A neat trick to secure your home from invaders

Technology, ,

First, get an Amazon Echo. You probably already have one, but if not, you’ll need it.

The Echo has this thing called “skills.” A skill is a bit of software that provides the device with some sort of ability. (see for example this post on a math-building skill.)

Once you have the Echo, install the Away Mode skill. You can get it here.

Once installed, Away Mode allows you to tell your Echo to play a long and involved audio of actors playing out various scenarios. If the volume is correctly adjusted, potential home invaders will hear this as conversations happening inside the house, and say away.

These are totally realistic scenes. For example, there is a book club meeting where everything except the book is discussed. It runs for 6 minutes. There is a guy planning a podcast about himself, an emergency PTA meeting to discuss fidget spinners, and a couple having a breakup while also watching TV. In other words, your life.

Minnesota Energy: Decarbonize, locally produce

Energy, , , ,

The McKnight Foundation and GridLab contracted Vibrant Clean Energy, LLC, to prepare a report called Minnesota’s Smarter Grid: Pathways Towards a Clean, Reliable and Affordable Transportation and Energy System. Among other things, the report says:

The study has shown that the economy in Minnesota can decarbonize by 80% (from 2005 levels) by 2050. All the decarbonization pathways involve deeper energy efficiency of existing electric demands (particularly in the industrial sector), heavy electrification of transportation, transitioningheating of space and water from natural gas and resistive heating to heat pumps, building new zero-emission generation technologies, and retiring fossil-fuel generation.

The electrification of other sectors provides the electricity sector with new demands, which have different load profiles to existing demands and have greater flexibility potential. These new loads provide increasing sales for the electricity sector to invest against. Further, the greater flexibility allows the electricity grid to incorporate more variable resources, which are low-cost and nearzero emissions. Further, the electrification provides net cost savings for consumers because the reduction in spending on other energy supplies (natural gas for heating and gasoline for transportation) outweighs the additional spending in the electricity sector for the electrified loads.

You can get the PDF here.

Under Trump, Putin Gets To Slowly Invade Georgia

Politics, , ,

Every now and then, Russian operatives go out in some field in Georgia, sometimes at night, tear down a fence and put up a new one, making Russia bigger and Georgia smaller. You may remember a related incident that happened during the McCain-Obama election, of which much was made.

From WaPo:

This constantly changing boundary has already divided communities and swallowed up homes in Georgia, a country of 3.7 million that hopes to one day join NATO.

Many consider it nothing short of a silent, creeping occupation on the fringes of Europe supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“What should I do? If the Russians come closer I will not be able to do anything,” Vasya, 51, said with a shrug and a waft of a freshly lit cigarette. He wants only his first name used for fear of reprisals by nearby border guards.

The Russians have been trying to Russianize Ossetians living in the nearly island like enclave in Georgia for decades, and eventually issued many Russian passports.

It is the standard Russian move. Make up a situation in which there are people in some territory that say “Hey, we’re Russians. Where’s Russia! Come help us, Russia!” Then, the tanks roll in. In this case, until Putin put Trump in the US White House, the US helped Georgia resist this move in South Ossetia. No more. Trump is screwing over an important ally in the region.

In Georgia, there is a saying. You use it when you are disagreeing with someone. “We can discuss this in the morning. But during the night, I will sneak into your house and cut your throat,” or words to that effect. Well, now it’s Trump cutting the throat of Georgia.

“We can do nothing to protect ourselves … we cannot start war on them,” said Temuri Khuroshvili, 59, a retired police officer whose cinder-block house is in one of the 52 villages on the boundary. His home is surrounded by annexed territory on three sides.

“What can you do against Russia? They do whatever they can,” he said as he sat in the roadside shade while rusty tractors groaning under bales of hay rattled through the dusty lane. “The Russians don’t care at all.”

This is not the kind of mess that an actual US President, when we get one, is going to be able to clean up easily.

A human built lung has been successfully transplanted into an individual.

Health and Medicine,

The individual is a pig, and one of several where things didn’t go so well, but this is a fairly spectacular result.

This isn’t a lung developed from scratch, quite. A lung is taken from a donor pig. That pig, of course, loses its lung and presumably is converted to other uses such as ham. That lung is then sripped of cells and liquid tissues, leaving just the connected tissues that make up a sort of non-cellular skeleton.

This skeleton is then seeded with cells and growth factors and such, and the cells find their proper location and re-constitute a pig lung.

This is not an ideal scenario for a lung transplant in a human, but it is a step in the right direction. The way it would work for humans is probably like this: You get a pig lung and remove the cells and blood. You get some cells from the recipient and bio-engineer them. Perhaps you remove the genes that cause the recipient to have a bad lung to begin with. You further bio-engineer the lungs to properly divide and propagate and migrate, to move the correct locations with the pig-lung-skeleton. Then you stick that lung in the recipient and sis-bam-boom, new lung.

The summary from the original paper:

Lungs are complex organs to engineer: They contain multiple specialized cell types in extracellular matrix with a unique architecture that must maintain compliance during respiration. Nichols et al. tackled the challenges of vascular perfusion, recellularization, and engraftment of tissue-engineered lungs in a clinically relevant pig model. Nanoparticle and hydrogel delivery of growth factors promoted cell adhesion to whole decellularized pig lung scaffolds. Autologous cell–seeded bioengineered lungs showed vascular perfusion via collateral circulation within 2 weeks after transplantation. The transplanted bioengineered lungs became aerated and developed native lung-like microbiomes. One pig had no respiratory symptoms when euthanized a full 2 months after transplant. This work represents a considerable advance in the lung tissue engineering field and brings tissue-engineered lungs closer to the realm of clinical possibility.

USA In Space 2.0

Technology,

The next era of Humanned Space Flight will involve NASA trained astronauts leaving the Earth in space ships designed and built by two private corporations, SpaceX and Boeing.

Time to re-read The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert Heinlein. But I digress.

Today NASA announced the crew of astronauts to be trained for these missions. They will be going to the International Space Station. They are Sunita Williams, Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley and Eric Boe.

Cheap Books: Vonegut, Robots

Other

Now cheap in Kindle format.

Jailbird: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut.

Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government—and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

I don’t know about Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation by Terri Favro, but it looks interesting.

Generation Robot covers a century of science fiction, fact and, speculation—from the 1950 publication of Isaac Asimov’s seminal robot masterpiece, I, Robot, to the 2050 Singularity when artificial and human intelligence are predicted to merge. Beginning with a childhood informed by pop-culture robots in movies, in comic books, and on TV in the 1960s to adulthood where the possibilities of self-driving cars and virtual reality are daily conversation, Terri Favro offers a unique perspective on how our relationship with robotics and futuristic technologies has shifted over time. Peppered with pop-culture fun-facts about Superman’s kryptonite, the human-machine relationships in the cult TV show Firefly, and the sexual and moral implications of the film Ex Machina, Generation Robot explores how the techno-triumphs and resulting anxieties of reality bleed into the fantasies of our collective culture.

Clever and accessible, Generation Robot isn’t just for the serious, scientific reader—it’s for everyone interested in robotics and technology since their science-fiction origins. By looking back at the future she once imagined, analyzing the plugged-in present, and speculating on what is on the horizon, Terri Favro allows readers the chance to consider what was, what is, and what could be. This is a captivating book that looks at the pop-culture of our society to explain how the world works—now and tomorrow.

There is one country in this world moving away from more efficient transportation

Climate Change, Environment, Politics,

And that is the United States, and that is because of Donald Trump. From WaPo:

The Trump administration on Thursday announced plans to freeze fuel-efficiency requirements for the nation’s cars and trucks through 2026 — a massive regulatory rollback likely to spur a legal battle with California and other states, as well as create potential upheaval in the nation’s automotive market.

The proposal represents an abrupt reversal of the findings that the government reached under President Barack Obama, when regulators argued that requiring more-fuel-efficient vehicles would improve public health, combat climate change and save consumers money without compromising safety.

Trump’s plan also undercuts California’s long-standing ability to set its own tailpipe restrictions, most recently in an effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

What is the rational for this? There is only one. Hippie punching. He is showing his base that he has yet another way to make the liberals cry.

But guess what. The liberals will not cry. But they will fight.

California Wild Fires Bad

Climate Change, , , ,

My only remaining Republican friend, Paul Douglas, provided this information.

Considering the top 20 most destructive California fires from Cal Fire’s database, 6 of those have happened in the last 10 months.

The worse so far is the Tubbs Fire last October, and that was HUGE. Nearly 6,000 structures were burned, 22 people were killed. The sixth on the list is the Carr fire, with just under 1,500 structures burned and six killed as of this writing, but that fire is still burning.

I’ll just add this. There was a moment in time between about 2 and 3 years ago, when it was apparent to me and many others that fires were getting worse. But the data was just coming in. There were studies that stopped their data roughly a year or a year and a half earlier that showed no statistically convincing increase. The delay in data range is normal. You get your data, clean it up, then Reviewer three adds eight months to the publication process, etc. so most studies are one or maybe two years late. Anyway, I was being told over and over again that I was wrong whenever I talked about fires. Much of that came from those who were sufficiently in the game to pretend they were not denying climate change, but who chose to get into the contrarian game despite the huge moral cost of doing so.

Well, we were right. We told you so. Shame.

Eventually, of course, the wildfires will stop. Like the surgeons say, the bleeding always stops. Eventually. One way or another.

Should people be charged if their gun is used in a crime?

Violence and Guns, ,

Yes, just as if their car is used in a crime.

Obviously if someone breaks into your house, breaks open your gun safe, takes your gun, goes down the street and robs a bank with it, that is not your fault.

But if you leave a loaded gun laying around unsecured, and a four year old grabs it and shoots a five year old dead, you, the gun owner, have just committed homicide.

Almost everything else is in between, and yes, there is a line there, or more than one, that has to be found. But we are a civil society and we can deal with the difficulties of drawing that line. And, anyone who is uncomfortable with there being such a law can easily address their anxiety. Just live in a gun free home.

I bring this up because the Washington Post has a new piece by John Cox and Steven Rich addressing this issue. Here.

And, right, if your car is locked up and in your garage and the key is with you in the house, and someone breaks into your garage, hot wires your car, drives down the street and uses the car in the commission of a crime, that is not on you. If, on the other hand, you leave your car unlocked and running on the street and somebody jumps in it and takes off and commits a crime with the car, that is at least partly on you. And somewhere in between lies this line, see?

Ohio 12th Congressional Special Election: What does winning look like?

Politics, , ,

The Democrats already won the special elections game. Since the 2016 election, there have been several special elections at the state and federal level, each of which serving as a test of the hypothesis that people are turning away from Trump, or the Republican Party, or Putin, or something along those lines. Overall, Democrats have won this long running contest hands down. Either a Democrat pushed out a Republican in a seat normally held by Republicans, or the Democrat lost but had an excellent showing, typically costly to the pertinent unit of the Republican party, in a seat where loss to a Democrat is unthinkable. I should point out that there were races in that first category, where the Democrat won, that were unthinkable Republican losses.

As I understand it, there is one more special election coming up. This is in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District (perhaps this is the last known federal level special election and there are still some state level ones out there, so don’t take this “last one” thing too seriously).

This race fits into the unthinkable category. Republicans have represented this district or its earlier incarnations continuously since 1982, when it was taken by John Kasich. Pat Tiberi (pronounced “tea-berry”) took over in 2000, then resigned, leaving the seat open for this election. It is generally felt that Tiberi is leaving Congress because he is fed up with Washington, and wants to focus on family stuff. Prior to 1982, it swapped back and forth between D and R numerous times. I’ll guess, and it is only a guess but you know I’m right, that the Republican stranglehold on this district since ’82 is a function of redistricting and possibly local voter repression. Because this is how Republicans cheat.

In 2014, Republican incumbent Tiberi beat Democratic Challenger David Tibbs in a 68%-28% rout. In 2016, Tiberi beat challenger Ed Albertson in a 67%-30% rout.

This district went for Trump in 2016 by 8.6%. It went for Obama in ’12 by 3% and in ’08 by 4.6%. The district voted marginally for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

The district is 82% white with the leading minority being black, has a high education rate (nearly 90%) and a modest household income level ($48K, which is below the US median of $54K). So, it is not an upper scale suburban zone, and not a deep red rural zone, but rather, a fairly typical but leaning more towards working class mainly Republican zone where the many of the white people slept through the Obama elections while Blacks voted in higher numbers, probably.

The current D over R percentage nationwide is must under 7%.

So the demographic stats look good for a Democratic win, but the electoral history of the district strongly signals a Republican win. The R’s beat the D’s 2:1 normally. This means that the Democratic candidate really can’t win.

The race is currently between Troy Balderson, Republican, and Danny O’Conner, Democrat. Trump has endorsed Balderson in this tweet:

Cooks, Inside Elections, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball have been characterizing this race as a toss-up or a lean-Republican.

A Monmouth poll from today shows the race dead even (Balderson up by 1).

So, here is what winning looks like:

Balderson 51%
O’Conner 49%

Or, of course, O’Conner winning. It is possible. But the current Republican strategy of scaring their base to the polls, combined with the usual techniques of voter repression, and the long tradition of sending Republicans to the White House from this district, mean that we do not require O’Conner to win the election for this to be a Democratic Blue Wave win.

Jeff Johnson vs Tim Pawlenty in light of Donald Trump

Politics, , ,

Have a look at this campaign ad, which appears pursuant to the Minnesota Republican Primary coming up in two weeks, in which former Governor Tim Pawlenty and perennial and not overwhelmingly successful state level candidate and current Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson are running to represent the Republican Party in the upcoming gubernatorial election.

The person in the political ad is Tim Pawlenty.

Am I crazy, or is it impossible to tell if this is a Tim Pawlenty ad or a Jeff Johnson ad? It really could go either way.

In order that you do NOT have to click on this ad in case you see it, I can tell you it is a Jeff Johnson ad. I’m pretty sure.

How To End A Presidency

Politics, ,

To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment

The history and future of our democracy’s ultimate sanction, presidential impeachment, and a guide to how it should be used now

To End a Presidency addresses one of today’s most urgent questions: when and whether to impeach a president. Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz provide an authoritative guide to impeachment’s past and a bold argument about its proper role today. In an era of expansive presidential power and intense partisanship, we must rethink impeachment for the twenty-first century.

Of impeachments, one Constitutional Convention delegate declared, “A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one will be kept in fear of them.” To End a Presidency is an essential book for all Americans seeking to understand how this crucial but fearsome power should be exercised.

Just sayin’