Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Some fun with Hostas.

The Haunted Palace (1963) follows the ambivalent fate of a man, Kerwin (Vincent Price) who has become a necromancer in service to the “elder gods”, who wish to resume their positions of dominance. Much to his dismay, he is caught in flagrante delicto, quite literally, and is set ablaze by the local New Englanders. A great curse is pronounced as he discovers his supernatural patrons cannot protect him.

110 years later his descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, returns to the site of the crime, lured by the inheritance of a deed to the hulking palace. He and his wife encounter the descendants of those who persecuted his ancestor, and they have indeed been suffering from the curse.

They proceed to the inheritance, and soon the wife sees her husband begin to change, to know things. Servants appear, of some dismaying appearance, even if their words are correct, and soon procedures are back on track to return the elder gods to their places. Vengeance occurs as part of the conversion, and soon affairs become perilous, until the descendants of the villagers arrive. Then the fate of everyone becomes ambiguous.

For all that the plot sounds creepy, the movie is not what it could have been. The musical score is clumsily applied, and the story leaves too many questions: How do the descendants of the villagers recognize Ward as a descendant of Kerwin? No pictures are easily available. What is this monster in the closet, and where did it come from? Sometimes the segues are both abrupt and almost nonsensical. And what about these elder gods? If they were so dominant, what happened to them?

In the end, too many questions crowd the mind during this movie and ruin the fine efforts of the cast. It’s intriguing, but ultimately this Lovecraft-derived movie is unsatisfying.

It appears South Carolina, in a rush to head off Zika, has exacerbated another problem. From Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.com:

Naled is a common insecticide that delivers death to mosquitoes on contact. It has been in use in the United States since 1959. Reportedly the chemical dissipates quickly enough that it is not a hazard to people. (So they say…)

For bees, it’s a different story. The neurotoxin does not discriminate between honey bees and mosquitoes; it is known to be highly toxic to the pollinators. Knowing this, with enough warning beekeepers often cover their hives before aerial spraying; conversely, many counties spray at night when honey bees are safer and not out foraging for pollen.

But without sufficient warning, the results of the recent spraying were disastrous. At Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply in Summerville, the inhabitants of 46 hives died on the spot, totaling some 2.5 million bees, writes Guarino. “Walking through the farm, one Summerville woman wrote on Facebook, was “like visiting a cemetery, pure sadness.”” There were many other losses as well.

The county claimed it gave good warning via newspaper and FB posting, and the beekeepers would have covered the hives if they’d known. It appears they need to work more closely with their agricultural community.

It’d be better if we have a vaccine for Zika, then we could skip the entire spraying activity. Until the next plague arrives.

Back in the early ’90s, I remember the pundits remarking on Bill Clinton’s most salient tactic: taking an issue owned by his opponents and making it his own. Hillary’s ripped that page right out of Bill’s book and taped it to her iPad, judging from Steve Benen’s remarks on MaddowBlog:

In her address, Mrs. Clinton championed the notion of American exceptionalism, a term that has traditionally been embraced by Republicans.

It’s hard to overstate just how eager Clinton was today to drive the point home. When her campaign distributed a transcript of her speech to reporters this afternoon, the headline read, “In Cincinnati, Clinton Touts American Exceptionalism.” A quick review of the transcript found that the Democratic presidential hopeful used the word “exceptional” eight times while speaking to the American Legion.

This was arguably the most striking: “[M]y opponent in the race has said very clearly that he thinks American exceptionalism is insulting to the rest of the world. In fact, when Vladimir Putin, of all people, criticized American exceptionalism, my opponent agreed with him saying, and I quote, ‘If you are in Russia, you don’t want to hear that America is exceptional.’ Well maybe you don’t want to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Of course, that raises the question of why did Clinton lose to Obama in the primary 8 years ago? While I don’t have any clear memories of the primaries, I suspect this Clinton tactic works best with opponents who view issues as convenient ladders to power, who don’t really have a solid grip on them. Obama has demonstrated his commitment to the issues, from the ACA to ISIL, has thought through the issues to the extent possible, and plays the long, long game – a difficult proposition even for the brightest, and especially for businessmen who think quarter to quarter.

I think we have yet to see Hillary demonstrate that same commitment to the long game, but I don’t think that means she can’t. By all accounts she’s driven, smart, and very experienced. If she is, Obama should serve as one of her most important, if unofficial, advisors.

In some ways, I wonder if the GOP just decided to throw a sacrificial lamb to the wolf this time around. It’s hard to justify that statement in view of those initial 17 candidates, but I can still see it happening.

On Lawfare, Robert Chesney points out that we’ve struck the Libyan city of Sirte roughly 100 times in the last month in an effort to dislodge ISIL. In his mind, here’s the remarkable bit:

Why so little attention [in the media]?  Part of it is that Trump coverage is eating up so much media space.  Part of it is that, after fifteen years, stories of this kind just aren’t grabbing the public’s attention as easily. And part of it is that the strikes seem primarily if not exclusively to involve scenarios at or near what is passing for a “front line” between ISIL forces in Sirte and US-backed forces trying to drive them out.  But I wonder if part of the neglect also stems from the fact that we are using manned aircraft and helicopters rather than drones; it’s hard to fit the Libya story into the familiar drone-mania framing, after all.

There are other ways to read it, if you’re a partisan.

By not mentioning Obama taking decisive action against ISIL, the media narrative skews against him.

They’re against the military.

They’re for the military by not scaring off potential recruits.

More crowd my mind, but I think I’ll let them go – they tire me. Honestly, as an Irish software engineer once told me during a visit to the States, “Your country is so big! I can’t blame you for not paying attention to the rest of the world, you can’t even keep up with your own country!”

Add in a dose of inevitable provincialism, a presidential election, and I’m afraid the ugly bits of news that can be hard to understand – international politics – gets squeezed out.

I am not a Roger Corman aficionado, but I’ve seen a few Corman directorial and/or production efforts over the years, with Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) being the last, which both horrified and made my Arts Editor and I laugh, so recently going into The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) , my main concern was lasting long enough to make an honest effort of writing the review.

Was I ever wrong.

At first, I was willing to give Vincent Price all the credit for the initial willingness to continue on. But as we made it further into the jungle of the plot, we had to admit that this film was hitting on just about all cylinders: an intriguing story (why does the coffin have a glass plate? Wait, why did the corpse open her eyes just then?) about a man and, more importantly, his wife, who considers herself his wife even when she’s dead, and how this can really creep everyone out; excellent acting from the entire cast, including the (uncredited) black cat; filmed quite nicely on location at a gorgeous English ruin, with creative cinematography.  I particularly enjoyed Roger’s work with flames, with the last sequence making me think of the fires of Hell.

However, the special effects that made the black cat into some sort of supernatural demon were horrible, as I think they resorted to getting a stuffed black cat and throwing it at the actors with abandon. And it must be said that this movie does not have an up-tempo ending, as a remake might indulge in today. It’s very measured, building on anticipation, relaxing, then creating the tension again. It’s an older style that might bore a younger, inexperienced audience, but delight those who’ve studied story-telling and appreciate this relative rarity. But then, the film is based on a short work by Edgar Allen Poe, so we would expect a high level of craft from the plot.  And this retelling of the story does not disappoint.

The climax was unforeseen and quite invigorating, as Vincent dances through fire once and again, a puppet to his wife’s needs. Who will live, who will die? Will Vincent once again burn, as in The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)? But what terrible deed did he commit in this one to deserve such a fate?  And isn’t there any legal recourse attached to the vow of  “until death do us part”?

If you like Vincent Price, see this. He does some fine work.

(With Deb White)

If you were wondering about North Korea at the Olympics, Andray Abrahamian on 38 North brings his perspective on why the North Korean athletes seemed to be shunning their free cellphones:

When the North Koreans weren’t marching in the opening ceremony with the Samsung phones given to all athletes by the Olympic partners, the media speculated it was “likely in an attempt to control their access to information. Tight control may be part of an effort to prevent defection.” The former sentence is probably true, the latter probably isn’t. The biggest reason was probably that carrying the symbol of your rival and enemy country’s greatest corporate success is a worse public relations look than not carrying them at all.

Generally, Andray didn’t much care for the coverage of North Korea during the Olympics, which isn’t surprising since it’s a sporting event covered by sports journalists – not political journalists. Still, they should have picked up on this:

The media understandably obsessed over the symbolism of a selfie taken by South Korean gymnast Lee Un-ju and North Korean gymnast Hong Un Jong: it was a heartwarming shot of two athletes from a divided country sweetly and spontaneously smiling together. To the media’s credit, they generally resisted reading too much into the selfie. But there was less reflection on how weak a symbol of unity that was, compared to Sydney in 2000, when North and South marched in the opening ceremony together under a unification flag, to a stadium-wide standing ovation. They did it again in Athens in 2004.

Now we get North Korean missile tests.

Our garden 8/31/2016.

Big, bad new houses get more big, bad raps on the knuckles:

McMansion (starter castles) and similarly styled though smaller houses are Ugly and Horrible, in my humble estimation. Have you seen James Howard Kunstler’s TED talk review of suburbs and this style of architecture? If not, you should: https://www.ted.com/…/james_howard_kunstler_dissects…

Most houses these days are built using one style which can be called neo-eclectic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-eclectic_architecture), but which is really just a bunch of stupid ideas thrown together to fake “impressiveness”, “style” and “taste” — and at the same time be cheap, cheap, cheap for builders to build. And if you live someplace like Minnesota where ice dams are a real problem, all those stupid, fake extra gables are just water leak problems waiting to happen.

I can’t say enough bad things about typical suburban-style building.

Take a deep breath … I’ll have to find some time to see that TED talk.

A reader expresses skepticism about returning prisons to public sector management:

The mega-prison corp’s. are big enough that I expect major lobbying to stop this, so basically I won’t believe there’ll be any change until I see significant numbers of federal prisons being “nationalized”.

If Trump or Johnson wins, I agree, but if Hillary wins then I expect trend back to public sector management to continue, as she’s taken a pledge to do so. However, via The Intercept_, it appears the CEO of the Correction Corps of America agrees with my reader:

THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of the largest private prison company in America reassured investors earlier this month that with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the White House, his firm will be “just fine.” Damon Hininger, the chief executive of Corrections Corporation of America, was speaking at the REITWeek investor forum.

Private prisons have received a great deal of criticism this election cycle, first with Bernie Sanders campaigning to end for-profit incarceration, followed by Clinton taking up a similar pledge.

After The Interceptrevealed that the Clinton campaign had received campaign donations from private prison lobbyists, a number of activist groups confronted Clinton, leading her to announce that she would no longer accept the money and later declaring that “we should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

But Corrections Corporation is apparently not concerned. Asked about prospects under Trump or Clinton, Hininger argued that his company has prospered through political turnover by taking advantage of the government’s quest for lower costs.

“I would say that being around 30 years and being in operation in many, many states, and also doing work with the federal government going back to the 1980s, where you had Clinton White House, you had a Bush White House, you had Obama White House, we’ve done very, very well,” Hininger said.

“If we continue to do a good job on the quality, and with that, we can demonstrate savings both on capital voids, but also cost savings in our services, then I think we’ll be just fine,” he said.

The report goes on to note CCA was founded by the former head of the Tennessee Republican Party.

A reader finds a better phrase for counterfactual regret minimisation.

There’s already a term for this in finance and economics: it’s called lost opportunity cost.

Ah! Well, depend on software geeks to come up with new words for old concepts. The one I loathe the most: prepend. Y’all could use prefix, ya know.

The 38 North blog attempts to cover and analyze incidents and trends in North Korea. Recently they covered an activity out of the Cold War – the recurrence of a Numbers Station. Numbers Stations are shortwave radio stations which send coded messages, presumably to agents operating in other countries, and have fallen out of use with the advent of the Internet and digitally secure communications. 38 North’s Martyn Williams explores why North Korea may have resumed use of a Numbers Station:

Some are worried it signals that North Korean might be planning some type of operation, alerting its spies by sending the coded broadcast. But for that to be true, North Korean agents would have had to have been listening at the right time to take down the message, and how would they have known it was coming? Numbers haven’t been broadcast for 16 years, so have agents really spent the last decade and a half listening just in case something came across? It is possible they could have been alerted that such a message was about to be broadcast, but then when why not send the message contents over whatever communications channel was used for such an alert?

Had this been a real broadcast, interpreting the message would have relied on code books that are probably years out of date, making the whole thing all the more unlikely.

There is also a possibility the broadcast really was some sort of remote mathematics course, but that seems equally unlikely given its sudden and unexplained start.

Perhaps the most credible theory says that North Korea is trying to cause a bit of panic and confusion in Seoul. If that’s true, then mission accomplished—at least for a day or two.

But the fuss in Seoul about the return of North Korean numbers on the airwave misses an important point: South Korea itself resumed its own numbers broadcasts back in February, although the National Intelligence Service isn’t as keen to talk about those.

South Korea has a much richer recent history of using numbers stations than its northern neighbor. After all, while the Internet and digital communications have made the radio stations obsolete in the rest of the world, North Korea stands alone in the almost complete absence of technological progress. So radio remains the best and safest way for South Korea to contact its agents in the north.

Beyond what I read in Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, I know very little about North Korea, so this is fascinating. No doubt reflective of the convoluted machinations of current Leader Kim Jong-un, does this suggest espionage activity is increasing? I’m not so incredulous concerning the use of the station for exactly what it was used by in years past – getting agents out of North Korea and into South Korea may not be as difficult as Martyn believes.

The really sad part is we may never know the truth.

Measurements of language diversity and what I’ll call communications efficiency are a slippery goal, but useful in that it’s good to understand how well we, as an amalgamated whole, can communicate. Hari Balasubramanian reviews the fascinating issues and the work of Joseph Greenberg in connection with this problem on 3 Quarks Daily:

The most basic measure Greenberg proposed is the now widely used linguistic diversity index. The index is a value between 0 and 1. The closer the value is to 1, the greater the diversity. The index is based in a simple idea. If I randomly sample two individuals from a population, what is the probability that they do not share the same mother tongue? If the population consisted of 2000 individuals and each individual spoke a different language as their mother tongue, then the linguistic diversity index would be 1. If they all shared the same mother tongue, then the index would be 0. If 1800 of them spoke language M and 200 of them spoke N, then index would be:

The anomalous signal from HD 164595 has attracted some comments and a bit more research. First the readers:

But was it just one blip?

Another: [picture not available, darn it]

On the SETI @ Home forums Eric Korpela, who saw the raw report and is listed as a project scientist for SETI @ Home, opines:

We believe a signal when

• It is persistent. It appears at the same spot in the sky in multiple observations.
• It only comes from one spot in the sky.
• If we reobserve the target, the signal is still there.

Things that add to believability

• Its frequency/period/delay does not correspond to known interference.
• Its Doppler Drift rate indicates that it is exactly frequency stable in the frame of the center of mass of the solar system
• Its properties (bandwidth, chirp rate, encoding) indicate intelligent origin.

Unfortunately the observing method used by the Russian team does not permit many of these things to be determine. 1. The signal was not persistent. 2. The signal was gone when the target was reobserved. 3. The signal frequency/period/delay cannot be determined. 4. The signal Doppler drift rate is unknown. 5. Many sources of interference, including satellites, are present in the observing band.

So it appears the initial answer for the reader is Yes, just one blip so far, and perhaps this is a lot of fuss over nothing.

Christine Lepisto @ Treehugger.com reports on research on the hominid skeleton we’ve named Lucy, 3.18 million years old, and how she may have died from a fall from a tree:

The “smoking gun” consists of a proximal humerus fracture of Lucy’s left shoulder, consistent with the type of broken bones that occur when a conscious person stretches out their arm to break a hard fall. The fractures were sharp, and splintered, not consistent with the usual fractures seen in ancient fossils. Dozens of other compressive fractures, including at the ankle, knee, and pelvis, even a broken rib, all point to a fall from a great height. Because there is no evidence that these fractures started healing, the scientists conclude that the fall occurred shortly before Lucy’s death.

I don’t get too excited about hominid discoveries and research, but this is really interesting:

What’s more: you can make up your own mind. For the first time ever, the Ethiopian National Museum provides a set of 3-D files of Lucy’s shoulder and knee for the public to download and print.

Which might be seen as another move towards the democratization of science – a dubious suggestion, to my mind. Science is already available to anyone with the intellectual chops to make it happen. But suggesting anyone with a 3D printer and an Internet connection can have a valid opinion on a subject both difficult and political is to let in those who would prefer one conclusion over another for purely ideological reasons.

But it makes me wish I had a 3D printer.

Worried that the Bradley Effect may be skewing polling results? Jon Perr on The Daily Kos covers the topic thoroughly:

If this formula sounds vaguely familiar, it should. That’s because back in the early 1990s political scientists, pundits, and the press proclaimed the existence of the “Bradley Effect” in which some white voters would lie to survey takers (and even themselves) about supporting a black candidate only to mark the ballot for his or her white opponent on Election Day. The Trump campaign, it now appears, is counting on the reverse dynamic to save it in November. …

In September 2008, the legendary Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium weighed in on “The Disappearing Bradley Effect.” As more analysts suggested the polls would contain a hidden bonus for John McCain, Wang cautioned the usual conventional wisdom peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier:

Now comes a large-scale empirical study (in preprint form) by Harvard political scientist Dan Hopkins. He finds that since the mid-1990s, the Bradley effect has disappeared. His paper is a must-read…Until now, the empirical evidence for the Bradley effect rested on individual cases…Now Dan Hopkins has gathered some highly relevant information. In a recent paper he analyzes polling data and election outcomes for 133 gubernatorial and Senate races from 1989 to 2006…

Polls did show a significant Bradley/Wilder effect through the early 1990s, which includes the period when Bradley and Wilder were running for office. However, Hopkins notes that the effect then went away in races from 1996 onward. To quote the study: “Before 1996, the median gap for black candidates was 3.1 percentage points, while for subsequent years it was -0.3 percentage points.”

And there’s lots more.

On this topic Fredrik deBoer, who is taking a break – perhaps a long one – from blogging, has a last, and informed, shot at the replacement of public education with private education:

Here’s the model that the constant “online education will replace physical colleges” types advance: education is about gaining knowledge; knowledge is stored in the heads of teachers; schooling is the transfer of that knowledge from the teacher’s head to the student’s head; physical facilities are expensive, but online equivalents are cheap; therefore someone will build an Amazon that cuts out the overhead of the physical campus and connects students to teachers in the online space or, alternatively, cuts teachers out altogether and just transfers the information straight into the brains of the student.

The basic failure here is the basic model of transfer of information, like teachers are merchants who sell discrete products known as knowledge or skills. In fact education is far more a matter of labor, of teachers working to push that information into the heads of students, or more accurately, to compel students to push it into their own heads. And this work is fundamentally social, and requires human accountability, particularly for those who lack prerequisite skills.

I’ve said this before: if education was really about access to information, then anyone with a library card could have skipped college well before the internet.

Or in other words, education is not a mechanical, deterministic process, but requires processes outside of those which can be implmented by a computer. Teachers must motivate kids who’d rather be outside – or at football practice. Study groups can be exceptionally beneficial – and if it’s not convenient to form them, they may not form. Fredrik has a final thought:

Education is always getting disrupted, in the Silicon Valley mind. And though they dress it up in a million different ways, this disruption always functions the same way: by minimizing the teacher, the actual human being, whose job it is to inspire and direct and cajole and, yes, to drag students into competence. Either the teachers are replaced by an iPad or they’re forced to scale up the number of students they can teach by factors of hundreds or thousands through online technologies. One way or the other, the teacher is the problem the technology is designed to solve.

There is another way, which is to actually put our money where our mouth is, recognize that education is expensive, and that teachers themselves have value, and that mankind has cultivated human relationships of respect and guidance between teacher and student for millennia for good reason. I know a thing or two about a thing or two, and people pay me for that knowledge. But despite a culture of the autodidact, I know almost all of it because of great teaching, because teachers with patience and dedication had the time and resources to guide me to understanding. Teachers are not a problem to be solved; teachers are skilled laborers who should be well-compensated and respected.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has awarded its Balles Prize to Vox’s Julia Belluz:

For deftly debunking unscientific and outrageous medical claims, and for taking on the gurus of pseudoscience and quackery, Julia Belluz of Vox.com will be awarded the Balles Prize in Critical Thinking by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a program of the Center for Inquiry. The award will be presented on October 28 at the CSICon conference in Las Vegas.

“The peddlers of medical misinformation have more ways than ever to spread their message and bamboozle and endanger the public, using the tools of the web and social media, and shrouding their ludicrous claims in scientific-sounding jargon,” said Barry Karr, Executive Director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. “Julia Belluz beats them at their own game. In her outstanding work at Vox, she combines the tools of digital storytelling with a unique, passionate voice and good old-fashioned fact-based reporting (imagine that!), dispelling myths and sparking genuine critical thinking in the minds of her many readers.”

Kudos!

HD 164595 lies near the source of an interesting new signal. CNN is a popular source of information:

Astronomers engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are training their instruments on a star around 94 light years from Earth after a very strong signal was detected by a Russian telescope.

An international team of researchers is now examining the radio signal and its star, HD 164595 — described in a paper by Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others as a “strong candidate for SETI” — in the hopes of determining its origin.

“The signal from HD 164595 is intriguing, because it comes from the vicinity of a sun-like star, and if it’s artificial, its strength is great enough that it was clearly made by a civilization with capabilities beyond those of humankind,” astronomer Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, which searches for life beyond Earth, tells CNN.

Whenever a strong signal is detected, “it’s a good possibility for some nearby civilization to be detected,” Maccone tells CNN.

For a more technical approach to the phenomenon there is Paul Gilster Centauri Dreams:

A candidate signal for SETI is a welcome sign that our efforts in that direction may one day pay off. An international team of researchers has announced the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595” in a document now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in the Karachay–Cherkess Republic of Russia, not far from the border with Georgia in the Caucasus.

The signal was received on May 15, 2015, 18:01:15.65 (sidereal time), at a wavelength of 2.7 cm. The estimated amplitude of the signal is 750 mJy.

No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study. Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization. If it were a narrow beam signal focused on our Solar System, it would be of a power available to a Kardashev Type I civilization. The possibility of noise of one form or another cannot be ruled out, and researchers in Paris led by Jean Schneider are considering the possible microlensing of a background source by HD164595. But the signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target.

The mJy is a mega-Jansky, a unit of spectral irradiance, “… equivalent to 10⁻²⁶ watts persquare metre per hertz.” A Kardashev Type categorizes civilizations and their energy usages:

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization‘s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to use for communication.^[1] The scale has three designated categories:

• A Type I civilization – also called planetary civilization – can use and store energy which reaches its planet from the neighboring star.

• A Type II civilization can harness the energy of the entire star (the most popular hypothetic concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet).

• A Type III civilization can control energy on the scale of their entire host galaxy.^[2]

The scale is hypothetical, and regards energy consumption on a cosmic scale. It was proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. Various extensions of the scale have since been proposed, including a wider range of power levels (types 0, IV and V) and the use of metrics other than pure power.

Isotropic might be summarized as unfocused, as could be guessed from the context.

Credit: N. N. Bursov, et al, via Centauri Dreams

All we have is a signal that has low, but non-zero, probability of being just random noise. The reports I’ve read do not discuss whether the signal is constant or time or just a single blip, but a chart from Centauri Dreams suggests a blip, if I understand the scale properly.

Exciting! (Or, as the Arts Editor says, Nerdgasm!)

On Lawfare, Professor David Wirth addresses complaints from Congress that President Obama overstepped his authority with regard to the Paris Agreement regarding climate change:

… it has triggered cries of protest in the Congress, and especially the Senate, where there have been claims that the President has bypassed the Constitutionally-mandated advice and consent process for a treaty.  Along the way, there has been much confusion and misinformation.  And President Obama, if anything, may have undershot in the Paris Agreement by failing fully to exercise his Executive authority.

In negotiating the Paris Agreement, the Executive Branch took great pains to remain within the confines of its authority as provided by (1) the President’s plenary powers; (2) federal statutes, particularly the Clean Air Act; and (3) existing treaties, most notably the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change , to which the Senate gave its advice and consent in 1992, under the George H.W. Bush Administration, which subsequently ratified the Convention for the United States.  Even the most cursory review of the text of the Paris Agreement discloses a careful, purposeful alternation between the mandatory “shall”—indicating a binding obligation governed by international law—and the hortatory “should”—non-binding statements of strictly political intent without legal force. Indeed, the U.S. delegation held up the closing minutes of the conference that adopted the Paris Agreement over the should/shall distinction in an important provision of the Agreement addressing the need for developed country parties to undertake increasingly ambitious emissions reductions goals over time.

Professor Wirth thinks President Obama may have been too cautious:

If anything, U.S. negotiators overcompensated on the side of caution in the negotiation of the Paris Agreement, even to the title of the instrument.  The Convention specifically addresses the relationship between that instrument and ancillary protocols.  But as long ago as 2009 governments had widely understood that the new agreement could not be called a “protocol” without complicating U.S. participation after the highly charged domestic debate over the earlierKyoto Protocol.  More to the point, the many undertakings employing the hortatory “should” can be examined one by one to determine whether they might have been supported by U.S. domestic law.  This preference for a non-binding mode is part of a pattern in negotiations undertaken by the Obama Administration, which has the effect of avoiding the creation of internationally legally binding obligations altogether.

The result? No truly binding legal obligations. If his successor decides they don’t like the agreement, any convenient garbage can will do.

Labyrinth (1986) is a collaboration of David Bowie and the Jim Henson puppet team. The story opens with a fantasy prone teenage girl, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), asked to babysit her infant brother, who finds the task insufferable and accidentally invokes the Goblin King (Bowie) to remove the baby. Upon discovering her mistake, she embarks upon a quest to return the infant, encounters enemies, friends, obstacles, dreams, and treachery as she races against a deadline that will turn her brother from human to goblin – and cause him to forget he was ever human.

I had trouble at the beginning as this teenager is a spoiled little girl, her fantasy world featuring her at its apex, her real world meticulously ordered – but for her brother, who cries and cries and frustrates her instantly. Her inadvertent invocation of the services of the Goblin King is satisfyingly traumatic, but her instant requirement of the return of her brother, without a moment’s introspection – perhaps it would be to your advantage to lose your brother, did it ever occur to you? – renders her a troubling and unrealistic quicksilver character.

Queerly, this nearly unbelievable change plays into the story, for her quest for her brother leads her into the Labyrinth, the path to, and the barrier guarding, the goblin king’s castle, sometimes made of rock, sometimes so overgrown that its mystery is forgotten for the forest and its creatures that live in it. Here is the playground of the Jim Henson team, tirelessly inventing flocks of creatures, creatures that talk, have powers and vulnerabilities. The puppets, ranging from knee-high to 8 feet or even more, provide the friends and enemies, the backdrop, to the magical labyrinth through which she travels.

But in the metaphorical dusk there always lurks the Goblin King, bringing not only a sense of dread, but also of timelessness to the folk of the labyrinth. The creatures have, mostly, the wrinkles of age on their faces, the dust of the ages sagging on their shoulders, and a certain indefinable and attenuated ennui as they enact their parts, once again, for His Majesty and his Goblin retinue. Of children, there are none, the classic tableau of fairy-tale creatures, who exist and exist and exist, and …

… into this charges change: Sarah. She is the one who dares to play outside her role, who surprises the Goblin King with her persistence, and then her luck. She gnaws on the poisoned fruit, and prospers. She stirs the clotted pot that the Goblin King has set with her very presence, bringing forth obstacles, enemies (but so ineffective), unexpected friends, and in so doing exposing, to herself and to the audience, those tendons which really bring worth to our world of social creatures: relationships. As she depends on friends to help her in her quest, they depend on her as she introduces redemption and helps them to their goals, whether it’s personal glory, or simply forgiving them their sins. In the end, what of things, of dolls and book, or the keeping of people? What of those who we love? These are the questions brought to life in her drawn-out battle with the Goblin King, he who awaits her with honeyed tongue and golden locks.

Is it a great film? No. The musical compositions are ineffective; my Arts Editor was heard to mutter, “Oh, this is awful.” The musical performances were OK but not memorable. Bowie brings a certain otherworldliness to his role, but it needed to be a little more off-world. But the special effects were, with an exception or two, quite good, the puppets were exceptional, and the story was, if perhaps a bit slanted towards the younger set, still enjoyable and unpredictable in all its turns, if not in its dénouement. (I was also amused to see the proto-Star Wars Death Star crew appearing during the battle scene.)

It won’t appeal to everyone, but we had a good time watching.

Besides, who can resist a movie that causes my Arts Editor to exclaim, “Oh, it’s a bog full of anuses!”

counterfactual regret minimisation

This a relatively new evaluation technique devised for poker bots to use when considering strategies. From NewScientist (20 August 2016, paywall) and Adam Kucharski:

“Regret” here refers to the difference between the expected pay-off of the action taken by their poker bot, named Cepheus, and the potential pay-off if it had acted differently. The technique involves Cepheus tweaking its strategy over the course of billions of hands, lowering its overall regret until it is as small as possible.

They are days when I wish I had taken up AI studies beyond that single course. It just sounds so interesting, even if I’m rather dubious about the uses of AI.

In a related move to the Federal retreat from private prisons comes this Reuters report on a requested study of whether Department of Homeland Security privately run detention centers are doing the job:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will study whether to discontinue using privately run detention centers, which the Justice Department recently called unsafe, for migrants and shares of private prison operators fell on Monday after the news.

Department Secretary Jeh Johnson said he directed his advisory council to evaluate whether the agency should continue to contract with private prison operators and make a recommendation by Nov. 30. Advocates for immigrants have accused the companies of withholding proper mental health and medical care from detainees to boost profits.

Without expectation, I would hope there would be a section on the theoretical underpinnings of the performance of the centers – or lack thereof. As noted earlier in this thread and examined in some – disorganized – detail here, if the centers are found to be wanting I’d expect there to be a focus on the differing goals of the entities involved, i.e, the private sector focus on profit (for I do not expect these companies to have embraced Conscious Capitalism) vs the government goals of detaining those who should be detained in a humane mattermanner. I shan’t add without regard to price as this, too, can be an invitation to abuse; the trick is to find the proper balance.

[edited 8/31/2016: change matter to manner.]