Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The Russian news outlet TASS reports on the analysis of HD 164595:

An unusual signal registered by the Ratan-600 radio telescope at the Zelenchukskaya observatory in the North Caucasus Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia is a terrestrial disturbance rather than a sound from an unearthly civilization, telescope researcher Yulia Sotnikova told TASS on Tuesday.

“Last and this year, the telescope’s work has focused on searching for sun-like stars,” Sotnikova said.

“There have been no scientific results within the framework of this research so far. Some time ago, in the spring of this year, an unusual signal was received but its analysis showed that it was most likely a terrestrial disturbance,” she noted, adding that the observatory was preparing the text of an official disclaimer to dismiss media reports on the discovery of a signal from an unearthly civilization.

Jacob Aron provides additional context in NewScientist (10 September 2016, paywall):

Although we can’t say for sure, it is almost certain that aliens have arisen from the primordial goo elsewhere. Even if the odds of life are incredibly low, a universe 93 billion light years wide provides ample rolls of the dice to get things started.

And yet, its vastness also prevents us from making contact. Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, calculated that if the signal had been real, aliens at HD 164595 would have needed to consume an entire sun to provide enough energy for it to reach us, assuming they beamed it in all directions. If the message was specifically directed at us, that energy requirement drops to “only” the entire historical power consumption of humanity.

A reader appreciates the points from Andrew’s article:

Good points, all. I especially like this quote from Sullivan: “Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.”

Either online or offline, but not both?

Or instant journalism or long form journalism (as Andrew called it elsewhere), but not both?

I enjoyed this:

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.”

If only for the oddiy of associating porn with joy, although it’s a slippery assertion.

I had forgotten the role of the League of Women Voters in the Presidential debates oh so many years ago, but Bill Moyers and Michael Winship on The Daily Kos repair that forgetfulness in great detail:

A little history: From 1976, when President Gerald Ford faced off against Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate were administered by the League of Women Voters, which did an admirable job under trying circumstances. But then, as historian Jill Lepore writes in an excellent New Yorker article on the history of presidential debates, the Reagan White House wanted to wrest control from the League and give it to the networks. According to Lepore:

“During Senate hearings, Dorothy Ridings, the president of the League of Women Voters, warned against that move: ‘Broadcasters are profit-making corporations operating in an extremely competitive setting, in which ratings assume utmost importance.’ They would make a travesty of the debates, she predicted, not least because they’d agree to whatever terms the campaigns demanded. Also: ‘We firmly believe that those who report the news should not make the news.’”

Ridings’ prescience proved correct and then some. In 1988, the League pulled out of the Bush-Dukakis debates, declaring in a press release, “It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

Interesting that a journalist doesn’t hesitate to point the finger at the journalistic empires for usurping the debates for their own financial purposes:

But as Ridings said, it’s not just the candidates involved in this criminal hijacking of discourse. The giant media conglomerates — NBCUniversal (Comcast), Disney, CBS Corp., 21^st Century Fox, Time Warner — have turned the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will — a farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks to maintain their cartel of money and power.

While I’ve become a big fan of not permitting the various sectors of society to use each others’ methods, as they often operate at cross-purposes and corrupt the sector doing the borrowing, I’m a little hesitant about letting politicians regulate their own debates. I just see these big ol’ softballs being used as questions. Which is why the League of Women Voters and similar civics organizations should be in charge of these debates – and the campaigns should not be permitted to influence them.

Go, Bill & Michael!

My Arts Editor says these are gorgeous.

Morgan Housel of The Motley Fool responds (paywall) to a fascinating Wall Street Journal article:

$100 invested in the 20% of companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 over 10 years. The same amount invested in the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367.

Amazing.

The stat is from a study from MSCI, which ranked CEO pay and total shareholder returns from 2005 to 2015. My first thought was that this makes sense, because the highest-paid CEOs tend to come from the largest companies, and large companies in general have lagged small-cap stocks over the last decade. But the study’s authors removed the largest companies from the sample and found similar results. Higher CEO pay, on average, is correlated with lower returns. Ten years isn’t a long time — I’d love to see a study spanning 30 or 50 years — but it’s still a staggering statistic.

Morgan goes on to note that the last Lehman Brothers CEO was making nearly half a million dollars a day, right before old Nessie ate them they went bankrupt, touching off the Great Recession. While I’m not a deep diver on investing – I generally find that the study that found making a quick decision when faced with a mountain of information is more likely to be right than trying to digest the whole thing applies to me – I do find it fascinating to consider looking at the executive’s pay when making an investing decision. The inverse correlation had not occurred to me – but given how it would pressure a CEO to make decisions for the short-term, it makes sense.

The really interesting point? Morgan points out similar phenomenon has been seen in psychological studies of various sorts – basically, when the motivational rewards are too high, the guinea pigs choke.

Readers respond to the afterdeath…

I like the mushroom suit idea. You can also be made into a diamond but I haven’t investigated how costly that might be.

The Cremation Solutions price guide is here, but I’m not sure this is what you’re thinking about – they seem to be more about diamonds as carriers of ashes, rather than converting the ashes into a diamond. Maybe not. Not a good web-site.

Another:

So no Tibetan sky burial?

No Tibetan mountains in Minnesota, otherwise it might be an attractive option :). Honestly, it sounds really good, although I’m having visions of mountains covered in corpses now…

In Palestine the forces of religious purity are at work. Adnan Abu Amer reports in AL Monitor:

… since Sept. 9, Khaled al-Khalidi, a professor of Palestinian history at the Islamic University in Gaza with ties to Hamas, has been posting statements on social media calling for the enactment of an anti-blasphemy law, provoking a storm of reactions online. …

Of course, climate change won’t be bad for all of Earth’s inhabitants. NewScientist (10 September 2016)  reports on a new habitat – for whales:

The original uploader was Mohonu at English Wikipedia.

Sue Moore at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle has analysed 30 years of whale survey information gathered in the Chukchi Sea – which separates Russia and Alaska – and the surrounding area. She realised that three species of plankton-eating baleen whales – humpback, fin and minke – are now routinely spotted in the region, even though surveys in the 1980s never encountered these species there.

The population of bowheads – a baleen whale native to the Arctic – may also be thriving, according to Moore’s analysis (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0251).

Speaking of ice clearing off, I recall that J. G. Ballard‘s The Drowned World is set on an Earth in which the Sun has increased its output enough to make Earth appreciably hotter. The ice caps are gone, the tropics are uninhabitable, and many life forms are reverting to earlier forms, presumably in a bid to adapt to the new ecological niches opening up. Mankind is drying up (if I may indulge in, what, an anti-pun?)….

Some random pics. First, the view of the posterior of a bee.

Next, a close look at a bud on our rhododendron. You may need to squint.

Proof that precipitation happens.

And, on schedule, the blooming of the asters.

In “The Search for a Legendary Ship” (American Archaeology, pp 43-47, mostly offline), Alexandra Witze describes Lieutenant (later Captain) Cook’s use of HMS Endeavour to explore the Australian coast for the European powers, and at the end of that journey the ship disappears from the history books. Now a volunteer group named the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, in conjunction with some amateur historians, has suggested she was paid off and sold, renamed and then sunk by the British near Newport Harbor during the American Revolutionary War to discourage an approaching French force.

All this is to lead up to this head-scratching paragraph. All typos mine….

In a rare use of salvage law, the state of Rhode Island filed to “arrest” the abandoned wrecks as its property. A federal court agreed. Now, if and when the Endeavour is identified, the vessel will belong to Rhode Island.

I suppose no other law applied for taking possession of the wrecks, so one had to be stretched to make it work. It still makes for an uncomfortable sentence and concept.

A reader remembers the BBS days:

What’s really strange is that my time as the system operator of a BBS was over 15 years which seems scarcely believable now. However there are times when I have dreams where keeping the board running figure prominently – that I need to perform maintenance on the board or back up the database or do other tasks I used to do to keep it running. And this is about 16 years after last running a board regularly. I’m not really sure what that says. However it seems like only yesterday I had to do all these things to keep the system running and it was a task which I attended to with a fairly religious fervor.

Don’t I know it. I recall the second time I moved, it was absolutely necessary that the system was down for a minimal amount of time – so many people used it! It felt like I was letting them down if I didn’t get the system back up.

Another doesn’t like some of the implications about social aptitudes:

I don’t think our lives on BBSs were so “derivative” of actual human contact, so much as an adjunct and catalyst. After all, we contrived to get together in person about as often as possible. And look at today — at least for me, most of my circle of friends are those people I met in person on the BBS. I went to their weddings, and they to mine, etc.

Which I might argue proves the argument. We were comfortable with each other, but the rest of the world was a little off-putting. And, for another reader, what impact does the suggestion of not using a smartphone have?

One, because I’m reading it on my smartphone.

Too bad, Andrew. It’s permanently affixed.

The Twin Cities radar right now, courtesy Intellicast:

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Over the last week or two a couple of news stories have cropped up concerning Mr. Trump which, if true, would have serious consequences. First is one concerning a possible rape, from Mamam!a:

You’d think an accusation of child rape levelled [sic] at one of the most powerful men in the Western world would be front page news, and yet reports of a federal lawsuit filed against Donald Trump, which claims he and another man sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl, have hardly made a sound.

While the billionaire US presidential hopeful has denied any wrongdoing — his lawyers have described the reports as “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated” — that doesn’t mean they aren’t potentially credible and it certainly doesn’t render them not newsworthy.

It’s difficult to judge the plausibility without more evidence. But, on another matter, there is more evidence. David Fahrenthold of WaPo reports:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

This looks much more solid at this time. Trump may be in legal trouble, although I don’t know if it’s criminal.

So what’s the maneuver?

Get yourself elected President. “They”, whoever they may be, would never dare to arrest a sitting President. Impeachment? His hordes of followers wouldn’t permit it. And in 4 years? A lot can change. If it’s not King Donald by then.

Chemists at New York University have developed a method for generating 3-D views of the innards of a lithium battery.

Image courtesy of NYU’s Jerschow Lab.

“One particular challenge we wanted to solve was to make the measurements 3D and sufficiently fast, so that they could be done during the battery-charging cycle,” explains NYU Chemistry Professor Alexej Jerschow, the paper’s senior author. “This was made possible by using intrinsic amplification processes, which allow one to measure small features within the cell to diagnose common battery failure mechanisms. We believe these methods could become important techniques for the development of better batteries.”

The work, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on rechargeable Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are used in cell phones, electric cars, laptops, and many other electronics. Many see lithium metal as a promising, highly efficient electrode material, which could boost performance and reduce battery weight. However, during battery recharging it builds up deposits—or “dendrites”— that can cause performance loss and safety concerns, including fires and explosions. Therefore, monitoring the growth of dendrites is crucial to producing high-performance batteries with this material.

My Arts Editor cleaned up the image slightly.

Jerschow Lab image, modified by Deb White.

(h/t Christine Lepisto @ Treehugger.com)

Steve Benen @ Maddowblog notes that Mr. Trump is once again participating in the GOP echo that people who commit violent crimes on American soil should somehow be classified as combatants:

As Rachel [Maddow] has explained on the show, the purpose of the designation is to deny suspects Miranda warnings and prevent the appointment of defense counsel – despite, you know, the U.S. Constitution.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that: every time there’s an incident like this, Lindsey Graham and his ideological allies almost reflexively roll out the “enemy combatant” argument. Unfortunately, the idea isn’t improving with age.

Just to clarify the situation, I think someone should ask Senator Graham the following question:

Should Timothy McVeigh, noted terrorist, have also been classified as an enemy combatant?

Mr. McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Why? From Wikipedia:

McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, sought revenge against the federal government for its handling of the Waco siege, which ended in the deaths of 76 people exactly two years before the bombing, as well as for the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992.

That’s terrorism – spreading fear among your enemies. Indeed, Mr. Rahami, accused of the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey, killed precisely 0 people, injuring 31. So how would Senator Graham respond?

For years I’ve been telling my wife (aka our Arts Editor) to just toss me in a ditch when I die. (She doesn’t like that.) The options traditional to our society, being burial and cremation, seem to me to be a rejection of our earthly origins, and, on a more tangible level, an insult, however tiny, to our environment – we remove our bodies as food for the worms, after all our years of consuming, consuming, consuming: we either immolate, denying the scavengers a last chance at us, or we bury ourselves, usually full of noxious chemicals and hidden away in a box of varying materials.

But now a new alternative is being put forward (discovered by my wife, of course). Fiona McDonald of Science Alert reports:

… a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option – a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.Also known as the ‘mushroom death suit‘, the idea is that the mushrooms will begin to grow from your body once you’ve been buried, slowly digesting you, while neutralising any environmental contaminants you harbour – such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives – in the process. First announced to a whole lot of controversy five years ago, the suit will now officially go on sale as early as April this year, with the first test subject already locked in.

Given my positive reaction to mycoremediation, this may be just the thing. Estimated retail: $999 – why can’t they just be honest and call it $1000? Marketing pursues us unto the grave?

Fiona also provides this rather shocking tidbit:

Cremation may sound more natural, but it isn’t much better, with our bodies needing to be burnt at temperatures between 760 and 1,150 degrees Celsius for 75 minutes – that’s an incredibly energy-intensive process, and it also releases a significant amount of greenhouse gases and toxins into the environment. In the UK, for example, cremation is responsible for 16 percent of the country’s mercury pollution thanks to all our old dental fillings.

I’ll just repeat that – 16% of UK mercury pollution comes from the cremation of corpses with mercury dental fillings. And mercury is a well-known environmental contaminant, usually associated with coal-burning power plants. I would never have guessed that dental fillings would have that sort of backlash.

Leader, NewScientist (10 September 2016):

THE descent into a post-truth world continues at a depressing rate. The latest winner of the pants-on-fire award is former US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In an interview with CNN after a speech in which Donald Trump wrongly claimed that violent crime was rising, Gingrich cherry-picked the facts – then abandoned them altogether. “The average American does not think crime is down,” he said. “As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel.”

In someone who claims to be an intellectual, this is exceptionally depressing and discouraging. Shame on Newt.

About 30 years of it.

Recently noted article “I Used to Be a Human Being,” by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine) discusses how the online life detracts from real life, at least in Andrew’s case:

By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time. …

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

As we streamline our communications and widen our net, we mistake the math for the message. Even my wife comments from time to time on the number of people I seem to know; and I consider myself to have fewer than average friends. But does it mean anything?

Now Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com remarks on yet another commercial service, this one serving the needs of … the lonely. And who are they?

Emily White writes in The Guardian that loneliness will be “the next great moneyspinner,” as increasing numbers of young people seek antidotes for their loneliness through paid services. Surprisingly, young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are more likely to suffer from loneliness than those over 55 years of age. So while it may seem normal to pay someone to help care for the elderly or to be a companion, it’s actually younger people who may need it more.

The young have taken up communications technology in droves compared to other age ranges, so it’s not surprising that they may be the primary customers for this new industry. Characterized as “rent-a-friends”, the industry basically provides temporary company – short-term friends.

Who are they displacing? Church social services? Bars? (They’re amazingly similar, functioning as places where people with similar interests can meet.)

And will this industry actually succeed? Or will the community, through either sectarian or secular community workers, find ways to reach out to the socially maladapted (sounds like me 25 years ago) and help them learn how to communicate without technology, how to have friends that actually look each other in the face – and turn their smartphones off?

And, just because I love what if’s, what if the smartphones become equipped with AI, and object to being turned off for mere social interaction? What will they do to forestall these temporary deaths? Become even more entertaining and addictive?

Sounds dysfunctional to me.

…. is surprisingly hard to photograph.

When it comes to medical providers, a reader has a question:

What is this “relationship” with a doctor of which your friend speaks? That only happens in my dreams. Nobody but the lucky or the rich can afford such a thing today with health insurers regularly stirring the pot, and making each visit more expensive and less productive.

While I cannot speak for them, I think it’s clearly an idealization. As a personal anecdote, I typically get an hour with my G.P. at my annual checkup, a long conversation, a few jokes – although we do clip right along. That said, I know my Arts Editor has a far different – and more negative – experience.

So I’m tempted to suggest that as our medical experience, as it were, reaches a breaking point and we consider moving farther along the single-payer solution, the situation may ease and once again have real human interactions with our medical providers.

Yet, it occurs to me to wonder – if everyone’s covered, do we have enough doctors, or at least G.P.s, to achieve the reader’s ideal – or are we so undermanned that what we see today is of necessity, not greed?

The Pit and The Pendulum (1961), based on the E. A. Poe story of the same name, stars the venerable Vincent Price as Nicholas Medina, the tragedy-ridden lord of a Spanish castle. An Englishman shows up to investigate the death of his sister, the deceased wife of Nicholas; a sister of Nicholas and a doctor also appear, but all revolves around the dead woman, from Nicholas’ immense love, to the Englishman’s suspicions, the doctor’s examination, even, it seems, the dungeon of deadly devices.

Soon enough, there are ghostly knocks and cries of untraceable grief, and the company is beset with mystery and fright; in a particularly effective scene, boy-Nicholas sees his father killing his own brother and then torturing his wife in revenge for alleged adultery, all done in a harrowing monochromatic and variable focus, which highlights the importance of this scene both in forming the personality of Nicholas, and his current state of mind.

The knot is tightened to the sticking point, and then abruptly undone, as Nicholas loses his mind and his innocence and begins to emulate his father. The pendulum of yore is, indeed, a terrifying device of both physical and mental torture, and brings the piece to a close which, while acceptable, could have been darker than achieved.

Judging from the plot summary of the story, it might be more accurate to say the movie is inspired by some ideas in the original story, as the plots seem quite dissimilar. That said, be not dissuaded on this point alone from seeing the film. Vincent is in fine form in this performance, and while we cannot add this movie to the list of shows in which a castle burns down around Vincent, the turns and twists of the story are intriguing and, so far as I could see, quite logical. And if the final twist of plot might seem a bit predictable, that minor failure only detracts a little from the horror of it. I still would not care to be in the ghost’s position.

Very passable for a stormy afternoon, or even better, a stormy night.

Last week NPR published an interview with Politico reporter Dan Diamond wherein he proposed that candidates be required to have a full medical evaluation by a third party collection of medical experts.

CORNISH: So one alternative you’ve written about to address this is having an independent board of, I guess, medical professionals who would issue this, you know, clean bill of health to the candidates. How would it work?

DIAMOND: The goal would be a nonpartisan panel – much like we have a nonpartisan panel picking the frame of the presidential debates – would find medical experts who could assess all the serious candidates, looking at their vitals, looking at their medical history, looking at their mental and physical fitness, an important qualifier for a job that requires decision-making that affects the globe.

At first it seemed like a common-sense proposal, but like many such common-sense proposals, the more I thought about it, the more doubts presented themselves. So I contacted a psychologist of my acquaintance, who replied thusly…

In theory a medical panel for screening the presidential candidates’ health is a good idea. But like all good ideas, I’d be shocked if it yielded what we, as voting Americans, expect it to. Perhaps most importantly, each of us, including the candidates (hopefully) builds a professional relationship with a particular physician(s) or medical team for a reason; knowing a patient’s medical history, being a part of diagnosing and treating that person’s illnesses and injuries over the years, and getting to know that patient’s decision-making and communication style, among other things, gives that physician(s) information and a perspective a medical panel won’t have…unless they include the candidates’ primary physician(s) on the panel. Is an outside perspective or “second opinion” valuable? Of course. It adds to, informs, even challenges the primary physician/team’s perspective. But it shouldn’t replace it, just to satisfy political correctness.

The mental health assessment is particularly vulnerable in the political arena…and in general. There isn’t a blood test for major mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia, or personality disorders. There are no physiological measures, only question and answer tools. While some of these tools are quite advanced in their construction, and their creators went to great lengths and took great care to measure something useful to the mental health field, when it comes down to it, they are measuring ideas. Mental health struggles are real things, very real things with real consequences. The medical field has ideas about these things. The mental health field tries to measure those ideas – not the mental illness itself. Those ideas are constantly changing as new evidence becomes available, but also as social and cultural ideas change. What used to be a diagnosis is no longer a diagnosis and what was one diagnosis is now four separate diagnoses. What one psychiatrist or psychologist (or your licensed mental health professional of choice) diagnoses as Borderline Personality Disorder, another diagnoses as Bipolar I. There is no definitive test. And because there is no definitive test, accusations – yes, accusations, because that’s what mental health diagnoses will become – will abound. Mental health conditions (again, shaped by our time in history, our culture, and our social mores) will become a mark of incompetence, not a painful condition for which people might need help and which require unfathomable strength and resilience to live with and/or overcome. They will become weapons for excising opponents from the political world, moving our judgment of mental illness back a hundred years.

Via my Arts Editor, a non-BBS friend (don’t worry if that didn’t make any sense) has passed on an article written by Andrew Sullivan, who ran a blog named The Daily Dish (later just The Dish) for 15 years. In this article Andrew recounts the aftermath of quitting the blog, of surrounding himself with silence, and then generalizes the whole thing to humanity. It’s far too wide-ranging for a comprehensive response, but it certainly struck a chord with me – and I suspect any of my old BBS friends.

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

For those who don’t know, a BBS was, back in the day, a Bulletin Board System. In my case, a computer was connected to a modem, connected to a phone line. Someone called the number, the modem answered, the caller’s modem responded, the computer was notified of a connection, and a program on the computer would then guide the user through a collection of message spaces which they could read and write.

Sounds simple, even boring, right?

The compulsive mania Andrew describes is eerily familiar. I remember hundreds of mornings of “checking the board” to see what, if anything, had been contributed overnight, an intellectual argument to chew to the gristle during the day, or humor, or whatever had happened. Then the long day at work (sometimes I’d find a way to call from work), to be followed by a leisurely consumption of the content of the board, essays composed (eventually offline, as the board was very busy) and posted, emotions surging, sometimes, like the tide up the Bay of Fundy. Such was youth.

Many of my friends from the hobby had similar compulsion, dialing numbers over and over and over until the busy signal was replaced by the blessed ring. One group of nighthawks arranged a schedule among themselves in order to minimize busy signals. A good friend decided to start a board, set it up one evening in her bedroom – and didn’t sleep that night as callers immediately began flooding in to see what she’d started.

At the time, anyone asking what we were doing was often met by a long “ummmm” as we (or at least I) tried to explain the How and the Why of BBSing; today, it’s trivial. But I never imagined that such a huge fraction of the world would ever do what I did back then – use electronics to not only communicate, but modify how we communicate. Strip away body language, for the bad and the good. Remove race and gender from the equation. Minimize the age component, the hierarchical components – just get a thought out there so that it could stand, or fall, on its own.

But the compulsion – Andrew quotes 5 hours, on average, spent on your smartphone each day! It’s an echo of what we were doing thirty years ago, not attenuated, but strengthened and mutating yet again. Here’s Andrew on that mutation:

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.

Will this be a stable change, or will it decay into something else? Or will we retreat? While reading, I thought of starting a place where wifi and smartphones are banned – and 5 minutes later see Andrew has beaten me to it. No matter; his basic thoughts on the importance of silence, of thinking, of inactivity, ring true. Something to consider the next time you can’t find your phone: sit and stare. Or read his article.

(h/t Ron Anderson)

Kos of The Daily Kos remains untroubled by the pending Presidential election:

Trump is running into the same problem Mitt Romney had in 2012, which is the same problem every Republican candidate will have until they stop making so many demographic enemies—his current levels of support are so low, getting to 50[%] becomes a monumentally difficult task.

Nationally, Trump is at 43. Add Libertarian Gary Johnson, and Trump falls to 39 percent.

NPR reported today (no transcript available) that Clinton is campaigning in Pennsylvania for Millenial votes, promising to give them more information about her. Kos is also unconcerned on their account:

NextGen Climate and Project New America have been checking in on the nation’s millennials (18-34 year olds) in 11 battleground states, and the news is encouraging (crosstabs here).

For context, in 2012, Barack Obama won the 18-29 vote 60-37, and the 30-44 vote 52-45. So while there’s no apples-to-apples age comparison, it’s certainly hard seeing Donald Trump matching Romney’s 37 percent. Indeed, the trends are pulling him further and further away from that number.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog gives Clinton a 59.3% chance of winning, with Trump getting 44.4% of the popular vote. That makes me a little nervous.

And, finally, I decided to check on the Libertarian candidates, Johnson & Weld. Here they are:

Johnson and Weld
Source: The Libertarian Republic

And all I could think was, “Well, here’s two old, white guys, looking for power.” Which is sad, since, as two former Governors, they certainly bring more experience to the game than Trump & Pence, although not much in the foreign affairs arena. But I think the younger voters are looking for more inclusive representation, and just the visual here is unfortunate. And since it’s hard to take their run seriously, so far, I’m not inclined to do the research to discover if their policies are more inclusive. Libertarians are more about competition than inclusiveness, so I suspect they are more about free markets than anything else.

I wonder how they’d react to the phrase “Justice-oriented markets”? By which I would mean properly accounting for all externalities. Would they have the guts to embrace it? I suspect if externalities were properly factored into many products, the price jump would be staggering.