Unsightly Mental Blemishes

NewScientist (13 August 2016) reports that if you’re a mouse with Down’s Syndrome, doctors may be able to help you:

Several compounds have improved memory and learning in a mouse version of the condition, suggesting that its cognitive effects can be changed. Until recently, this idea was unthinkable, says Mara Dierssen at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain. …

People with Down’s syndrome seem to have fewer neurons in some brain areas, fewer connections between neurons, and altered neuron behaviour.

In both mice and people, a molecule called NKCC1 seems to be involved. Reducing levels of this compound in neurons taken from Down’s syndrome mice makes them sprout more connections, Laura Cancedda of the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa told the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, last month.

In 2015, her team found that using a drug called bumetanide to block this molecule made Down’s syndrome mice perform as well as other mice in memory tests. The drug is already used to treat heart disease, and trials in adults with Down’s syndrome are set to start towards the end of this year, says Cancedda.

There’s been some evidence suggesting Prozac given to pregnant women carrying a Down’s child may be helpful. This has led to an interesting blockade in testing:

[Carol] Tamminga [at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center] has now begun a small placebo-controlled trial of Prozac in pregnant women. However, she has found that many families would rather try Prozac themselves than risk being allocated to the trial’s placebo group. “Those who are potentially interested in doing this are doing it anyway,” she says.

When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and recommended for an experimental study, it was not a blinded study, so we knew which arm he landed in, and I recall vividly our relief that he was in the arm in which the new treatment would be studied; the other arm was a standard treatment. Given the morbidity of pancreatic cancer, it seemed going experimental was the best approach.

Since Prozac is easily procured, I can see how desperate parents would decide on self-medication, despite the dangers and unknowns.

Finally, and reminiscent of some in the deaf community, comes objections from those who value Down’s Syndrome patients for themselves:

Rather than trying to develop drugs, it would be better to change our education and work systems to enable people with Down’s syndrome to live fuller lives, says Simone Aspis at the UK campaign group Changing Perspectives.

I glanced around the Changing Perspective website but didn’t find anything on this subject. To me, not working on resolving the disability seems like madness, unless you believe there’s a divinity which has commanded that a child shall have a severe disability. That, too, seems like madness.

The Vampire (1957) is an old fashioned tragedy: a man is cursed through no fault of his own, and, despite his best efforts, will meet his doom at the hands of the gods Er, a pill – well, that lacks punch, doesn’t it? But I might as well say it: Much like Oedipus, his fate is seemingly inescapable.

In this case a doctor in a small town is accidentally dosed with the experimental pills developed by a researcher to regress animals to more primitive states. As the evening comes along, he (inexplicably) changes into a monster that attacks whoever is nearby, indulging in an exceptionally neat neck nibble which results in their death. He awakens at home, restored physically and amnesiac, but soon tormented with visions of his fatal actions.

His victims, meanwhile, after dying decompose at an accelerated rate due to the virus the doctor carries in his saliva. It certainly takes care of any untidy extra vampires, but why this is necessary is not clear.

Finally, horrified at his nightly excursions, he decides to be honorable and commit suicide, but is delayed in this effort by a valiant nurse who he then terrorizes as he makes one more trip into the land of terrors. Eventually the police intervene and he’s put down. Uh, killed.

There is little to think about in this movie. Don’t take the pills your daughter brings you, perhaps? The characters are living their everyday lives or fighting for them; little growth is achieved. And as medical pills are substituted for the remarks of an oracle, it’s difficult to place it in a greater context. Oedipus Rex, which my Arts Editor and I saw on the stage at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival last year, is a play of horror, which in my view was written to enforce respect for the gods. This movie is more about the random horror that can occur in the most placid small American town – and it’s just not all that convincing. He can struggle all he likes – but the scriptwriter is implacable in his plans.

This is not to condemn everything. Cinematography, audio, and makeup are all good, and the acting is at least competent (although the psychiatry professor is miscast – he comes across as almost a good old boy, rather than an academic). But the story is at fault, as it throws away a couple of interesting characters without exploring them, and fails to develop the other characters to any great degree.

Perhaps others will like it more, but I cannot recommend it.

Carl Engelking on Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog is reporting the possibility there’s an Earth-like planet orbiting in the Proxima Centauri system – the closest such system to our own, at 4+ light years.

The ante for hyping a new exoplanet discovery is a little higher these days, but if rumors are true, this one makes the grade: astrophysicists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) plan to announce they’ve spotted an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in its habitable zone. This, according to an anonymous source quoted in a report that appeared Friday in Der Spiegel.

“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface—an important requirement for the emergence of life,” the source said.

Carl throws a little cold water on the flames of curiosity:

Although media reports say the rumored planet orbits in a region that’s potentially favorable for life, these smaller stars are less stable, and Proxima Centauri is known to have violent flares at times. Its occasional tantrums have made astronomers skeptical of finding life around red dwarf stars in the past.

Dental calculus is a hardened form of dental plaque. In an offline article for Archaeology entitled “Worlds Within Us,” (September / October, 2016, pp. 38-43) Samir Patel reports on a new branch of archaeology – the intersection of field archaeology, dentistry, and genetics:

The mouth is the microbial equivalent of a rainforest, teeming with creatures, interspecies warfare, cataclysms. Some of these residents for a film on your teeth, colonies stuck together with DNA, proteins, and polysaccharides. Left unbrushed, this plaque, for reasons that aren’t really known, occasionally fossilizes in your mouth to form tartar, dental calculus. Calculus is tough and almost universally observed clinging to the teeth of adult skeletons discovered at archaeological sites. For many years this material was ignored, discarded, and otherwise overlooked, as were human bones prior to the introduction of modern archaeological practices. …

Now? With the increase in understanding of the microbiome, the web of life becomes a more salient concept. Although not the first sample published, the Dalheim burials has had a rich yield.

[Christina] Warriner and her coauthors – 32 in total from a range of disciplines – catalogued, from the mouths of four medieval individuals, 40 opportunistic pathogens, including species associated with cardiovascular disease, meningitis, and pneumonia, as well as what might be the oral ancestor of modern gonorrhea. They sequenced the entire genome of Tannarella forsythia, a cause of periodontal disease. They saw dietary DNA from pigs, cruciferous vegetables, and bread wheat. They looked for proteins as well, and found ones associated with pathogen virulence, others produced by the human immune system, and beta-lactoglobulin, a durable dairy protein.

Etc etc. A veritable hoard of information which will further shape our perceptions of the environment and living conditions of our ancestors. Will our insistence on clean teeth deprive future archaeologists of information about us?

Deb’s been a little frustrated with our broccoli plant.

Maybe ‘cuz it grows up with big leaves – but nothin’ to snack on.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press covers the rampaging duck here.

From an offline-only article in Archaeology entitled “Romans on the Bay of Naples,” by Marco Merola, comes the word lapilli:

A team of archaeologists and conservators worked to remove mud and lapilli (small stones ejected by a volcanic eruption) and to expose and clean the stunning wall  paintings emerging from the debris.

Having been to Naples, Herculaneum, and Pompeii many years ago, I was fascinated by the article, picturing the work near the magnificent Bay of Naples, wondering just what the villa looked like in its day.

Before the lapilli started falling.

A reader observes the Trump memorabilia and revolts me:

If that actually was Trump if could feed a lot of hungry people.

Oy. Who would have such poor taste?

A reader draws a connection between Minnesota and the Met Opera:

Why does this sound exactly like the Minnesota Orchestra, except the musicians did back down? Yeah. I still think the management at the M.O. [Minnesota Orchestra] are a bunch of crooked bastards. Like so many other idiots, they pissed in the soup and won’t be forgiven or forgotten for many decades.

I suspect Scott would agree that the situations are remarkably similar. However, I do not agree that it won’t be forgotten, because management is not the face of the Minnesota Orchestra – it’s the players. In 10 years, perhaps 15% of the audiences will remember the hiatus and who caused it. Hopefully, in 20 years the current management team will be entirely gone, and the replacements will be better – and not drawn from the business world. And the audience, by and large, will neither remember nor care. Just a few – hopefully the important ones.

Like Scott and you.

When Obama took office one of his goals was the shuttering of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. From MTV:

A long time ago, Senator Barack Obama explained why the detention facility at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay needed to close. “Our legitimacy is reduced when we’ve got a Guantanamo that is open,” he said during a debate in June 2007. “Those kinds of things erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles.”

More than eight years later, after getting a significant promotion, he hasn’t changed his mind. “For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our security,” President Obama said on Tuesday at the White House. “It undermines it. … This is about closing a chapter in our history.”

Upon announcement of the transfer of 15 more detainees to the United Arab Emirates (leaving 61 still resident, from a high of nearly 800), Benjamin Wittes publishes a comment on Lawfare:

First, this is a significant accomplishment, in my opinion. Getting detainees out of Guantanamo is very hard. There is both an intensive internal review process and, for those detainees who clear that process, there’s the additional hurdle—sometimes a very time-consuming hurdle—of finding a country that will take the detainee subject to the security and humane assurances that the review process and other U.S. legal and policy constraints demand. The result are two backlogs: the backlog of detainees who cannot be cleared for transfer, and the backlog of detainees who are cleared but cannot be removed. This one action clears 43 percent of the second backlog. Before it, there were 35 detainees at Guantanamo cleared for transfer; now there are only 20.

Second, with this transfer, Obama is getting rather close to the point at which keeping Guantanamo open looks just plain silly. I’ve never much cared whether Guantanamo closes or not. I dislike the symbolic politics of the “Close Guantanamo” movement about as much as I dislike the chest-thumping symbolic politics of the Guantanamo-is-toughness crowd. If Obama manages to remove a substantial fraction of the remaining 20 people cleared for transfer and Hillary Clinton maintains his policy of not bringing new detainees to the site (Donald Trump promises to revitalize detention there, so if he wins the presidency, the point is moot), the notion of maintaining an entire detention facility for the long-term detention of as few as 40 or so detainees will become increasingly hard to sustain. Guantanamo is not Spandau Prison, and it doesn’t make much sense to maintain it for the sake of maintaining it.

Just plain silly. How much longer will Congress obstruct the closing of Guantánamo Bay?

The ACLU is not entirely happy with the Administration’s approach to rendering Guantánamo Bay meaningless:

SkepticalRaptor on The Daily Kos writes about those who are pushing the “medically unfit” rumor about Mrs. Clinton:

Who’s behind the medically unfit Hillary Clinton myth

According to the article in Breitbart, “The executive director of a physicians’ organization questions how the mainstream media can ignore signs of what could be a traumatic brain injury in the Democrat nominee for president.”

Wow, that sounds serious. And from someone who heads a “physicians’ organization.” That person must be running the American Medical Association. Or maybe they head the American Neurological Association, because they mentioned traumatic brain injury.

That would be no.

The person behind this trope is Dr. Jane Orient, who has some official position with the physician organization, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She is also the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPANDS), published by AAPS. The journal does not have an impact factor, and does not appear to be indexed in PubMed.

It’s a full on attack, which is to be expected on a progressive’s website – but not inappropriate, if the facts as presented are valid. They suggest Dr. Orient is operating outside of her specialty, possibly outside of ethics, and is part of an organization which is anti-vaccine, etc.

Given the same set of knowledge about biomed and the rumors about Mrs. Clinton, I would have taken a far different approach to writing about it – I’m not nakedly partisan, I just think Trump’s a disaster.

All that said, this is the sort of sniping at the Clintons that has been going on since the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s Administration, if not earlier. I recall sitting in a Mazda dealership’s service waiting area, reading an article out of REASON Magazine, my mouth literally hanging open as the article explicitly said that Bill Clinton, sitting President of the United States, was an emotionally damaged child, and was only operational in combination with Hillary. From someone who had personally examined Bill? No, no. Just from what they’d seen on TV.

From a magazine with the word reason in its name.

REASON mostly published interesting material, so that was part of the shock – this was pathetic, and also damn long – much longer than their average feature article. But I wonder how many readers just lapped it up, since I’m sure a substantial portion of the readership was rabidly conservative. How many understood the absurdity of publishing that article in a magazine named Reason – and how many just nodded and added it to their mythos?

I gave up on REASON shortly after Matt Welch took over as editor. While a good columnist, when he assumed the top editorial position the magazine became excruciating to read: deeply anti-Obama without using actual reason, and switching to columnists whose command of the art of writing was so bad that I couldn’t evaluate their facts or reasoning abilities. I don’t know if this was Matt’s fault, or the publisher, who for a long while was Robert Poole, a well known conservative engineer. In any case, with my marriage imminent, it seemed like a good resource-eater to be rid of.

They have Godzilla. It destroys cities.

We have … a big rubber duck.

Image: http://www.thebigduck.us

According to Lake Superior Magazine, it’s due in Duluth right now.

As if a dozen or so tall-masted ships arriving in Duluth would not generate enough buzz, the organizers of Tall Ships Duluth 2016 have signed up another iconic maritime figure for the summer festival.

The “World’s Largest Rubber Duck” will be joining the galleons and schooners at the August 18-21 event.

The profession of software engineer (except in those locales where “engineer” is a legally defined term, in which case I’m a computer programmer) brings with it a literal turn of mind, required in order to understand the code someone has written and you must understand. While this is hopefully something I can turn on and then off (when speaking with those human creatures who operate on other planes of existence), sometimes that discipline can leak through those compartments we make of our minds.

Thus it is with a phrase most of us will read with little concern about those things which, in my case, leap out and try to throttle me with illogic. From Archaeology magazine (August / September / October 2016, p 24) comes this tidbit by Samir Patel on ancient Morocco:

A hominin bone belonging to the species Homo rhodesiensis and around 500,000 years old, found among a large deposit of bones in a cave in Casablanca, had been cracked, gnawed, and punctured—probably by an extinct hyena.

So I’m bothered in at least two different ways. First, individual creatures do not go extinct, they die; extinction applies to species and greater groupings. Call this a semantic blunder.

Second, extinct creatures do little more than lie around and rot. They do not chew up the bones of anything, much less relations to homo sapiens. This is a sort of chronological disorder. It makes me worry that my headstone will read Here Lie The Pieces of H. White, Ripped Asunder by Saber-Toothed Tiger.

Yeah, yeah. That’s how my mind sometimes works.

[And in a bit of irony, the next day I correct the date on the magazine.]

My Arts Editor sprang this … this … thing on me. How Quiznos possibly survived it beggars belief.

And if you were spellbound, here’s the Sponge Monkeys shilling for another victim.

Akiva Eldar finds the conduct of high government officials in Israel, as noted earlier, to be deplorable, as he explains in AL Monitor:

These words epitomize the xenophobia, separatism, racism and cruelty that are eating away at every value that Israel once held sacred. These toxic waters are trickling down from the top to the very roots of society, overflowing and flooding the environment. They began with Knesset member Miri Regev, the current culture minister, calling asylum seekers a “cancer” in Israel’s body in 2012, and then moved on to the group calling itself Students for Southern Tel Aviv, which a year ago “ratted out” soldiers who volunteered at daycare centers for the children of asylum seekers. At the time, the army spokesman issued a response to the right-wing Jewish Voice website that ran the item, stating that the activity was part of the army’s encouragement of soldiers to contribute to their communities, that it was apolitical and that it was approved, as usual, by the commanders and education officers of their unit. Of note, IDF soldiers also assist Holocaust survivors, children with disabilities and charitable organizations that distribute food to the poor.

Indeed, in an enlightened society, the state bears responsibility for those less fortunate — the state, not soldiers and other volunteers, such as the nongovernmental organization Elifelet, which takes care of children of asylum seekers. The asylum seekers, who numbered 57,000 in 2012, cannot be deported because of the danger that would await them in their homeland. There is no doubt that they are needy, among other reasons because of draconian Israeli laws and regulations, and that they reside in Tel Aviv. Given this, why are they not worthy of consideration as “paupers” who have priority? After all, the Talmud’s maxim does not refer to “Jewish paupers.”

When a nation is subjected to persistent attacks of all kinds, verbal and physical, whether existential or not, some of its citizens will crack, as it were, abandoning values of national importance, and they will find ways to despise those who attack them. Those who Eldar condemn, if his characterization is true, have climbed to the heights of power on the backs of those who have been trained to be fearful, not generous, to fear those who may indeed be ready to attack them. Perhaps it is right to grieve for both those who’ve lost their way even as they attain power, and those who see it, and can do little more than write about. Eldar finishes with this:

So, kindhearted soldiers were forced to abandon the toddlers they took out of the darkness of the children’s warehouses into the sunlight. It is a missed opportunity to substitute a photo of an Israeli soldier hugging a non-Israeli baby for the one that filled the pages of foreign media showing the IDF soldier who shot and killed a wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron in March or of a politician comfortably ensconced in the Defense Ministry flexing his muscles at the chief of staff on the backs of miserable babies. All that really matters is that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs has appointed a special team to battle, so explained the ministry’s general director Sima Vaknin, Israel’s image as a “pariah state.”

In Turkey, suspicion of the West links the coup plotters via their cash, as reported by Tulay Cetingulec in AL Monitor:

One-dollar bills have been found on high-ranking officers involved in the July 15 coup attempt, in what is perhaps the most bizarre of the many oddities to emerge from the massive crackdown on the Gulen community, the accused culprit in the putsch. The $1 bills have been found also on policemen, judges, academics, businessmen, teachers and other civilians linked to the Gulen community, the government’s former ally, which it now calls the Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO).

The bills are said to denote membership in the secretive group, and their serial numbers are believed to have coded meanings. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said the $1 bill “is undoubtedly of some important function within FETO,” while Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has vowed to defeat “the lowlifes who sell their souls for $1.”

Assuming these are authentic, just how information assigned by a third party could have a coded meaning stretches credulity, although a very sophisticated operation could do it – or, as is explained (not really authoritative, could be someone making it all up) here, very simple:

One of the exchange offices Al-Monitor visited had accumulated hundreds of $1 bills, with one employee grumbling, “It’s not like before. People are afraid to both buy and sell them.” Another currency dealer said the demand for $1 bills ended “at a stroke” after Gulenists were reported to use them for secret communication. “People have come to see them as criminal tools,” he added. A third shop had done away with the $1 bill altogether. “No $1 bills here,” the dealer said. “Neither buying nor selling.”

Yet, not all $1 bills are of an “incriminating” nature. The serial number matters. According to media reports, a serial number that begins with the letter F denotes that the holder is a top Gulenist leader, while C is for lower-level managers and J for ordinary members. Other reports claim the $1 bills were blessed personally by Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric heading the sect, before being distributed to members, and that the serial numbers serve as a sort of ID number, the records of which Gulen keeps at his mansion in Pennsylvania.

This has the effect – possibly primary – of effectively removing one of the greatest of currencies from usage in Turkey. A suspicious person might suspect this scheme is just one step in a purposeful attempt to make Turkey more insular and turn them away from the secular ways of the West.

Scott Chamberlain, an experienced non-profit organizational hand, and my cousin, thinks he’s caught the management of the Met Opera with their pants down. First, he notes a recent report that the Met has reported achieving a balanced budget. Then comes this:

Two years ago, the Met was in the midst of contentious contract negotiations with its unionized workers.  At that time, General Manager Peter Gelb repeatedly told the press the Met was in a dire financial situation, and the company literally faced bankruptcy in two years.  The only way to stave off financial disaster was to have the unionized workers at the Met agree to massive concessions with sacrificial pay cuts right that very minute.

The workers refused, and Mr. Gelb was forced to back down. His proposed cuts never went through.

Well, here we are two years later—the exact length of time until Mr. Gelb’s projected bankruptcy. And the Met has recorded two straight years of balanced budgets.

Huh.

Given this astonishing record of overblown, self-serving, and erroneous statements, why would any reporter give credence to anything Mr. Gelb says about… anything?

When it comes to an analysis, there is a fine line here. Do we cut management a break under the argument that reality can be highly variable? Or are we hard on them under the argument that management should be aware that of that variability and not been so dictatorial to the union? I incline towards the latter, but I don’t know much about this world.

The balance of the post complains that the Met is mistreated in the press with regards to its non-profit status, and hands out some expert opinion on running a non-profit.

Posters, campaign pins, bobbleheads – all common and collectible. But these?

From The Verge.

Five identical statues of a nude Donald Trump have appeared overnight on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City. So, The Verge ran down to Union Square in NYC to see as much of fake nude Trump as our eyes could possibly tolerate …

I so look forward to seeing one of these on Antique Roadshow in 20 years or so. Will the appraiser be excited, or appalled? And will some Trump supporters try to imitate the stunt? Morbid curiosity requires the question, but I don’t know that the answer will be good.

Will the nation be traumatized by the damage age does to us? Or just realistic, giving given our demographics?

(h/t my Arts Editor)

The local fast food joint uses pressurized gas for ketchup dispensation – when it works, it’s fast, clean, and makes it easy to get exactly the amount of ketchup desired. When it overworks, you get …. carbonated ketchup.

And, since we’re talking liquified tomato, here’s a spiritual predecessor to ketchup.

Some say it’s a nipple. To me, I see inflated cheeks and something about to be ejected, a la the sauce dispenser in Chicken Run.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUdew5gMbTg

Roughly 2:00 minutes into this clip.

For the past several days I’ve been trying to write a review of Finding Dory (2016), the long-awaited sequel to the Disney classic Finding Nemo (2003) and have been failing. What’s bugging me the most is this: three quarters of the way through this visually excellent movie I found myself thinking …

My God! These fish have stereoscopic vision!

As if this is important in an animated movie about sentient sea-life.

Yet here’s a picture of Dory’s real world counterpart, a regal tang. It might have limited stereoscopic vision, or more accurately binocular vision¹.

So the real point is that I was not captivated by this movie. This is despite the usual high Disney standards in animation and voice talent; there’s little to fault in these areas. I believe there are two problems with this movie.

First, and unavoidable, is the lack of novelty. We’ve been here before, we know the feel and the rules of the place. Indeed, we’ve lost the sharks, who certainly added a lot to the first movie through the injection of human concepts into the fish-realm, and how sometimes human concepts are either ridiculous or, more rarely, transcendent. And in terms of the landscape and the supporting characters, little is added.

Second, the story does not really result in growth for any of the characters. In Finding Nemo, both little Nemo and his father, Marlin, learn and grow emotionally during the movie. I don’t see the same happening in Finding Dory. As a fish with short term memory loss, Dory has a hard time learning anything; the best that can really be said is that her recall of important facts are beneficial, that we really shouldn’t forget. As a lesson, it’s not really forceful.

There are other characters, of course, such as Hank the octopus, but while an argument can be made that each faces a challenge and overcomes it, none of them are nearly so compelling as those of the first film.

For me, at least, out of context this is a fine movie; but in the context of its predecessor, it suffers. It simply is not as captivating.

¹It’s also bugging me that I can’t find an antonym for binocular vision. Oh, now that I have the right term it’s obvious: monocular vision.

It is a great mystery to me how Octaman (1971) was ever made, much less released. The story of a mutated monster octopus (obviously wearing boots) caring for its children in a Mexican lake, one of her children is taken and subjected to vivisection by a scientist, whom she promptly murders. Maybe she. Maybe he. The rubber suit doesn’t give us a clue. I was impressed how a tentacle could be used like a sword, though, although it’s not used with abandon. Maybe that’s too bad.

Another scientist returns, along with a carnival owner and a few assorted others – one might be a mestizo, but who can say, he smiles far too much for being in such a life-threatening situation – and they’re on the hunt for this clumsy, slow monster that somehow keeps taking them by surprise. Her, I mean his weakness? The lone lady of the expedition, who can somehow daze him with her, uh, well she’t not outstandingly beautiful, isn’t flashing cleavage, so what’s motivating this monster anyways? Her personality?

Tricked into being trapped in a cave, the expedition collapses except for the mestizo, who finds a way out and leads them back to their Winnebago-like vehicle, but as they prepare to pile into it and run away, the guy in the rubber suit comes bursting out of the vehicle and assaults them yet again! But he, or she, must be losing stamina as now when she barely touches an expedition member, they fall over but get up a little later, whereas before one lazy slap was good enough to lay them out for good.

I would compare this with the equally dreadful Empire of the Ants (1977), except my Arts Editor and I were unable to finish that one, so technically a comparison would be unfair. Still, I’d have to say that this movie is a true time-waster.

If there’s anything good to say about this movie, I’d have to say the eyes of Octaman (oh, maybe that’s a clue to gender!) were exceptionally striking.

Lloyd Alter catches wind of the test flight of the Airlander 10 for Treehugger.com:

… the Airlander 10 took its first flight on August 17. It was a short flight, only 19 minutes, 500 foot altitude and only 35 knots speed, but it is perhaps the start of a new era of low-carbon transportation. It is also not going to catch fire, because it is filled with helium, not hydrogen. TreeHugger used to worry about using so much helium in blimps, but major new fields have been discovered that lessen the worry about peak helium. …

Airships have a few advantages over other flight tech; they are quiet, they don’t pollute nearly as much, since their engines are not doing the heavy lifting, but are for control and movement. The Airlander has 4- 325 hp, 4 litre V8 direct injection, turbocharged diesel engines; that’s smaller than the engine on a pickup truck. Most of the lift is provided by the helium, but as much as 40 percent of lift can come the aerodynamic shape of the hull; it is a giant flying wing. This means that it is not a truly lighter than air vehicle like the dirigibles were, but a hybrid:

Image: Hybrid Air Vehicles

Questions concerning high wind conditions were not discussed, which leaves me dubious of what is otherwise an attractive technology. There are few examples, since lighter than air craft have not been in common use, but consider that of the USS Shenandoah, operated by the U. S. Navy, as related by Airships.net:

On September 3, 1925, on its 57th flight, Shenandoah was caught in a storm over Ohio. Updrafts caused the ship to rise rapidly, at a rate eventually exceeding 1,000 feet per minute, until the ship reached an altitude over 6,000 feet. Shenandoah rose, fell, and was twisted by the storm, and the ship finally suffered catastrophic structural failure, breaking in two at frame 125, approximately 220 feet from the bow. The aft section sank rapidly, breaking up further, with two of the engine cars breaking away and falling to the ground, killing their mechanics.

The control car, attached to the bow section, also separated from the ship and crashed to the ground, killing the six men still aboard, including the ship’s captain, Lt. Cdr. Lansdowne. Without the weight of the control car, the remaining bow section, with seven men aboard, including Navigator Charles Rosendahl, ascended rapidly. Under Rosendahl’s leadership, the men in the bow valved helium from the cells and free-ballooned the bow to a relatively gentle landing. In all, fourteen members of the crew were killed in the crash.

I’m no expert – just a nervous nelly when it comes to storms and high, unstable places.

Today WaPo is reporting good news about a long dormant thread!

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

In summary …

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services, and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that,” Yates said.

This only applies at the Federal level, so State prisons may still be privately run. It’s not a sudden cutoff, but implemented as contracts run their course. But it’s a necessary step.

My only regret is that the official memo cites failings of the prisons, rather than the fundamental problem that private operators are not oriented towards the government goals.

Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver posts a note suggesting a near-legendary agency may be human after all:

And on Twitter, Mikko Hypponen noted an announcement on Github that had gone overlooked for two days, a group is hosting an auction for code from the “Equation Group,” which is more commonly known as the NSA. The auctioneer’s pitch is simple, brutal, and to the point:

How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions. You write many words. But not all, we are auction the best files.

…

Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic. And it does not appear to be information taken from compromised targets. Instead, the exploits, binaries with help strings, server configuration scripts, 5 separate versions of one implant framework, and all sort of other features indicate that this is analyst-side code—the kind that probably never leaves the NSA.

And then things get scarier. As I’ve noted in before, computers are multipliers. Spy agencies have always been targets of other spy agencies, but prior to computers, breaking in was hard and then the materials stolen were simply harder to move.

Nowadays, once a compromise occurs, poof! It’s all copied, not removed, and sometimes it takes months to discover what happened.