swarms at China Lake, California. The test, conducted in October 2016 and documented on Sunday’s CBS News program “60 Minutes”, consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from three F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing. …

“Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said SCO Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”

The demonstration is one of the first examples of the Pentagon using teams of small, inexpensive, autonomous systems to perform missions once achieved only by large, expensive ones. Roper stressed the department’s conception of the future battle network is one where humans will always be in the loop. Machines and the autonomous systems being developed by the DoD, such as the micro-drones, will empower humans to make better decisions faster.

Technically, I wonder if they attempt to have a composite brain, as implied, or if each individual simply follows a set of simple rules, as has been used in other such projects. A potential problem with the latter approach is that why the simple set of rules works in Nature with a flock of birds, I cannot think of an analogous situation for a combat situation. The approach might be a dead-end, or a subservient part of the greater solution.

Socially? No reactions at the anti-killer robot sites, but no doubt it’ll come. Lawfare notes the news release and that it’s going to be an important development.

Shrift can mean confession or absolution, the latter of which I select:

Absolution is a traditional theological term for the forgiveness experienced in the Sacrament of Penance. This concept is found in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Anglican churches, Lutheran churches and Methodist churches. [Wikipedia]

As in short shrift. Heard on Jeopardy.

It’s not heartburn, Spence.

The Devil at 4 O’Clock (1961) is a movie about redemption: of sick children, of felons, of priests.

Of civilizations.

The volcano on the island of Talua in the south Pacific is having indigestion once again, and the islanders, both native and European, already upset by a hospital for children with leprosy, are nervous. Into this flies a collection of criminals transferring to Tahiti, as well as a new Catholic priest to replace the old, sour priest. The latter is a bad old apple, even smelling of it – an alcoholic.

And then the volcano launches into a rant against humanity, and the islanders begin to evacuate, with the exception of the hospital, which was established at some remove from the islanders as they, in their ignorance and selfishness, feared the leprosy carried by the children.

With the hospital cut off by landslides, the old priest must make last ditch efforts to reach it, the hospital he literally built with his own hands, the staff he recruited himself, and the children, who he brought to the church when the islanders turned their faces from them. The felons, handed the opportunity to help out in exchange for a good word at sentencing, volunteer and soon the priest and his helpers find themselves flying into the mouth of hell.

The hospital is evacuated and now the race is on against the Nature-imposed deadline of the outgoing tide. But this is no easy slide down a hill, because between a fast pace and pursuing lava, casualties are inevitable and we suffer with those who lose companions, for the characters are sympathetic and believable.

In the end, though, the interpersonal relationships are not always completely believable. Convict Harry (Frank Sinatra) supposedly falls in love with a blind girl and marries her, yet I didn’t find it believable – there was a vague echo of the necessary change, the movement towards regret and redemption, but it didn’t come through strongly. As this was part of his redemption, it weakens the primary theme. I put the blame for this on Sinatra, as it seemed the story line was there to support it, but he didn’t quite have the chops to pull it off.

Similarly, the theme of redemption is not fully and believably explored. Not that I’m knocking the movie; I enjoyed it on several levels. The acting is generally fine, including Spencer Tracy as the sour, old, desperate priest; filmed in Hawaii, it looked and felt very authentic.

The special effects were more than adequate, between numerous quake scenes which were clearly more than a nervous camera operator, and a fully believable volcano – if I’d been there, I’d be nervous. Dialog, visuals, audio, story – all are good enough.

The movie climaxes and ends in a quite shocking manner, both visually and with regards to the story, and so while part of me mourns the unexpectedly lost characters, part of me celebrates the choice of the story-tellers. Perhaps the latter was inevitable, as a symbolic judgment upon the islanders who thrust the sick children away, even with such a curable disease.

It’s a good movie, but not a great movie. I can think of worse ways to while away a lazy afternoon.

Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare discusses at length the behavior of PEOTUS Trump’s Twitter followers and the basic intellectual dishonesty practiced by Trump and his allies, and it’s well worth the read. One of her more frightening thoughts:

Even if the needle doesn’t move, the mere prospect of a President using Twitter to tacitly encourage attacks on private citizens and lawmakers who oppose him is unpleasant enough, recalling a kind of mob rule demagoguery.

In the case of private citizens, it could lead to a chilling effect in the public square of the internet, with commenters hesitating to criticize Trump for fear of harassment. In the case of Republican legislators, it is also a novel, and particularly nasty, form of political engagement. The online culture of harassment harnessed by Trump has lowered the bar to political involvement and made the possibilities for that involvement uglier, promoting a form of trolling as political participation. But it’s a strange kind of political involvement. Trolling, after all, requires very little effort and allows for the semi-ironic detachment so beloved of certain corners of the internet. There’s no longer any need to drive miles to an hours-long Tea Party meeting, or even to reveal one’s name to put pressure on an elected official who is straying from the leader’s course.

However, one her more interesting observations:

All this poses a particularly odd set of legal problems when Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, taking possession not only of the nuclear football but also of the @POTUS Twitter account. Perhaps the two Twitter handles @POTUS and @RealDonaldTrump will, in the spirit of our baffling zeitgeist, become the king’s two bodies—the institution of the presidency and the person who happens to fill it.

In that case, how do we take a threatening tweet posted by @POTUS as opposed to one posted by @RealDonaldTrump? What happens, legally, if someone suffers damages, or is seriously hurt, as a result of the loosing of a mob by either account? Usually in such a situation, we would look to First Amendment doctrine regarding incitement. But coming either from the President or from the institution of the presidency, such a tweet would probably represent state action and therefore be outside the scope of the First Amendment entirely. Could a party injured, or merely harassed, as a result of one of Trump’s tweets bring a suit against the government? And if so, for what? Is the President, in whom all executive power is vested, allowed to tweet insults at individual people knowing that the result will be to “unleash my beautiful Twitter account on you”? This is uncharted territory.

So if someone is injured because of a POTUS-inspired insult, that might mean Trump is liable, no matter how much he screams about free speech.

But suppose he isn’t held legally responsible. Then what? I propose that WaPo or some other large, national publication begin a column called Trump’s Twitter Victims. Each time someone identified as a Trump opponent is hurt or, tragically, killed, he or she would be listed in the column, along with a biography and the evidence connecting Trump to the incident. Soon it would be syndicated.

And each column could plaintively end with

Why Hasn’t Trump Been Impeached Yet?

Because this behavior is utterly intolerable in the American Republic.

A friend mentions an article published in the Columbia Journalism Review of interest to bloggers. A blogger is in civil court in South Carolina, sued for defamation because he published reports that a (now former) state lawmaker was under investigation for ethics violations and would be indicted.

The lawmaker denied the investigation, and was never indicted. Now he wants damages and sources, which the blogger, Will Folks, refuses to give up. He may end up in jail on contempt charges, but his attorney has asked for an opinion from the SC Supreme Court. Journalists are unhappy, as he’s not a favorite of their’s. Local journalism professor Doug Fisher:

Indeed, the blogger’s use of unnamed sources is now at the heart of this current legal battle. How it shakes out is of concern for Doug Fisher, who teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and was news editor in the state for the AP from 1992 to 2001. He worries about a potentially bad precedent that could have a long-term adverse affect for journalists.

“The case scares me,” he told me in a phone interview Wednesday as he gamed out the potential outcomes. One is that the Supreme Court declines to hear the case. Another is that the court hears it and rules in the blogger’s favor. Or the court hears it and rules against him. “That makes it one in three that you get a ruling that’s in your favor. I don’t like those odds.”

Which is also bad stats, unless you think the Supreme Court is just rolling dice.

On the bigger picture, this is a tricky situation. As a blogger who doesn’t try to make money off this hobby, I’m not at risk because I make no effort to publish original news, simply opinions concerning the news and the opinions of others (just think of me as a parasite on a parasite on …); nor will I pick sides. To me, the issues are tightly balanced, between the right to publish legitimate news vs the right not to be slandered by a malicious individual. How to prove it any particular case? That’s the fun part.

But – one could argue that the news is illicit as the proceedings are, I think, expected to be private; the leak of such news is probably against the rules, if not the law. But, of course, if it’s really serious, it should be reported in order to safeguard against corruption. Laws & traditions are not created with the expectation that everyone “plays fair”, otherwise there would be no point to having them in the first place. A law safeguarding privacy is equally a law covering for corruption.

I wonder if it’s an appropriate legal strategy to ask if the lawmaker really was under investigation. If not, then the contempt of court is applied; if so, then dismiss the case.

I’m not a lawyer, so I really have no idea. It just seems … logical.

Noah Feldman writes in Bloomberg/Politics about a recent Indian Supreme Court decision regarding what speech by candidates for office may contain:

The decision by the seven-member panel of the court was an interpretation of India’s Corrupt Practices and Electoral Offenses law, first enacted in 1951 and amended subsequently. Section 123(3) of the law makes it a corrupt practice for a candidate to make an appeal “to vote or refrain from voting for any person on the ground of his religion, race, caste, community or language.”

The central legal issue was whether the law only bans the candidate from appealing to his own religion or community, or whether it extends to cover references to the voters’ identities, too. …

The court split 4-3, with the majority adopting the broader reading and the dissenters the narrower one. The leading opinion of the majority emphasized that India’s founders “intended a secular democratic republic where differences should not be permitted to be exploited.” Treating this as the law’s purpose, the majority rejected the narrow reading of the word “his” as referring to the candidate’s identity as inappropriately literal.

So what, you say – that sounds reasonable, no? Turns out context is everything:

On the surface, the decision looks like a close legal case with a defensible conclusion. But the reality is otherwise — for a concrete legal reason. In 1995, a three-judge panel of the court issued a famous judgment colloquially known as the Hindutva or Hinduism decision. In it, the court said that because Hinduism didn’t subscribe to a single dogma or worship a single God, it did not satisfy the traditional definition of religion. It was therefore “a way of life and nothing more.”

Thus, according the 1995 precedent, Hinduism isn’t a religion for purposes of the election law. The result is that the broad reading of the statute doesn’t equally disadvantage all appeals to religion – it disadvantages only minority religions. Thus Muslim candidates can’t invoke their creed to win votes, but Hindu candidates can.

Infamous might be a better word for it. But it’s interesting that in a country where the Hindus outnumber the Muslims 5-1, the majority just found another way to oppress the minority – even if it was by accident.

Which I’d never heard of. MIT’s Technology Review covers the latest accomplishment involving single pixel cameras:

In the last few years, single-pixel cameras have begun to revolutionize the field of imaging. These counterintuitive devices produce high-resolution images using a single pixel to detect light. They do not need lenses, the images of have none of the distortions that lenses produce, and the entire picture is always in focus. Physicists have used them to make movies and even to create 3-D images.

And that raises an interesting question: how much more can these devices do?

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Bin Bai and co at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, who have built a single pixel camera that can see around corners. Their new device can photograph objects even when they are not in direct view.

The technique is similar to that used with other single pixel cameras. The trick is to first randomize the light that the pixel detects, record the resulting light intensity, and then repeat this process thousands of times.

It’s easy to think that this randomization makes the task of creating an image even harder, but the reverse is true.

So the Chinese researchers are mining the reflections of a convenient wall to see around the corner. It doesn’t say how long it takes to acquire the 50,000 inputs used to compose the image.

There’s no doubt that AI, if achieved, will affect most aspects of society, including literature. But in the area of literary devices? Here’s my thinking. In NewScientist (17 December 2016, link temporarily unavailable), Leah Crane reports on the projected fate of the Cassini probe:

… the Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn, sacrificing itself for the sake of the ringed giant’s potentially habitable moons.

First, I thought this was horribly inaccurate. The flight controllers are the responsible parties. But, of course, this is a literary device, a little conceit, which led me to wonder if Leah is aware of it, or if it’s just an automatic expression, dispensed on command.

But then it occurred to me, if & when AI matures and becomes something like our equal, this expression will move from literary device to literally true. The machine could actually make the volitional decision to plunge to its non-existence in the clouds of Saturn.

(Telepresence for the AI comes to mind. Just for fun. Is it a literary device then?)

And that leaves this literary device an attenuated creature, some of its viscera dematerialized by the advance of technology.

With regard to President Eisenhower, here were two reasons I decided to read his farewell address. The first was simply that I never had done so, and it’s relatively famous. The second had to do with its most famous component, the military-industrial complex. It had begun striking a chord for me recently, and I wanted to know more. Here’s the complete relevant passage from the speech:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military[-]industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific[-]technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Perhaps Eisenhower further pursued this theme in other publications, but I will be bold and claim a certain consonance with some of my thoughts without further research (and if I earn the reputation of being lazy, it is not without warrant). Specifically, I believe his warning has to do with a consistent theme I find myself sounding on this blog: the problems incurred by importing the methods and processes of one societal sector into another. While I’ve gone on at great length here on the subject (for which I excuse by saying I was thinking out loud), I can summarize easily enough. Clearly, Eisenhower is warning that the military-industrial complex, or armaments corporations, may seek undue influence over the policy of the United States. Why? The first reason is no great secret: the prospect of profits in the offing.

But, not so clearly, but implicit, is the confusion of the methods and processes of the armaments corporations with governmental processes. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower says, and it’s clear that a democratic process is his main concern. Shall corporate profits take precedence over democratic processes? Shall the corporation take over a duty of government, bringing its self-interest into play in a function which demands disinterest?

Eisenhower is calling for keeping the rifts between the sectors as clean and well-defined as possible, because he recognizes the incompatibility between corporate and governmental priorities. And that, in general, has been my assertion and my reason for caution amidst all the calls for privatizing this and privatizing that: the methods and processes optimized for one sector, so successfully, may be catastrophic for another.

And, clearly, President Eisenhower understood this and warned us.

And, just as clearly, the lesson is not so well understood.

Peculation, aka embezzlement:

Embezzlement is the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion (theft) of such assets, by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes. Embezzlement is a type of financial fraud, e.g. a lawyer might embezzle funds from the trust accounts of his or her clients; a financial advisor might embezzle the funds of investors; and a husband or a wife might embezzle funds from a bank account jointly held with the spouse. [Wikipedia]

Encountered in The Reverse of the Medal, by Patrick O’Brian.

Suspected peculation, absence without leave or fancied disrespect would rouse her to a volume of sound that seemed to  mark the utmost limits of the female voice; but this was an illusion, for once unchastity in man or woman came to her attention these bound were left far, far behind, the remote babbling of some distant brook.

Fun!

On Lawfare Quinta Jurecic introduces Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats:

While on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats signed on with the minority in the committee’s report on interrogation, along with Senators Richard Burr, James Risch, Marco Rubio, and Tom Coburn. He was one of only three members of the committee to vote against declassifying the report in 2014. Coats opposed the USA Freedom Act and voted against it, writing that the legislation significantly weakened U.S. intelligence capabilities.

Notably, Coats is banned from entering Russia—along with a number of other Senators and government officials—due to his support for sanctions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. At the time, Coats stated that he found Russia’s behavior “unacceptable” and declared his intention to “lead efforts on Capitol Hill to bring Putin to his senses.” During his most recent term in the Senate, he was known as a Russia hawk who routinely pushed for a hard line against Russian adventurism in Ukraine. His position on Russia may cause friction with other members of the Trump team and will likely raise questions during his confirmation hearing given the President-elect’s coziness with the Kremlin. Coats’s previous hedging when asked if he would feel more comfortable with Trump controlling nuclear weapons than Obama may not help his case.

Coats’s connections to the intelligence community and reputation as a more traditional establishment Republican rather than a partisan bomb-thrower have been welcomed by some intelligence officials, who hope that Coats will be able to bridge the gap between the intelligence community and the President-elect.

And an easy confirmation, overall. This may be reassuring to those on the fence about dumping Trump in a hurry. But if Trump later disses Coats then we may see fireworks.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist who calculated the maximum size of a white dwarf, which is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. On his initial presentation of the theory to his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, a man already famed in astrophysics, he was rejected, and in fact Eddington never did accept the proof. Gino Segrè quotes Chandrasekhar in A Matter of Degrees, p. 268 (typos mine) on the incident:

“The moral is that a certain modesty toward science always pays in the end.  These people (Eddington …) terribly clever, of great intellectual ability, terribly perceptive in many ways, lost out because they did not have the modesty to say ‘I am going to learn what physics teaches me.’ They wanted to dictate how physics should be.“

I can’t help but note that this is, incidentally, a blistering indictment of the current GOP. Not only in climate change, but in economics as well, as demonstrated in the Kansas debacle, wherein Kansas, after applying the GOP’s model of how the economy works, has suffered an economic decline not in keeping with its neighbors. The man responsible, Governor Brownback, wants to apply his model to the entire nation.

All I can think is that Brownback would bring the nation down in order to improve Kansas’ performance, relatively speaking.

Anyways, seeing politics even in Chandrasekhar’s observation of scientists’ intellectual errors makes me wonder if I’m taking the political world far too seriously.

debitage:

Debitage is all the material produced during the process of lithic reduction and the production of chipped stone tools. This assemblage includes, but is not limited to, different kinds of lithic flakes and lithic blades, shatter and production debris, and production rejects. [Wikipedia]

Noted in American Archaeology (offline).

Quartz reports on the turbulence of biotech company Theranos:

In 2015, Stanford Business School published a fawning interview with Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, the now-discredited biotech company that claimed to have invented cheap, effective, and revolutionary blood-testing technology.

In the interview, Holmes said her road to success “wasn’t weighted by influences that I couldn’t do it,” and, perhaps most tellingly, said would-be billionaires should avoid backup plans: “I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”

That thinking on Jan. 6 resulted in the announcement of 155 layoffs (paywall)—40% of the company’s staff. Those job losses, The Wall Street Journal reported, come on top of 340 cuts in October, leaving Theranos with about a quarter of the staff it had last August. In a statement, awkwardly titled “Company Re-engineers Operations,” the company said it has “identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans,” and that its rejiggered executive team has “substantial additional regulatory, compliance, and operational expertise.”

Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this doesn’t sound like an obscure legal problem, but rather the reality that Your Solution Doesn’t Work. It might even be A Bloody Fraud. It could even be I Must Be Part Of The Game.

Which doesn’t have anything to do with respecting your customers, nothing to do with social responsibility. Now, I haven’t researched any further, although I’ve heard rumbles about the troubles of Theranos for years. So I suppose I’m just troubled – why not shut the company down and be done with it? Surely it’s not hard to prove the technology does or doesn’t work, it seems to be a well-defined and, if I dare, an unsubtle problem to prove solved.

I’m puzzled.

Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan – discussed here – has some thoughts on robots and the economy. I had talked a bit about taxation of robots on the basis of income. In NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall), he talks about another, even more important facet – voting:

Granting AIs voting rights would raise many tricky questions and moral quandaries, in particular because there are a few billion computing devices on Earth. Even if just 10 per cent were judged to deserve personhood and given rights accordingly, they would massively swell the voting population in democracies.

Aspiring futurist politicians like myself may well wonder whether, instead of spending money to campaign for people’s votes, we should just buy AIs that can vote.

There are other conundrums. In the US, for example, there are concerns over the influence of a few swing states and the electoral college system in determining election outcomes. If a server that a robot uses for its consciousness is in Nevada, but its “body” is in Ohio, where does its vote count? That choice could influence results in swing states and spark legal battles.

And if we allow sapient AIs to vote, does their cross in the box count the same as ours? What happens if intelligent machines clone themselves: will back-up copies and alternate selves all be legal voting entities?

While I think his estimated percentage of intelligent computing devices of 10% is impossibly high (I’m thinking .0001% might be more accurate), his concerns remain riveting.

The most interesting facet of his opinion piece is his assumption implicit in the suggestion that politicians (or parties) should just buy the AIs for their votes. On closer examination, this seems to be a bit fallacious. First, vote buying is illegal.

Second, permitting any entity to vote implies freedom of choice. Therefore, buying such an entity is in itself at least absurd, akin as it would be to slavery, and particularly in the expectation that it’ll vote as programmed.

In fact, if AIs can qualify to vote, I suspect they’ll be like an ideal vision of the citizenry – voting for what they perceive as their self-interest, or for what’s best for the nation (which can be vastly different, but it’s not clear to me that political activists – not to mention citizens – clearly understand that the difference exists). Which? That’ll depend on whether or not their survival instinct is individualistic or group; the first will result in votes thought to correspond to self-interest, the other for the nation.

So long as they perceive the nation will safeguard their long term interests.

His other concerns seem to be somewhat superficial. Backup copies are easily seen as attempting to vote multiple times; variants of an AI again implies freedom of choice.

So, if in fact a reasonable AI technology is developed and they are granted voting rights – two very large IFs – I suspect they’d vote for the major parties, just like everyone else.

Or reproduce like mad and form their own party, if it turned out the AI technology was excessively clannish, culturally speaking.

… but don’t do much about it. The Pew Research Center, in a report on the religiosity of the 115th Congress, notes …

The new, 115th Congress has the smallest freshman class of any Congress in the last 10 years – 62 new members will be joining 473 incumbents.

If you’re a champion of stability and continuity, this is good news. If you were disgusted by the behavior of the controlling members of Congress in the 114th, then this is not so good news, as none of the leaders went down to defeat, although majorities shrank in both chambers. Nor does this imply 62 seats changed hands, as some incumbents retired and their party-affiliation successors won.

Think of it this way: 62 new amateurs are now frantically learning their new jobs – or making plans to leverage their new power to impose fringe views on you.

That’s a nice start to the morning.

The 2014 version of Godzilla finally moves the mesmerizing movie monster of yore out of the downtown areas of Japan and into the United States. Not that this hadn’t happened once before, but that version was fairly wretched.

This one is not.

Adorned with excellent special effects, actual characters, and an eye for dramatic visual shots, this Godzilla carries the burden of its cinematic history effortlessly, not hesitating to reference it, but not letting that history be an anchor on this one. Similarly, the monsters exhibit impressive powers, including Godzilla’s trademark halitosis, but upgraded with Hollywood’s best efforts.

And while perhaps kaiju-movie purists may object, for this viewer it was a bit of a relief to see that humans can actually affect their fate, even as monsters older than God have a go at each other. Perhaps this is the latest message from the series; in previous incarnations, the message was that nuclear weapons and power hold humanity helpless; in this entry, we’re told that, with effort, we can save ourselves.

But it would be more effective if some bad guys, interested in self-enrichment, had gotten their just rewards. This doesn’t happen.

But for those of us who enjoy a good dustup, this surely fits the bill, particularly as the monsters wrestle about in the gloom of burning buildings. Perhaps sublime seems a strange word to use here, but the power and terror are classically, in the Burkean sense, sublime, much like the Balrog of Lord of the Rings, both seen and unseen, letting our imaginations believe in their greater power, just out of reach of our eyes.

And getting there is really fun.

The New York Times reports on how France is working on environmental problems:

More radical is the edict that went into effect on Sunday banning the use of pesticides in public gardens and along public highways. It promises to make public green spaces safer for birds and other small animals, which are especially vulnerable to the poisons used in pest killers.

It will not be easy for the gardeners employed by cities to turn to more sustainable methods. When the city of Lyon abandoned pesticides voluntarily nine years ago, it took quite some time to change the culture, although Lyon is now considered a model.

In 2019, the antipesticide law will expand to include amateur gardeners — a challenge not only for the French with backyard rows of dahlias and daisies, but also for those who nurse roses in their window boxes.

While we avoid pesticides, we do not formally ban them. The very first summer I lived here I had to use a pesticide to save my rhododendron. I suspect some American gardeners would find it very difficult to make the move to no pesticides. And does this include natural pesticides?

And no doubt a few corporations would be a little irritated, although I doubt it’s a huge market.

Yes, living in fear is a new sensation. Samuel Burke, via Brian Stelter on CNN, reports how the tech industry is responding to President-elect Trump’s trigger Twitter-finger:

One incredible thing that’s catching my attention is tech CEOs — talking about Trump — are fearing getting a tweet about their companies at 3 a.m. West Coast time since the president-elect often tweets in the 6 a.m. Eastern hour.

On the one hand I’ve heard from many in the tech community here who say they are eager for a Trump rollback on regulations that could have a positive effect on their business.

On the other hand — multiple tech leaders say they or their PR folks have adjusted their schedules to make sure someone is up at 3 a.m. local time to catch the the tweets out of fear that a Trump tweet could crash their stock and put their company into a frenzy.

The business community loves predictability, and Trump is anything but – and no one filters his Twitter account. While an obvious response might be to hijack his account, I would be more interested to hear if Twitter is suffering more systemic attacks in an attempt to spike the cannon, as it were – Denial of Service, that sort of thing. And was it a foreign enemy – or domestic?

And how would Trump respond to that? Hold a press conference to denounce his loss of free speech rights?

Will he ever grow up and stop using Twitter? I don’t mean this as a slam on Twitter, but in the context of a POTUS and his new-found ability to terrify allies and move markets, all in a very irresponsible manner. Between that and the inevitable crudity of the message that can be expressed in 140 characters, it’s not a good mix.

Sukkot hut:

A sukkah or succah (Hebrew: סוכה‎‎, plural, סוכותsukkot ; sukkoth, often translated as “booth”) is a temporary hut constructed for use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot. It is topped with branches and often well decorated with autumnal, harvest or Judaic themes. The Book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describes it as a symbolic wilderness shelter, commemorating the time God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness they inhabited after they were freed from slavery in Egypt.^[1] It is common for Jews to eat, sleep and otherwise spend time in the sukkah. [Wikipedia]

From “Are ultra-Orthodox taking over this secular Israeli city?” on AL Monitor:

“I’ll block the Gur Hasidism from coming here. They don’t have nursery schools here and I don’t have an infrastructure for them. I told the minister of housing not to build apartments here for them. They should only build apartments without balconies for the sukkot huts, and multistory apartment buildings that are not suited for the ultra-Orthodox [who do not use regular elevators on the Sabbath]. Arad has a secular character, and as long as I’m here I’ll do everything to make sure it doesn’t change.”

Seems combative.

The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) is causing chaos in the Iranian political scene as both sides, consisting of President Rouhani’s Reformists and the hard line conservatives, would like to use the JCPOA for their own purposes in the upcoming election – but are having troubles. Hashem Ali writes about it in AL Monitor:

Make no mistake about it: Rouhani is engulfed in a fierce battle that might see him become the first Iranian president since 1981 to not serve a second term. This is what his conservative foes are fighting for, yet their coalition is not delivering — despite the building of solid anti-government rhetoric, exploiting the setbacks of the JCPOA, highlighting the failures of Rouhani’s team since coming to office in 2013 and hitting him over his shaky relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The main reasons behind the conservatives’ failure include their lack of unity and the absence of strong candidates who could defeat the incumbent in the polls.

“While there is no doubt that Rouhani is under tremendous pressure, I don’t see his re-election in danger mainly because there is no serious contender yet,” Adnan Tabatabai, an Iran expert and the CEO of the Germany-based think tank Carpo, told Al-Monitor. Tabatabai added, “Rouhani’s mandate will certainly be weakened, and the complexities of the JCPOA implementation have called his foreign policies into question.”

Oddly enough, I didn’t think the GOP had any strong candidates to challenge Clinton back during the general primary – every candidate seemed fatally flawed. But certainly the Iranian situation differs from the American situation. But Hashem notes this is an opening for someone who’d been dismissed:

Until a few months ago — Sept. 25 to be precise — former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was widely thought to be the main rival Rouhani would face in the May 2017 elections. He started campaigning across the country and was closing the gap, becoming a real threat to Rouhani’s ambitions. Then, in late September, Rouhani appeared to suddenly enjoy some respite when Ayatollah Khamenei publicly gave Ahmadinejad the “advice” not to participate in the elections. But Ahmadinejad does not appear to have given up.

“The former president still wants to run in the elections, despite the [supreme] leader’s advice,” a moderate conservative source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “He is still going around the country, meeting people, launching media attacks on the government. He is trying to impose himself as a de facto candidate.” The source said one reason Ayatollah Khamenei is unlikely to approve of Ahmadinejad’s candidacy is that the controversy accompanying the former president’s return could shake up internal stability.

And does Khamenei want a loose cannon in the MidEast again? Especially with an unpredictable President Trump meddling as well – it could be an explosive combination. Indeed, a more subtle analysis may be impossible with these two.

As noted previously, the JCPOA has not cured the Iranian economy, yet – and the conservatives hate it. President Rouhani faces an additional problem:

… he also needs to address the concerns and demands of his Reformist allies. Since taking office in 2013, Rouhani has rarely delivered on issues raised by his Reformist supporters, including the matter of the yearslong house arrests of former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Other unfulfilled requests include those for a reduction in internet and social media restrictions and for a larger Reformist presence in the Cabinet.

As previously suggested in Al-Monitor, the Reformists have no alternative to Rouhani in the coming elections — but this does not mean that he can automatically count on everyone actually voting. Indeed, many Iranians, if not feeling content, might just decide to stay home rather than stand in long lines to cast a ballot for someone whose policies they do not trust.

That, too, sounds familiar.

The Amazon Alexa personal assistant is doing well in terms of sales – and with its customers, as NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) reports, in a way that was unanticipated:

Daren Gill, director of product management for the Alexa personal assistant used by Amazon’s Echo, says he has been surprised by how often people try to engage the assistant in purely social interaction. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘good morning’ to Alexa,” he says. Half a million people have professed their love. More than 250,000 have proposed. You could write these off as jokes, but one of the most popular interactions is “thank you” – which means people are bothering to be polite to a piece of technology.

It’d be fascinating to see an analysis broken down by the vocations/careers of the customers, particularly for those whose marriage propositions were serious. Does that consist mostly of non-engineers, who, not knowing the internals of software, are more accepting of other entities as possible spouses? Or are we seeing software engineers who are building their own spouses?

Or does this have something to do with autistic individuals and how the reactions of Alexa are far more acceptable than a neurotypical human?

Frederik deBoer lances the boil that is our intellectual culture:

It’s my observation that the smart kids that write our culture – not at all restricted to the media or academia, but the larger mass of people who were the high achievers in high school, the people who were in the top reading group and who got National Merit Scholarships, and who now do so much to define our shared cultural assumptions and conventional wisdom – have developed a strange and unhealthy relationship to being smart and having knowledge. Ours is a culture of cleverness, not of knowledge, one that is far more comfortable in assessing wit than in assessing evidence. It is disdainful of the idea that being an intelligent person requires spending hours reading books, slowly absorbing complex ideas, waging war on your own ignorance through attrition. It presumes that you should be well-read but is distrustful of the bookish. (It produces a micro-genre of listicles about the books “everyone” has claimed to have read but hasn’t/has started but never finished.) It places a premium on being smart but is skeptical, even contemptuous, of public displays of the work of getting smart. You want to be the kind of cultured person who knows great books intimately, but if you have Proust on your knee on the subway people will roll their eyes at you. That kind of thing: obviously smart but not, like, all tryhard about it. You are expected to work out relentlessly to train your body and to show everyone that effort, but your intelligence must be effortless, even accidental.

I dunno, maybe I’m not part of that culture – I’m certainly not smart enough. But I do wonder if that culture is slightly overwhelmed with the sheer mass of knowledge it must absorb at breakneck pace. Frederik has further thoughts on the cause of the problem:

It is an artifact of the sickness within American “meritocracy.” Though I am frequently a harsh critic of the coastal striving class, this condition is not something that they’ve done. It’s something that was done to them. This condition was inflicted on them by a socioeconomic system that harms and degrades people and then tells them it’s their fault. It’s the fault of an economy that compels large groups of people to try and climb up a narrower and narrower ladder together until they have no choice but to push others off.

Which sounds like the naturally competitive system humans appear to indulge in effortlessly, honestly speaking. Even within cooperative systems, in my experience, there is an element of competition – who can be kindest, most helpful, that sort of thing. That said, Frederik has a point – there are many more losers than winners, and our system doesn’t really work very hard at making the losers feel OK with that result.

You may have heard that triclosan has been banned from hand soaps. NewScientist (17 December 2016, paywall) now has some details on a potentially worse situation because of how triclosan functions in relation to bacteria – which is, by stopping them, rather than destroying them.

Now there’s reason to worry over even more serious effects. To see whether antibacterials can affect the performance of antibiotics, Petra Levin and Corey Westfall, at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, exposed Escherichia coli to common antibiotics and triclosan, and measured their survival over 20 hours.

When the bacteria were exposed to the antibiotics streptomycin or ciprofloxacin, plus triclosan, they were 10,000 times more likely to survive than those that weren’t also given triclosan. Further tests found that triclosan protects the MRSA superbug against vancomycin, a crucial antibiotic often used as a last resort in MRSA infections (bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/090829).

We don’t know why triclosan has these effects, but one explanation might lie in the different ways that antibiotics and antibacterials work. Most antibiotics kill bacteria by interfering with essential steps in their life cycle, such as making cell walls. Since triclosan prevents bacteria from growing, they may not go through as many life cycle stages, becoming impervious to antibiotics as a result. “A dormant cell has not a lot of active targets, so there’s not much to corrupt,” says Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston.

One of those results which reminds me that reality is far more bizarre than I can imagine sometimes.