Women Kick Butt to Kick Off 2018

It’s a rising tide.  Momentum from the women of 2017 carries right into 2018.

Oprah Winfrey’s rousing speech at the Golden Globes fueled hopes that the #MeToo movement will be more than just backlash against exploitation and abuse by men.   It was also a  call for women not just to step up, but to move forward.  It was a call to arms.

And two days later,  Diane Feinstein took the fight to the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party, by releasing the transcript of testimony from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in defiance of Committee Chair Charles Grassley. That was the testimony by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS on investigations into Trump’s twisted history, that was conducted during the 2016 election.

The transcript of Simpson’s testimony itself—not classified, but kept under wraps by Grassley and his henchmen—revealed just what malicious games Grassley and his allies in deceit such as Lindsey Graham, have been practicing, in their attempt to undermine the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election.*

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Superintelligence: Proceed with Caution

Superintelligence: a Book, an Hypothesis, a Warning

After having earlier dismissed Artificial Intelligence as a bogeyman, I confess to being deeply frightened by the book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. (2014)

The book’s author is Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute and director of the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at the University of Oxford.  You can view his academic creds on Wikipedia. There’s an excellent profile of him—highly recommended—in The Guardian* at Guardian profile of Nick Bostrom

If you’ve heard much about Nick Bostrom or the Future of Humanity Institute, what follows could be a rehash. But I’ll plow ahead even though this book is four years old, for what it may be worth.

In the first paragraph, The Guardian puts the scope of Bostrom’s concerns this way:  “Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?”

The Guardian’s piece identifies Bostrom’s key themes, and is so informative (including telling nuances such as Bostrom’s finicky diet and germ phobia) that I have little of substance to add on the man himself, but the following is my take on the most salient messages from his signature work, Superintelligence.

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More on “The Other Addiction”

George Will gets one thing right

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post (link below), the conservative intellectual George Will engaged in one of  his favorite tasks of bashing other intellectuals for their dire predictions  of doom, using one of his favorite sages, Eric Hoffer.

There’s some truth in his point about doom-saying intellectuals, although on the tax bill issue he’s off the mark—he’s overlooking the long-term effects of the new tax bill.  Not that George Will is myopic; instead he skips the subject because slashing the corporate tax is an item of conservative faith.  He might think the cut was too big, but in principle it’s a move in the right direction. So he won’t talk about its defects.

The  “attention economy” and undermining of human will

It’s at the end of this opinion piece that George Will (not “human will”) puts his finger on something that’s really troubling: the internet heating public discourse to the boiling point,  especially in social media.

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National Insecurity

My thing is bigger than your thing.

The bigger, more powerful button.  The Wall. The exclusion of immigrants. Increased defense spending.  All of a piece in the vision of “America First.”

Donald Trump’s latest descent into juvenile posturing, the warning to Kim Jong-un of how he, the world’s mightiest leader, has a larger, more powerful nuclear button than “Rocket Man,” is the latest manifestation of not just Trump’s insecurity, but the insecurity of many who elected him. That’s those who see foreigners as jackals circling us,  tearing off—or ready to tear off at the first opportunity—the choicest pieces of America, feasting on our nation’s wealth and power in a torment by a thousand bites.

This may remind you of Richard Nixon’s characterizing the U.S. as a “pitiful, helpless giant,” as a justification for launching new military spending programs, which were later expanded under Reagan.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 2: Exoplanet Binge

Stunning Revelations from Kepler Space Telescope Exoplanet Survey: MANY small planets

On June 19, 2017, NASA announced the release of the eighth Kepler catalog of exoplanet candidates—now totaling 4,034, of which 2,335 have already been verified as planets.  Here’s a link to the press briefing materials on the NASA website, that includes some absolutely cool visuals.

Kepler survey announcement June 2017

The news in June was that another 219 candidates had been added since the last announcement, 10 of which had characteristics of size, distance from host star, and sun-like nature of the host star,  that suggest conditions hospitable to life as we know it.  Rocky planets with diameters between 0.7 and 2 Earth diameters are the most promising if they fall within the “Goldilocks Zone” where liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

Turns out, contrary to what I had been expecting from the news about huge exoplanets dribbling out over the last decade, now we hear that “small planets are common”  according to NASA. Note that “small” is in the eye of the beholder. NASA qualifies a planet as “small” if it is less than four Earth diameters.  The trend toward the discovery of “gas giants” exoplanets early on was due to the difficulties, with less sensitive instruments and less sophisticated methodology, of detecting the smaller objects.

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Let’s NOT Get over It: Always Learn from History

“Just Get over It” is (usually) shallow and mean-spirited

Oh dear, sorry for this but I am once again sucked into political commentary, provoked by other persons’ commentary.  Here I was hoping to concentrate on the soothing cerebral task, the Most Amazing Year in Space Ever, but my mid-brain took over thanks to following a link on The Daily Kos.  It’s not my fault, but here goes anyway:

In the context of taking to task Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s sickeningly callous statements about government-funded food assistance programs (here ) brought to us by Kos Media, a number of folks commenting engaged in an argument over Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss  in 2016.

Once again we heard some voices on the left telling those of us who deplored past attacks on Clinton from within her own party that we should  “just get over it.”

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER, Part 1B: Eclipse, Sun, & Earth

 

In Part 1A of the eclipse drama, we talked about the Moon. Now for the Sun and Earth.

First The Sun.

The gigantic sphere of plasma* (2.7 million miles in circumference, weighing 330,000 Earth masses) that is our Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at about 514,200 miles per hour, a speed which takes it once around the galactic center every 230 million years. (Since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it’s made it a little more than a quarter of the way around.) It helpfully drags us around with it, enabling us to observe intergalactic space in many directions over time. Physically, it’s about as normal a star as you can find in the local neighborhood (less than 1,000 light years away). Its relative “normality” is nice for astrophysicists, who can learn a lot about other stars from observing this one close at hand. Despite being sort-of normal, the Sun has a lot of electromagnetic storms and bursts of plasma that can do monstrously scary stuff to us (discussed in another of my posts here). Yet, it is tame relative to many other stars, whose volatility may make the evolution of life around them a crapshoot.

We’ll talk about the speed of the galaxy itself relative to other galaxies in a later post (promise: before we’ve completely orbited the galactic center).

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 1A: Eclipse and the Moon

For solace, look to the heavens.

While one terrible thing after another was happening on Earth in 2017, the news from outer space was chock-full of amazingness to a degree rivaled in my lifetime only by the Apollo moon missions. Those of us fortunate to live in the relative calm and prosperity of the First World have the opportunity, in rare moments of serenity, to bask in a new era of cosmic discovery made possible by extraordinary technology in the service of science’s ceaseless voyage toward truth.

The moon landings were amazing, all right, and especially heartening for Americans at a time when the country was in a state of turmoil and division unique to the 20th Century. It prompted me to buy my first TV, a small black and white device, not that color mattered for a moon landing. But for sheer scale, the exploits of puny humans on our nearest heavenly body 50 years ago can be compared with the significance of 2017’s Year in Space as a Home Depot compared with the One World Trade Center.

Do I exaggerate?  Let’s go down a list, in order of least amazing to the most spectacularly profoundly spine-tinglingly amazing:

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Will Work for Crumbs: Why Republicans May Hold the House

Pocketbooks will fatten just enough to get scammers on the congressional Right re-elected

It couldn’t be more transparent, that the middle class has been bought off with token tax relief in the Republican tax bill, while billionaires and corporations continue to top up their coffers with still bigger tax breaks.

But the transparency doesn’t mean much, since the cynical middle class has had to resign itself to getting Something rather than Nothing for the last few decades.  They’re inured to it. Now a few crumbs tossed to ordinary folks will suffice to keep Republican politicians in the House afloat for at least another year.  That’s because elections usually turn on pocketbook issues, and if by November the average taxpayer has received $1,500 worth of reductions  in withholding, then s/he will settle for the status quo. (Even a status quo with Trump at the helm, as long as he does not actually start a major war.) Put that together with gerrymandering, and seeing that the House Republicans would have to lose 46 seats to lose majority, I imagine they will hold it.  Especially because there are bound to be more rounds of attempting to repeal the ACA—even though McConnell is now loathe to touch it in the Senate—which will rally the conservative base.

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Ignorance as Policy: Rare Consistency in the Trump Administration

Parade of know-nothing judicial nominees marches on

Of recent Trump judicial nominees: two were yanked by the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conservative Charles Grassley, for lack of competence. A third (Matthew Petersen) withdrew after being grilled on basic points of the the law by Republican senator John Kennedy, during which the senator’s consternation over Petersen’s hedging and failure to answer was ill-disguised.

News organization such as the Washington Post bring to light the most flagrant cases of  incompetence on the part of Trump nominees who are seeking lifetime judicial posts, but we can safely infer that many of those being confirmed, without our hearing of it, are likely to have only marginal  credentials. They get confirmed because they are conservatives, and the committee is in a hurry to cram them in—so much of a hurry that committee Democrats are largely frozen out of the loop (as with the tax bill, although these judgeships may be more consequential in the long run; the tax bill can be undone by future legislation, but these federal judges’ positions are for life—ironically, that provision was meant to insulate the judges from politics, but these nominees are coming in with plenty of conservative political baggage from the get-go).

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