Monthly Archives: October 2016

On The Google Pixel

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First, for the record, I want one. But, since my current smart phone is a Nexus 6, I don’t need one yet. I’m fine for a while.

Google essentially invented Android, and the Nexus phones were pretty close to being Google phones, but they were not. They were simply very well designed and powerful smart phones that generally came with unadulterated Android, and likely to work best with Android because of Google’s involvement.

The new Google Pixel is an actual Google phone. So, this is a bit like the iPhone of the Android world, in the sense that there is excellent and carefully engineered hardware and software integration.

I’ve heard that you should avoid buying your Google Pixel from Verizon. Verizon is the only service provider that can also sell the Google phones as per the normal arrangement, and everybody seems to be assuring everybody else that this means nothing, that Verizon is not going to break the phone like some service providers do, with bloatware and such. Verizon will be including a few apps that are removable, Verizon claims they will push out Android updates the very moment Google puts them out, etc. etc. So may be it does not matter.

However, the Verizon sourced phone will, it appears, have the bootloader turned off by default. If you don’t know what the heck that is, then you probably don’t care.

If you buy the phone from pretty much anyone, you are getting an unlocked phone because that is how these phones roll, and you should be able to use it with Verizon or any other carrier (but check with the carrier first).

A few features of the Pixel:

The battery charges up for over 7 hours of use in about 15 minutes. The best camera ever put in a phone. Google provides unlimited storage for photos and 4K videos. Super gorilla glass 4 screen. Built in VR (so you get Google Glasses without the cardboard?) Super powerful processors and other guts. Finger print sensor. Pretty much everything any smart phone ever had.

The Phone has Google Assistant built into it.

The phone also has a normal 3.5 mm headphone jack! Which is the traditional headphone jack every electronic device made since 1754 has had, up until a few weeks ago when Apple forgot to include one in their new phone.

Thre are two kinds of phones, the Pixel with a 5″ display, and the Pixel XL with a 5.5 inch display. If you’re getting me one, I’ll take the larger one.

The phones come with either 32 or 128 gigabytes of storage.

Here’s the Google site for the phones. I looked on Amazon to see if there were cheaper prices there, but not yet (check back in a few weeks, maybe)?

Royal Society Puts Matt Ridley And His Friends On Notice

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The Royal Society is the world’s oldest extant scientific society. And, it is a place where scientific controversy has a home. Both Huxley and Wilberforce were members back in the 19th century, when young Darwin’s ideas were first being knocked around.

More recently, just a few weeks ago, the Royal Society accidentally agreed to host a talk by coal baron and formerly respected science writer Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley has been a great disappointment to us scientists and science teachers. Many of us used his book as a supplementary reading in our evolution courses, for example (Ridley was a respected science writer back in the day). But more recently he has become a global warming science denier, and the suggestion has been made that this is because his personal wealth is tied up in coal mining.

Here are some resources to get up to speed on the Ridley controversy:

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/11/30/matt-ridley-and-benny-peisers-misleading-guide-to-the-climate-debate/"><strong><em>Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser’s Misleading Guide to the Climate Debate</em></strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/01/19/testing-matt-ridleys-hypotheses-about-global-warming/"><strong><em>Testing Matt Ridley’s Hypotheses About Global Warming</em></strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/12/10/mat-ridley-anti-science-writer-climate-science-denialist/"><strong><em>Matt Ridley, Anti-Science Writer, Climate Science Denialist</em></strong></a></li>

Anyway, the Royal Society accidentally allowed the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is an anti-science organization pretending to be a, well, a policy foundation of some sort, to book a talk by Matt Ripley. This was clearly an attempt to legitimize climate change denial. The real science community got wind of this, and objected. From Graham Readfearn:

The Royal Society is coming under internal pressure to cancel a booking on its premises made by climate science “sceptic” group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, DeSmogUK can reveal.

Several fellows and associates of the society – the world’s oldest scientific academy, founded in 1660 – are angry over an agreement to hire its premises to the GWPF for its 17 October annual lecture, to be delivered by Lord Matt Ridley.

DeSmogUK also understands some scientists intend to raise the issue at a meeting of the Royal Society’s governing council on 6 October, with a request to cancel the GWPF booking.

Well, they did. And the Royal Society thought about it and decided to allow the talk to continue.

And, we can get mad about that if we want, but I’m not. The Royal Society clearly made a mistake in making the booking, but this sort of mistake is one of the costs of at least trying to live in a world where the conversation over science can generally be an honest one, and nefarious shenanigans such as this booking by a fake think tank to have a fake expert talk about fake science circumvents that honest conversation.

I’m reminded of the time when Harvard’s Kennedy School of government accidentally booked Famous African Dictator Mobutu Sese Seku Kuku Kibombe of Zaire to give a talk as part of a series of world leaders talking about government. Not long after word of that got out, there was a move towards uninviting, but that is actually very difficult for an institution to do. That talk went forward, with protests, and Americans became suddenly much more aware of Mobutu and what he had been up to in the country formerly and currently known as the Congo. This actually helped with ongoing efforts to get the US Congress to cut ties with Mobutu (he had been a loyal mercenary extraordinary and plenipotentiary on behalf of the US for years, fighting the Libyans and other African bad guys …) but I digress. The point is, Mobutu’s talk at the Kennedy school ended up being an important nail driven into his eventual coffin.

DesmogUK’s Kyla Mandel now reports that the Royal Society will allow the talk to go forward, but promises that if the speaker throws science under the bus, there will be people watching and reporting.

When the Royal Society met to discuss the matter, there was general agreement that climate change was real, that Ridley was not a friend to the science, that they regretted giving the talk, etc. But they also felt that cancelling the talk would give more cachet to the cancelled speakers and his fake think tank than they deserved. Rather, they thought, let the talk go ahead and “If the GWPF uses this opportunity to misrepresent the scientific evidence it would undermine the legitimacy of its views on policy responses to climate change.”

Sounds very Minnesotan. Passive aggressive counter attack, that.

Mandel’s report has more details, go read it here.

I look forward to the debunking of the talk by Matt Ridley, the 5th Viscount of Coal. Or whatever he calls himself. His career as a respected science writer is pretty much over, but there’s always room for one more nail.

Great White Sharks in Captivity

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There aren’t any. But, aquaria have many times tried to make it so, and it always goes bad for the shark. The basic problem is that great white sharks are pelagic, and it is very hard to keep pelagic creatures in a confined space, and the largest aquaria are very confined from the point of view of a large pelagic animal.

greatwhitefeedingonsealAnother problem would eventually become important in the event that an aquarium managed to keep a great white shark alive long enough. When they are young, great white sharks dine on fish. When they are adults, they seem to prefer mammals. So, imagine feeding time at the zoo with an adult great white shark ….

Anyway, VOX has put together a really excellent video on the history of great white sharks in aquaria. Wildlife biology or marine biology high school teachers take note, this video has a lot of learning in it about stuff you probably teach!

For example, you learn what “pelagic” means.

Here’s the video:

I’ve seen great white sharks in the wild several times. You can to. You just need to know where to look. I suggest the southern coast of South Africa. Oh, and if you are going to go around spotting sharks, you’ll need a good shark spotting guide.

The Electoral Map: Clinton Vs. Trump

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Above is my latest electoral college projection.

This uses the technique previously described. However, instead of using RCP averages for all polled states and then using extreme (non-tossup) states to develop the regression model, this method uses only polling from states with one or more recent poll, and only with good polls. these poll numbers are then “predicted” by black/hispanic/white/Voted_Romney numbers, and that generates a model, based on just over 20 states, designed to predict all the states.

As expected, the r-squared value is much lower using this method, but this method does not violate any important statistical laws like the last one did.

Most of the polling data pre-dates the revelation of Trump’s interest in sexual assault, last Friday, and of course, Monday’s “I’ll throw my opponent in prison when I win” debate on Sunday. If you believe those events influence the election further, then you can figure this is a conservative estimate from the perspective of Clinton.

All of the blue states, both shades, are projected to go to Clinton, but I left the three closest to 50-50 in light blue.

I suspect the most controversial state here is actually Iowa, which seems to be throwing some sort of hissyfit in the polls.

And this, of course, is why my model is different from everyone else’s. The polls are used in this case to calibrate (in the absence of earlier results, like could be done in the primary!) but the actual prediction then does not use the polls directly. So, even though a recent poll showing Iowa as Trump, the model does not, because the model does not lie like the Iowans do, apparently!

PREVIOUS PREDICTION

A way to match paint without cutting a chunk out of your wall?

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… or furniture, or whatever.

I really needed one of these a few months ago. And I feel the need coming again soon as I do things to the walls of our new house, now and then.

The Color Muse is not a new technology or a new idea. It is a very expensive technology suddenly available for a few bucks.

The Color Muse is simply a hand held spectrometer that interfaces with your smart phone. You use it to get info about a color of wall paint (or something similar) that you can then take to the hardware store and match.

If you chunk out a bit of the wall, you can have the hardware store do it, using their fancy multi-gazzilion-dollar machine. That machine they’ve got probably works better. But this thing looks like it is good enough for most uses. And, at the price it is certainly worth a try.

Here is a very short video showing it in use:

I have not used this product, so I can’t vouch for it. If you have please let us know below what you think! The reviews look good, though.

I’ll probably get one. I’ll let you know.

Is Trump Yet Another Russian Oligarch?

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There has been a lot of talk about Trump and Russia and Putin. I think most people watching this see some sort of connections. Some go so far as to say that Trump is literally a Russian agent. Here is an interesting perspective from intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election …

About Nance’s book:

In April 2016, computer technicians at the Democratic National Committee discovered that someone had accessed the organization’s computer servers and conducted a theft that is best described as Watergate 2.0. In the weeks that followed, the nation’s top computer security experts discovered that the cyber thieves had helped themselves to everything: sensitive documents, emails, donor information, even voice mails.

Soon after, the remainder of the Democratic Party machine, the congressional campaign, the Clinton campaign, and their friends and allies in the media were also hacked. Credit cards numbers, phone numbers, and contacts were stolen. In short order, the FBI found that more than twenty-five state election offices had their voter registration systems probed or attacked by the same hackers.

Western intelligence agencies tracked the hack to Russian spy agencies and dubbed them the CYBER BEARS. The media was soon flooded with the stolen information channeled through Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. It was a massive attack on America but the Russian hacks appeared to have a singular goal—elect Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

New York Times bestselling author and career intelligence officer Malcolm Nance’s fast paced real-life spy thriller takes you from Vladimir Putin’s rise through the KGB from junior officer to spymaster-in-chief and spells out the story of how he performed the ultimate political manipulation—convincing Donald Trump to abandon seventy years of American foreign policy including the destruction of NATO, cheering the end of the European Union, allowing Russian domination of Eastern Europe, and destroying the existing global order with America at its lead.

The Plot to Hack America is the thrilling true story of how Putin’s spy agency, run by the Russian billionaire class, used the promise of power and influence to cultivate Trump as well as his closest aides, the Kremlin Crew, to become unwitting assets of the Russian government. The goal? To put an end to 240 years of free and fair American democratic elections.

Wow

Who will win the presidential race?

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I’ve made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted.

For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats.

It turns out that white people vary a lot across the country with how many per state are assholes. I think there is some variation among Hispanics as well, but African Americans are pretty consistent. So, here, I combined ethnicity with a “Romney Index” indicating how many people in a given state voted for Romney against Obama.
—-LATEST PREDICTION HERE CLICK HERE—-

I then put down the poll numbers, the averages of the last several polls, from RCP, where available. I then ranked the results to knock out states with no polls. I then took out the middle, which included swing states, close states, etc. to use only the 23 most distinct states for which there were data to produce a multi variable regression model using “white”, “black”, “hispanic”, and “romney_index” as independent variables. The dependent variable was the poll value. In future iterations, that is what will change. I’ll do a more refined version of that.

I then applied this formula to predict the breakdown between Clinton and Trump in the other ca. half of the states that are more ambiguous.

The multiple R-squared for this model was 0.952, so that’s great. But, I was using only the values at the extreme, so I violated the law of homoscedasticity. But I don’t care about no stinking homoscedasticity, because I have only one data set, am predicting only one election, and I am basically using the regression model as a fancy fill in the blank formula. The fact that the R-squared is so high is great, were it low, I’d be in trouble, but its actual value is not important.

I then took all the states where Trump gets over 50% of the vote and gave them to him. I then gave almost all the other states to Clinton, but I left out a few that were very close, to leave them as unknown. Even if all those unknowns go to Trump, however, the outcome is the same: Clinton wins. Trump loses.

I’ll refine and revise again with more care given to the various parts of the model. I’d love to do this poll free, but not sure if that is possible.

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The final output data are spewed onto 270 to win.

NEXT PREDICTION

Who Won The Presidential Debate Weekend?

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You can’t say who really won the debate, because on Friday, news broke, confirming other news from the prior Monday (and general suspicians) indicating that Donald Trump is not fit to be President in Yet Another Way, and his campaign essentially imploded. So, instead, we’ll ask, “who won the weekend?”

As you know, I’m the last person to write off Donald Trump. From the very beginning, without fail, I’ve been warning you that he’ll do well, that he’ll win the GOP debates, that he’ll win various primaries, that he’ll win the nomination, etc. All of it. I have never once been wrong about this.

The reason I’m never wrong is because I know something that you also know but that you refuse to admit because it is too painful. Most Americans, perhaps way more than a majority, share one or more opinions with the core Republican political and social philosophy. A smaller number, a minority but not fewer than about 40%, agree with most or all of those points of policy. Added to this Republicans tend to work better in lockstep than Democrats.

And this, dear reader, is why Republicans have been mostly in charge for most of the time since the Republican party became what it is today (staring in the 1970s).

Donald Trump, meanwhile perfectly represents most of that ~40% of Americans, and that is why he is their candidate.

However, more than one thing must be in place to win an election. One of these things is having a large and loyal base, and Trump has that. Another is money, from multiple big donors. Trump had that (including himself) but it is gone (except himself). Another is the support of the party elite and all those great surrogates that go out and stump for you. Trump lost whatever he had along those lines a while back, and as of a couple of weeks ago has had absolutely nothing in the way of surrogate support. It has been just Trump and Pence. And now, Pence seems to have stopped campaigning, so it is just Trump over the last few days, today, and tomorrow, at least.

There remained for a while the Basket of Hypocrites, such as Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and the others. These are mostly evangelical conservatives who were willing to throw every one in the country under the bus just to defeat Hillary Clinton, regardless of the cost. But with the culmination of sufficient evidence to regard Donald Trump as a supporter and likely doer of sexual assault on arbitrary females as a given part of his privilege, even the Hypocrites can not survive being associated with him.

And for this reason, over the weekend, these rats left the ship.

As of some time over the last 48 hours or so, the Trump Campaign is over, and this is true regardless of any debate.

Then, there was the debate.

One could argue that Trump did better than expected, and Clinton could have done better, but everyone who is not extremely partisan thinks Clinton pretty much won.

So, what do the polls show? A new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, that does not include the debate (because it was conducted on Saturday and Sunday, before the debate) puts Clinton at 46% to Trump’s 35% in a four way match. Head to head, the spit is 52% to 38%, so if some of those third party snowflakes get with the program and actually vote in the election, the spread widens from 11% to 14%.

Those are double digit numbers. We’ve not seen double digit numbers from a major and legit poll since, I think, the start of the national campaign.

I’m pretty sure the debate did not push the polls back the other way. I’m pretty sure this weekend poll reflects the current situation, more or less. Of course, it is only one poll.

Looking at phone polls by major pollsters and/or major news agencies, excluding one outlier because its numbers are so far different (FOX), from September 1 to the present (including the poll mentioned above) we get this from HuffPo Pollster:

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-12-45-18-pm

OK, now, pretend I’m wearing a Steve Kornacki mask and I’ve got a sharpie.

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-12-48-12-pm

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-12-49-37-pm

I could do more, but I think you get the point.

I expect more scandalous news.

Last week there were indications that the NYT had more about taxes that would eventually come out. I’ve heard rumors of a tape with Trump saying the “N-word.” Right now there is strong evidence that Trump is on board with the whole idea of sexual assault, and there is already some information out there about this, but with the Access Hollywood tapes out, may be we will start seeing actual victims, if any, come to the fore. And, there are known to be tapes from The Apprentice said to be similar to, maybe worse than, the Access Hollywood tapes.

These things will not come out today, because today, the news cycle is still finishing with Friday’s information, and still working on the Debate, so any editor or producer with something to say will wait until tomorrow. So, if something is out there, may be we’ll hear of it then. a few days ago I suggested that we’d be seeing approximately one Trump news dump about every four days until the election. The time span between Monday’s revelations (already forgotten) and Friday’s was about four days, right? Then there was friday ..let’s see … (counting on fingers) … friday, saturday, sunday monday, … TUESDAY! So, Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. Stay tuned.

Mike Mann, The #HockeyStickGraph, #Matthew, #AGW

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It turns out that there is an untold story behind the “discovery” of the famous Hockey Stick graph by Mike Mann and his colleagues. It is an excellent example of how science works, worthy of repeating, say, in a science classroom.

Anthropogenic Climate Change is very serious business. And, therefore, there has been far too little humor applied to communicating about this problem. Mike Mann and his co-author Tom Toles have started to backfill that gaping hole in the collective effort to bring the most important existential issue of our time to everyone’s attention.

Hurricane Matthew wasn’t just a storm enhanced by, or affected by, or influenced by, climate change. Matthew is the new poster storm for climate change and catastrophe, not because it Destroyed America (it didn’t, America got lucky, though Haiti did not) but because of several unique characteristics of that storm.

So, I did an interview with Mike Mann, even as Matthew was just about to pounce on Florida, in which we discuss various aspects of Atlantic hurricanes, and Matthew in particular.

We also discuss long term variation in the climate record, those squiggles in the surface warming trend on top of which regular warming is imposed.

We discuss Mike’s journey to the Hockey Stick, which I’m pretty sure is a story that has not been covered on a blog post or podcast or anything like that.

And, we discuss Mann and Tole’s new book, “The Madhouse Effect.”

Click here to get more info and hear the podcast, the latest edition of Ikonokast, with Mike Haubrich and Yours Truly.

If that is of interest to you, note also that we have an earlier interview with Peter Gleick on the California Drought and the crisis in Syria, and other matters, all related to Climate Change.

And a recent interview with Emily Cassidy on the food supply, which is a fairly closely related topic.

The Big Winner in the Second POTUS Debate: Climate Change!

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Climate change is a settled issue. It is now widely and recognized as real, and as one of the top, if not THE top, existential problems the world faces today. Americans want climate change stopped, and they want the next version of the US Government, the one that starts in January, 2017, to work hard to reduce the human release of greenhouse gas as rapidly as possible.

How do we know this?

Because no one mentioned a thing about it during last night’s debate!

A few months ago, I would have expected presidential debates to have included climate change pretty much in every iteration. It doesn’t matter if the overarching subject matter is national security, the economy, or any other topic; climate change figures importantly in every aspect of American national policy. But, in the intervening time, we’ve had the Paris agreement, we’ve had a general acknowledgement that climate change is real by a growing number of former skeptics, and recently, even Donald “It’s a Chinese Hoax” Trump told us that he never said it was a Chinese hoax.

So, it’s over! No need to discuss the most important issue of our times, even after the floodwaters caused by a devastating global warming enhanced hurricane are still receding in the American southeast, and bodies are still being found in the rubble in Haiti. Apparently, everyone, including Anderson Cooper (who did a TV special on how important climate change is a few years go) and the others at the debate, are have boarded the cliamte change train and are ready to move forward!

I’m so glad that people have finally come to their senses.

For more on climate change at last night’s debate, see: #KenBone becomes famous — and not for asking a non-#climate question fcl

The Republican Path To Victory in 2016 is Assured

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I have no idea why so many smart people are saying that anything that happened over the last few days changes this election, or destroys the Republican Party. Pay attention, people. that is not what is happening.

The Republican Party has become the party that harbors racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate, politically expedient willful ignorance about all things science, classism, anything anti-PC, and dedicated service to the demands of the wealthiest Americans.

Most of that comes from the Tea Party the rest comes from the elite in the party. In this way, the Republican Party represents something just under a majority of Americans, about something percent. America is a racist country. America is a misogynist and sexist country. America is a country that isn’t quite sure about education and has no real interest in universal health care. America has one of the most abysmal criminal justice systems of any democracy.

(The Republican Party has always been bad at security, economics, medium and small sized business support, education, science, the environment, family values, healthcare. That isn’t particularly relevant to the question at hand, but I just felt like mentioning it, because this is something most people don’t seem to know.)

The Republican Party has been unable to put forward a candidate for President that enough Republicans could support that they would have a chance of winning for three elections in a row. Why?

Romney was too normal for the base (the Tea Party). McCain was (allegedly) famous for working across the aisle and being a states-person (both exaggerations, but that was the belief). He was unacceptable to the Tea Party even after pandering to them by making the single worst pick for Vice President ever in our history. Neither candidate was able to beat a black man in a racist country. This happened because the party has major factions, the Tea Party and everyone else, and the elite in the party chose to please themselves and not the Tea Party in the election. So the Tea Party said no.

This year the Republicans finally put up a candidate that represents their majority, a sexist, racist, misogynist, willfully stupid, anti-education, anti-environment, pro 1%er movie star. This candidate will also lose. The base will support him; these latest scandals will not affect that at all. But the leadership and party elite have already failed to ensure a Trump victory by their inaction, and what little they were doing now ends (as does some important funding).

It takes more than one thing to win an election, and one of those things is the support of a good number of voters. But another thing is the full throated and vigorous support of a lot of other well known partisans, surrogates, representatives, together with money from the usual sources.

McCain had the latter, not the former; Romney had the latter, not the former. Trump has the former, not the latter.

In the end, this year’s Republican candidate, Donald Trump, will be trounced by a woman in a sexist country, must like McCain and Romney were beat by a black man in a racist country.

There is NO DIFFERENCE between the Romney campaign, the McCain campaign, and the Trump campaign. They all are or were doomed to fail for the same reasons, though the details represent different sides of the same coin.

Republicans will lose this year, not because of this week’s gaffs by Trump. They were going to lose anyway. People will still vote for Republicans in the Congress, and at the state Level. Overall, while Republicans may lose a down ticket race here or there, they will maintain control of at least one house of congress or, if they lose both houses, they’ll get at least one back in a short two years from now. No one who knows anything about American politics doubts this.

Having a Republican congress (full or in part) obviates the President, for the most part. And, since the Republicans’ main goal is to make government ineffective, the Republicans win no matter who is in the white house. A similar formula applies across the states as well.

And, nothing will change about this. All this talk about the Republican Party falling apart, going away, having to change, is well meaning wishful thinking.

The Republicans will win this year, again, no matter who goes into the White House, just like they won in 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, and so on most of the way back to just after World War II. Even though they are in the (slim) minority.

Cthulhu Calling: A New Take On An Old Horror (Updated)

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National Novel Writing Month Project

NaNoWriMo is an international project< involving thousands of writers, or would be writers, who commit to writing an entire novel within the month of November. (I hear that you can finish a work already started, but you have to produce 50K words during the month for the novel to count). Since I’ve written a novel within a month once before, I figure I can do it again, only this time, better. Why will it be better? Because I can take my time, since I have a WHOLE MONTH to do it in. (I only had a few days to finish the last one.)

This post is a modified version of my novel’s page at the NaNoWriMo site, which apparently can’t be public.

Cthulhu Calling

This is H.P. Lovecraft’s story, set in more recent times, without the racism and sexism, and the story is kinda different too. Disclaimer: The Synopsis and Excerpt provided below may or may not survive the writing process.

Author:
GregLaden

Genre:
Horror/Supernatural

Synopsis

A timelessly ancient presence lurks deep beneath a cold northern lake, sleeping and dreaming. It has been doing so since eons before the lake itself ever existed, passing time as glaciers came and went, scraping the surface of the planet closer and closer, and ever changing in its appearance.

But the Old One it does not always dream alone.  For the Old One, dreaming is sustenance, and those creatures that happen to be about, that happen to have evolved by chance or design of nature to exist at that moment in long and deep time, are recruited to be the chosen with whom the old one dreams. And generally, they are not aware that they are being fed upon.

Thousands of years after the Old One first took to resting on this quiet blue planet, one of the more clever denizens, the humans, happened by chance upon a feast in progress, and became curious.  That same species had an expression:  “Curiosity killed the cat.”  The Old One knew nothing of cats, but felt very uncomfortable with human curiosity.

And so begins the story of Gean and Lacy, two humans not delectable in the usual way, and thus untouched, undemented, by the reaching mind of the ancient sleeper, who would entirely by chance discover at least part of the unthinkable truth, and ultimately step unsafely close to the unearthly creature busily consuming its meal.  

This monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, with an octopus-like head and face covered with a mass of tentacles, a scaly, rubbery body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, vestigial wings, and large enough to displace all the waters of a sizable Walleye honey hole, would be the least of Gean and Lacy’s problems. They should really have avoided enraging the Masters of the Universe who ran one of the country’s largest corporations, raising the suspicions of the investigators in charge of a secret bureau of the Department of Homeland Security, or disturbing the troubled harmony of the academic world of anthropologists and other scoundrels.

Excerpt

It turns out that sometimes, when you dream a certain thing, you die.

Had this happened once, it would never have been noticed.  Twice, it would have been attributed to coincidence.  But it happened three times, and in this case, three times is not a charm.  Over 10,000 people had been sleeping while attached to a SleepMeter 2000 during the course of up to four and a half years, nearly 80 million hours of data from their sleep cycles uploaded to the central server. Four of them happened to die during their sleep. One was not dreaming at the time and the cause of death was a heart attack.  That’s a coincidence.  The other three had died of a brain hemorrhage, and the data from the SleepMeter 2000 indicated not only that they were dreaming at the time, but they were dreaming oddly. The signals picked up by the sensors built into the Sleep Cap that comes with the SleepMeter 2000 clearly indicated dreaming, but along with the dreaming came an additional electronic signature utterly unique compared to all of the other signals stored over the years on the SleepMeter servers.

Also, all three died at the same exact moment in time.

This is what Lacy Edwards, my roommate and nerd-in-chief at SleepMeter Inc, was telling me.  Lacy sat across the kitchen table, telling me the story while she typed rapidly on the keyboard of her ubiquitous laptop and I munched on a piece of toast leftover from breakfast.  Her long semi-curly red hair was jiggling slightly against her shoulders as she tapped away at the keys. Her pale but very pretty face, punctuated by a sideways colon of sharp green eyes, fragile em-dash nose and, with her intense focus on her keyboard, open-bracket frown tilted down, not looking at me, but only at the screen. Ok, maybe it isn’t fair for me to always think of Lacy as an emoticon, but she seemed to spend her life inside computers so it felt right.

“There were nine other instances of that strange signal coming from people’s heads while they slept,” she said.  “Eight in the ones who died, at various times over the previous weeks.  One had been picked up from the brain of another individual who seems to be both still alive and still a customer using the SleepMeter 2000 service.  But the bosses at work have been totally cagey with me. ‘This is just an anomaly, and has nothing to do with our device,’ they said.  They told me to lay off.  Hell, they are probably right.  The 2000 is safe.  It doesn’t DO anything, just reads signals.  That’s not the problem.”

“We don’t need to look into safety, I told them. We need to look into these people.  I think we might have discovered a new disease or something. And the thing is, we saw it coming in all the cases where they died, and one guy is still alive.  For now.”

“And if you really did discover a new disease,” I mentioned through my toast, “you also have the diagnostic tool for it.”

She looked up from her laptop for the first and only time and, giving me a wink (colon to semi-colon and back) said, “… and of course, I thought of that. That’s when I realized the reason they did not want me looking into this.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I was the inventor of most of the technology that went into making the SleepMeter 2000 work.  Therefore, I am the inventor of this possible technology to identify a medical condition that can lead to death from brain hemorrhage.  And of course, they want to patent that themselves!”

“Oh. Right.” I poured more milk into my coffee.  The coffee was too cool to be considered hot coffee, but maybe with a little more milk it would kinda be ice coffee. “So what are you going to do about that?” I asked, fairly confident that she could not do much about it.

“Well, I’m not going to do nuthin’” Lacy said, saying each of those syllables with grand exaggeration and timing them with hard one-fingered hammering, hand raised dramatically with each strike on her keyboard, in a gesture of over dramatic finality. “Because I just finished doing it.  Let’ go eat something, I’m starved.”

“What did you do?” I asked as she slapped the cover of the laptop shut.

“I’ll tell you at dinner.  From now on I assume our apartment is bugged,” she said with another semi-colon wink and a closed parenthesis, er, grin, clearly joking about the bugging, but I was pretty sure not about dinner. 

UPDATE: October 26th

I’ve been working out the story, and I’m confident I have a good overall plan. I also have a good sense of where the characters will be coming from (and going to), at least the main characters.

I have enough of the plan worked out that I can write backwards, starting with the apex of the story, aka “Act III.”

For reference, Act II is the part to the left of he paper stuck on the white board with the magnet. The sock is for cleaning off the white board. Slightly dampened, it works better than the dry erase erasers.

photo_20161026_164852

The Likely Outcome Of The Latest Trump Revelations

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You know the problem. Not just the release of the “I’d grab her …” tape, but starting before that. Here, watch:

A roughly written Facebook comment by me, reacting to much of the reaction I’m seeing:

To everyone who is saying that Trump is out of the race because of his admitted preference for sexual assault as a way of getting women to like him: Sorry, you are wrong, and you may be living in a bubble.

Do a transect across humanity, in the US. You will find that a double digit percentage of both women and men (though I’ll allow you the possibly true but possibly not true idea that more men than women) view intersexual relationships exactly as Trump views them. Not only that, but they probably view this as both normal and, suddenly, politically preferred.

(While you are doing your transect of society, take notes on decals and bumper stickers on pick up trucks. You will see the correlation between “Trump for President” stickers and “Get her drunk and get her done” stickers.)

Putting this a slightly different way, now that sexual assault is part of the known Trump behavioral repertoire (it already was, but for some reason these remarks are being taken seriously while earlier indications were not), it is now a feature of Republican philosophy (yes, my dear friends and family who are Republicans, you are now part of the Sexual Assault is OK Party, so let’s see how long you can live with that!)

This revelation may affect the distribution of support for Trump at close to the level that a bad debate performance will. Not much, but a little.

Second point: All the talk about replacing trump, or how would that work, etc. etc. is pretty much information free yammering.
On one hand, it is virtually impossible to change a ticket.

No, you can’t replace the Presidential candidate with the VP candidate. It simply does not work that way.That is not what the VP candidate is or does. Even if a ticket was elected and the president elect died, the VP would not take over that position (this doe not apply after the electors have chosen, thanks to Steve for noting my ambiguity here). The VP has no role in party or national politics or governance other than to replace the president on the event of the president’s death, or in certain other situations.
On the other hand, the electors are not legally bound at the federal level to do anything in particular. They are bound at the state level. I’m pretty sure that faithless electors, say, the electors from a state that are supposed to vote for Trump vote for someone else instead, were charged by their state’s attorney, that would be thrown out of court at the federal level like moldy cottage cheese.

Of course, what electors would do this, and for whom would they vote? They’d be from that population of inexperienced but energized by Sanders or Trump to join up, who somehow got to be electors. There are probably no more than a handful of such individuals, most electors are experienced in the process. But in a close election it would only take a few electors voting for a third party to send the entire process to the House of Representatives. This is highly unlikely, but it would give us a non-elected Republican president for four years. Cruz? Romney? Gingrich? the fight would be epic.

It is possible that this process gets ruined so far down the line that this does not work either, and we get to the part in the Constitution that says something like, “Hand the problem over to The Congress and they will figure out, in a manner they deem appropriate, who the next president is”

(The process for the VP is parallel and different. Senate not house, etc.)

So, to summarize:

1) No, this revelation has no real meaning, no real new information, and will have no effect. Trump really is the candidate because he represents the party that nominated him, nothing has changed.

2) Most of the yammering about what might happen or what might be done is based on zero understanding or information about anything.

I made a big ugly graphic to summarize two possible effects: small vs. large. Unfortunately, the Monday debate will be conflated with this effect. Let’s check back on Friday and see.

screen-shot-2016-10-08-at-3-26-22-pm

Of course, according to my four day theory (there will be a major October surprise every four days until the election) there will be yet another big news story on Tuesday (plus or minus one day) so it may be impossible to test this hypothesis.

#Matthew, #Tweeted

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A collection of tweets showing things #Matthew related

Feel free to embed your fave’s below.

Getting #Matthew Wrong

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This morning I was forced to do the “get off my lawn” thing with the kids at the bus stop. They were systematically destroying the pavement around the common mailbox area down the street from my house, throwing chunks in the street. I lined them up and read them the riot act. They are children, so they can be excused for bering a bit stupid about life, and the guy down the street telling them to get off the lawn is part of the learning process for them.

And now it’s your turn.

The right wing yahoos have already started yelling about conspiracies related to Hurricane Matthew. “They are telling us lies, that it will be a total disaster because of [some dumbass reason nobody quite understands]” This has lead, on the internet, to “don’t leave your homes, Obama and Shillary will be down here to take away your guns” (OK, I admit, that last one was me being sarcastic, but there are similar tweets out there.”

Let me explain something to you.

Matthew is a very large and dangerous hurricane that was predicted to go on a course the center line of which (where the eye would be, approximately) would parallel the coast, just off shore, for a long distance, for hundreds of miles. At any moment the eye could shift left or right, the predictions said. Also, the size of the hurricane force wind field could widen or narrow. Therefore, if the hurricane did as predicted, it could seriously affect the entire coast, knocking down power lines and trees, doing other damage.

RELATED: An Interview With Michael Mann (in which we discuss Matthew and other matters).

So far, that is exactly what has happened. No deviation. You hear “the eye moved east.” Bullshit. There was never a line on which the eye was to move.There was a center line of a prediction cone, and the storm has stayed right in the predicted area. It was alway predicted to be about where it is, plus or minus. It is well within the plus or minus.

Every here and there, the predictions indicated, the hurricane could produce a dangerous storm tide. Each section of coast has a different potential for this because of its shape. The exact timing of high tide matters. The storm’s exact configuration and distance from the coast matters. So you can’t predict in detail what will happen, but what you CAN do is produce a likely scenario in the worst case. If all the factors come together, and you live in a house in this region, you are truly fuckered. The Hurricane turns left a bit, or a certain band of winds interacts with an embayment just right at high tide, or whatever. If you live in that house, and you do not act as though this may happen to you (i.e., evacuate), then you are a dumbass.

A maximum storm tide of something around 11 feet, sometimes more, sometimes only about 6 feet or so, was (and is for the next day or two) predicted for the entire coast from some point north of Palm Beach all the way up through Georgia and beyond.

This does not mean, and it never meant, that there would be an 11 foot flood covering the entire coast. No. It. Never. Meant. That. If most of the Atlantic coast from South Florida to Bogna Riva does not flood to 11 feet killing all the people and puppies and kittehs, THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE PREDICTIONS WERE WRONG.

This morning NBC actually had a snarky local yahoo meteorologist on (the commenters and Al Roker were visibly embarrassed after the fact) who went through the whole storm chaser routine …

“… Here I am in my car. Here I am getting out of my car. Her I am cutting through the bushes, telling you breathlessly: wait ’til you see this, look at what Imma show you now’ etc. etc…..”

Then he brought the camera out on the beach and there was nothing there but some waves.

“See? They said there would be a storm surge. There is no storm surge. Nothing happened here.”

They cut away from that dude, I’m afraid because he was counter sensationalizing, not because he was being all Rush Limbaugh, though the latter was clearly true. Roker and the others hinted that the storm tide in that area, had there been one, would have passed hours ago so of course it is not visible. Etc.

This is a very smart thing on the part of the right wing. They were prepared for this hurricane in this manner. Somebody figured this out, got the word around, and they are pulling off an excellent and well designed public image manipulation event for Matthew. Here is what they figured out.

1) The hurricane is going to be near something close to 500 miles of coast.

2) There will be breathless yammering about the dangers along 500 miles of coast, recruiting perhaps 40 or more storm studs, national and local, and hundreds of tweeting meteorologists, etc. etc. going on about how bad it will be.

3) Even if the storm seriously damages one place, kills people in part of Georgia or whatever, it will not be 500 miles of 11 foot flood everywhere, like promised.

4) Therefore the storm was hyped, by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama flying overhead in their Black Helicopters, swooping in to take our guns and bibles.

5) In the end there will be 500 miles worth of things that were said would happen but never happened, and maybe five miles of real disaster in some feckless coastal town.

So that’s the real getting Matthew wrong. A public image coup for the right wing, the climate deniers. They won this storm.

Got it? Great. Now get the hell off my lawn. And get it right next time (giving stern look to the climate communicators).