We got this:
All posts by Greg Laden
Neil deGrasse Tyson Accessory to War
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
This is not a book that fully explores the alliance and overlap between war and makers of war on one hand and science and scientists on the other. Authors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang focus on one part of that relationship, the link between astrophysics and related disciplines (really, astronomy at large) and the military.
Even as I recommend Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
Back when I was working in or near the Peabody Museum, in Cambridge, the museum’s assistant director, Barbara Isaac, hired me to work with the NAGPRA database. NAGPRA was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Ultimately, large swaths of the Peabody Museum’s collection would be turned over, or some other thing done to it, as per the wishes of the various Native American groups associated with that material. Most of the work had already been done. But, Barbara is a meticulous person and wanted to make sure the dotting of each i and crossing of each t was double checked. So, I was one of two people charged with going over the printouts, on that old green and less green striped paper, bound in large blue cardboard books. Each line (or two) was an item or collection of items, with notes, and an indication of what was going to happen to the material. There were just a few options, but the basic idea was this: An item listed was either going to be returned to a tribal group, or not. My job was mainly to look at stuff that was not going to be returned and, given my ongoing scan of what was going to be returned, and my knowledge of North American prehistory, ethnography, and archaeology, to earmark things that said “do not return” but where maybe we should be returning it. So, for example, after noting that a particular South Dakota Lakota tribe would have this, and that, and this other, soapstone tobacco pipe returned to them, when I saw that the ninth pipe on the list, several lines down and all by itself, is labeled to not be returned, I’d earmark that. Nearly 100% of the time, that ninth pipe was just something that nobody wanted, or it didn’t really exist (not all museum databases are exactly accurate). But, it would be earmarked.
Many items on the list had information as to how the item had originally gotten to the museum.
Many, many items, especially items taken from Native Americans living in what was the frontier between about 1840 and 1900, were taken by medical doctors who, as we all know, also stood in for naturalists, or some kind of traveling scientist, on military and quasi military expeditions (Like Darwin).
And many of those items were taken for use as medical specimens.
We initially learned that Native Americans have a particular blood type because, in part, of studies done on blood stains on shirts of slain warriors, collected after various battles with the US Army units accompanied by such scientists. There are a few famous cases of Native American bodily remains, mostly but not all skeletal remains, sitting in the anatomy teaching rooms of this or that college. But a lot more, a lot not noticed by either historians or even the all seeing all knowing Wikipedia, are or were sitting in museums around the world. Collected, by scientists wearing military uniforms, on military ventures, with a scientific twist.
So the science-military link is not exclusive to astronomy and astrophysics.
I wrote elsewhere about the person I met who was taking Pentagon funding to build an object that would help cure cancer. An example of a scientist subverting the military funding process. And so on.
OK, my complaint.
The authors have two long chapters (and references elsewhere) covering the early history of human endeavor in general (not limited to military) and the evolution of astronomy, mainly as it related, over a very long period of time, to navigation. One chapter covers land, the other the sea.
Staring somewhere along the way in each chapter, we get a very nice, well done, and pretty full description of the process of humans learning about the stars, about the earth and how to find one’s way, etc. But prior to that, the authors do what so many authors do and I so much dislike. I’ve written about this before. We get a version of human prehistory, and indeed, current human variation (or at least, ethnographically recent), that is bogus. For example, the authors speak of the first modern humans wandering around in the Rift Valley of Africa. There is no evidence that modern humans evolved there. Using just the archaeology, southern Africa is a more likely origin, and the physical anthropology record is simply incomplete. There are early fossils there, but that is because the rift valley is and was a big hole that made fossils. The entire rest of the continent is big, and the evolution probably happened there, not in the rift.
Similarly, ethnographic variation we see in the present and recent times is stripped out. For example, most rain forest dwelling foragers are not known to have a sky oriented cosmology, or to use the sky for much information about seasonal change in ecology, or navigation. And, there have always been a lot of rain forest dwelling foragers.
Putting that criticism aside, however, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
Now we also need a book on the broader issue of military-technology links. And, we need a personal ray gun that zaps out of control robots:
Keith Ellison for MN AG: Statement from Indivisible Leaders
I’ll be honest. Indivisible is Imperfect. Owing to some bad press for Congressman Keith Ellison (which in my view largely evaporated) a lot of members of the Indivisible Community forgot the number one rule of elections: Fight in the primary, fall in line for the general. They turned in ballots without a vote for Ellison.
After realizing 1) the alternative to Keith Ellison will cause people to die, and set us back to the middle ages, and b) it turns out that Congressman Ellison will make an excellent Attorney General despite efforts to Al Franken him, sudden rush to un-judgement flooded the community and compelled the construction of the following letter.
It is signed by Indivisible leaders, because we are all in touch with each other, more or less. It would certainly be endorsed by many local indivisible groups, but there is simply no time to turn such a project around so fast, and, frankly, a lot of groups simply don’t endorse. I am absolutely certain that given another 48 hours, the number of signatories on this letter cold be increased from just over 50 to something closer to 1000. For now, you’ll just have to trust that leaders of various groups signed knowing that a good number of members of the various groups we work with also support Ellison.
So, here it is, ignore the typos. We did this fast.
November 1, 2018
Dear Minnesota Voters,
As leaders of local, grassroots, progressive organizations, we care deeply about gender equality, reproductive rights, civil liberties, racial equity, and freedoms and protections for the LGBTQIA communities. We are all strong and vocal advocates of the #MeToo movement and believe that all women must be heard. And we all agree that voting for Keith Ellison is vital to protecting many of the issues that we hold dear.
Please do not leave this race blank on your ballot.
The Attorney General may be the most important office that you will be voting for this election.The Attorney General is the state’s attorney, tasked with protecting the civil rights of all Minnesotans. Here are some things that State Attorneys General have done in the past two years:
Filed suits opposing the initial Muslim Ban.
Filed suits about families being separated at the border.
Fought for environmental protections.
Fought against possible financial corruption in the current administration.
In some states, they’ve supported lawsuits that would allow for pre-existing conditions to NO LONGER BE COVERED as they say that when the individual mandate was removed, the rest of the law should be invalidated.
There couldn’t be anyone better suited to serve as the attorney for the people of Minnesota than Keith Ellison, whose congressional campaign slogan has been “Everybody Counts, Everybody Matters.” Keith will make sure we have patient protections for preexisting conditions. He will work to lower drug prices for Minnesotans. He will protect the LGBTQIA communities, uphold a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, protect everyone’s right to vote, and fight corporate corruption – all of which underscores the high quality of life we enjoy in this state.
Keith’s opponent, Doug Wardlow, will not just neglect Minnesotans’ civil rights, he will actively work to undermine them. The issues that matter so much to us have been the number one target of Doug Wardlow his entire career – and now he is on the precipice of succeeding. He has tried to weaponize the constitution against same sex marriage, against transgender kids’ safety, against voter rights, and against a woman’s right to chose. His first priority once elected? Politicizing the AG’s office by firing attorneys whom he suspects are democrats and filling the attorney general staff with extremists from the Alliance to Defend Freedom. He describes himself as “100% pro-life” and has spread false claims of fetal body part sales at the U of MN Medical Center. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6raHdz8unOg&feature=youtu.be&t=30m23s)
His extreme views are no secret. After failing to be re-elected to the MN House in 2014, Wardlow took a position as a legal activist at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group that has been working to recriminalize homosexuality, opposes hate crime laws, and has proposed the sterilization of transgender individuals. The ADF is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a hate group.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliance-defending-freedom
Doug Wardlow’s views are alarming and far from any mainstream position.
We’ve thought a lot about the allegations made against Keith Ellison and have read many summations. Our overall take, as non-experts, is that there was a full investigation and her claims are unsubstantiated. She has hired the former boss of Keith’s opponent, Doug Wardlow, as her attorney and has recently been prominently featured on many right wing conspiracy minded shows and has herself retweeted right-wing propaganda, such as the #walkaway hashtag known to be started by Russian bots. Furthermore, Keith’s now-public divorce proceedings revealed no history of abuse in his marriage of 25 years and Keith has the full support of his ex-wife.
Our groups comprise thousands of Minnesotans, all of whom are working very hard in the struggle for a more just, equitable and caring society. We will continue to work hard in that space and hold whoever wins the AG race accountable to our values. But right now, the choice is clear to us. If we want to protect the values of equality and justice for ALL people under the law, than we must elect Keith Ellison as the MN Attorney General. This is why each of us are voting for Keith Ellison and we urge you to do the same.
Sincerely,
Jena Martin & Laurie Wolfe
Co-Chairs, IndivisibleMN03
Scott Ickes
Chair, Minnesota Indivisible Alliance and Co-Chair Indivisible Minnesota Local
Taylor Winkel
Co-Chair, Indivisible Minnesota Local
Alicia Donahue, Su Reaney
Women’s March Minnesota Executive Board
Jordan Orzoff, Laura Eash, Curtis Johnson, Timmie Harriday
Stand Up Minnesota Steering Committee
Lyn Dockter-Pinnick
Chair, Menahga/Park Rapids Indivisible
Sara Chapman, Mark Frascone, Connie Sierras
Co-Chairs, Indivisible Resistance of Eagan Burnsville (IREB)
Kayli Schaaf
Executive Director, Indivisible North Metro
Aimee Engebretson
Co-Chair, Indivisible St. Paul
Pamela Dowell
Co-Chair, Itasca County Indivisible of Minnesota
Judy Dunbar
Chair, MN Indivisible Chaska
Caren Fine Gallagher
Administrator, CD2 Action
Board Member, Minnesota Indivisible Alliance
Kris Miner, Kati Simons
Co-Chairs, Indivisible Eden Prairie
Greg Laden, Clara McIver, Barbara Boldenow
Co-Chairs, Indivisible Plymouth
Chris Evans
Co-Chair, Indivisible NW Metro
Jennifer O’Brien, Lynn Speckhals Duane, Joseph Rapacki Jr.
Co-Chairs, Edina Indivisible
Lynn Rankinen
CD2 Action-Faith In MN Liaison
Barbara Prindle
Founder, Progressive We Stand – Golden Valley
Krista Peterson, Deirdre Mulcahy, Ryan Hankins
Co-Chairs, The Power of Many – MN
Ambre Quinn
Administrator, Postcards for America – MN
Katie McMahon
Chair, Swing Blue MN
Jaime McGeathy
Executive Director, Watch Your Reps MN
Tom Edwards
Board Member, St. Paul Regional Labor Federation Political Action Committee
Sonja Hendrickson
Team Lead, Action Together Twin Cities
Yurie Hong
Lead Coordinator, Indivisible St. Peter/Greater Mankato
Mary Messall,
Administrator, Indivisibile Allies of Minnesota
Carol Hanson
Founder, Indivisible/Undaunted
Cindy Mundahl, Rachel Mundahl
Co-Chairs, Indivisible Minnetonka
Suzanne Laing, Becky Lauderdale Nelson, Carol Zazubek
Co-Chairs, Indivisible Bloomington
Vicky Johnson, Elise Radtke-Rosen, Heather Tidd
Co-Chairs, Stand Up Dakota Country
Pernell Meier,
Indivisible Rochester
Susan Moses-Zirkes
Chair, Indivisible MN02 and Co-founder, CD2 Action
A Classic STEM toy: Rock Tumbler
National Geographic Hobby Rock Tumbler Kit
There are other rock tumblers out there, and if you want to get serious, you’ll want to shop around and maybe even look at the Vibratory Tumblers
Warning: Figure out a way of disposing of the sludge that does NOT involve putting it down a drain. It will ruin your drains. Dig a hole in the back yard, or make an evaporation system (that’s what we do) so you can throw the dried sludge in the trash.
Expect to buy more rocks, as well as more raw materials. Here are a few examples of what we invested in:
Polly Plastics Rock Tumbler Tumbling Media Grit Kit & Plastic Filler in Heavy Duty Resealable Bags
Crystal Allies Materials: 1lb Bulk Rough Pink Rose Quartz Crystals from Brazil – Large 1″
Crystal Allies Materials: 3 Pounds Bulk Rough 10-Stone Assorted Brazilian Mix – Large 1″
Mueller and his Grand Jury are likely to drop a shoe or two next week
About two fortnights ago, almost all evidence of the Mueller investigation’s progress stopped. This was expected, as it is a Justice Department rule to not do things, like issuing indictments, from several weeks prior to an election, until after the election.
Coincidentally (?), yesterday, a document was released to the public that dates back to the days of Watergate. This document is, in essence, an indictment issued by the Watergate grand jury, bring charges against Nixon. However, since the policy was to not actually indict a sitting president, this special indictment was given, not to a federal prosecutor, but to the US House judiciary.
So, there are two things floating around in my head that I’m wondering about.
First, and most obvious, is this: Will next Wednesday, or at least, the latter half of next week and perhaps a day or two into the next work week, see a series of actions from Mueller? And if so, what?
Second, and less obvious, is this: The document that was released yesterday isn’t just a grand jury document, but also, the decision by a federal judge that this grand jury indictment-thingie should properly be passed to the house, secretly, just as a normal indictment would be passed to a federal prosecutor, secretly. The secrecy part is just because all grand jury proceedings are secret. It is then up to the prosecuting body to make things public by carrying out actual indictments and prosecutions, or in the case of the house, impeachment.
The point is, it is now federal case law that a Grand Jury investigating a president can hand over what would normally be an indictment to pass on to a federal prosecutor to the House Judiciary Committee, for their consideration. It is secret when that happens, and if the committee decides, it can remain secret.
So, is it possible that the Mueller grand jury has already written one of these embryonic indictments, and is planning to hand it over after the election? Or after the new House is sworn in? Depending on how the election goes????
Is it possible, in fact, that such a document has already been handed over, and is being ignored by the Republican leadership in the House? If so, will it be resubmitted to the new Congress later?
I suggested several weeks ago that there would not be any action until after the election. Now, I’m noting that the election is about to happen, so we can expect … something.
A little background:
Difference and Disease: Excellent new book on medicine and race in the 18th century British empire
Suman Seth is associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, at Cornell. He is an historian of science, and studies medicine, race, and colonialism (and dabbles as well in quantum theory). In his new book, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
As Europeans, and Seth is concerned mainly with the British, explored and conquered, colonizing and creating the empire on which the sun could never set no matter how hard it tried, they got sick. They also observed other people getting sick. And, they encountered a wide range of physiological or biosocial phenomena that were unfamiliar and often linked (in real or in the head) to disease. A key cultural imperative of British Colonials as to racialize their explanations for things, including disease. The science available through the 18th and 19th century was inadequate to address questions that kept rising. Like, why did a Brit get sick on his first visit to a plantation in Jamaica, but on return a few years later, did not get as sick? If you have a model where people of different races have specific diseases and immunities in their very nature, how do you explain that sort of phenomenon? How might the widely held, or at least somewhat widely held, concept of polygenism, have explained things? This is an early version of the multi-regional hypothesis, but more extreme, in which god created each type of human independently where we find them, and we are all different species. (Agassiz, with his advanced but highly imperfect geological understanding, thought the earth was totally frozen over with each ice age, and repopulated with these polygenetic populations of not just humans, but all the organisms, after each thaw).
Seth weaves together considerations of slavery and abolition, colonialism, race, geography, gender, and illness. This is an academic book, but at the same time, something of a page turner. Anyone interested in disease, colonial history, and race, will want to re-excavate the British colonial world, looking at disease, illness, and racial thinking, with Suman Seth as your guide. I highly recommend this book.
The House Democrats and the Big Blue Wave
I’ve been doing analyses of house races in which I fairly conservatively evaluated each of the close races. Here, I use a slightly different approach. I use only the most recent non partisan poll to estimate the chance of a Democrat vs. Republican winning the race.
When I do this, I get just enough Democrats winning to remain a minority but by only one seat. However, that puts seven seats NOT in the Democratic column because they are estimated to be at exactly 50-50.
These seats, clearly key, are FL26, KY06, MI11, NM02, NY19, OH12, and UT04.
If those are really 50-50, then a conservative two or three seats among them will be Democratic at the end of election night, and the Democrats will have a slim majority in the House.
If we insert a magical blue wave, raising all the chances of Democrats winning by one percentage point, then the Democratic majority is much larger, to the tune of about 27 seats. A two percent blue wave gives the Democrats, interestingly, just a few more, to reach 35 seats.
However, that is unlikely, if the Blue Wave is already factored into the polls.
We might think of there being two Blue Waves. Or, a Blue Wave and a Blue Tide added together. Or a Blue High Tide with a Blue Storm Surge on top of it. Whatever. Point is, there is the general, expected, electorate, which I assume the polls cover, and that may be enough. But added to this is the added votes from the ever mythical “they never vote but they might come out this one time,as if” vote. That is where the one or two percent extra could come from. I suspect the effects of that extra spring tide may be seen in only some districts.
Here is my raw data, ranked from highest proportion to Democrats to lowest. Feel free to argue.
PA05 0.60
PA06 0.60
MN02 0.57
VA10 0.57
CA49 0.57
PA07 0.56
PA17 0.56
AZ02 0.56
KA03 0.56
CO06 0.55
NJ07 0.55
FL27 0.54
IO01 0.54
MN03 0.53
KA02 0.53
IO03 0.51
IL06 0.51
CA10 0.51
MN01 0.51
CA45 0.51
NJ11 0.51
NY22 0.51
CA39 0.51
ME02 0.51
FL26 0.50
KY06 0.50
MI11 0.50
NM02 0.50
NY19 0.50
OH12 0.50
UT04 0.50
CA25 0.50
TX32 0.49
IL14 0.49
PA01 0.49
TX07 0.49
NJ03 0.49
NC09 0.49
CA48 0.49
FL15 0.49
MI08 0.48
VA02 0.48
VA07 0.47
NC13 0.47
MN08 0.41
PA14 0.40
Can you convert a regular bus into an electric bus?
Of course you can, and they did it in Boulder. From the Boulder News,
What’s 30-feet long, bright orange and runs on electricity? Boulder’s newest old bus, the first in its fleet to go fossil fuel-free, courtesy of a Front Range company specializing in conversions that are both cheaper and faster than buying brand new.
Via Mobility Services, which operates the HOP line for the city of Boulder, commissioned and paid for Bus No. 15 to be stripped of its non-functional diesel engine and outfitted with an electric power train. Lightning Systems of Loveland performed the retrofit; Longmont’s UQM Technologies provided the electric motor The process cost $260,000 and took roughly four months.
The bus plugs in overnight; one charge powers a full day’s route.
Everybody needs to do this now.
Some cheap kindle books: Starving, Starving on Mars, Brutal Murder,
These books are cheap in Kindle form right now.
First, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Novel (FSG Classics)
If you’ve not read The Martian: A Novel
I know a lot of you are fans of forensic fiction. Puruant to that interest, these two books by Patricia Cornwell: Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert [Kindle in Motion]
Educational Kids Gift: The Human Body by Smithsonian
There is a new series of educational kits called Exploration Station, coming out in a few day. You can pre-order them. I’ll post about three of them, starting with Exploration Station: The Human Body
The kids are designed for learning by kids six years and above, but I think they are ideal for third or fourth graders. All the kids follow a similar theme. There is one item that will end up on a bedroom shelf along with other toys like items. In this case, a make it yourself human skeleton one foot tall. There is a book on the subject, in this case, the human body. There is a large sheet of heavy duty laminated material and a set of stickers to stick on to it. In this case, it is a 13 by 18 inch poster with a depiction of the human body. In addition, this kit includes a set of flash cards about various aspects of the human body or physiology.
The science is good, the book is engaging, lots of words but also lots of pictures. The manipulable materials are fun and educational.
I think the kits were originally designated to be about $22, but the pre-order price is closer to $15 . I think they are worth the larger price, but the lower price is very nice.
This is an ideal holiday gift for a kid in the right age range. It is not going to fill your space with a pile of useless crap, and it is not going to make a mess, or any noise. The educational value is high, and the quality is right in the range for an item of this price range. The only down side is that it is a little hard to wrap round things, but you’ll mange.
I recommend the Exploration Station: The Human Body
Why weather gets weird: science confirmed, future is bleak
We have some new research in the form of a Science article called “Projected changes in persistent extreme summer weather events: The role of quasi-resonant amplification” by Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf, Kai Kornhuber, Byron Steinman, Sonya Miller, Stefan Petri, and Dim Coumou. (Vol 4(10))
I have been discussing on this blog for a few years not the problem of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) of the jet stream. Let me quickly review what that is, then tell you about the new research.
The Earth is encircled by giant twisting donuts of air. The two main donuts lie side by side along the equator. Air warmed at the point where the sun is strongest (a climatological equator that moves north and south with the seasons) rises. It traverses, at altitude, either north or south, towards the polls, then drops and then circles back towards the equator. This drives wetness at the equator as moist air hits cold air aloft and thunderstorms are everywhere.
These primary giant twisting donuts, called Hadley Cells, set up a second set of twisting donuts to the north and south. These donuts, called mid-latitude cells, tend to cause a dry zone to form. Look at a map of the planet, and you can trace the dry zone across the northern hemisphere from the deserts of Central Asia, to the deserts of the US Southwest. In the south, the deserts of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa line up with dry regions of South America and, pretty much all of Australia.
There is a third cell, the Polar cell, north and south of the mid latitude cells.
These cells, as they move around the spinning earth, are the trade winds. Near junctures of the cells, at latitude, air molecules face an interesting mathematical problem. Air pressure, temperature, cell-driven winds, and all the various factors set up a situation where those air molecules sitting between the upper parts of the cells are supposed to be somewhere where they are not, pretty much all the time. In order to solve that problem, the air has to move very rapidly in one direction. This is a bit like nature abhorring a vacuum, large scale. That rapidly moving river of air is the jet stream.
A combination of trade wind effects and the jet stream tends to move storm systems around the planet in the mid latitudes. Under pre-climate change conditions, a low pressure system might ride along just south of the Jet Stream, moving across the planet at a few tens of km an hour, bringing rain followed by fair weather. But if the jet stream either slows or changes direction somewhat, that conveyor belt effect can get kinked up, and the low pressure system can sit in a giant meteorological kink, causing a large region to experience wet conditions for days or weeks at a time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the jet stream, in the counter-kink that a curved jet stream might cause, you can get a stalled high pressure system bringing dry conditions for longer than normal, causing what meteorologist Paul Douglas calls a “flash drought.”
Go back to the beginning a second. This entire process is controlled by the global process of heat accumulated in abundance at the equator moving to the north and south poles. But in recent years, the arctic has warmed considerably. Lack of snow cover in northern Canada and Siberia, loss of sea ice, and, probably, darkening of glacial ice in Greenland, combine to cause the Arctic to warm to a much greater degree than the rest of the planet.
This is a little like putting your refrigerator too close to the wall and building a cabinet around it without proper ventilation. The heat pump that runs your refrigerator will stop working. The behavior of the giant twisting donuts and the jet streams changes.
What occurs is this: The jet stream gets wavy, and that waviness can form a standing wave, like a swirl you see in a running brook that sits in one place because of an underwater obstruction like a rock or log. The wave, in a sense, resonates with the circumference of the earth, so you get a regular number of waves around the planet, and they tend to move only very slowly, or not at all, for months at a time.
There are two phenomena that have caused the plethora of wild and wicked weather we have been experiencing across the globe for the last five or six years. One is the increase in strength and possibly frequency of various storm systems as a nearly direct effect of warming. The other is this QRA system causing major weather patterns to pan out abnormally.
These two problems can interrelate, by the way, but that is a subject of a different essay, perhaps.
The result of quasi-resonant waves? The California drought, massive multi day rainfall events in Calgary, Boulder, Minnesota, China, Japan, Mediterranean Europe, and on and on and on.
Two questions arise from the research showing this effect. One: is it real, is there really a QRA effect? Two: will this persist, get worse, or get better, over time?
The answer to the first question has been getting more and more solid with the publication of research paper after research paper. There isn’t any longer a doubt, in my view, that this phenomenon is for real and seroius. The second question is harder. The paper that came out today on this topic says that the degree of extra warming in the Arctic is probably the biggest factor affecting the future of QRA effects. The research also suggest that it could get worse and it could persist. But there still is some uncertainty.
Real Climate has a detailed article on the QRA phenomenon, and concludes, in part:
We find that the incidence of QRA events would likely continue to increase at the same rate it has in recent decades if we continue to simply add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But there’s a catch: The future emissions scenarios used in making future climate projections must also account for factors other than greenhouse gases. Historically, for example, the use of old coal technology that predates the clean air acts produced sulphur dioxide gas which escapes into the atmosphere where it reacts with other atmospheric constituents to form what are known as aerosols.
These aerosols caused acid rain and other environmental problems in the U.S. before factories in the 1970s were required to install “scrubbers” to remove the sulphur dioxide before it leaves factory smokestacks. These aerosols also reflect incoming sunlight and so have a cooling effect on the surface in the industrial middle-latitudes where they are produced. Some countries, like China, are still engaged in the older, dirtier-form of coal burning. If we continue with business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels, but countries like China transition to more modern “cleaner” coal burning to avoid air pollution problems, we are likely to see a substantial drop in aerosols over the next half century. Such an assumption is made in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s “RCP 8.5” scenario—basically, a “business as usual” future emissions scenario which results in more than a tripling of carbon dioxide concentrations relative to pre-industrial levels (280 parts per million) and roughly 4-5C (7-9F) of planetary warming by the end of the century.
As a result, the projected disappearance of cooling aerosols in the decades ahead produces an especially large amount of warming in middle-latitudes in summer (when there is the most incoming sunlight to begin with, and, thus, the most sunlight to reflect back to space). Averaged across the various IPCC climate models there is even more warming in mid-latitudes than in the Arctic—in other words, the opposite of Arctic Amplification i.e. Arctic De-amplification (see Figure below). Later in the century after the aerosols disappear greenhouse warming once again dominates and we again see an increase in QRA events.
Author Michael Mann notes, “Most stationary jet stream disturbances will dissipate over time. However, under certain circumstances the wave disturbance is effectively constrained by an atmospheric wave guide, something similar to the way a coaxial cable guides a television signal. Disturbances then cannot easily dissipate and very large amplitude swings in the jet stream north and south can remain in place as it rounds the globe.”
From the abstract of the original paper:
Persistent episodes of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere summer have been associated with high-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves, with zonal wave numbers 6 to 8 resulting from the phenomenon of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA). A fingerprint for the occurrence of QRA can be defined in terms of the zonally averaged surface temperature field. Examining state-of-the-art [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5)] climate model projections, we find that QRA events are likely to increase by ~50% this century under business-as-usual carbon emissions, but there is considerable variation among climate models. Some predict a near tripling of QRA events by the end of the century, while others predict a potential decrease. Models with amplified Arctic warming yield the most pronounced increase in QRA events. The projections are strongly dependent on assumptions regarding the nature of changes in radiative forcing associated with anthropogenic aerosols over the next century. One implication of our findings is that a reduction in midlatitude aerosol loading could actually lead to Arctic de-amplification this century, ameliorating potential increases in persistent extreme weather events.
Here is Michael Mann discussing the research:
Bleak.
Victims That Survive Rise Up
Richard Avedon sat with a beer at the horseshoe shaped bar of the Black Forest Inn, on what is now known as Eat Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Avedon was a relatively well known and ascending photographer, producing work for Vogue, Life, and Harper’s Bazaar. He was an unusual photographer, or at least, his photographs were unusual. Or maybe better put, the expressions and emotions, or lack thereof, of the subjects of his photographs, combined with his particular art and a certain kind of color scheme, or lack thereof, were in combination unusual.
The year was 1970, and his decades long career was well underway, but something was wrong. Not with his career, or with the photographs he had been finalizing and hanging for an exhibit at the nearby Minneapolis Museum of Art. What was wrong was the wall he was staring at, across this horseshoe shaped bar, in the Black Forest Inn. Over the weeks, working on his exhibit, he had become a regular, befriending the owner, settling in. But that wall… something was missing from that wall.
Back at the museum, Avedon came to a minor realization. A mural portrait he had prepared for the exhibit, titled “Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” was the wrong size for the exhibit. So, he made plans to re-print the life size image. It then occurred to him that the first print, while wrong for the Museum exhibition, would be perfect for that wall back at the Black Forest Inn.
Fifteen years after the installation of the Daughters on the wall, about the time this book by Avedon
But this event does serve to vaguely link the Avedon Name to somebody shooting off a gun in a public place where they should not have been doing that, or at least it did in my mind when I watched the interview taped last night of Michael Avedon, grandson of Richard, on Lawrence O’Donnel’s “The Last Word.”
There is a connection between O’Donnell and Michael Avedon. It happens that Lawrence knew Richard, but also, Lawrence O’Donnell worked for Danial Patrick Moynihan, Senator from New York (and my Senator for a while). Michael Avedon’s middle name is Patrick, and he takes that name from his maternal Grandfather, the Senator. Small world.
The interview was about a very interesting project by Michael, done for New York Magazine. The cover story is called “The Class of 1946-2018: Twenty-seven school-shooting survivors bear their scars, and bear witness,” by Jared Soule, Amellia Schonbek, and Michael Avedon. Journalism, interviews, photographs, combine powerfully in this compelling piece that you can see on line. It reminds us of the fact that for every mass shooting, in-school or otherwise, there are usually multiple individuals who survived, but were physically wounded and who may bear for a lifetime those scars, mutilations or permanent damage. I recently did a quick study of mass shootings since and including Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005. Those events, more than 50 of them, led to 515 dead and 948 physically injured as part of the shooting. In some cases, there are dozens of other injuries due to panic or other factors. And this says absolutely nothing about those injured psychologically. There are probably well over 1,000 people walking around today (or wheelchair bound in some case) in the United States who survived, but with injury, a mass shooting in a school, workplace, or public event. There are probably tens of thousands who were present and terrorized, and a couple of hundred thousand who are their immediate families and friends. Small world with a lot of damaged people in it.
We live in a small world, in a small space, and too many of us are armed with deadly weapons. We live in a world that has no room for systematic government sponsored hate. The most dangerous professions in America include fishing, logging, roofing, and flight crews on airplanes. A high death rate for those in that range may be close to 140 per 100,000, or about one or two tenths of a percent. But those are professions widely participated in. Not counted on lists of most dangerous jobs is the job of POTUS. The chance of a President of the United States being killed in office is, over the entire time this job has existed, close to 10%. This rate is probably suppressed recently, even as the danger goes up because of better weapons and more hate, because of herculean efforts by the Secret Service.
But over the last two years, some other ways of life have become increasingly dangerous, because of POTUS. Being a journalist is more likely to get you beat up or even killed than ever before in the US. Being a refugee seeking asylum seems to have suddenly become very dangerous, what with the US Army closing in on the southern border. Being a student has been more and more dangerous every year, even as we teach our first and second graders to serpentine in the event they are being shot at.
It has always been dangerous to be a Jew in a world where antisemitism always lurks, even if for large areas of geography and for long stretches of time complacency is allowed. But suddenly, active violent antisemitism is ramped up because of the Republican conspiracy theory mill, and even being a Democrat or a critic of Donald Trump can get you bombed.
The most significant emerging source of mortality or morbidity in the US right now is not some novel disease or unexpected feature of a widely distributed toy or model of motor vehicle. It is the president of the United States and his loosely affiliated gang of Republican thugs and faux news commentators. When 11 were killed and six injured in Pittsburgh, that was an explicit attempt to address a non existent problem cooked up by the lying right wing, and for his part Donald Trump first ignored the event, then decried it as a distraction from his winning big, then blamed the victims, then offended the community by arriving unwelcome to pay lip service. At the same time, over a dozen individuals, legally and justifiably publicly critical of Trump and his administration, were sent pipe bombs in an explicit effort to suppress that criticism and support Donald Trump.
Donald Trump and the Republicans have become a danger to the citizens of the United States. Our solution must be to vote them out of office. We must vote Republican members of Congress out of office next Tuesday so there can be checks and oversight. We must turn state legislatures and governorships over to Democrats so there will be the necessary number of Democratic states to pass Constitutional changes such as ridding us of the Electoral College and Citizens United. We must have a Democratic Senate for at least a dozen years to right the wrongs that have been done to our federal judiciary. We must never again allow a Republican to be in charge of elections. In two states right now, Republican Secretaries of State (that’s the person in charge of a state’s electoral process) are running for governor and using their job as SOS to cheat. We must increase the number of Democratic Attorneys General, in order to protect citizens from oppression by the federal government.
Some will split hairs. The Tree of Life killer is said to have not liked Trump. Doesn’t matter. Conspiracy theorists, supported by and supportive of Trump, laid out the problem. Jews of means were funding a caravan of killer migrants who would swarm over the Mexican border at any time. That killer went after a special group of Jews, those most closely involved with helping immigrants. That was a call for active hate by Trump converted to a hail of bullets from an assault rifle available due to the incessant activities of the Republican NRA.
Some will spit hairs. The bombs never exploded, these men were crazy, the white supremacist who helped orchestrate the deadly Charlottesville protest just arrested was an odd ball.
To the hairsplitters, I say this: You are part of the problem, time for you to step aside.
Any American who can vote who chooses for any reason not to is carrying out an immoral act, and there is no excuse for it. I’ve seen young people claim that we should not ask young voters to come to the polls, because this country was ruined by baby boomers. That is absurd. Yes, of course, this country was ruined by baby boomers, as well as the generation before them, and the Xers haven’t helped. But if the so called Millennials can recognize the ruin and its cause, that is even more reason for them to show up in numbers greater than the usual 50% and do something about it. Jewish Americans tend to vote about 3:1 Democratic. That seems like a large percentage for the Democratic party, but it is pitiful. Why does any jew vote for a Republican? I hope that changes this year. The gender gap is pitifully small. No woman should vote for any Republican, yet many will. But maybe that will shift as well next Tuesday.
My own analysis suggests that Congress will remain in Republican hands for the next two years. A large part of the potential electorate will likely spend the next two years blaming the losers for their loss. We will then likely see Trump re-elected. It is quite possible that we will are now two years into an 8 to 12 year reign of hate, and dismantling democracy. It is quite likely that the levels of Trump-ed up violence we see today is small compared to what will be happening as our first graders, serpentine trained, the ones that survive school, grow to voting age. If voting is still a thing, maybe they will save us. Or maybe they will be indoctrinated to love the new regime and its senior officers, in the name of their founder Trump.
Do you think my pessimism is wrong? Prove it.
People have big heads, but children have giant heads.
A human is born with more neurons than they will have as adults. This is one of the main reasons that the size of the head of a child is not going to increase much as it grows. (Also, it is simply hard to make heads get bigger for various reasons, so it isn’t just humans that have large heads relative to body size when they are young.)
A person’s mass (weight) which roughly relates to volume goes up about 900% during growth. A person’s head circumference goes up about 35%. Big difference, even if you factor in the dimensional effect.
Try this: Find a small child. Preferably, your own, or if not, get permission. Show the child how you can touch your ear with the contralateral hand, by arching your arm over your head. Then, ask the child to try it. LOL.
This phenomenon, of head growth vs. body growth, comes up every time I teach about brain development, which I just did. And, it happens that right after doing that, I came across an interesting photograph. The photo is from a set of comparisons, putting an old family photo of one or more people when they were kids, to now, matching setting, clothing, props, body position, and facial expression.
When you do that, you see the head size thing really clearly in many photos. This one in particular shows it dramatically:
If you use the person’s right shoulder to help define her coronal plane, and visually project that onto the bricks, you can see that her head is close to three bricks tall in both photographs.
(I think the setting is not the same in both photos, by the way. Different bricks, different almost everything. But the person is the same, and that is what counts.)
US House Race: strong blue wave might result in a 50-50 split plus or minus 1
I estimate that there are about a dozen highly likely turnovers from Democrat to Republican control of house seats, net. These are what I regard as, roughly, sure things. There are enough other districts that are close that I’m comfortable saying that in a strong Blue Wave, we will have 25 turnovers.
If I’m right, the electorate acting as it usually does will move the Democrats about half way to a majority. The Putin-Trump-Republican axis will continue to control the United States. If I’m right, but there is also a strong blue wave, the control of the House will be as close to 50-50 as it can be, and given the closeness of several of the races, there will be recounts.
Since there is an uneven number of members in the house, and there are a lot of them, and many of them are old or indictable, expect the control of the house to switch back and forth a time or two over the next two years, should there be a blue wave.
Details:
Arkansas: There will be no turnovers in Arkansas. If anything, the one close seat (Arkansas’ 2nd) is more Republican now than it was two weeks ago. We won’t be returning to Arkansas this year.
Arizona second will be a turnover from R to D.
Nothing else will be happening in Arizona’s house districts.
For California’s 39th,I’m adding a new category to supplement “probably yes” and “no way.” I’ll call it “If only.” If only there is a stronger than expected blue wave, California’s 39th district will result in an R to D takeaway.
California’s 45th is a turnover.
California’s 49th is a turnover.
California’s 48th is an If Only, heading for a likely turnover, but it is not there yet.
California’s 25th is an If Only, heading for a likely turnover, but it is not there yet.
California’s 10th is an If Only, heading for a likely turnover, but it is not there yet.
Colorado’s 6th district is a very likely turnover.
I previously opined about Florida, but no more. Nothing will change there.
Iowa’s 1st district is a turnover.
Iowa’s 3rd district is an If Only.
Fogettabout Illinois.
Kansas’ 3rd district is a turnover.
Kansas’ 2nd district is probably a turnover, but the data are erratic. I’ll keep it in the If Only column for now.
Kentucky’s 6th district is an If Only.
A lot of people are looking at Maine’s 2nd district as a possible takeaway>. To me, it is only barely an If Only.
Michigan’s 11th is a turnover, while Michigan’s 8th is an If Only.
Minnesota’s 1st district is a likely loss of one for the Democrats, but the Democratic candidate is showing recent good numbers, so maybe not. But I have to be conservative and put this district in the negative column.
Minnesota’s 2nd district is a turnover.
Minnesota’s 3rd district is a turnover!
Minnesota’s 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th districts are stable.
Minnesota’s 8th district is strong Republican. However, there is an October Surprise happening there right now that could help. But it won’t. This will be a negative number.
So, Minnesota is the only state that will lose democrats in the house, but it will also gain, for a net zero.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and put New Jersey’s 2nd, 3rd, and 7th districts all in the If Only category.
New York’s 19th district is an If Only, verging on a takeaway.
I’m going to stick with my original wild assertion that Pennsylvania’s 1st district is a turnover, even though everyone else thinks it is not.
Pennsylvania’s 5th, 6th, and 7th are turnovers.
Whitey Bulger Dead, and the Trivers Willard Hypothesis
The original version of this post was called “Whitey Bulger Caught, and the Trivers Willard Hypothesis.” A while after that, I wrote a post called “Whitey Bulger Convicted, and the Trivers Willard Hypothesis.” Today, it was announced that Whitey Bulger, Boston crime boss, is dead at 89. Thus, the new title.
Most of you won’t know who Whitey Bulger is. He was for a while on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. He spent a lot of time overseas running from the Feds, but they eventually caught up with him, convicted him, and tossed him in jail.
Whitey was top dog in Boston’s Winter Hill gang. His brother was a Senator for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and served as Senate President for several years.
It is said that Whitey was an FBI informant, and that his handler, FBI Special Agent John Connolly, tipped Whitey off that he was about to be indicted on racketeering charges. No problem. Whitey had left stashes of cash in safe deposit boxes all around the world, in preparation for the day he had to go on the lam. So he took off in 1995. Special Agent Connolly spent several years on vacation in the stir.
I remember when Whitey disappeared, and ever since then, I’ve used him almost annually in lecture material describing the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. It goes like this:
The Trivers-Willard model (I prefer to call it a “model” rather than a “hypothesis” because it is not specific enough to really be a hypothesis … it’s a model that generates lots of hypotheses) states that selection should favor the ability to differentially bias investment in offspring by sex if the two sexes have differential variances in reproductive success, and if there is any way to predict offspring rank. That’s a bit thick, so it requires some examples and further explanation. Maybe a story about a mobster would help..
OK, so an example: Red deer (also known as Elk) give birth to one offspring (max) per year. Males compete for access to or to be chosen by females. So, only a small percentage of male red deer mate in a given year, a significant percentage may never mate at all, and a very small percentage sire many many little red deer. Male red deer have a high variance in reproductive success. If you tried to predict how many offspring a given randomly chosen male would have, knowing nothing at all, your best guess would be the average number of offspring red deer have in an average lifetime. But you would be wrong almost every time because the actual number is highly variable. Male red deer have high variance in RS.
Females, on the other hand, have a pretty standard number of offspring. There is not much competition among them, they can always find a male to mate with, etc. If you needed to guess how many offspring a particular randomly chosen female red deer would have in a life time, you could guess the average, and you would be right on or very close. Female red deer have low variance in RS.
So, male and female red deer have differential variance in RS. Males high, females low.
If a female red deer could somehow “predict” the likelihood of her offspring getting to mate, i.e., if she could tell if any offspring she had in the present year (male or female) would be average vs. high ranking, then selection should favor the evolution of a mechanism to actually give birth to the appropriate sex offspring (thus biasing investment in one sex or the other). It turns out that she can. A female red deer that is herself average or lower-quality (thin, ill, injured) is likely to give birth to an offspring that will be either low ranking or average. But if the mother-to-be red deer is high ranking, she is likely to give birth to an individual who will grow up to be high ranking.
Under these conditions, she should have a female offspring if she’s average or low ranking, but a male if she’s high ranking. And that, it turns out, is what red deer actually do.
That should be clear. But in case it isn’t, let’s take it down do real life, and bring in the gangsters.
You check the mail this afternoon, and there is a letter from a law firm you have never heard of. It says that your Great Aunt Tillie (whom you’ve also never heard of) just died, and left you with $1,000 in her will. The check is enclosed.
This may or may not be a recent photograph of a male red deer. Holy crap. Found money! What are you going to do with it? So you and your close advisors (your roommates, your cat, etc.) discuss it and you narrow it down to two choices. Choice A and Choice B.
Choice A is to go to your broker and buy $1000 worth of a nice, relatively safe mutual fund. The fund will buy and sell reliable blue chip stocks, thus spreading the risk over several companies, and over time you can expect to get a return of 50 bucks a years, easy.
Choice B is to buy 1000 one dollar lottery tickets. Your chances of winning are slim, but if you do, you will win 87 million dollars.
So, what do you do? The obvious sane choice is to buy the mutual fund.
But what if your cousin is Whitey Bulger? Whitey Bulger, as head of the Winter Hill Gang, is said to have owned the director of the Commonwealth Lottery agency.
So now, you have two choices.
Choice A: Invest in a mutual fund and gain a return of 50 bucks a year (that’s dollars, not elk); and
Choice B: Buy 1000 PowerBall tickets and have a great deal of certainty of winning 87 million dollars.
What would you do?
In case it isn’t already clear. the baby male elk is a lottery ticket, the baby female elk is a mutual fund, but the female can guess pretty accurately if the lotter ticket (male offspring) will pay off. Because the elk’s cousin is Whitey Bulger. See?