Unsightly Mental Blemishes

With regard to the computer hardware architecture mentioned in this post, it has occurred to me that writing a regression test on an architecture in which the LSBs are not predictable would be a special challenge. I suppose you’d have to implement a +/- approach to mathematical checks.

A reader comments on the bill:

Since there is already strong encryption available without backdoors, how would this legislation stop its continuing use? Make every one who owns a computer a criminal until they submit said computer to a “cleansing” agency?

Yeah. I don’t think the bill has been well thought out. Maybe those who already use strong encryption would be grandfathered in? Sounds a little ridiculous, just off-hand.

Lawfare has made available a link to a C-Span taping of the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on this issue. I have not watched it, and at nearly 7 hours long, I don’t know if I’ll have time. The Lawfare link lists the witnesses.

To steal a post title from The Dish…

Thanks to my Arts Editor….

UPDATE: My Arts Editor can’t see the picture from her machine. Let me know if you can’t see it…

UPDATE 2: My Arts Editor has provided a .jpg version of the image, which was a .png. Let me know if it is still unviewable.

“This solution will work for carefully chosen values of ‘now’.”

– Paul Close

While crafting a solution to a race condition.

I’m not quite sure why I, a non-lawyer, find I must comment on an opinion on a legal matter authored by a lawyer, but I find I am so compelled.  Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare, commenting on the newly introduced Feinstein-Burr bill, suggests it’ll be un-Constitutional and uses the following analogy:

It seems to me, however, that there are a number of objections to that plan – the most notable of which is that it probably violates the US Constitution. Granted, the precedent is a bit old, and comes from the Ninth Circuit, but nonetheless, there is a good basis for thinking that such a ban would violate the First Amendment. In Bernstein v. Department of Justice, the government tried to stop Bernstein from publishing his encryption algorithm. In that case they said it violated export law (rather than a hypothetical import law). But the 9th Circuit rejected that ban and ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and any regulations preventing publication would be unconstitutional. Of course, the cases are different – the export case is about the right to publish and the import case is about the right to read what has been published outside the US – but the similarities are strong.

The government objected that Bernstein had violated ITAR regulations regarding export of weapons technology, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains here. A closer reading indicates some strong variances, despite Rosenzweig’s assertion, chief of which is the fact that Bernstein wished to publish the algorithm and supporting mathematical analysis, as well as lecture on his work. This is a far cry from the current concern of Feinstein-Burr, which is the actual use of a working product lacking any sort of backdoor or decryption approach. A better comparison would be to suggest that it is lawful to possess plans for a machine gun, while not lawful to possess a working machine gun.

OSS (Open Source Software) is, I believe, protected under the First Amendment, so assuming you’re technically competent, you could download foreign OSS encryption software, compile and use it. Then the onus is on the individual user. But not all software is OSS.

Which is not to say SCOTUS wouldn’t still invalidate this legislation, assuming it becomes law. I just don’t see this analogy as being particularly strong.

Overall, I actually agree with Rosenzweig that this legislation seems impractical. As he says,

To summarize it seems to me that:

• Encryption technology is global;

• To enforce Feinstein-Burr domestically we will either need to run a firewall to prohibit importation of non-conforming encryption technology OR prohibit (civilly or criminally) the illegal possession of such technology; and

• Success (as unlikely as it is) in that endeavor would divert determined encryptors to other means of storage and communication which would be systematically less transparent to law enforcement than the current status quo.

And, of course, a backdoor usable by the government is a backdoor usable by a hacker.

It seems to me that the government needs to consider the encryption question in a strategic rather than tactical manner. NewScientist provided some brief coverage on that particular point in the UK back in January, which I covered here. To summarize, they recommended legislation requiring all databases that are online be encrypted; that encryption be completely legal, with no backdoors. While their particular points may work or not, the real idea here is to consider the big picture and the unintended (but not unforeseeable) consequences of laws that directly address the short-term problems we face; formulation of a strategic approach which may incorporate elements deemed to be counter-intuitive to agencies such as the FBI is certainly a notion I could entertain. But approaching these issues piecemeal may result in a lack of progress, or even steps backward.

Major Kong @ The Daily Kos Daily Kos covers those who didn’t make the Big Leagues during the Cold War:

The one that should really make you scratch your head and go “Just what the hell were they thinking?” is Project Pluto. If an 88-foot-long nuclear powered cruise missile flying at Mach 3 a thousand feet off the ground isn’t enough to give you nightmares I don’t know what is.

Yeah, you heard me, nuclear powered cruise missile. The nuclear ramjet was elegant in its simplicity. Air goes in the front, gets heated to a gazillion degrees by a freakin’ unshielded nuclear reactor and expands out the back with something like 35,000 pounds of thrust — forever. Well, not really forever but for a very long time.

The SLAM or Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, as it was called, would be able to orbit for weeks over (hopefully) the ocean until signaled to attack its targets. It would then drop down to low altitude and dash at Mach 3 across the Soviet Union, dropping nukes as it went.

Many of his pics are amazing.

This from Steve Benen just amused me:

If these culture war fights [un-Constitutional laws against abortion] were merely a waste of time, they’d still be annoying. States like North Dakota and Alabama are facing plenty of real challenges, and the public is best served when their elected officials invest their time and energies into meaningful policymaking.

But it’s also a waste of money, all of which come from taxpayers, and all of which goes to progressive organizations conservatives don’t like.

And it’s true. But no real reason is given as to why. Statement of belief? But they’re using taxpayer money, not their own. As members of government, they must walk a fine line between using their best judgment … and not allowing their personal views to interfere with their duties. Given their touted fiscal conservatism, even if it’s mistaken, these continued efforts seem hypocritical.

You can strangle the source of fossil fuels, or cut off demand. NewScientist reports (9 April 2016):

Last December’s Paris deal on climate change agreed national limits on emissions from power generation, land transport and deforestation from 2020. But it left untouched fast-rising emissions from aircraft and shipping. Meetings being held this month could change that.

The aviation industry is holding the last set of regional discussions this week aimed at finalising a deal to cap its emissions from 2020. Airlines will either have to improve engine efficiency and convert to biofuels, or offset emissions by investing in reforestation projects.

No mention of electric aircraft, though.  Airbus is working on them, albeit in small steps:

The electric E-Fan training aircraft is a highly innovative experimental demonstrator based on an all-composite construction. Airbus Group Innovations (AGI) intends to mature the aircraft for pilot training in four to five years, while also using it as a platform for understanding the potential of electric propulsion. The E-Fan is a key element in Airbus Group’s electric aircraft roadmap. This strategy outlines a step-by-step approach for Airbus Group’s short-, medium- and long-term development of electric planes.

Elon Musk has also made some noise on this front, and given his record of achievement, he’s worth taking seriously, as Quartz discovered:

When asked to reveal his “next great idea” during a brief Q&A session this week, Musk answered: “Well I have been thinking about the vertical takeoff and landing electric jet a bit more. I mean, I think I have something that might close. I’m quite tempted to do something about it.”

Shipping is a harder nut to crack, but in 2012 Treehugger reported on a planned sailing ship fleet, by Ecoliner:

Fair Transport’s founders Andreas Lackner, Arjen van der Veen, and Jorne Langelaan have for three years been sailing an old brig, the Tres Hombres, to demonstrate that sustainable wind-powered shipping is possible. But the trio would also like to offer the shipping world a fleet of high-tech sailing ships that can carry dozens of industrial containers while being navigated by a slim crew, and reducing container ship pollution – in other words, be economically and environmentally sustainable.

Fair Transport hopes the higher cost of building this ship can be amortized over its 30-year lifetime via lower fuel costs.

The Ecoliner is estimated to have a top speed of 18 knots, and when speeds drop below 12 knots it needs the assistance of an electric motor.

However, finding news concerning the Ecoliner is not easy, but seems to indicate they did not hit their 2013 schedule; they garner a puzzling mention here. While the thought of returning to sail for moving cargo has a certain romantic allure, whether it’ll actually work is another question. If it doesn’t, the price of foreign goods will go up as fossil fuels are restricted either legally or economically, and while this may benefit local manufacturers, it does slow down the progress necessitated by competition. Depending on who you are, these can all be bad or good.

Meanwhile, Green4Sea reports on the climate change goals of the mainstream shipping industry:

Shipping is the lifeblood of the global economy without which intercontinental trade, the bulk transport of raw materials and the import/export of food and manufactured goods would not be possible. About 90% of world trade is carried by sea and shipping is already by far the most energy efficient mode of commercial transport. Shipping is therefore part of the solution to preventing climate change.

Proportionate to its 2.2% share of the world’s total CO2 emissions, international shipping accepts its responsibility to contribute to the CO2 reduction measures being taken by the global community.

A prime candidate for film noir is Johnny O’Clock (1947), a movie about a junior partner, O’Clock, in a gambling operation who happens to be involved with the senior partner’s wife. A cool customer who continuously calculates the odds and is always on the lookout for himself, he misses something when the corrupt cop trying to muscle in on the operation disappears, and the cop’s girlfriend commits suicide. When the girlfriend’s sister shows up to mourn her sister, O’Clock, knowing the slain woman, finds himself taking the role of consoler as he pretends to be a decent man.

And, as a man who’s always calculated the odds, coolly made the right decisions (those being the decisions in his best interest) he’s always been a pretender. Decency gains him trust, thus he’ll be decent. So the man who works as his personal servant is an ex-con who owes his living to O’Clock; he treats the lower-level players in the gambling operation decently, because that enhances their performance.  Even the cheating dealer is treated decently, not because O’Clock is necessarily soft but because, as O’Clock observes, the man’s a good worker, a poor cheat, and now knows he’ll be under suspicion. A replacement might be better at cheating, and thus get away with it.

But O’Clock will slap a woman when he thinks it’ll improve her behavior, at least as it relates to himself; and he’ll formulate a complex plan ending in murder, betraying just a small amount of rage that the man may have tried to have O’Clock murdered. First, he’ll get the money owed him by the intended victim. Then, when the time is right … he’ll stop pretending.

O’Clock’s an elemental, only restrained by the practical considerations of breaking the rules of society, unconcerned about the indirect effects of law-breaking. God plays no role in his life, nor any other entity that influences him in the moral realm. He pursues what he wants, as a narcissist, possibly even a solipsist, although admittedly the topic is not broached in the movie.

So when the slain woman’s sister, Nancy, appears and finally awakens his passion, he finds himself ill-equipped to manage a relationship with her. She won’t run to escape danger when so instructed.  Unlike him, she doesn’t have a clear view of how to make a decision; she may, in fact, be “the fool” that he is not.

Nancy, however, is the one who sees clearly in the end.

And yet, the film technically fails as film noir. A good noir film follows the logic of the behavior of those living in the twilight of society right to their sordid ends. So the anti-hero of Rififi, even as he rescues the child, ends up dying because of his evil ways; film noir is full of morality tales. O’Clock may meet a destiny he’d spent a lifetime avoiding, but it’s not the one we’d been expecting. My Arts Editor exclaimed, “Well, that was a little flat.” And it was.

The cinematography is wonderful.  We were exclaiming over it immediately, while the audio is better than many movies of the era. The characters were mostly fascinating, although the slain woman was a bit of a cliched milksop. Dick Powell’s O’Clock is a cool cucumber, betraying emotions in small, ambiguous ways; Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) brings a certain freshness to a role requiring vivacity, vulnerability, frustration, and a certain sly sarcasm; and actor Lee Cobb. playing the cop who’s investigating the disappearance of a fellow cop, is neither perfunctory nor brutal and is given a certain cleverness, even if it’s not always effective. The supporting characters vary, but I thought the ladies in the boarding house where the woman’s corpse is found were a minor delight, betraying eccentricities and contradictions worthy of real life.

But the plot, while intriguing, does fail to give us a good view of O’Clock’s inner life. We can understand him, but too much of it is from inference and deduction, which is another strike against it being a noir film; illustrating that ill choices lead to ill ends is the raison d’être of the genre, so not understanding O’Clock is a strike against including the movie in the noir genre – and makes it a little harder to enjoy the movie. It’s hard to whole-heartedly endorse this movie, but it’s certainly worth your time if you enjoy the genre.

For those who are fans of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, or believe in the importance of a secular Turkey, these are dismaying remarks, as reported in AL Monitor by Pinar Tremblay:

The prominent attorney Erdal Dogan told Al-Monitor, “The Turkish state has never been able to achieve a proper functioning secularism, but never before has it been this far from secularism either. Jihadism has now been normalized in all of Turkey’s institutions.”

Dogan emphasized how government-sponsored religion can lead to discrimination and intimidation on multiple levels. “Anyone who is critical of the government is immediately labeled an enemy of the state, and this ‘one religion, one language, one nation’ ideology becomes particularly threatening to the most vulnerable groups — minors, prisoners and hospital patients,” Dogan said. Indeed, these are the groups currently being targeted through imamization.

Hatice Altinisik, chairwoman of the Alevi Bektasi Institute, told Al Monitor, “In a country where there are more mosques than schools, more imams than teachers, where science, philosophy, art, dance, theater are discouraged at the expense of religious education for minors, what should we expect? Soon, perhaps, when we need to see a doctor, we will first be required to get a permission slip from our local imam.”

The predecessor to modern Turkey was the Ottoman Empire, a devotedly Muslim state. At the time of its dissolution in World War I, it was known as the Sick Man of Europe, because it had become backward relative to the European Powers. I worry about these developments in modern day Turkey because religion rarely leads countries to enlightenment. The leaders of these religions (I include just about every cult that can be named) are concentrating on an intellectual edifice built on something no one has credibly observed; the energy of those involved dissipates on theology, on ideology, and hostility to those who might be your brothers is brokered by obscure points of intellectuality founded on nothing concrete. Rather than resolving tangible issues such as disease, local conflicts, or even global disasters, their talents and energies do little more than inspire their followers, and while the magnifying glass of religion may bring about great things, more often the navel is consulted for a while, and then it’s just off to work again.

I’ve noted that religion, upon receiving questions and criticisms rooted in the real world, excuses itself on the grounds of the fallen nature of Man, or that God approves, even if we disapprove. This is crucial as most of men’s endeavours, at least in the rational corners of the world, are subject to measurement, discussion, and, after the self-interested are oustered, correction or abolition. Sadly, this does not apply to the edifice of religion; historically, the measures that often are taken are of a bloody, repulsive nature; occasionally, adherents will simply no longer adhere, but this is not often seen. So I see Turkey slipping away from secularism, I see a religion taking the reins of government, and I wonder – will we see the same here? The religion’s name doesn’t matter, see the sad history of England (or this page) if you think it does. But how will it proceed? How will it end? From history, it does not augur well. The last end of the Ottoman Empire was not a good ending, only a good beginning. Will the Turks let it all slip away?

My Arts Editor today observed that an “exaflop“, deriving from this post, is clearly the divorced spouse currently sleeping on your couch.

While related to the odd approaches to software bugs discussed here, NewScientist’s “Let’s cut them some slack” (2 April 2016, paywall), by Paul Marks, makes the case that engaging with the harder computational problems require us to be able to accept being generally correct while being precisely incorrect, and using that acceptance to strategically underpower tomorrow’s big scientific supercomputers – a dimension to computing that I’ve never considered.

Let me illustrate the current context: Most programmers worry exclusively about functionality, which is to say that the proper answer is computed on demand. A few get tasked, often after the initial solution has been designed and implemented, with questions of performance – did the user go get a cup of coffee while we computed the solution? (The extreme example of this is the P=NP question discussed here.) And then come the large problems that consume unsupportable amounts of resources – the scalability problem. The goal is to reduce consumption of resources – commonly CPU cycles, memory, and access to databases – while still computing a proper solution such that, analogous to performance, growth in consumption of resources does not correspond to growth in input, but instead has a non-linear correspondence, such as log₂N.

But this problem is literally that of power:

Next-generation “exaflop” machines, which are capable of 1018 operations a second, could consume as much as 100 megawatts, the output of a small power station.

And they want to engage this problem in hardware, not software. How?

[Krishna] Palem’s answer was to design a probabilistic version of CMOS technology that was deliberately unstable. His team built digital circuits in which the most significant bits – those representing values that need to be accurate – get a regular 5-volt supply, but the least significant bits get 1 volt. “The significant bits are running at a proper, well-behaved voltage, but the least significant get really slack,” says Palem. As many as half the bits representing a number can be hobbled like this.

This means that Palem’s version of an adder, a common logic circuit that simply adds two numbers, doesn’t work with the usual precision (see “Missing bits“). “When it adds two numbers, it gives an answer that is reasonably good but not exact,” he says. “But it is much cheaper in terms of energy use.

Assuming all the main memory is treated this way, it seems a bit like … metaphors fail me. The alternative, however, implies a language¹ that can control which pieces of memory must be precise, and which can be fuzzy. While the hackers are no doubt drooling at the thought, the functional paradigm folks are probably twitching. (Not that this is completely unprecedented, as C used to support – and no doubt some implementations still do – the ability to assign certain variables to the CPU’s registers, rather than main memory. Registers are much faster to access than main memory.)

Researchers think application selection will be key. Climate forecasting is one keenly interested area:

The pay-offs could be huge. Today’s climate models tackle Earth’s atmosphere by breaking it into regions roughly 100 kilometres square and a kilometre high. [Tim Palmer, a climate physicist at the University of Oxford,] thinks inexact computing would get this down to cubes a kilometre across – detailed enough to model individual clouds.

“Doing 20 calculations inexactly could be much more useful than 10 done exactly,” says Palmer. This is because at 100-kilometre scales, the simulation is a crude reflection of reality. The computations may be accurate, but the model is not. Cutting precision to get a finer-grained model would actually give you greater accuracy overall. “It is more valuable to have an inexact answer to an exact equation than an exact answer to an inexact equation,” he says. “With the exact equation, I’m really describing the physics of clouds.”

But some parts of the job require exact precision, and some don’t, right? Do they know how to pick?

Researchers are attacking the problem from several different angles. Mostly, it comes down to devising ways to specify thresholds of accuracy in code so that programmers can say when and where errors are acceptable. The software then computes inexactly only in parts that have been designated safe.

Ah, no doubt I’d read this once already and it triggered my above speculations about computer languages, even though I don’t recall it. Brain inexactitude. But I do have my own observation here: if you can partition the computing space and you know the desired result for some particular set of inputs, or, better yet, multiple pairs of inputs and desired outputs, then you should be able to run repeated simulations in which members of the computing space are randomly selected to receive various levels of precision within some constraint of total computation. Run it a few hundred or thousand times, apply some statistical analysis, and soon you (or at least your computer) may understand where precision is required, and where it is not, in your problem model.

This all does make me wish I worked in this field. Sounds quite challenging.

And remember my “brain inexactitude” moment, above?

But there is a huge discrepancy in power consumption between the brain and a supercomputer, says Palmer (see “Power hungry”). “A supercomputer needs megawatts of power, yet a human brain runs on the power of a light bulb.” What could account for this?

Palmer and colleagues at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, are exploring whether random electrical fluctuations might provide probabilistic signals in the brain. His theory is that this is what lets it do so much with so little power. Indeed, the brain could be the perfect example of inexact computing, shaped by pressure to keep energy consumption down.

I’m somewhat suspicion of attempts to rate the brain in any measure we use for computers, be it flops or instructions/second. However, the overall point holds true: how do we solve the problems we solve while consuming power equivalent to that used by a light bulb? (And, yes, I understand the allusion to the old visual joke.)

And, finally, even scientists can be drama queens – which doesn’t mean they are wrong.

What’s clear is that to make computers better, we need to make them worse. Palmer is convinced that partly abandoning Turing’s concept of how a computer should work is the way forward if we are to discover the true risks we face from global warming. “It could be the difference between climate change being a relatively manageable problem and one that will be an existential problem for humanity.”

My bold.

¹We’ll just skip assembly and machine language.

V82 beached at the foot of Whale Island, as painted by William Wyllie between 1920 and 1922. Painting: National Maritime Museum PAF2085

The above comes from the Navy News, of the British Royal Navy, and is a reproduction of a painting by William Wyllie, as noted. V82 was a World War I German torpedo boat, roughly the same size as British destroyers of the era. This article, at Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War, details V82’s and V44’s (not pictured) life and fate:

The wrecks appear to have been almost totally forgotten and only came to light when a 2011 Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment of Portsmouth Harbour noted that two possible destroyers were present in Second World War era aerial photographs. After the Trust established that the remains were still present in 2015, work on identifying them began. This was achieved with a mix of German language and Admiralty sources, as well as the kind support of a number of academics and volunteers. The Maritime Archaeology Trust would like to thank WO1 Jim Rooney (HMS Excellent), Caroline Barrie-Smith, William Pounds, Professor Ian Buxton, Mike Greaves, Timo Inwich (webmaster of www.navy-history.com), Queen’s Harbour Master Portsmouth, the Defence Reserve Ships Organisation, all of whom assisted or volunteered to help with the fieldwork, post-fieldwork processing or research relating to V44 and V82.

The painting originally caught my attention (via a rotating advert on archaeology.org), but it serves to remind me of one of those odd reactions to which we’re all subject. In my case, it’s this: we really should pick up after ourselves. How many military naval wrecks litter our oceans, seas, and rivers? And what threats do the more recent wrecks pose? Many are oilers, while others carry ammunition. Have we ever seriously considered trying to clean up these wrecks that threaten lives, both human and non-human?

Another rant here.

Rather like Douglas Adams’ famous admonition, “The knack of flying is to learn how to throw yourself at the ground and miss,” You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) throws itself at frightfully predictable plot twists and manages to avoid the grimacing, whining, and outright groaning which should come from them. Sometimes, it takes a different twist than is perhaps anticipated, while other times there’s such a light touch, a disdain for the close examination, that before we can wipe our collective forehead in relief we’re already running down the next gag.

And gags come aplenty, as Fred Astaire, playing a theatre choreographer, must play backup to his employer’s indiscreet ways. Rita Hayworth, as Sheila, is one of the employer’s attractions, and as the ignored but wealthy wife of the theatre owner comes roaring into the picture, Fred must step in to be her faux-swain. Naturally, his heart is snagged by her beauty and dancing acumen, but all comes to naught as she detects the subterfuge and flounces away.

Fred, appalled at the bruising of his heart, turns to the Army for solace, but soon Sheila is in the picture again, as well as his irrepressible employer, with yet another bird in his gunsights. Between dancing, a jilted, then unjilted, then once again jilted Army Captain, which is difficult to believe, to gags ranging from moderately fun to downright painful, this movie is worth a lazy, stormy day where the chores are less than urgent, the affairs of the world churn your heart, as would those in the years following the making of this movie, and a beloved pet yearns for your lap. Coherency is not a virtue in this world, but the art of the dance, literal or figurative, is the song of the Gods.

NewScientist (2 April 2016) reports on the work of climate change scientist James Hansen in an alarming manner:

A MASSIVE rise in sea level is coming, and it will trigger climate chaos around the world. That was the message from a controversial recent paper by climate scientist James Hansen. It was slated by many for assuming – rather than showing – that sea level could rise by between 1 and 5 metres by 2100.

But now, just a week after being formally published, it is being backed up by another study. “He was speculating on massive fresh water discharge to the ocean that I don’t think anybody thought was possible before,” says Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “Now we’re about to publish a paper that says these rates of fresh water input are possible.”

The new study is here.

Here we use a model coupling ice sheet and climate dynamics—including previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs—that is calibrated against Pliocene and Last Interglacial sea-level estimates and applied to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated. In this case atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay its recovery for thousands of years.

Add in the water coming off the ice cap of Greenland and it’s all more than a little disturbing. Here‘s glaciologist Jason Box of Denmark:

“Increased glacial surface melt water infiltration induces ice internal warming. Warmer ice deforms more easily, promoting a dynamical flow response to climate warming and increasing irreversible feedbacks from surface elevation drawdown into warmer parts of the atmosphere. The increase in melt area and volume with warming is non-linear because ice cap or ice sheet elevation profiles are flatter as elevation increases. In a warming scenario, a melt-elevation feedback threatens to produce irreversible ice cap and ice sheet loss. Irreversibility depends on sufficient ice surface elevation drawdown and warming sustained above some stable threshold. The larger the land ice body, the longer time needed for the irreversibility threshold to be crossed.

“The Greenland ice sheet is essentially lost in a climate as warm or warmer than that during 2000-2015. Yet, the loss rate depends strongly on amount of warming above a stable level. In the case of Greenland, summer warming above pre-industrial is 1.2-1.6 C. If warming were stabilized at 1 C above the preindustrial era, the loss of a significant fraction of the Greenland ice sheet appears to require 10s of thousands of years. Larger and expected warming (3-6 C above preindustrial summer temperatures by year 2100) reduces the time of significant ice sheet loss from millennia to centuries.”

In the meantime, the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute is developing this interesting tool for climate modeling:

Climate Reanalyzer is being developed by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine to provide an intuitive platform for visualizing a variety of weather and climate datasets and models.

Investigate climate using interfaces for reanalysis and historical station data. Plot maps, timeseries, and correlations; export timeseries data to a text file for later use in spreadsheet software; export map layers to Google Earth.

Checking the latest weather forecast is really easy. Just enter a placename beside the “Search Weather” button at the top-right of every page. You can also view and animate forecast maps for different parts of the world.

Here’s a sample picture showing today’s temperature anomalies. I must find some time to experiment with this more.

The gears of justice grind ever so slowly, and I had lost track of Professor Clarkson’s lawsuit, so here’s an update. First, The Wichita Eagle notes she has lost her court fight (thanks to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News). Kris Kobach, Secretary of State for Kansas, where Clarkson resides and filed her lawsuit, has proposed a new law for auditing voting, as noted by The Wichita Eagle:

“As you know, there was an individual in Sedgwick County who wanted to do a private audit of ballots in Sedgwick County. Kansas law clearly prohibits that. Although I favor having audits of election equipment, I believe that the rule of law trumps any elected official’s preferences, so my answer had to be no,” Kobach said, noting that a judge had ruled against Clarkson’s earlier efforts to audit 2012 election results. “So the responsible thing to do, I believe, is to offer a bill to change the law and allow the audit.”

About 30 states audit election results in some form, Kobach said. His bill, which would take effect in 2017 if passed, would require counties to conduct public audits of election results between the election and the county canvass of 1 percent of the votes cast. If a discrepancy is found, the secretary of state would have the power to call for a more robust audit.

In response to the suggestion, state Representative Jarrod Ousley (D-District 24) reviewed the the audit process with Dr. Clarkson and then the bill proposed by Kobach, and came away with these thoughts, as reported by the Shawnee Mission Post:

With Dr. Clarkson’s help and legislative researchers and revisers, I began work on an Election Audit Act containing the critical safeguards recommended by Dr. Clarkson and other experts.  This draft would become HB 2659, a four page bill I introduced in committee Vision 2020, after which it moved to the Elections Committee.

In October, KU hosted a symposium where Secretary of State Kris Kobach voiced his support for effective and robust auditing practices, and this session Secretary Kobach also introduced a one page bill expanding Kansas audits.  However, his bill did not have the critical safeguards.  The Secretary’s bill was placed on the Elections Committee agenda, and Dr. Clarkson prepared testimony in support of auditing requirements, stressing the need for the additional provisions.  I had amendments drafted to expand the Secretary’s bill, and during the committee hearing, Secretary Kobach, Dr. Clarkson and I, as well as election officials from multiple counties (including Sedgwick, Johnson, and Wyandotte) all testified regarding the election audit process in Kansas.

Will they be effective? Hard to say, I do not get a sense of how the Kansas Legislature, a body with some serious state-wide problems, will react to such a bill, or whether Governor Brownback, who used to be considered a GOP visionary and is now never mentioned, would look on this favorably. The safeguards proposed by Dr. Clarkson seem reasonable, but I still prefer manual recounts, as they are harder to corrupt, if slower and less accurate.

Who.What.Why. profiles Dr. Clarkson here.

Then something happened in 2012 that shook her world. One day, Clarkson came across a statistics paper on the internet titled “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies.”

The authors of the paper found that in elections all over the country where electronic voting machines were used, a strange pattern kept appearing: the larger the number of registered voters in the voting precinct, the larger the Republican vote. Since precinct size should have no effect on the vote distribution, the authors concluded  that the data “indicates overwhelming evidence of election manipulation.”

Clarkson said she was astonished. She proceeded to reproduce the results of the study — she called it essentially a peer-review — and began to seriously question the trustworthiness of our electoral system. …

Eventually, the attention drew the interest of an attorney, who offered his services to Clarkson pro bono. To help defray some of her legal expenses in preparation for her March trial date, she founded the Show Me The Votes Foundation and set up a gofundme site.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) is a Zero Mostel vehicle deriving from a play in which he is a Roman house slave looking desperately for a way out of his situation. Various far-fetched and dubious events occur, including a memorable turn by Leon Greene as Captain Miles Gloriosus, a Roman soldier in desperate search of the woman to be his wife – dead or alive.

The romp is non-stop and mildly clever, but some of the gaps are too large to cover up. This is worth an afternoon of a head cold, but otherwise is a bit out of date.

In an op-ed column for WaPo, attorney and former SCOTUS law clerk Gregory Diskant opines on the role of the Senate in confirming new Justices:

Our system prides itself on its checks and balances, but there seems to be no balance to the Senate’s refusal to perform its constitutional duty.

The Constitution glories in its ambiguities, however, and it is possible to read its language to deny the Senate the right to pocket veto the president’s nominations. Start with the appointments clause of the Constitution. It provides that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” Note that the president has two powers: the power to “nominate” and the separate power to “appoint.” In between the nomination and the appointment, the president must seek the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.” What does that mean, and what happens when the Senate does nothing?

In most respects, the meaning of the “Advice and Consent” clause is obvious. The Senate can always grant or withhold consent by voting on the nominee. The narrower question, starkly presented by the Garland nomination, is what to make of things when the Senate simply fails to perform its constitutional duty.

It is altogether proper to view a decision by the Senate not to act as a waiver of its right to provide advice and consent. A waiver is an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege. As the Supreme Court has said, “ ‘No procedural principle is more familiar to this Court than that a constitutional right,’ or a right of any other sort, ‘may be forfeited in criminal as well as civil cases by the failure to make timely assertion of the right before a tribunal having jurisdiction to determine it.’ ”

If the Senate fails to act in a timely manner,

Presumably the Senate would then bring suit challenging the appointment. This should not be viewed as a constitutional crisis but rather as a healthy dispute between the president and the Senate about the meaning of the Constitution. This kind of thing has happened before. In 1932, the Supreme Court ruled that the Senate did not have the power to rescind a confirmation vote after the nominee had already taken office. More recently, the court determined that recess appointments by the president were no longer proper because the Senate no longer took recesses.

A fascinating way to break the shame logjam of the Senate. Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy (hosted by WaPo), while liking Justice Garland, disagrees:

UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argues that the Senate has a duty to vote on Supreme Court nominations because the Appointment Clause states that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States” (emphasis added), and the word “shall” implies a mandatory duty. But “shall” seems to apply only to the actions of the president, not to what the Senate might do. Otherwise, as Michael Ramsey points out, it would have to be interpreted as indicating that the Senate “‘shall give advice and consent,’ and no one thinks the Senate ‘shall’ consent.” And if “shall” does not create a duty to consent, it also does not include a duty to offer “advice,” since the “shall” that might refer to both is exactly the same. If such a duty to hold a vote does exist, it would mean that the Senate has repeatedly violated on the hundreds of occasions when it chose not to hold a vote on the nominations of judges and other presidential appointees covered by the clause (such as ambassadors and consuls, for example).

Dan Abrams of LawNewz also believes this is a fallacious approach, and then commits his own mistake:

There is also no doubt that it would spur intense outrage by the American electorate. As evidenced by the rising popularity of presidential Republican nominee, Donald Trump, U.S. citizens are weary of the Washington D.C. establishment, and their supposed propensity for skirting the will of the American people. An appointment without the ‘advice and consent’ of the U.S. Senate, would surely be looked at as nothing short of a blow to the separation of powers. Republicans are already critical of Obama for his extensive use of executive orders (which have, of course, been used by Presidents on both sides of the political aisle). This would only add more fuel to the fire.

But, according to Gallup, Trump’s not all that popular outside of the constricted confines of the GOP base:

That said, such a maneuver would embitter an already embittered, and embattled, right wing, and while the ideologues would rail against the President, those who can think for themselves would realize that the Senate merely had to convene and vote Merrick down.

Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine wonders about the Senate suing over this event:

What would likely happen if Obama acts as Diskant suggests? Diskant says the Senate would sue to remove Garland from the Court. That’s a certainty. However, if the suit dragged on into 2017 and Democrats won control of the Senate, that body might well withdraw the suit.

If the Supreme Court decided the suit, with Garland recused, the result might be a 4-4 vote. It’s possible, however, that one or more liberal Justices would balk at writing rules for how the Senate must treat judicial (and other) nominees. They might also be reluctant to undermine the public’s confidence in the Court’s legitimacy by approving of a power play as naked on the one Diskant has in mind, particularly since the Justices can be pretty confident that a new Justice will be confirmed early in 2017.

It’s possible that Chief Justice Roberts, who seems particularly sensitive to issues of judicial overreach and public perception of the Court, might refuse to permit Garland to sit. This seems unlikely, though.

Mirengoff forgets Chief Justice Roberts voting to uphold the ACA at a critical moment. I think Roberts is a wildcard who might well relish having an active court engaging with the issues of its own existence.

National Review’s Ed Whelan has little use for this gambit, but I have to wonder if he’s confusing tradition with correctness:

Throughout American history, the Senate has frequently—surely, thousands of times—exercised its power over nominations by declining to act on them. (The same Appointments Clause applies equally to Supreme Court nominations and other nominations, so any constitutional argument about what that clause means must apply to all nominations.) That’s been true of judicial nominations generally and also of Supreme Court nominations. As law professor Larry Tribe once put it, “The Senate has ways of blocking Supreme Court nominations other than by straightforward rejection in a confirmation vote.” To illustrate the point, he cited an instance in which the Senate “killed” a nomination “by simply refusing to act upon it.”

Sure, they’ve just sat on many nominations – and what damage has that done to the nation? How has it contributed to the notorious backlog of cases? I think Ed’s point is counterproductive and should lead to more discussion about Senate intractability when it comes to Federal judges being confirmed – or denied. Just sitting on them is intolerable.

Jonathan Adler at kwotable, after rejecting the legal arguments, notes:

Finally, let me note that Ilya and I are hardly the only ones to reject Diskant’s position. The article has prompted derision and scorn from quite a few informed observers across the political spectrum. On the right, Ed Whelan assailed the op-ed’s “gobsmacking stupidity” on NRO’s Bench Memos. On the left, Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress tweeted: “I want Democrats to gain a majority on the Supreme Court more than I love life itself. But this argument is dumb.” Other commentators were equally unimpressed with Diskant’s “bad argument,” including professors Christopher Walker, Eric Segall, and our own Orin Kerr.

And, while the approach seems untenable in the end, I cannot help but remember this bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqGOEmrrtO0

All they have to do is hold the hearing and vote down Justice Merrick’s nomination, and that would be it – none of this reputation-rending uproar. Instead, they listened to this mook and we’re all tangled up, rather than at least making progress on discovering a mutually agreeable Justice.

Which is the entire point of the matter. It almost makes you wish we had professional rulers, rather than this pack of raging amateurs.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.  Mark Twain

Another reader responds to a hypothesized link between tuition support reduction for higher education and the current generation’s lack of interest in driving and owning cars.

Oh it’s Unintended Consequences, all right. Unforeseen implies people making policies tried to consider things carefully, but usually they did not.

There’s a number of things leading to Millennials not driving as much. Big college debut [sic] might well be one of them. However, I disagree somewhat with those who claim the tuition and commensurate debt increases are because states have reduced investment. They may have, but there are other large drivers, including the following.

One big expense for universities is for personnel, of all sorts. And compensation for those people includes health insurance, and health insurance is eating our entire economy alive.

It makes sense that the UofM’s president would claim it’s the lack of funds from the state, since he’s part of one of the other drivers: the huge increase in administrative staff numbers and payrolls over the past 4 decades. Classic case of misdirection to hide one’s own sins.

That’s somewhat unfair to President Kaler on a personal level unless you can prove that he’s aware of the alleged rise in staff numbers and is deliberately not mentioning it. My observation over the years is that it’s a rare person who’s aware of all these factors and can identify and manage them properly. Frankly, how a certain person can be the apex of organizations of this size and responsibility and somehow be effective in all areas boggles me. On the other hand, President Obama has done a damn good job. It’s gotta be the people you hire… like it says in the manuals.

But as far as the general allegation goes, it’s apparently true. In 2011 the Washington Monthly‘s Benjamin Ginsberg covered the topic:

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

The balance of the article is quite interesting, if scathing. I wonder if the author has an ax to grind. HuffPost has a more recent article, and I’ll quote the interesting part, even if it’s a little off-topic:

“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”

Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show.

Another is government guaranteed student loans which have resulted in all kinds of “educational” organizations marketing and hard selling their wares to students. They all know that once the student gets the loan and pays their tuition, they’re in the money, no matter what the student does after that point. There have been a number of recent articles about how this inflates the cost across the spectrum.

I’ve posted on this topic before, here.  Relevant quote (it was a big post):

I have a related, simple (and no doubt simplistic) view – it’s all simple economics.  The seats available are the goods to be bought; the dollars students can bring to bear is the money.  It’s well known that printing more money results in inflation, which is the increase in price of the goods.  In the college scenario, the Federal aid is the equivalent of printing money, as now the students can bring more money to bear on buying access to education.  The institutes notice that the market will bear a price increase, and so boost prices; after all, alumni and governments are currently dicey sources of revenue, and those hard science majors need expensive gear.

Who’s screwed?  Anyone who can’t get a grant or a loan.  Which means buying access means dancing to the tune of the grant and loan providers; the alternative is, what?

So get rid of the loan programs and, after a lot of hollering, prices will come down – those seats must be filled. In all fairness, I do recall debating this on Facebook (not on my timeline, but someone else’s), and someone who works at a college claimed it wouldn’t work, but whether he (or she) knew what they were talking about is hard to say. But to continue, since prices would come down, funds to pay administrators would begin to disappear – and with them, the administrators themselves.

Back to our reader:

Related to the above, schools of higher education are wasting, er, spending more money on marketing and providing amenities designed to attract students, because even state schools like the UofM are big profit machines. None give a damn about the student debt; they just want their money.

But back to the unintended consequences of fewer people driving amongst the younger generations. I’d say that’s because they’re not as stupid as their forebears, in some ways. The whole sprawling mess of suburbs, exurbs and more highways per capita than every before is part of a radical 50 to 60 year experiment in a new but faulty way of building towns — conveniently ignoring thousands of years of civilization which learned to do it otherwise, in a more resilient and organic manner. Numerous federal policies have driven this, from FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac mortgages, to interest deductions on income tax, to federal spending on interstates and grants to states for more spending on highways, the transfer of general funds to the highway fund, since gasoline and similar road taxes have never paid enough to cover the bill, to zoning which prohibits effective land use, to constant subsidies to suburbs and exurbs for infrastructure, and on and on. I suggest reading Strong Towns to get a clue as how fragile and unsustainable that building model really is. (You know I’m a car guy, and even I see the writing on the wall — and see the increase in traffic, urban area and deteriorating roads all of which make driving less pleasant and more expensive.)

I have learned to be extremely skeptical of claims of the perfection of our forebears, so I’m very dubious about this claim of how we used to know how to build towns and now we don’t – the general case of attributing wisdom to earlier generations is such a widespread fallacy I believe the Skeptics community has even coined a term for it, which I do not recall offhand. In this case, those earlier geniuses never contended with the sheer population numbers, the densities, and the requirements of today. Nor did they have access to the technologies of today, for that matter.

That said, your policy complaints resonate. We’re trying to solve a difficult problem in a society predicated on individualism, and it’s just simply a hard nut to crack. Some policies are certainly counter-productive, and those mentioned certainly fall into the list of common complaints I’ve heard over the years. Our reader concludes,

I thought I had some more ideas, but I’ve run out of gas (no pun intended). Tying reduced car ownership to crushing college debt is something new I haven’t seen before, and it may well be one of the major causative factors. But it’s not the only one. Truly, though, the current and recent past of a huge automobile industry is past its peak. I’ve read that the recent (2014-2015) surge in car ownership is because of another cheap money bubble like the housing bubble — only this time it’s with cheap, poorly vetted automobile loans. Ugh.

Nor would I claim it’s the only one. Perhaps it’s not even the primary cause. But I hadn’t heard about poorly vetted car loans; indeed, I had heard it was because of cheap fuel. I wonder if the amount of money tied up in car loans is roughly the same size as the bad house mortgages that caused the last recession…

From the May/June 2016 issue of Archaeology (page 12, not currently online, but will update when it’s available) comes the word psychopomp.

Researchers believe that shelled reptiles had symbolic roles as psychopomps, or guiding spirits, in the afterlife [for the inhabitants of the village of Kavuşan Höyük].

UPDATE: Here’s the link.

The post concerning a hypothesized link between withdrawal of higher education funding by the state 30-40 years ago and a waning of interest in driving and owning cars today by the younger generations has elicited this comment:

This has never been a mystery to me. All this malarkey about demographics and different attitudes towards transportation dances around the obvious reality; millennials are avoiding cars because of budgetary pressures from other climbing costs – housing, education, health care.

Hourly car rental programs are spreading. That’s a leading indicator that things and services Americans were once able to afford independently are now priced such that they must be shared. The “sharing economy” exposes a declining standard of living.

Certainly, with such services as zipcar, car2go, and even Uber, it appears that way. However, I have not run across any research (yet) regarding the backgrounds of the users of these services. Are they people who are backsliding, economically speaking, or are they people who could not afford a car now, or ten years ago, or ten years in the future, but now can share in the, virtually speaking, ownership of one? And what of those who can use the dollars saved by on-demand rental to buy something else? I think the reader’s argument needs further bolstering.

But by addressing the reader’s assertion, I’m permitting an exclusive primacy claim to the economic motivation of the folks buying, or not buying, cars, and I’m not actually prepared to do that. In other words, economic motivation may not matter to some folks. For example, the ecologically concerned consumer may look at the impact owning a vehicle has on the environment and choose not to own a vehicle, but rather rent only when really necessary – ride a bike, walk, or take public transit. I know these people, I read their blog entries and news articles, I hear their proposals for increasing the economic costs of owning vehicles as a way to help the environment.

And there are other motivations. For some, it’s simply a matter of convenience: cars take time that can be devoted to more important matters. If public transit or rental is inexpensive and convenient, why own a car? If you’re living in a big city and they’re starting to talk about restricting, or even banning, cars in the city proper, then why own a car?

Therefore, I cannot share my reader’s confidence in his assertion until supporting data is provided.

I did go looking for prices of cars in constant dollars over time, but the question is complicated by the fact that the base car of 50 years ago is a far different beast from today’s base car: much less safe, more materials used (i.e., heavier), inefficient. I had to question the value of the comparison.

On Lawfare, Daniel Severson covers as a news item (vs. an opinion piece) recent French political activity occurring in reaction to recent terrorist events:

On March 30, President François Hollande announced that he was abandoning a constitutional amendment that would have enshrined state of emergency powers and stripped French citizenship from convicted terrorists.

Just days after the November 13 attacks in Paris, President Hollande promised to amend the constitution in a speech to Congress assembled at Versailles. The speech met with applause from across the political spectrum, but political divisions have since dealt a blow to Hollande’s project.

As Le Monde reports, the controversy over the amendment sprang less from constitutionalizing the state of emergency than from the proposal to strip convicted terrorists of citizenship. The original version announced by the government on December 23 would have allowed the government to strip only dual nationals who are convicted of terrorism of their French citizenship.

Hollande defended the provision as a signal that French citizenship entails a commitment to fundamental democratic values [bold added]. But opponents on the left worried about creating two classes of French citizens and alienating French Muslims.

The bolded text initially won my approval as an important political statement. However, upon contemplation, it seems to me that terrorists do not hold French citizenship to have any value, as they are actually seeking to disrupt the French, or indeed any democratic state, as a perceived enemy of their preferred system of government; and for those who are not terrorists, it is an obvious statement.

As to whether immigrants understand the importance of understanding and conforming to societal norms, surely there are more direct and legible approaches than this.

Due to a couple of minor illnesses (head colds), and then the terminal illness of Mischief, this project has been on hiatus for a couple of months. With the passing of Mischief, I hope to have some free time to return to work on it, which, to recap, is the implementation of a validating XML parser for Mythryl using recursive descent techniques. A possible barrier is that we still have Mischief’s brother Mayhem, who was tightly bonded with his sister and is now seeking extended lap time with the two of us.

I am self-aware enough to ask myself why I’m working on this project, since, after all, there appears to be very little interest in the language, and its main proponent, developer, and janitorial staff, Cynbe ru Taren, has lung cancer (further discussed here) and thus cannot devote as much time as he might like to it. It appears to be a dead-end language in the otherwise promising field of functional languages.

I mentioned this conundrum to my wife, and her answer was, of course, supportive. Paraphrased: “It makes you think in a different away about programming problems, and stretching the mind is always a good thing.”

And I do like tilting at the occasional passing windmill. (How many mobile windmills have you run across?)

We saw Deadpool (2016) at the local drive-in last night. Coming in at a comfortable 1:48:xx, this movie makes a claim to be the king of snark, and all aspects must be observed, from credits to snappy asides to the audience to (according to official reviews) references to past movies performed by the stars. As I greatly appreciate well turned snark, I found this portion of the movie to be right up to snuff.

(Random, sleep-deprived-fueled thought: the snappy aside to the audience is known as “breaking the fourth wall” in circles inhabited by critics and writers. The movie attempts some sort of unusual use of this technique that I didn’t really catch. I am suddenly wondering if any dramatic production has ever attempted a different variant: two characters “break the wall” – to two different audiences. Perhaps one speaks to the camera and one speaks slightly off-kilter, visually speaking, to the same camera…. Think of a multiverse. A technique to be used for a specific reason.)

This movie is, to use my Arts Editor’s observation, virtually “plot-free”. Oh, there’s a plot, a goal for Deadpool, a man who has acquired super-powers through human machinations, and now seeks revenge on his savior (he comes to his skill in snark through perfectly normal procedures) while saving his girl. But the theme of the movie? Off the top of my head, I couldn’t name it. Nothing to really chew on. This movie is all about style as embodied in the snark, the restraint-free profanity, and the violence that is eternally rained down on both the bad guys and on Deadpool.

If & when the owners of this franchise choose to make a sequel, I believe using the same approach would be a mistake. They will need to find an interesting theme and explore it using Deadpool’s unique capabilities and viewpoint on life, or audiences will simply react with “been there, done that.” In the end, despite the delight it brings, snark is the medium … not the message.