* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), theory of queues (series), updating the potato (series), AI generates clickbait articles, AI evaluates toxicity, alternatives to alcoholic beverages, plastic roads, contrail contribution to climate change, gene testing & the law, Libra cryptocurrency, China's Green Great Wall, and resource crunch on sand.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JULY 2019: On 23 July, Boris Johnson became prime minister of the United Kingdom. He went into office with a promise to deliver Brexit -- saying that he would renegotiate the Brexit deal with the EU. If the EU didn't want to renegotiate, Johnson says that Britain will leave without a deal, on 31 October 2019.
The EU has repeatedly, wearily, stated they won't renegotiate the deal, and it appears that Johnson believes them -- since his government is, by all indications, working towards a no-deal Brexit. Since the clear majority of Britons don't want a no-deal Brexit, there's going to be a crash. Labour and the Liberal Democrats don't want a no-deal Brexit, and neither do many Tories. It has been suggested that Johnson's ministry may be one of the shortest in Britain's history. He was placed in office by a majority vote among the Tories, but he is only supported by a minority of the British public. He is unlikely to be able to stand a vote of no confidence if it comes to that.
Nobody, however, feels confident in predicting what's going to happen next. Indeed, the ascension of Johnson to #10 Downing Street is really just chaos as usual, only mildly newsworthy, since nothing has changed, nothing has become clear -- except that the Tories are in an ongoing implosion, and Labour isn't healthy, either. Where Britain stands a year from now is anybody's bad guess.
* As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("The US-China Race for Tech Dominance Is the Worst Game of Twister Ever" By Marc Champion, 11 June 2019), appearances suggest that the US and China are engaged in a new Cold War, run along technological lines. The Trump Administration has in particular targeted Chinese tech giant Huawei -- claiming that Huawei telecommunications gear represents a "Trojan horse" that could grossly undermine Western security.
A closer inspection gives a more confusing picture. At an industrial park in Oxfordshire, just off Britain's M40 highway from London to Birmingham, there is a nondescript brick building that houses the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre. The only things that seem unusual about the structure are the one-way glass used for the window, the considerable number of CCTV cameras littering the installation, and the oversize air-conditioning units that cool the arrays of telecom servers.
The center is run by the British government, with its few dozen employees given thorough security screenings. Those employees, however, are paid for by Huawei. The workers inspect Huawei gear for security faults -- looking for a Trojan horse, in effect. It's not a bad deal for Huawei, since the company gets a thorough debugging of their gear for their money. More to the point, thanks to the evaluation by the center, the British government is perfectly happy to allow Huawei to sell server gear for the UK's emerging high-speed "5G" telecom network.
The Trump Administration has exerted great pressure on America's allies to shut out Huawei, arguing that the Chinese firm cannot be trusted. Huawei officials reply that deliberately building a "back door" into their gear would be business suicide; if one such were found, nobody would ever buy Huawei gear again. The Trump Administration counters that the Chinese government could legally compel Huawei to do whatever the government wanted -- but what sense would it make for the Chinese government to force Huawei to do something so rash, that is very likely to be found out?
The Trump Administration's efforts to proclaim a technological "Iron Curtain" between China and the West doesn't wash. The Iron Curtain between the Soviet Union and the West was a manifestation of a rivalry between a statist anti-capitalist regime and the Western capitalist democracies. In the current case, it's a rivalry between a statist capitalist regime and the Western capitalist democracies -- whose economies are deeply interconnected, and much more cooperative than not at an economic level.
A recent Chinese government white paper released on June 2 described the two economies as a single industrial chain "bound in a union that is mutually beneficial." Nothing of the sort would have come out of the Soviet Union, even in its warmest phases. Of course, security concerns haven't disappeared, and the rivalry between the two modern systems is often edged, with the US and China doing their best to get the edge on 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, gene editing, and the data flows that fuel them all.
It is by no means beyond belief that the world will end up divided between users of Western technology and users of Chinese technology. The breach, for the time being, appears to be widening, with China seeking means to retaliate against American economic sanctions. The Chinese government is also trying to discourage tourism to the USA, warning Chinese that America is very dangerous, that visitors may well be robbed or killed.
Nonetheless, it would be very difficult for the two countries to cut off communications, and not to the advantage of either. Efforts of American authorities to step on Chinese cancer researchers for "stealing secrets" have been derided as absurd; the more cancer research gets spread around, the better off the world will be. Andrew Gilholm -- who directs analysis for greater China and North Asia at Control Risks, a consulting firm -- also asks: "How do you restrict exports of AI? These are intangible things that are not developed by one company or country, but are developed globally on open platforms."
The US has not had much luck convincing its allies to stop doing business with Huawei. Huawei sells good products at good prices, and the security risks are seen as manageable -- or for that matter, not so different from technology obtained from the USA. We live in an age of malware and Black Hats; instead of setting up a system to vet Huawei for security holes, we might be better off to set up a system that vets everybody who makes gear that presents a security challenge.
In addition, the Trump Administration's blindly self-serving concepts of international diplomacy have not fostered an inclination to agree with the White House. The Chinese don't have much incentive to play nice with the USA, either. Trump Administration policy is chaotic, and nobody believes Trump keeps his word. If the Chinese made a deal with him, that would help him get re-elected, so they have an incentive to hold out until he leaves office -- likely in 2021, 2025 if it comes to that. The new administration, by acting reasonably, will be in a good position to come to a deal, and stabilize the relationship between China and the USA.
* Donald Trump's dubious ideas about international economic relations were mentioned here during the 2016 election campaign. Nothing in the time since then suggests Trump was right all along -- and as discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("Despite Trump's Claims, There's No Currency War Against the US" by Peter Coy, 20 June 2019), Trump hasn't learned any better either, insisting that Europe and China are engaged in a currency war with the USA. On 18 June, Trump tweeted:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Mario Draghi [outgoing president of the EU Central Bank] just announced more stimulus could come, which immediately dropped the Euro against the Dollar, making it unfairly easier for them to compete against the USA. They have been getting away with this for years, along with China and others.
END QUOTE
OK, Trump is technically correct; the euro really did decline against the dollar, to $1.12 USD from $1.16 USD a year ago, after Draghi, said "additional stimulus will be required" if the economic outlook for the 19-country euro zone doesn't improve. In addition, a cheaper euro will indeed make exports from the euro zone to the USA less expensive, while making exports in the reverse direction more expensive.
Trump's misunderstanding is that Draghi is weaponizing the euro. That's an extreme read on a practice that isn't necessarily controversial. It is perfectly sensible for the ECB to cut interest rates, to stimulate domestic economic growth by lowering borrowing costs -- the "cost of money" -- for consumers and businesses. Of course, cutting rates also tends to depress value of the euro; that does add to the stimulus, but it's a side effect, not the goal. In a recent public panel discussion, Draghi said: "We don't target the exchange rate."
If the fall of the euro did make the US trade deficit worse, bad enough to slow down America's economy, the US Federal Reserve would cut interest rates to boost the economy again. That would, in turn, lower the value of the dollar, with the previous exchange rate relative to the euro restored. However, as with the euro, the Fed's goal would not be to target the exchange rate. The ECB would certainly not believe the Fed was engaged in economic warfare against the EU.
It may seem futile for both the EU and the US to cut interest rates, with the end result of leaving the euro-dollar exchange rate intact -- but once again, the exchange rate isn't the target, it's economic growth for both parties. Brad Setser -- a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations -- says: "In principle, that's just a coordinated easing that increases the level of demand."
Trump's claim that China is manipulating its currency is even weaker than his case against the EU. In fact, the People's Bank Of China (PBC) hasn't been trying to push down the value of the yuan; the PBC has refused so far to cut the benchmark one-year lending rate at 4.35%, where it's been since October 2015 -- despite the fact that the Chinese economy has been soft. If China wanted to drive down the yuan, another approach would be to sell yuan to build up foreign currency reserves, and China has not been building up foreign reserves. China plans to move up the economic pyramid, selling more expensive products with higher value and profit margins. Competing on price is no longer the objective, and so neither is a weaker yuan.
That leads to the question: so how would anyone know if a country is really trying to lowball its currency? One give-away, as mentioned above, is the country's central bank buying lots of foreign currency to drive down its own currency's value, even though the country has a healthy surplus in trade and investment income with the rest of the world. China was playing that game up to 2014; Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand have played it on occasion.
According to a recent article by Setser, at the present time, one of the biggest offenders is Taiwan. The Taiwanese central bank says it had the equivalent of $464 billion USD in foreign exchange at the end of May -- more than the holdings of bigger nations such as Brazil, Germany, and India. Trump, however, doesn't feel like picking fights with Taiwan; he is certain to keep on complaining of the unfair trading practices of China and Europe.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI CLICKBAIT: As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Endless AI-Generated Spam Risks Clogging Up Google's Search Results" By James Vincent, 2 July 2019), there's been a lot of fuss recently about the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to generate fakery. The biggest concern has been about generating "fake news" -- but another trick is emerging: faking out Google.
AI could be used to generate endless blogs, websites, and marketing spam at minimal cost. The material would look pretty and say all the right things in a syntactically-correct way, but it would be effectively meaningless. Search engines, however, can't figure out meaning, and so they can be fooled. For example, consider an AI-generated blog post titled: "What Photo Filters are Best for Instagram Marketing?" The text looks perfectly sensible:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You might not think that a mumford brush would be a good filter for an Insta story. Not so, said Amy Freeborn, the director of communications at National Recording Technician magazine. Freeborn's picks include Finder (a blue stripe that makes her account look like an older block of pixels), Plus and Cartwheel (which she says makes your picture look like a topographical map of a town).
END QUOTE
Unfortunately, it's gobbledygook: syntactically coherent, but meaningless. It's the product of content marketing agency Fractl, which has generated a number of similar meaningless blog posts to show the potential impact of AI in the business of search engine optimization (SEO). Fractl partner Kristin Tynski says: "Because [AI systems] enable content creation at essentially unlimited scale, and content that humans and search engines alike will have difficulty discerning [...] we feel it is an incredibly important topic with far too little discussion currently."
The bogus blog posts were written using an open source tool named "Grover", written by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Tynski says Fractl isn't going to game SEO with AI, but she believes others will: "Black Hats will use subversive tactics to gain a competitive advantage."
SEO has long been gamed, with an ongoing "Red Queen's race" in progress between the Black Hats and search-engine providers -- the Black Hats trying to figure out ways to trick the search engines, the operators trying to defeat the trickery. In a blog post, Tynski pointed to "article spinning", which emerged 10 to 15 years ago. Article spinners use automated tools to rewrite existing content, changing words and making other tweaks so that the text looks original. Google and other search engines responded with new filters and metrics to weed out these copycat blogs, but it wasn't easy to do. Tynski says that AI text generation will take article spinning to a new level, allowing for "a massive tsunami of computer-generated content across every niche imaginable."
Can anything be done about it? Rowan Zellers of the Allen Institute for AI says the answer is YES -- at least for now. Zellers and his colleagues, who created Grover, were able to create a system that can spot Grover-generated text with 92% accuracy. The give-away in fake AI text, according to Zeller, is that it has several predictable linguistic and grammatical traits, such as an inclination to keep re-using certain phrases and words. He says: "We're a pretty long way away from AI being able to generate whole news articles that are undetectable. So right now, in my mind, is the perfect opportunity for researchers to study this problem, because it's not totally dangerous."
Unfortunately, even if it's not "totally dangerous", it's likely to be a big nuisance, requiring a lot of effort on the part of search engine operators to keep it under control. However, at the same time, more web searches are being performed by proxies like Siri and Alexa, and so search engine operators only need to provide a few known-good answers, instead of a long list of possible answers. The focus on "one good answer" does have problems of its own, but it's harder to game.
The interesting consideration, however, is where AI-generated articles may be in a generation. Down the road, it could be possible to simply tell an AI system to write an article on a topic, and have it turn out a well-written, meaningful article on its own. Tynski says: "It may be the case that in the next few years this tech gets so amazingly good, that AI-generated content actually provides near-human or even human-level value." In other words, maybe this is a problem that will ultimately solve itself.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GET IN LINE (2): Multiple parallel lines, each in front of a register is a traditional queueing scheme, known as "multiple servers / multiple queues. It suffers from slip & skip. It's a truism that "the other line always moves faster", and people tend to "jockey", or move from one line to another; "renege", or just give up the line; or "balk", refuse to get into the line. That led to development of the "serpentine line" -- AKA "multiple servers / single queue" -- which is regarded as one of the most significant advances in the design of queues.
It's not clear who came up with the serpentine line -- American Airlines, British Airways, Chase Bank, and Wendy's, among others, all claim they invented it -- but it's now almost universal in airports, large stores, and the line. All customers are funneled into a single line that switches back and forth, with those at the head of the line going to the first available counter. It's strictly first-come, first-serve, and nobody can claim they were treated unfairly.
The Whole Foods supermarket chain, now an arm of Amazon, pioneered the use of the serpentine line among grocers, and has "line managers" to keep a line running smoothly. Whole Foods also has a hybrid scheme in some of its stores, with multiple color-coded queues, each with a display. When a register becomes available, it is assigned to the longest line, with the display giving the register number.
However, it's not always easy to figure out what scheme a particular establishment uses, and not all stores are efficient at line management, According to Larson:
BEGIN QUOTE:
My local drugstore, which is an international chain, uses what I call "accordion" queue management: they'll only bring up another checkout person if the line exceeds some threshold. And that's fine, but there are no lines on the floor and no stanchions to indicate where the queue starts, and whether you should queue up separately for each station, or have one master queue. That's an example of where line design is necessary, but this huge multibillion-dollar chain doesn't seem to focus on it.
END QUOTE
One of the challenges in design of a queue is to make sure that people know what queue they are standing in; it's an exasperating experience to have to wait in a line, only to find out it's the wrong line. According to Don Norman of UCSD:
BEGIN QUOTE:
There are places that invest a lot in this, like theme parks, but I'm otherwise surprised by the lack of attention. My suspicion is that there's a lot of attention to all sorts of features of a building and its interior space, but very little attention to the way that people work inside them. And then when the people come they have to make do with the way things are laid out.
END QUOTE
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (66): Rutherford Hayes promised he would only serve one term; he was as good as his word, being replaced in 1880 by James A. Garfield, a Republican, as POTUS 20. Garfield's only distinction in his presidency was to be assassinated, being shot by a deranged office-seeker on 2 July 1881. However, Garfield didn't die right away. As the Constitution stated, in the interim Chester Arthur, Garfield's vice president, was supposed to take over the "powers and duties" of the presidency -- but Arthur was reluctant to do so, with the result being a vacuum of authority up Garfield's death on 19 September. Arthur then became POTUS 21. The Constitution might declare that a vice president take over if a president were indisposed, but that would prove tricky in practice.
Arthur proved no more able to establish a more egalitarian social order than his predecessors did. The Radical Republicans had greatly altered the Constitution to change America's direction; but the Federal judiciary refused to go along. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had outlawed discrimination in public places, such as hotels, restaurants, theaters, and railroads; it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883 under the CIVIL RIGHTS CASES -- a set of five similar cases considered as a set. The High Court judged such segregation constitutional, on the basis that segregation involved no direct legal attack on the rights of black Americans, instead imposing an undue burden on businesses. Didn't businesses have the right to deal with customers as they pleased?
The vote in CIVIL RIGHTS CASES was 8:1. The sole dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan, who proclaimed the court had effectively gutted the 14th Amendment -- acidly commenting that, before the war, the court had been perfectly agreeable to granting considerable authority to Congress in hunting down fugitive slaves. As far as the right of businesses to discriminate went, Harlan pointed out that common law had long established that businesses such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters performed a public function, and that governments had appropriately regulated their operations to a degree. If businesses discriminated, they did it with the tacit approval of the state government, meaning the 14th Amendment was applicable. Harlan was largely ignored, but he wouldn't be forgotten.
In the same year, 1883, Congress passed the "Civil Service Reform Act", with support from Arthur. The assassination of Garfield by a frustrated office-seeker had brought pressure on the "spoils system", in which public offices were awarded to individuals on the basis of their party influence, not on their competence. The new act established a "Civil Service Commission" to establish rules and regulations for Federal hiring; it only covered about 10% of Federal hires at the outset, but by the end of the century, it would cover almost all of them. It is startling to realize that a government practice now seen as corrupt and unlawful was once, effectively, normal practice.
Also in 1883, the United States was a participant in the "Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property", which set up international patent protections. The "Bern Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works", which dealt with copyrights, took place three years later -- but the USA didn't sign up, and wouldn't for a century.
Arthur's health began to fail late in his administration, and the Republican Party snubbed him for the nomination in 1884 -- and so Arthur became a one-term president. He was replaced by Stephen Grover Cleveland, who became POTUS 22. Cleveland was a Democrat, an anomaly since only Republicans had been elected to the presidency since 1861. Cleveland was primarily focused on reform in government, working against corruption and inefficiency, the loose ethics that had taken hold from the Grant Administration having led to a backlash. Cleveland was not very concerned about civil rights, and in fact was a very strange Democrat by modern standards, preferring small government and low government spending.
Cleveland's disciplined presidency wasn't popular, and so he was voted out in 1888, being replaced by Benjamin Harrison -- a Republican, grandson of William Henry Harrison -- who became POTUS 23. He was a strange Republican by modern standards, implementing high tariffs and taking an assertive attitude toward governance, resulting in relatively high levels of government spending.
He also continued the push against corruption, signing into law the "Sherman Antitrust Act" of 1890 -- driven by Senator John Sherman of Ohio, brother of General William T. Sherman. The act allowed the Justice Department to move against businesses working to establish anti-competitive monopolies. It was an unprecedented expansion of Federal power to regulate business, created on the basis of the congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce. The judiciary let it stand. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("New Report Suggests Different US Navy Carrier Air Wing Mix" by Pat Host, 08 February 2019), a report issued in February by the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) -- an independent but military-funded think tank out of Washington DC -- has suggested that the US Navy's current notions of what should constitute an aircraft carrier air power wing might be rethought.
The current scheme envisions a carrier air wing (CAW) consisting of about 20 F-35C Joint Strike Fighters (JSF), and 24 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets or F/A-XX strike aircraft -- the F/A-XX being a proposed follow-on to the Super Hornet, currently under investigation, but not under development. The CSBA report, titled "Regaining the High Ground at Sea", instead proposed a CAW to be fielded by 2040 that consists of:
Although the total payload capacity of the CSBA's proposed CAW is about the same as the USN's planned CAW, the CSBA believes that their CAW will have significantly greater range and endurance, or more payload at shorter ranges, The CSBA also believes that the mix of aircraft platforms will be more flexible, with the F/A-XX better able to penetrate adversary defenses, and the UCAV able to perform a wide range of support missions, such as mid-air refueling and reconnaissance.
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Lockheed Quietly Developing AIM-260 To Counter Chinese PL-15" by Steve Trimble, 20 June 2019), one of the worries of the US in current tensions with China is the Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missile (AAM), which outranges the US AIM-120 AMRAAM AAM. The PL-15 poses the threat that US fighters will be destroyed with impunity by Chinese fighters.
As a result, US defense giant Lockheed Martin is now developing the "AIM-260" AAM, which will match or exceed the PL-15's range. A joint Air Force / Navy program office awarded Lockheed a secret contract in 2017 for what was then called the "Joint Air Tactical Missile (JATM)" after a competition, with the program revealed to the public on 20 June 2019.
Few specifics have been announced. The JATM / AIM-160 will have the same form-factor as the AIM-120 AMRAAM; how it gets extended range was not revealed, but it was said that it would not use ramjet propulsion. Initial flight tests will be in 2021, with initial operational introduction in 2022. Obviously, with such a short development cycle, the AIM-260 will be effectively an improved AMRAAM, the only question being; how much improved?
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Rafael launches Spike NLOS from Tomcar Buggy" by Yaakov Lappin, 6 February 2019), Rafael's Spike series of anti-armor missiles is popular all over the world, with the family including the "Non-Line Of Sight (NLOS)" variant. Spike NLOS, which was introduced in the 1980s, is larger than the other Spike variants, being more a precision surface-to-surface missile with pop-out wings and tailfin, guided by an electro-optic seeker, with the video sent back to an operator via a fiber-optic link. Range is given as 30 kilometers (18.6 miles).
Spike missiles can be carried by naval vessels, helicopters, and ground vehicles. The latest new offering in the Spike family is an 8-round Spike NLOS launch system on a stock Tomcar 4-wheel dune buggy. Rafael officials say that the system is lightweight, easily air-deployed, and well-suited to special operations forces. The 8-round Tomcar launcher system was designed in response to customer requests, and can be readily mounted on other vehicles.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI TAKES ON TOXICITY: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Hazchem Or Not?', 4 August 2018), humans may come into contact with a staggering number of different chemicals. European Chemical Agency (ECHA) recognizes over 130,000, while the US Environmental Protection Agency recognizes 85,000. Testing all of them for toxicity is impractical. Animal testing is slow, costly, cruel, and controversial -- nor is it very reliable, with results often being of low significance and not reproducible.
The task would be easier if there were some way to estimate the probable toxicity of a substance before conducting animal tests, so tests can be focused on the substances that look the dodgiest. Toxicologist Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has been working towards this end for years -- his earlier research having been discussed here in 2017.
Toxicologists do already have some ability to link molecular structure and biological activity -- through a scheme known as "read-across", in which an untested chemical is compared to one with a similar structure that has been tested. In 2015, the ECHA authorized use of read-across for chemical evaluation. However, read-across is no more than educated guesswork, with the guesswork requiring considerable education, and it is also difficult to generalize beyond small, well-studied groups of chemicals.
Hartung believes that machine learning can expand the reach of read-across. He has been working with Thomas Luechtefeld, a computer scientist who joined him as a doctoral student in 2013. Machine learning requires piles of good data -- but when the researchers began, they only had data for about 250 chemicals. As discussed in the earlier article, Hartung then built up a database of hundreds of thousands of ECHA toxicity studies, covering thousands of chemicals.
In 2014 and 2015, Luechtefeld implemented a machine learning system that could assess the reports, extract meaningful information from them, and identify patterns from the data. The system correlates chemical features like the presence of particular groups of atoms with measures of hazard such as the median lethal dose in an animal test. The system worked to a degree, but it was really only a proof of concept. They needed much more data.
In 2017, Luechtefeld began to scour public data sets like those from PubChem, run by America's National Institutes of Health. He has acquired data on over 80,000 chemicals, and has been able to correlate their features with 74 types of hazard -- not just medical threats, but also such things as fire hazard and potential to corrupt the ozone layer.
The most recent iteration of his system focuses on nine types of toxicity, including skin irritation, eye irritation, and mutation-causing potential, as determined by animal trials. Given that data, the system can estimate the toxicity of untested chemicals. Instead of a simple single number, such as the median lethal dose in an animal test, the system generates a probability that a substance is hazardous. Anything that scores above 0.8 is obviously hot and needs to be investigated, while anything that scores below 0.2 can be set aside. Anything between those bounds should be treated with caution, until more data is obtained.
Hartung and Luechtefeld, who has now obtained his doctorate, stated in a recent paper that the system's assessments are more accurate than animal testing. That's a grand claim, and it comes along with careful conditions. They are now waiting to hear back from ECHA and the EPA. Right now, nobody thinks any such system is a substitute for testing; all it does is indicate which chemicals ought to be tested first. Given that the task of nailing down chemical safety is overwhelming, the system promises to be a big help, and it will continue to get smarter, as more data is added.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NO MORE BOOZE? An article from CNN.com ("People Are Sick Of Drinking. Investors Are Betting On The 'Sober Curious'" by Sara Ashley O'Brien, 10 June 2019) begins with:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Getaway in Brooklyn was comfortably full for a Saturday night, when I came in to try my first "shrub" - an acidic beverage made from vinegar, fruit, sugar, club soda and zero alcohol. I ordered a carrot-and-ginger shrub and hoped it would be palatable. I was pleasantly surprised, drank the whole thing and, voila, was not even tipsy. Even more exciting: my bill. It was a mere $15 for two drinks and a bread bowl -- to soak up the non-alcoholic beverages, of course.
END QUOTE
Getaway is a "sober bar", which are becoming more popular in New York City. The idea is to provide an environment for socialization that doesn't involve alcohol. Americans are becoming more concerned with wellness, with a corresponding decline of interest in alcoholic beverages. Everyone is drinking less beer, while millennials are less interested in alcohol of any sort.
With sales of alcoholic beverages on the downslope, big alcohol companies -- from Heineken to AB InBev, the owner of popular beer brands such as Budweiser -- are rethinking their businesses, investing in non-alcoholic or low-alcohol drinks. Startup investors and entrepreneurs are also looking to cater to the "sober curious", the people are reconsidering their use of alcohol.
For example, consider the startup company Kin Euphorics, which has introduced its first product, named "High Rhode." It's made from plant extracts and supplements; the company is careful to say that High Rhode isn't snake oil, it isn't guaranteed to deal with any affliction. It just addresses a market niche for those who want something to drink, but don't want to consume alcohol or get a sugar fix. Jen Batchelor, cofounder and CEO of Kin, says that people tend to think that if they don't want to drink alcohol, they should just stay home. She says: "If those are the two choices, then something is broken. You can do the 'feel good' thing and still be out at a bar, still take a client out."
Big Tech companies are interested in startups like Kin as of late, and also have their own reasons for an escape from alcohol. Big Tech has been under increasing public scrutiny and criticism. After Google came under fire for mishandling sexual harassment cases, the company announced changes to its work culture, one element being to discourage excessive drinking. Google announced: Harassment is never acceptable and alcohol is never an excuse. But one of the most common factors among the harassment complaints made today at Google is that the perpetrator had been drinking (~20% of cases)."
Arguably taking the trend to an extreme, another startup named "Liquid Death" is peddling canned water. As the name suggests, all it's got to offer is marketing zest, the tagline being: "Murder Your Thirst". Ridiculous? Not necessarily. According to CEO and co-founder Mike Cessario, the original idea was to cater to heavy metal and punk rock fans, allowing them to keep hydrated while they appear to be chugging a can of beer or energy drink. It also has appeal as a bit of a gag.
Does the trend away from alcohol signal a new era of voluntary Prohibition? That's unlikely; people have been drinking alcohol for a long, long time, and they're not about to give it up. However, it's always nice to have alternatives.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GET IN LINE (1): As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Waiting Game" by Jacopo Prisco, 15 February 2019), when we're out in public, we spend time waiting in lines. Sometimes that's not a problem, but it becomes troublesome if we have to wait too long. Even if it's not a slow line, it's troublesome if the experience is made to feel indifferently inconvenient, or unfair -- nobody likes line-cutting, it's a form of bullying.
A considerable amount of work has been put into the design and operation of queues. According to Don Norman, a user experience researcher and director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD):
BEGIN QUOTE:
A wait is a psychological state. In that way, it's a matter of design, of trying to understand the psychology of the people waiting but also their boredom and frustration. It requires a human-centered design perspective, from the points of view of both the people doing the servicing and the people waiting in line. That isn't hard, but you have to develop a sensitivity to it or realize why it might be important.
END QUOTE
Part of help people deal with waits is to adjust their perceptions. For example, consider the mirrors often found near elevators. According to the story, the mirrors started being installed during the postwar building boom, when people began to complain about long waits for an elevator. Richard Larson, a queuing theory expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, comments:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Putting mirrors next to elevators is a way to distract people for a minute or two, so they can adjust their ties or their hair and make sure they're looking great. You can do something to reduce the complaints even though the duration of the wait remains unchanged.
END QUOTE
According to another tale, an airport got complaints about the long wait at the baggage carousel. The airport tried to speed up baggage delivery; that failing, they then moved the arrival gates to outside the main terminal. That meant a relatively long walk for arriving passengers to get to the baggage carousel, with the baggage available with little or no wait. It also meant baggage didn't have to be hauled across the terminal to reach ground transport. The complaints faded out.
The study of queues was invented over a century ago by Danish engineer A.K. Erland, who devised formulas to calculate how many lines and operators telephone companies needed for a smooth service. Larson says: "He invented queuing theory and even though about 10,000 articles have been written on queuing theory since, his formulas are still the most widely used today."
Queueing theory has both a mathematical and a psychological basis. Larson recalls, with some annoyance, that years ago he was at a department store, being forced to wait while others got service. He calls this "slip & skip," a violation of the "first come, first served" rule. Despite the fact that slip & skip implies somebody wins while somebody loses, Larson points out that it's not a zero-sum game. People who win on the skip may not notice it, while those who suffer the slip can be furious -- cutting into lines sometimes leads to violent confrontations. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (65): Despite positive accomplishments, the story of the Grant Administration was one of missed opportunities. In an environment where deals meant much more than ideals, the goal of reforming Southern society and ensuring civil rights was gradually forgotten. Most of the Radicals were gone, survived in Congress by opportunists like Ben Butler, who found the gilded postwar environment perfectly satisfactory. Most Northerners, busy with a booming economy, only wanted to put the war behind them. Before the war, abolitionists had been able to influence a broader public -- but now slavery was officially dead, and as far as most folks were concerned, that was good enough. Although the Freedman's Bureau had obtained another extension in 1868, its functions were trimmed, and it was shut down at the end of June 1872.
While tens of thousands of Southern officials had been disenfranchised after the war, the North was tiring of vindictiveness. A General Amnesty Act was passed in 1872 that restored the full rights of all but a few hundred. In the meantime, the various armed and militant white supremacist groups in the South were busy undermining Republican rule through harassment and intimidation. Stories of murders and other atrocities filtered North, but the public had become indifferent.
The Republican state governments began to fall, and by 1876 the only states that were still under Republican control were South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Some carpetbaggers assimilated, working agreeably with the new order; those who didn't get with the program were chased out, in a few cases murdered. Black people were put on the bottom of the social order.
In fact, in some ways slavery returned. States had set up programs to obtain revenue by farming out convict labor, and as the scheme began to be profitable, black people were often arrested on trivial pretexts and put to work in chains. Southern governments began to implement "Jim Crow" laws -- the name being derived from a pre-war black-face "minstrel show" character -- that were, in effect, lightly-disguised versions of the older Black Codes, intended to keep black people in their place, segregating them from mainstream white society and curtailing their voting rights.
In a last-ditch effort to halt the rollback of social reform in the South, the US Congress had passed a "Civil Rights Act" in 1875, originally proposed by Sumner and Butler five years earlier, to ban discrimination in schools, places of public accommodation, transportation, and juries. It would prove ineffective.
The Presidential election of 1876 was the last major act in Reconstruction. There was some consideration for Grant running once more, but although he retained his stature as one of the great heroes of the war, few retained any confidence in his political leadership, such as it was. The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, who had a good war record, had been governor of Ohio for three terms, and wanted civil service reform. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a reformist governor of New York, and hoped to win thanks to popular disgust with the widespread corruption of the Grant Administration, and of America of the Gilded Age in general. The vote was very close, and the result was bitterly contested to the point where a new rebellion seemed possible.
The swing factor in the contest was the electoral votes of the three Southern states still in Republican hands. To break the impasse, prominent Republican and Democrat leaders went into extended negotiation sessions, and in the end Hayes became POTUS 19. The Southern Democrats played a controlling role in the negotiations, and the Republicans offered them a better deal.
The agreement was known as the "Compromise of 1877". Hayes quickly withdrew Federal troops from the South, though it appears that he had planned to do so anyway, and that the real concessions to the Southern Democrats were economic. However, the withdrawal of troops allowed the Southern Democrats to "declare victory" to their own people, a useful face-saving gesture after having backed a Republican nominee for the presidency. With the troops gone, the last Southern Republican state governments finally fell. Hayes wanted a more egalitarian society, but proved unable to exert any influence.
Reconstruction was over. The South had lost the war but had managed to win the peace. It was the sole consolation of defeat and a demotion of the South in national affairs relative to prewar days -- with the irony that the backwards social order retained by the South helped perpetuate that diminished influence.
Grant would not be remembered as America's worst president, but he would certainly not be ranked as among the best. He was not corrupt himself, but corruption swirled around him, and his failure to stop Jim Crow would have lasting and pernicious effects on America. The only mitigation for Grant is that, under the circumstances, nobody else had much chance of doing better. There was only so much the Civil War's victors could do to alter the social order of the South; Southerners were more determined in resisting than anyone could have reasonably been in coercing them. The Grant Administration did have its successes, notably in foreign policy. The Union also continued its expansion under Grant, with Colorado becoming the 38th state in 1876. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for June included:
-- 05 JUN 19 / SMALLSATS x 7: A Long March 11 booster was launched from an ocean platform in the Yellow Sea at 0406 UTC (local time - 8) to put seven smallsats into orbit. They included:
Jilin 1 High Resolution 03A was the latest satellite in the Jilin 1 Earth observation satellite constellation. It had a launch mass of 42 kilograms (93 pounds); it could obtain imagery with a resolution of a meter, over a swath width of 17 kilometers (10.5 miles).
11 Jilin 1 satellites have been launched since 2015. The Jilin 1 constellation was developed in China's Jilin Province, being China's first self-developed remote sensing satellite for commercial use. The launches have included:
The plan is to have 16 satellites in orbit by the end of 2019, providing a baseline system. The second-phase plan is a constellation of 60 satellites in orbit in the 2020s, to provide imagery of any place on Earth on a half-hour interval. The third-phase plan is to have 138 satellites in orbit in the 2030s, to provide a 10-minute revisit interval.
-- 12 JUN 19 / RADARSAT CONSTELLATION -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1417 UTC (local time + 7) to put the "Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM)" for the Canadian Space Agency. The satellites were to support all-weather maritime surveillance, disaster management, and ecosystem monitoring for the Canadian government and international users.
RCM was the third in the series of the Canadian Space Agency's "Radarsat" satellites. The first, "Radarsat 1", was launched aboard a Delta II rocket on 4 November 1995; the satellite had a design life of five years, but exceeded that by twelve years, finally expiring in 2013. "Radarsat 2" was launched in 2007 by a Russian Soyuz-Fregat booster, being designed for a 7-year service life. At last notice, it was still in service.
The three identical satellites of RCM were built by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA Corporation) of Vancouver, a subsidiary of Colorado's Maxar Technologies, and based on the SmallSAT MAC 200 platform developed by Bristol Aerospace. Each satellite had a launch mass of 1,430 kilograms (3,150 pounds), and a design life of seven years. Like the earlier Radarsat spacecraft, each RCM satellite carried a C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload. In addition to the SAR payload, each satellite carried four Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers to track maritime shipping.
The Falcon booster first stage performed a successful soft landing in California.
-- 20 JUN 19 / AT&T T-16, EUTELSAT 7C -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2141 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "AT&T T-16" AKA "DirecTV 16" and "Eutelsat 7C" geostationary comsats into orbit.
T-16 was built by Airbus Defense and Space. It was based on the Eurostar 3000 LX satellite platform, with a hydrazine main engine and electric thrusters for station-keeping maneuvers. It had a launch mass of 6,330 kilograms (13,955 pounds), a payload of Ku / Ka-band transponders, and a design life of 15 years. T-16 was intended for direct-to-home TV broadcast, as part of the DirectTV constellation of comsats.
AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015; the brand name is being phased out. Direct-to-home broadcast is in decline, as video streaming on broadband networks becomes more important. T-16 was placed in the geostationary slot at 100.85 degrees west longitude to serve the USA and neighboring regions. The T-16 satellite was be co-located with the T-4S, T-8 and T-9S broadcasting satellites, and replaced the T-15 satellite.
Eutelsat 7C was built by Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California -- Maxar was the product of a 2017 merger between DigitalGlobe and MDA, and absorbed Space Systems / Loral. The satellite was based on the Maxar 1300-series bus; it had a payload of more than 40 Ku-band transponders, and featured an all-electric propulsion system. Eutelsat 7C was placed in the geostationary slot at 7 degrees east longitude, to serve Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. It replaced the Eutelsat 7A satellite, launched in 2004; Eutelsat 7A was relocated to another geostationary slot.
-- 24 JUN 19 / BEIDOU 3 IGSO2 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1805 UTC (local time - 8) to put a "Beidou" navigation satellite into orbit. The satellite was put into inclined geostationary orbit, being given the series number of "Beidou 46".
-- 27 JUN 19 / STP 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0630 UTC (local time + 4) on the US Air Force's "Space Test Program 2" mission, carrying 24 payloads. The biggest payload was the "Demonstration & Science Experiments (DSX)" satellite from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). It carried payloads to observe the space environment, notably including a long deployable boom and truss.
The next most significant set of payloads was the six identical "Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC 2)" satellites, developed by a collaboration of the US National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Taiwan's National Space Organization, with instrument contributions from the US Air Force. The prime contractor was Surrey Satellite Technology LTD (SSTL) of the UK. Each COSMIC 2 satellite weighed 300 kilograms (660 pounds); they established a weather observation network to map data on temperature, pressure, density and water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. Other microsatellite payloads included:
The rest of the payloads were CubeSats:
Total payload weight was 3,700 kilograms (8,160 pounds), which was a very light load for a Falcon Heavy -- but the upper stage had to perform a number of maneuvers to put its payloads into their proper orbits, so the payload weight was proportionate to the task.
The strap-on boosters performed a soft landing in Florida; they had both been previously used on the Arabsat 6A launch in April 2019. The core stage was to land on the SpaceX recovery barge, well downrange, but it missed the landing. Half the payload fairing was recovered, the first time that a recovery attempt was even partly successful.
-- 29 JUN 19 / MAKE IT RAIN -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 0430 UTC (local time - 11) to put seven smallsats into orbit. They included:
Total payload weight was 80 kilograms (176 pounds). The flight was arranged by the Spaceflight company. With this flight, all six Electron missions since the failed first launch have been successful. The mission was nicknamed "Make it Rain", in honor of the damp weather common in Seattle, the location of Spaceflight's headquarters
Rocket Lab is working a launch pad at Wallops Island in Virginia, which will be operational by the end of 2019. The company is also developing its own smallsat bus, the "Photon", based on the kick stage sometimes flown on the Electron.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PLASTIC ROADS: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("On The Plastic Highway", 13 September 2018), only about a tenth of the plastic produced since the 1950s has been recycled. Most of that plastic is in landfills, though a lot of it litters the environment. The problem of plastic waste is going to get worse before it gets better: about 380 million tonnes of it were turned out in 2018.
It might not seem relevant to point out that's over three times the current production of asphalt. At first sight, there's no obvious connection between asphalt, which is mixed with aggregate material to build roads, and plastics. However, having said that, the question jumps out: why not build roads with recycled plastics instead?
In September 2018, the Dutch town of Zwolle opened a 30-meter (100-foot) long bicycle track, made from 70% recycled plastic, with the rest being polypropylene. The track is a test of a product named "PlasticRoad", being developed by two Dutch firms -- KWS, a road builder, and Wavin, a manufacturer of plastic pipe -- working with French oil giant Total.
As envisioned, PlasticRoad is to be factory-made as modular blocks, with the sections to then be hauled to road site, and laid down on a prepared bed. The sections are hollow, to accommodate drainage channels, as well as conduits for gas and electricity. For the Zwolle project, the modules were 2.4 meters long and 3 meters wide (7.9 x 9.8 feet), being fitted with sensors to monitor variables such as temperature, flexure, and water flow though the drainage channels. A second pilot cycleway is being built in the nearby town of Giethoorn.
The inventors aim to ultimately make the sections entirely from recycled plastic, with modules used to built footpaths, car parks, railway platforms, and car-carrying streets. The modules could contain sensors for monitoring traffic, ultimately leading to "smart roads" that can assist robot vehicles, and recharge electric cars wirelessly.
What about durability? The companies, who are admittedly not impartial on the matter, claim the plastic roads should last two to three times as long as conventional roads -- and cost less, because construction times would be cut to two-thirds. Anti-slip surfaces can be fabricated using aggregates like crushed stones embedded in the plastic. When sections wear out, they can be individually replaced, and then recycled in turn. For now, however, engineers are checking to see how the roadbed handles wear and tear, and if the hollow structure leads to resonances that could make the road too noisy.
* A less radical approach to using recycled plastics in road construction is to stay with conventional construction techniques, but mix recycled plastics with asphalt. A road is being built this way on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, to test a number of specialist roadmaking plastics developed by MacRebur, a British firm. According to Toby McCartney, one of the firm's founders, MacRebur uses plastics that are not easily or cheaply recycled, and so traditionally have ended up in landfills.
MacRebur cleans and sorts the plastic, then grinds the waste into flakes or pellets. The plan is that this part of the process will be performed at the road construction site, so that local waste is used to produce local roads. The plastics are not merely filler; each mix can contain 20 or so different polymers for specific surfaces. One mix, for example, might be useful for a bus lane that handles heavy loads, while another might be useful for roundabouts, being made to flex under lateral forces, instead of tearing. Extremes of temperature can also be dealt with. The plastics also make the roadway more watertight, preventing seepage that could lead to potholes.
MacRebur's plastic mixes have already been used in roads, car parks, and airport runways in various parts of the world. One of the oldest projects is a stretch of road in Cumbria, in north-west Britain, which is extensively used by heavy vehicles. This road used to have to be resurfaced twice a year or so, but it's still going strong after two years. When resurfacing is needed, the material can be recycled again.
The plastic additive is from more than a tenth to up to a quarter cheaper than asphalt, so it is cost-effective. At present, no more than 10% of the mix is plastic, but McCartney says that could go up to 25% with experience.
McCartney says he got the idea after a visit to India, where plastics are used to fill potholes. Plastic waste is collected by trash pickers, to be packed into a pothole, which is then soaked with diesel and set alight. It is a very cheap and dirty solution, but it is something of a fix. India also makes roads using plastic and asphalt mixes, and the idea is catching on in Australia as well. The idea that pollution is nothing more than a misplaced resource is optimistic -- but it's not always wrong, either.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CONTRAIL CONTROVERSY: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Aviation's Dirty Secret" by Katie Camero, 28 June 2019), the aviation industry has, unsurprisingly, a hefty carbon footprint. Now a study shows that the contrails left by high-flying jetliners have an even bigger warming effect, one that will triple by 2050.
Jetliners leave contrails behind them as they cruise through the thin, cold air at high altitudes. Water vapor condenses on the soot left by the jet engine exhausts, freezing to create cirrus clouds that can linger for minutes or hours. It would seem contrails would work against warming by reflecting sunlight -- but the ice crystals trap heat that would otherwise escape into space. While low-level clouds do have a cooling effect, contrail-formed clouds result in warming.
A 2011 study suggested that contrails contributes more to atmospheric warming than all the carbon dioxide produced by planes since the dawn of aviation. The warming will get worse as air traffic grows, with some estimates suggesting global air traffic will quadruple by the year 2050.
Atmospheric physicist Ulrike Burkhardt -- of the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Wessling, and one of the authors of the 2011 report -- wanted to know what the long-term effects of contrails would be. Working with colleagues, she created a new climate model that was an innovation, in that it gave contrail clouds their own category, separate from natural clouds. That allowed them to model distinct qualities of the human-made clouds that affected the rest of the model.
The researchers modeled the effect of global contrail cloud coverage in 2006, a year for which they had accurate aviation data. Working off estimates for future air traffic and emissions, they projected the model out to 2050, to find that the warming effect of contrails would triple by that time. They altered the model to account for a 50 reduction in soot emissions, which resulted in a 15% reduction in warming. Even if soot were reduced by 90%, it wouldn't bring the climate impact of air travel back down to 2006 levels.
Burkhardt isn't optimistic that much can or will be done. Andrew Gettelman, a cloud physicist with the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, admits that contrail cirrus clouds are a complex problem, but their effect is still minor compared with the overall quantities of CO2 belched by society: "If all we had were contrails, there wouldn't be global warming." He adds that it's still important for the aviation industry to understand the science and "get their impact right."
ED: There's a website titled CONTRAILSCIENCE.org that discusses contrail science and mythology, with a section on contrail mitigation. The simplest way to avoid contrails is to fly at an altitude where the air is warm enough to prevent contrails from forming. The Lockheed U-2 spyplane, developed in the 1950s, had a low-tech solution, with the pilot using a rear-view mirror to see if he was leaving a contrail. Modern aircraft, like the Northrop Grumman B-2 stealth bomber, use a lidar detection system instead.
Airliners cruise at altitudes where they have optimum flight efficiency, so adjusting altitude to get rid of contrails isn't practical. Soot emissions, as discussed above, could be reduced, but that won't buy much. Military aircraft have also suppressed contrails by spraying chemicals into the engine exhaust, but this is expensive, and the chemicals are toxic; greatly increasing their use is not practical. One interesting idea is to use a microwave or ultrasonic beam to break up the ice crystals. This is a promising idea, but nobody's demonstrated if it's practical yet -- and the airlines won't be under any pressure to adopt it, unless the regulatory agencies make them do it.
There has been talk of using jetliners to disperse chemical to make contrails that reflect sunlight, reducing solar heating to the planet. It would be nice to have a neat solution that cancels out the contrail problem, but that's likely way too optimistic to be true.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* IMPROVING THE POTATO (4): Pim Lindhout -- head of R&D for Solynta, a startup company in Wageningen, the Netherlands, that he helped found in 2006 -- is working on an approach that would bypass much of the labor in improving potatoes, by attempting to produce hybrid offspring from true-breeding parent lines. Hybrid breeding is not news, it revolutionized corn production in the 20th century, allowing breeders to readily create high-yielding varieties that have what is known as "hybrid vigor".
The first step is to generate make inbred parent lines, which have identical alleles on all chromosome copies, meaning each pair of chromosomes is a perfect twin. The result is that the offspring of such true-breeding parents will inherit a predictable set of traits. That's done by repeated self-pollination over many generations. As is expected with highly inbred organisms, they tend to be impaired in certain ways -- but when breeders cross two inbred lines and sort out the best results, the first-generation offspring are healthy, and have beneficial traits from both parents.
Potato breeders traditionally believed that this approach could not work for potatoes. One major difficulty is that many potato species can't fertilize themselves. In 1998, researchers found a gene that somehow allows one wild species of potato to self-fertilize. When that gene is bred into other species, it lets them self-fertilize as well -- but the resulting plants are weaklings, producing puny tubers.
Undiscouraged, researchers went on to inbreed those weaklings by self-fertilizing them, generation after generation, until they ended up with potatoes featuring matched chromosomes. This would have been very difficult with ordinary cultivated potatoes, which are quadruploid, and so breeders have either worked with varieties that are diploid, or manipulated quadruploid varieties to become diploid. Lindhout published the first report of inbred diploid lines on 2011, and reported that he had been to come up with ones that are vigorous and productive. Other researchers then reported they had created inbred diploid lines.
Solynta sees diploid inbred plants as revolutionary. They will make it possible to combine traits in commercial varieties with certainty, ease, and speed. They will also simplify efforts to add desirable traits directly from wild relatives while eliminating their many drawbacks, such as small tubers or poor flavor. Such undesirable traits can be bred out of the descendants of a diploid cross through a well-known technique known as "backcrossing".
In 2016, Solynta conducted its first field trials of hybrid seedlings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in 17 locations across Europe, with the plants growing well. Although Solynta hasn't come up with a commercial variety yet, the company is planning to introduce new varieties for European and African markets. Other firms, including large seed companies, are also working on hybrid potatoes.
Basic research could benefit from the work. While commercial seed firms generally regard their varieties as proprietary, Solynta plans to release a line, named "Solynthus", so that scientists can study its genetics. It's in Solynta's benign self-interest to do so, since investigation of the Solynthus genome could reveal new options for potato improvement.
Another advantage of hybrid potatoes is that they can be planted with true seeds, not seed tubers. That means a spread could be planted with a small bag of seeds, not a truckload of seed tubers. That would be a particular benefit to small farmers in the developing world, since it would greatly simplify their logistics. The seeds are also not anywhere near as likely to carry diseases.
Hybrid potato seeds aren't a cure-all. For example, young plants grow more quickly and vigorously from tubers than from seeds, which means seeds would have a disadvantage in some climates. They also haven't arrived yet, and until they do, farmers will have to work with the resources at hand. Back in Peru's Sacred Valley Peru's Sacred Valley, Ellis and others from CIP have teamed up with small-scale farmers who belong to an association known as "Potato Park", which is dedicated to preserving hundreds of local potato varieties, planting them in test plots.
Some of them don't do well, others are promising. Pedro Condori Quispe, one of the park's growers, is optimistic that the communities will find a way to keep growing potatoes here. Potato farmers, he says with a smile, "are used to challenges." [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (64): Ulysses S. Grant was elected the 18th President of the United States in 1868; he would serve two terms. Andrew Johnson, incidentally, became the only US president to return to Congress, being elected a senator from Tennessee in 1874 -- though he died of a stroke only a few months after taking office. It is an interesting little question as to why few ex-presidents wanted to go back to Congress, and not one of them became a state governor after being president.
In any case, although Grant had done much to destroy slavery and preserve the Union, any analysis of him as a presidential candidate showed he left much to be desired. He was a hero, yes, but he had no background in politics, and in fact his indifference to politics was one of the things that had made him successful as a general. Grant was a generally honest man, to be sure, but many who backed him for the presidency saw him as a convenient figurehead whose popularity would get him elected -- while they actually ran things, once he was in the White House.
Grant felt that his role as president was to implement laws passed by Congress, which reduced the administrative branch of government to dancing on the strings of Congressional intrigues. Any opportunity for civil rights was lost for almost a century, and Republicanism acquired its reputation as a party of and for the privileged that it never managed to shake. The drift towards the mercenary was all but inevitable, America having entered into a "Gilded Age", where money and privilege meant a great deal, while principles and responsibility weren't so important. His administration was marked by corruption and scandals; Grant himself was never implicated in any of the scandals, but he was phlegmatic in dealing with it.
Nonetheless, the Grant Administration did have its substantial accomplishments, notably creation of the "Department of Justice" in 1870. It was a great expansion of the office of the attorney general, who became the head of the new department; it acted as the law enforcement arm of the Federal government, at the outset focusing on the Klan and other Southern white-supremacy groups.
Grant also established another innovation in government, by appointing the first "special prosecutor". In 1875, a scandal came to light, involving liquor distillers bribing government officials to evade whiskey taxes. To avoid conflicts of interest, Grant appointed General John Henderson, once a senator from Missouri, to perform an independent investigation of the "Whiskey Ring". It was characteristic of Grant that, when Henderson identified General Orville Babcock, the president's personal secretary, as a member of the ring, Grant fired Henderson, replacing him with James Broadhead, an attorney. The investigation yielded 110 convictions and recovered over $3 million in taxes -- but Grant's interference in the investigation did nothing to improve the bad smell of his administration.
Another achievement was the "Treaty of Washington" with Britain in 1871. It resolved a package of complaints between the two countries, the top of the list being Union claims against Britain for construction and sale of commerce-raiding vessels to the Confederacy. The raiders, most notably the CSS ALABAMA, had roamed the seas to inflict severe pain on Union shipping. The British had complaints of their own against the Union, and there was ongoing squabbling over US fishing rights in Canadian waters.
As with the Jay Treaty almost a century before, the two parties agreed to hand the issue off to arbitration by a joint commission acceptable to both parties. The USA ended up being awarded $15.5 million USD -- multiply that by about 20 to give contemporary US dollars; the actual award was larger, but reduced by British claims against the USA. Britain also provided an apology for building the commerce raiders, but did not admit to fault, while the Americans got fishing rights in Canadian waters. The Canadians were not happy about that, and it would remain a running sore point.
The 1871 Treaty of Washington was seen as a highly successful exercise in the use of arbitration to resolve international disputes, and it also worked out far better than the Jay Treaty, doing much to reduce tensions between the USA and Britain, which had reached threshold-of-combat levels during the Civil War. It did not, of course, result in perfect harmony between the two nations.
In a more obscure, but still significant, exercise in international relations, the USA became a founding member of what is now known as the "Universal Postal Union (UPU)", created by the Treaty of Bern in 1874. Before the creation of the UPU, postal treaties were established between pairs of nations, to allow the two countries to exchange mails and parcels through the posts. In 1863 the USA, finding this a cumbersome process, called for an "International Postal Congress" to come up with a truly international scheme for postal service.
The end result was the formation of the UPU, the actual prime mover in the effort being Heinrich von Stephan, the Prussian Minister of Posts. It is not clear if this was the first multilateral, effectively global, treaty signed by the USA -- but it was clearly a pioneering effort in that direction. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Enormous Energy Kite Promises A New Way To Harness Wind Power" by Denise Chow, 4 December 2018), the idea of flying kites to obtain wind energy is not new. In a recent such exercise, Makani -- a firm out of Alameda, California, one of the components of Alphabet's secretive Google X lab -- has developed a prototype power kite. It's actually in the configuration of a tethered sailplane, the tether transferring the power to a ground station. It has a wingspan of 26 meters (85 feet) and eight rotors, with four under and four over the wings, to generate power. It follows a smaller demonstrator with four rotors.
The kite's eight generators driven by the rotors can act as motors to allow the kite to climb to operational altitude. The kite orbits in a circle at an altitude of about 300 meters (1,000 feet), generating about 600 kilowatts. That's equivalent to a rather small ground-based wind turbine -- but the kite has access to stronger, less turbulent, and more persistent winds.
The company also says that, unlike a ground-based wind turbine, the kite is transportable, being made of lightweight carbon composites, and could be quickly sent to a location in need of emergency power, or which needs to set up a power system quickly. It is unclear just how competitive the price is compared to a ground-based wind turbine, and there are no specifics on when the kite system will be fielded.
* As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Chinese Schools Are Using 'Smart Uniforms' To Track Their Students' Locations" by Chaim Gartenberg, 28 December 2018) are now adopting digitally-enabled "smart uniforms" that allow them to track the locations of their students. Each uniform has chips in the shoulders, which allow tracking when and where the students enter or exit the school. There are facial recognition systems at the entrances to make sure students haven't switched uniforms. Any kids who try to leave during school hours trip an alarm.
The uniforms are washable. According to the Guizhou Guanyu Technology Company, which developed them, the uniforms outfit can endure up to 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) and 500 washes. The uniforms also can tell if a student falls asleep in class, and allow students to make purchases -- in conjunction with facial recognition or fingerprint to confirm the purchase.
The uniforms are not standard yet, but they have been used in a number of China's schools since 2016. In principle, the uniforms could be used to track students after they go home for the day, but a principal says: "We choose not to check the accurate location of students after school."
* As discussed by an article from ENGADGET.com ("Caper's Smart Shopping Cart Uses AI To Skip Checkout Lines" by Saqib Shah, 11 January 2019), Amazon.com has been leading the charge towards "smart" stores with the Amazon Go concept, in which surveillance systems allow people to simply walk out with purchases and have them automatically paid for.
That requires quite a bit of infrastructure to get to work. Now a startup named Caper is taking an alternative approach with a "smart" shopping cart. The Caper Cart has an interactive display and card swiper -- presumably a near-field reader will be added in the future. A customer scans barcodes as items go into the cart, to then pay electronically when the cart is loaded up. The display not only tracks purchases, it can direct customers to deals. Presumably, the cart has location capability, so it can flag deals that are near at hand, and wireless communications, to keep it up-to-date.
The scheme is being trialed in two stores in New York. Caper is now working to get rid of scanning by using cameras in the cart with AI product recognition and a weight sensor. The company plans to expand to 150 more chains this year, and to develop a smart shopping basket.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GENE TESTING & THE LAW: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("As Gene Testing Surges, Lawsuits Aren't Far Behind" by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, 7 May 2019), genetic testing has become commonplace. Inevitably, it is becoming more entangled with legal complications, with doctors and other health care providers already being slapped with lawsuits -- sometimes being held liable for how they offer, interpret, and counsel patients about genetic tests.
The laws aren't keeping up. That was a conclusion of a three-year, $2 million USD project named "LawSeq", which was intended to define a legal foundation for genetic medicine. According to Ellen Wright Clayton -- an expert in law and genetics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN, and co-leader of the LawSeq project: "To say that this is a gnarly issue is a wild understatement."
Doctors have long had to care for patients while protecting themselves from lawsuits. Traditionally, they did so by adhering to a legal "standard of care", closely linked to medical standards. However, genomic medicine is new and still changing rapidly, so the standards aren't there. A doctor assessing how much a particular gene variant increases a patient's risk of breast cancer or heart disease ends up walking into a legal minefield.
Trying to dodge the issue isn't an option. One lawsuit came in response to the death of 16-year-old Joseph Polaski in Pennsylvania in 2010. He died from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, two years after his father had an electrocardiogram (EKG) as part of a medical checkup. The family went to court, with the claim that the EKG results should have set off alarm bells for Polaski's father's doctor. The doctor, according to the lawsuit, should have prescribed genetic testing for both father and son, despite the fact that the doctor had never treated the son. A jury decided for the family in 2015, setting a precedent.
In another case, a California woman in California was prescribed carbamazepine, a seizure medication, by a physician, who she only dealt with over email. The drug can cause a severe skin reaction in some people of Asian ancestry, with the drug's label recommending genetic testing for patients of Asian descent before they take the drug. The woman didn't have an Asian family name, and the doctor never met her face-to-face; the patient took the drug without being told of the hazards, and almost died. The case was settled out of court, with the conclusion kept private.
To make things worse, what genetic testing can uncover today isn't what it could uncover a year ago. What is doctor's or lab's liability when a new discovery affects a patient after earlier consultation or treatment? Reed Pyeritz -- a medical geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania -- runs into this situation about once a month, and assumes it will happen more often in the future. Pyeritz says: "We try our darndest to recontact somebody who's had a reinterpretation -- but people move, they change their cellphones."
They're usually reachable, but not always. In 2018, Pyeritz and others published a policy statement on behalf of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics with "points to consider" about recontacting. The document suggested physicians do their best to recontact patients with new information, but added that providers should warn patients they can't promise to get in touch with them if the patients aren't keeping the channel open.
A study published in 2018 by Gary Marchant -- a law professor at Arizona State University in Tempe -- and his colleague Rachel Lindor -- now an emergency medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix -- found 202 genomics malpractice cases. The rate of lawsuits seems to be level for now, but about 60% of genomics cases resulted in a payout to the plaintiff, compared with at most 22% of those in other medical malpractice areas.
Marchant says many other cases are resolved out of court, and so remain largely invisible. Once, while chatting with an attorney for an insurance company, he wondered aloud about the scarcity of cases involving sensitivity to the blood-thinning drug warfarin. Genetic testing easily detects the sensitivity, but Marchant suspected doctors were failing to check for it. The attorney replied; "Oh, we've had two. We settle them right away, before they're filed."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* LIBRA CRYPTOCURRENCY: As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("Facebook Reveals Digital Currency Details", 18 June 2019), social media giant Facebook has now revealed plans to launch a cryptocurrency, named "Libra", or more informally "FaceCoin", in 2020. Company officials say people would be able to make payments with Libra using Facebook apps, as well as the messaging service WhatsApp; other companies are on board as well.
Although Facebook is the prime mover behind Libra, it doesn't "own" the currency. It is under the control of a collective of companies, named the "Libra Association", headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with dozens of members -- all of which accept and use Libra. Current members include:
Facebook is of course a member, through the company's "Calibra" organization -- that being the name of the Facebook digital wallet as well. Calibra is carefully "firewalled" from the rest of the Facebook organization to help ensure the privacy of Libra users. No doubt other companies will also come up with Libra digital wallets, but they will be compatible with each other. Transactions in Libra will be largely transparent but secure -- being based on an encrypted "Libra blockchain", though it appears not one that is distributed to every user.
The Libra Association is a nonprofit, with businesses making money off it by offering services. The transactions will be performed at no cost, or at less cost than for wire transfers, with Facebook proclaiming:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In time, we hope to offer additional services for people and businesses, such as paying bills with the push of a button, buying a cup of coffee with the scan of a code, or riding your local public transit without needing to carry cash or a metro pass.
END QUOTE
Libra, unlike Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, will be backed by real assets, consolidated in a "Libra reserve" system. It will be pegged to a set of stable currencies -- including the pound, US dollar, Japanese yen, and euro -- at variable exchange rates; in effect, its quantity will be determined by how much formal currency is pumped into it. Only members of the association will be able to generate the currency.
Unlike Bitcoin, Libra is not intended as a challenge to government-issued currencies; it is instead intended to improve access to money for the 1.7 billion adults worldwide, mostly in developing countries, who do not have a bank account.
In addition, Libra will need to be compliant with regulatory regimes in the countries where it is used. At launch, Libra is expected to be legal in about a dozen countries, including the USA. India is a tougher prospect, the government there having been clamping down on cryptocurrencies.
Unsurprisingly, many concerns have been voiced about Facebook pushing a cryptocurrency, since the company has acquired a bad reputation for failing to protect user privacy. To build trust, Facebook has been engaging with governments, central banks and regulators, including officials from the US Treasury and the Bank of England. On the plus side for the company, cryptocurrencies have such a bad reputation, that Facebook ends up looking good by comparison.
* BBC.com ran an essay on the potential of Libra for Africa, written by Andile Masuku, a Zimbabwean living in South Africa, who covers technology. Masuku pointed out that, according to a World Bank report, the cost of sending cash in sub-Saharan Africa is the highest in the world: sending $200 USD costs $19 USD. Masuku called it "daylight robbery", but added that the financial services weren't entirely to blame: many African governments have their fingers in the remittance industry, and make goodly sums off of it.
Of course, by the same coin -- so to speak -- many African governments don't like cryptocurrencies. They do have some legitimate concerns, such as tax evasion, illegal markets, money-laundering, and vulnerability to hacking. Such governments could make use of Libra very difficult if they wanted to. However, Masuku concluded:
BEGIN QUOTE:
With that all said, if on a future Sunday I could send my folks $100 to pay for some cattle vaccines via a WhatsApp message, and they could immediately go to their local agri-mart and make a purchase using Libra -- that would be rather nifty.
END QUOTE
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* IMPROVING THE POTATO (3): After collecting and storing varieties of potatoes, then comes the hard part: transferring desireable genes from wild potatoes into cultivated potatoes. Doing so in the past through cross-breeding was very troublesome and time-consuming, since the wild varieties also had undesireable traits; breeding in good traits and breeding out bad traits could take decades. What makes things worse is that cultivated potatoes are "quadruploid", with four copies of their twelve chromosomes -- humans are "duploid", with only two copies of each of their chromosomes. It is very hard to make such potatoes "breed true', which is why potato farmers propagate their crop by planting bits of "seed tuber," which yield genetically identical plants.
Genetic analysis has helped speed up the process. To find out if seedlings have inherited a trait such as disease resistance, breeders can easily test for genetic "markers" associated with that trait, and not have to wait for the plants to mature, then expose them to the disease. Even with such aids, a potato breeder must screen up to 100,000 offspring per year. It can take 15 years or more to find one with the right traits, properly test it, and generate enough seed tubers to distribute to farmers.
It's not easy to even improve existing varieties, since introducing a new trait is likely to interfere with existing traits. That's why That's why classic, widely grown varieties of potatoes, such as the russet burbank, still remain standards.
There are breeders who are willing to do the work, and they can get results. In 2017, for example, CIP released four new varieties in Kenya, obtained by of crosses from established breeding lines. In field trials, the new potato plants maintained yields with 20% less rainfall and temperatures higher by 3 degrees Celsius. That shows there is still genetic diversity in existing breeding lines -- but researchers are concerned that diversity isn't deep enough to meet challenges posed by climate change, or enable other improvements.
The wild plants, however, hold valuable, untapped genetic diversity. Organizations such as EMBRAPA are working hard to screen through derivatives of Brazilian wild species, while in Lima, the Crop Trust has funded CIP to test wild varieties for promising traits even before any breeding begins. In 2013, center researchers started to characterize 12 wild species collected 30 years ago.
Others have accepted the inevitable and are working with genetic modification (GM). CIP's Marc Ghislain and colleagues, for example, have plugged new genes into existing commercial potato varieties. They took three genes for resistance to late blight from wild relatives, then added them to varieties of potato popular in East Africa. The process is much easier than trying to achieve similar results through cross-breeding.
The engineered varieties have proved successful in three years of field tests in Uganda, and are undergoing final studies for regulators. Transgenic potatoes that resist late blight have already been commercialized in the United States and Canada. Since the genes inserted into the potatoes are from other varieties of potatoes, the engineered varieties are less controversial than organisms that are modified with genes from entirely different species.
However, the GM approach has a limitation, in that it only works well with traits controlled by single genes, such as disease resistance and tolerance of bruising. It doesn't work well when the target is a complex physiological trait governed by many genes, such as water-use efficiency. For now, the only way to obtain such a trait is with laborious traditional breeding. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (63): The 14th Amendment guaranteed civil rights; it did not guarantee political rights, most significantly the right to vote. Ironically, while Congress pushed black suffrage in the South, black men didn't have the right to vote in many states of the North. Southerners were quick to point out that the North was forcing rules on the South that Northern states didn't follow themselves. This hypocrisy was far too blatant, and so the Radicals devised the 15th Amendment of the Constitution.
The amendment was voted through by Congress in February 1868. Congress made it clear to reluctant ex-Confederate states that their readmission was dependent on ratifying the 15th Amendment. The 15th Amendment was enacted in February 1870, much to the joy of black Americans and their white sympathizers. It was simple, like the 13th Amendment:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
END QUOTE
This only meant males: if white males were allowed to vote, then black males were allowed to vote as well. At the time, females didn't have the vote. The 15th Amendment led to controversy among pioneering feminists, since it only gave all men the right to vote; some of the feminists felt it was a step in the right direction, others felt it was a misstep. Women's rights were an issue to be addressed by a later generation.
In any case, it seemed Reconstruction was working as planned; by the time the 15th Amendment was passed, six of the ex-Confederate states were back in the Union, with the rest returned to the fold by the middle of 1870. However, by that time, the Radical Republican governments of the ex-Confederate states were in gradual retreat, with "Redeemer" governments taking power in state after state, with a barely-concealed agenda to undermine the rights of their black citizens.
* By 1870, there were some indications of a return to normalcy in the South. Most of the damage had been repaired, and cotton production had returned to its prewar level. However, the rest of the Union was enjoying an economic boom that was leaving the South in the dust.
The class structure, though it had been weakened, remained in place. Large plantations survived, in a modified form, with the land worked by "share croppers" and "share tenants". Share croppers were usually blacks who essentially rented their land, homes, and equipment from a landlord, and paid the landlord a portion of their crops, usually a third to a half. Share tenants were similar, but were generally white, and usually provided their own equipment. There were many variations on these concepts.
Some of the planters found the new order agreeable. Southerners had long made much of the "social security" net provided by slavery, with the slave-owner taking care of children, the sick, and the elderly, and however well or poorly they did so, it was still more expense than they had using share croppers. The end of slavery actually meant cheaper labor -- and now even the poorer farmers who couldn't have afforded slaves were able to hire on help when they needed it. The result was a stifled economy, with few avenues for financial or social advancement.
Southerners would, for good reasons, take a long time to forget their defeat and consequent humiliation by the North after the war, but occupations of rebellious provinces can last generations, and are often marked by monstrous atrocities. Although the Federal occupation of the South was no picnic:
Even more surprisingly, their property, except for slaves, wasn't seized. The indignities of the occupation were less a consequence of vindictiveness than of the simple bumbling of Northern outsiders engaged in half-baked attempts at "social engineering" of the renegade states, in particular attempts to push racial equality.
The Radical Republicans imposed black suffrage on the conquered states with little understanding of the realities involved. By using the black vote, they were able to sustain Republican governments in these states for a time; in Southern legend, this was a time when their state governments were passed over to black people, but in fact blacks did not dominate state governments even in states like Mississippi, where the number of black citizens substantially exceeded that of whites.
As Republican state governments fell, segregation became the basis for Southern society, with the system enforced by white-supremacy groups, such as the Pale Faces, the Sons of Midnight, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan. Such groups would dress in white sheets as ghosts of rebel soldiers to terrorize and kill blacks, and run white officials who resisted segregation out of town. Such lawlessness invited official retribution, and in 1870 the Federal government moved against the Klan and other terrorist groups. Well over a thousand men were arrested.
However, white Southerners also formed legal organizations, called "Rifle Clubs" or "Red Shirts" or "White Leagues", that were more discreet and subtle in their efforts and so far more effective. Whites were pressured to toe the line, blacks were told to stay in their place. Economic pressure proved particularly useful, since any black or white person who didn't obey the rules quickly became unemployable, and was denied credit or loans. Violence was usually not necessary -- but when it was necessary, it was used without much misgiving. When election time rolled around, the White Leagues and their like would parade in the streets, heavily armed, and black folk would make themselves scarce, if they valued their well-being. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Pet Bunnies Have Different Brains Than Wild Bunnies Do" by Elizabeth Gamillo, 25 June 2018), of course it is obvious that domesticated animals are much tamer than their wild ancestors. A recent study hints at how domestication led to changes in the brains of domestic rabbits from their wild ancestors.
The research team responsible for study was led by animal geneticist Leif Andersson of Uppsala University in Sweden and Texas A&M University in College Station. Andersson suspected that domestication led to changes in brain structure that resulted in more docile behavior. To investigate, he and his colleagues took MRI scans of the brains of eight wild and eight domestic rabbits, then compared the results.
The researchers found that the amygdala -- a region of the brain that processes fear and anxiety -- is 10% smaller in domesticated rabbits than in wild rabbits. However, the medial prefrontal cortex -- which controls responses to aggressive behavior and fear -- is 11% larger in domesticated rabbits. The researchers also found that the brains of domesticated rabbits are less able to process information related to fight-or-flight responses, because they have less white matter, than their feral cousins do. White matter correlates to information processing; it helps in response to danger, providing faster reflexes and helps learn what to be afraid of.
The brain changes reduce emotions like fear and aggression, and so the docile personalities of the domesticated rabbit. Of course, domesticated rabbits became the way they were because they were selected by breeders for desireable traits. They also were not under the same selection pressures as wild rabbits, being generally fed and protected.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("'Junk DNA' May Help Yeast Survive Stress" by Mitch Leslie, 16 January 2019), not all the DNA in the genome has any apparent function, with researchers wondering if the "dark genome" really has any function at all. Research suggests that at least part of it does -- with two recent studies showing that some "dark genes" may help yeasts survive bad times.
Genes that are known to have functions may have dark genes interspersed in them, with the dark genes spliced out when those genes are transcribed into proteins; each of our own tens of thousands of genes has an average of eight. Snipping out the introns during transcription imposes an energy penalty, as well as an elaborate mechanism to perform the snipping, suggesting that the introns would have selected against, and disappeared, if they were simply useless.
Research has shown that introns can have some function; it has been demonstrated that introns in some genes may help control how much protein that gene turns out. That didn't seem to be the case with baker's yeast, which has a particularly low number of introns -- less than 300 for about 6,000 genes -- suggesting that selection has winnowed them out. They haven't been completely thrown away, but researchers have found that deleting individual introns doesn't seem to have any effect on the yeasts.
However, researchers have generally only investigated yeast under lab conditions, not considering what happens when, say, yeasts are put on a starvation diet. RNA biologist Sherif Abou Elela of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and colleagues decided to see what would happen, selectively deleted introns from yeast to generate hundreds of strains, each strain missing all the introns from one gene. The researchers then grew combinations of these modified strains alongside normal fungi.
When food was scarce, most of the intron-lacking strains rapidly died out, unable to compete with normal yeast. Abou Elela says: "If you are in good times, it's a burden to have introns. In bad times, it's beneficial."
Exactly how the introns provide benefits is not clear. It may be that, as the yeast's environment becomes harsher, the pattern of synthesis of proteins in yeasts changes, with genes containing introns increasingly predominating. The greater number of introns act as a brake by clogging the molecular shears that normally snip them out of RNAs, slowing down the synthesis of some proteins and allowing the cells to conserve their resources. More research needs to be performed.
* As discussed by a video from TIME.com, a research team ran tests on 259 bottles of water, from 11 brands purchased in nine countries. More than 90% of the bottles had microplastics in them, with an average of about ten particles per liter. The same researchers had performed a similar study on tap water, and found only about half that many particles.
More than half the particles were polypropylene, which is used in bottle caps, followed by nylon. Although there's been a fuss over the matter as of late, there's actually no evidence the particles are harmful; they are probably inert. Nonetheless, it's still worthwhile to take a look at the matter.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GREEN GREAT WALL: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("China's Desert-Taming Green Great Wall Is Not As Great As It Sounds", 16 May 2019), there's been a lot of global interest in planting trees -- which has led to cautions that planting trees may not always be the smartest thing to do.
Welcome to the town of Minqin, in the province of Gansu in the Gobi desert of Northwest China. There, people are busy planting saxaul, a short spiky local tree, on the edges of dunes, in hopes of preventing wind storms from burying the town. One of the planters says that, without the trees, Minqin could be "eaten by sand".
The Gobi Desert is gradually expanding. In hopes of halting the expansion, authorities have been working on a massive afforestation project for four decades. The goal is to create a "Green Great Wall (GGW)" to restrain the Gobi Desert, with about a quarter of China's provinces involved in the effort. Formally, it's called the "Three North Shelterbelt Program", the "Three North" meaning China's north-east, north, and north-west regions. Officials are proud of the project, feeling that China is obtaining expertise that can help the rest of the world. There's just one problem: there's no solid evidence the GGW is working.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began the war against deserts not long after seizing power in 1949. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong was confident that socialist technical strength could tame the deserts, with China then obtaining arable land and boosting harvests. The land would be settled by ethnic-Han Chinese, who would act as a barrier to the Soviet Union, and also help keep politically-unreliable ethnic minorities under control.
Mao was mostly focused on ideology, and knew little about engineering of any sort. In reality, from that time, the desert has continued to grow -- in part, because of environmental mismanagement. Research funded by the Chinese government found that between the 1950s and the 1970s, China lost about 1,500 square kilometers (580 square miles) of land to deserts each year. By 2000, the rate had more than doubled, it seems in part because of climate change.
The current GGW effort began in 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader of China. The GGW effort is to be completed in 2050; by that time, tree coverage is supposed to increase to 15%, from an original coverage of 5%. Officials claim that the target has almost been reached, thanks to the efforts of more than 300 million Chinese, with trees being planted over an area the size of Italy. The GGW project is supported by government and citizen funding, with most of the work carried out by the private sector. Spending for this decade on the GGW is estimated to exceed 90 billion yuan, or about $14 billion USD.
The government claims that from 2004, the deserts have been shrinking. Experts say that seems to be true, but they aren't in such agreement as to why. In 2010, scholars from Beijing Normal University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the green wall's impact was being "exaggerated for propaganda purposes". They noted that sandstorms in several regions had been on the decline before the GGW project began, and that there was "no firm evidence" that the project was working.
In 2015 Chinese scientists examined satellite photos taken since 1983, and determined that afforestation had contributed less than 3% to changes in vegetation cover in Three North provinces with the biggest desert areas. The experts said fluctuation in rainfall accounted for about one-third. Other factors include controls on grazing and agriculture.
Researchers inspecting the GGW tend to find far fewer trees than local governments report. Corruption may be one reason. Officials may have been overstating the number of trees planted, in order to please their superiors, or line their pockets with funds allocated for tree planting. There's also a reluctance to admit the high failure rate: only about 15% of the trees planted in the Three North region have survived. There's been incompetence in the planting, with the wrong types of trees being planted; too dense concentrations of the right types of trees; and planting in places where there wasn't enough water to keep the trees alive over the long run. In fact, planting the trees could disrupt natural vegetation -- and once the trees died, desertification simply got worse.
In other parts of the world, governments that once pushed the green-wall approach are now having second thoughts. Scientists have largely succeeded in persuading leaders in the Sahel -- the African region along the edge of the Sahara desert -- that a proposal by the African Union in the early 2000s to plant a forest belt would not work as desired. Officials there are now experimenting with more sophisticated agricultural and water-use policies. Some of them do plan to increase existing vegetation.
Cao Shixiong of Minzu University of China says that limited and careful tree-planting can help defend small settlements, roads, and railways from sandy winds. However, Cao says that reversing desertification on a greater scale demands methods tailored to the ecology of each location, and that in some places it might be wiser to carefully let land alone, to heal on its own.
China's planning documents now do tend to acknowledge a need for more diverse methods of desert control -- but the push remains to plant trees. Tree-planting programs support many jobs in the forestry administration; since the 1970s, that organization has taken to planting trees with the same recklessness with which it once chopped them down. Planting trees is easy to do, easier than subtler schemes, and makes for good media attention. The media doesn't notice so much when the trees die.
There have been changes as of late. During a government shake-up in 2018, the forestry administration took over many environmental responsibilities from other parts of the government. That may well allow them to take a bigger view of their actions -- but for now, they still want to plant trees.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE SANDS RUN OUT: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The World Needs To Get Serious About Managing Sand, Says UN Report" by Rachel Fritts, 10 May 2019), sand is a resource we take for granted. However, it is a very significant resource, with the quantity used by humans second only to water. It is a major constituent of construction materials like concrete, and is also the basic feedstock for glass. Globally, humans consume up to 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel every year, amounting to 18 kilograms per person per day.
A new United Nations (UN) report suggests the supply of sand is not unlimited -- with the report saying the demand for sand poses "one of the major sustainability challenges of the 21stcentury," and dealing with the problem requires "improved governance of global sand resources." The report specifically recommends reducing demand for new sand, and reinforcing policies to mitigate the environmental impact of sand mining. It also recommends the development of a more traceable sand supply chain through better monitoring and international information sharing.
According to Pascal Peduzzi -- one of the authors and director of GRID-Geneva, a part of the UN's Science Division based in Chatelaine, Switzerland -- the report represents the first global effort to find solutions to sand-related problems. Peduzzi first became aware of the issue on a trip to investigate beach erosion in Jamaica:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We went to a small fishing village, and the villagers told us that one night some people came with trucks, armed with guns, and they stole their beach away. I was shocked that just for sand, people were ready to kill.
END QUOTE
Peduzzi collected his thoughts on the matter in a 2014 UN report titled: "Sand: Rarer Than One Thinks". He didn't think there was much more he could do about it, however -- until October 2018, when the UN organized a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, that brought together researchers, policy experts, and industry representatives to examine the problem and suggest solutions.
According to the report, demand for sand is on the increase. A construction boom in Asia and Africa has tripled demand over the past two decades. By 2060, extraction of sand and gravel is expected to grow to 82 billion tonnes a year. It might seem like the world's deserts could easily handle even that amount -- but desert sand is too smooth to use in building materials, so most sand is obtained from quarries. Sand is also being increasingly mined from coastal beaches, or dredged from river and marine ecosystems, damaging the environment in the process. As Peduzzi discovered in Jamaica, the increased demand for sand has attracted a criminal element, with "sand mafias" emerging in India, Morocco, and elsewhere.
The report says that legal and illegal extraction comes at the expense of other economic sectors, local livelihoods, and biodiversity. Aurora Torres -- an ecologist at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig -- adds that "growth in the extraction and use of these minerals is putting strain on the resource base, and will likely lead to a 'tragedy of the sand commons' -- unless a more responsible appropriation of these resources is promoted."
The report suggests that governments discourage frivolous construction projects. If buildings have to go up, recycling old materials is an option. Germany, for instance, recycles 87% of its waste aggregate materials. Recycled ash from burned solid waste can also replace sand. When new sand is needed, it should come from established quarries, not fragile aquatic ecosystems. To make sure of where sand is coming from, governments and businesses should create supply chains and regulatory structures that control the distribution of sand from its source to the final buyer.
The report, which was circulated to policymakers at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya in March 2019, has led to a new UN resolution that calls for sustainable sand management practices. This fits in with efforts in some nations to find new, sustainable sand sources. In Greenland, melting ice is expected to deposit piles of sand on the coast, where it could be exported. Geologist Minik Rosing -- of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark -- says Greenland is a promising source, since "the environmental consequences are likely to be low, governance standards are high, and there will be likely co-benefits for indigenous people."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The First Folio Of Finance", 6 June 2019), in mid-June, Christie's auction house in New York City put up for bid an original, first-edition copy of Luca Pacioli's SUMMA DE ARITHMETICA, GEOMETRIA, PROPORTIONI ET PROPORTIONALITA. Nobody needs to know any Italian to recognize that the SUMMA is a math text -- but on the face of it, it's hard to see what significance it has.
It started in Venice, Italy, when a prominent merchant named Antonio de Rompiasi hired young Pagioli to tutor his three sons in math. Working this start, Pagioli decided to write a survey of his field for a popular audience; and 30 years later, published the SUMMA, 615 pages long. It was a brilliant piece of work, innovative in several respects:
However, the greatest significance of the book was in a slim "how to" chapter that described the double-entry accounting system in use by Venetian merchants. Leveraging off examples from dealers in butter, to lemons, to silk, Pacioli laid out the method for tracking income and expenditure and the calculation of net profit or loss, which for the first time allowed a immediate snapshot of a firm's financial position.
Pacioli's book helped lay the foundations for the modern corporation. It wasn't just that he explained new ideas; he explained them clearly, and in a lively style. The book is littered with quotes from scripture and Dante, along with his own "bon mots" such as: "Without order there is chaos." -- well OK, and -- "Don't learn from ignoramuses who have more leaves than grapes." -- which is advice still relevant today. He wrote the accounting chapter to help aspiring traders in Venice, then the capital of the financial world, "sleep easily at night". Without double-entry book-keeping, he said, "their minds would keep them awake with worry."
Impressed by the book, Leonardo da Vinci suggested that his patron Lodovico Sforza to hire Pacioli to teach at the court of Milan. Pacioli and Leonardo collaborated on the treatise DIVINA PROPORTIONE, which linked math with art through the study of perspective -- and so linked Pacioli to the balance and harmonies of Da Vinci's THE LAST SUPPER.
About a thousand copies of the first edition were printed, of which about 120 survive. Christie's, in auctioning off the book, proclaimed it "the most influential work in the history of capitalism". The final bid was $1.215 million USD.
* As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("This Gay Married Couple Wanted To Have A Child. Their Family Members Stepped In To Help" by Jay Croft and Deanna Hackney, 30 March 2019), a gay couple of the names Matthew Eledge and Elliot Dougherty, of Omaha NE, decided they wanted to start a family. As Eledge says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
When you are gay and married and want to have a kid, you go into it with the knowledge that you are going to have to create a family in a special way. There are creative, unique ways to build a family.
END QUOTE
Indeed. Eledge fathered the child through in-vitro fertilization, with Dougherty's sister, Lea Yribe, providing the egg. Now here's where it gets really imaginative: Eledge's mother, Cecile Reynek Eledge, age 61, was the surrogate mother. She gave birth to Uma Louise Dougherty-Eledge on 25 March 2019, the baby being in good health.
There were a few huffy comments about this on Twitter, but for myself, I was greatly amused. When I was a lad, reading sci-fi novels in the 1960s, I had this wonder of how the world would be in the 21st century. Now I'm finding out: "This is wild!"
* I took my spring day trip south to Denver early in June to take photos at Denver International Airport (DIA) and the Denver Zoo. The session at DIA went very well; I was shooting on a Friday morning, and the air traffic was much more substantial than on other weekdays -- I'd been missing a bet. The trip to the zoo didn't yield too many shots, since it was warm, and the animals were inactive.
The most interesting thing that came out of the trip concerned the digital music player that I had plugged into my car cigarette lighter socket, which played through the FM radio. It had a USB port on it for a flash drive; I wondered if I could use it to trickle-charge my smartphone. Bad idea -- it fried the player. "Duh."
Oh well, the player was cheap, and I got to wondering if a similar gadget was now available that also had USB charger outlets. I checked on Amazon, and found much more advanced players that did. I bought one for $20 USD, made by the Victor Tsing company, and had it shipped to me on two-day.
It's a really fun gadget, with dual USB outlets. The old player was a real pain to use, but this one has a nice display and is a snap to use. It even gives voice announcements of settings -- female voice, British accent -- which is most handy while driving. It has a microphone and a bluetooth link as well -- I think I could use it as a hands-off phone interface, but I've got no use for that. When I'm driving, I plug in my smartphone into it to keep it charged up. Next, I've got to get some bluetooth earphones, and see how I can fit them into my cobbled-together system of gadgets.
* The Real Fake News for June started out slow, to gradually move up to nerve-wracking. Early in the month, President Trump began to make threats about slapping stiff tariffs on Mexico, if the Mexican government didn't do more to deal with illegal immigration. There was a last-minute agreement, whose details weren't all that clear -- suggesting that there really hadn't been much change in the status quo, and the whole kerfuffle was theatrics.
As far as Trump's ongoing trade war with China, there did seem to be some movement by the end of the month, with Trump saying he was willing to give up on his war against the Chinese Huawei company. Unfortunately, Trump says a lot of things, and it's impossible to know what of it to believe. It is also obvious that the Chinese have a motive to bide their time, and wait for Trump to go away.
The Trump Administration also continued to stonewall Congress, blowing off all requests for information and subpoenas of administration officials. Indeed, Trump is fighting back, with Attorney General William Barr promising to investigate the origins of the investigations against Trump. How that will work out remains to be seen. It will either be a dud -- much like Trump's Voter Fraud Commission, which simply died of irrelevance -- or will be a lunatic fiasco that won't do the Trump Administration any good. That one is hard to read.
Trump did raise a cloud of dust in mid-month when he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he, Trump, would listen to foreign governments if they provided dirt on political opponents. The dust settled quickly, to be forgotten, since we're all used to this sort of thing. Indeed, later in the month, another woman accused Trump of sexual assault -- getting uncomfortably detailed in the description of what he did to her -- but there was little fall-out from it. People who don't care for Trump know he's like that, his fans don't care, so what could be said?
And then, late in the month, the Environmental Protection Agency released its new emissions standards for the states, which were: "Do whatever you feel like doing." That also didn't amount to much, being no surprise; besides, it's obvious that the next administration will revoke all such Trumpian nonsense ASAP after entering office. More ominously, as discussed in the previous posting, the Trump Administration seems to be drifting blindly towards a war with Iran. The other shoe is yet to drop on that, but it could be any time now.
* It is possible that Trump will win re-election, but it's not the way to bet. Tim Mullaney, a writer for MARKETWATCH.com, gave "Five Reasons Trump Won't Win In 2020" (20 June 2019) -- the first reason being Trump's poor poll numbers:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Everybody has already made up their mind about Trump -- and his numbers stink. Right now, Trump's net approval rating is -8.5 percentage points in the REALCLEAR POLITICS polling average. FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.com says it's -10%, as 53% disapprove, 43% approve, and 4% won't say. That spread was first "achieved" in March 2017. Trump hasn't narrowed it below nine since, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT says.
In other words, no one's changing their minds about Trump. About 40% of us like his act, if only to "own the libs." Everyone else? Nope.
END QUOTE
Trump's approval / disapproval ratio is effectively fixed at 45% / 55%. That's not counting the people who don't have a fixed opinion on the matter, but they're the kind of people who say: "Don't talk to me about politics." -- and they don't vote. The Wikipedia page on presidential approval ratings gives a set of charts at the bottom for approval ratings during the terms of modern presidents. The Trump chart is the clearly odd one, since it's effectively flat.
Maybe Trump could eke a win out of the electoral college? After all, he lost the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million votes. Maybe he could pull the same rabbit out of his hat? Okay, moving on to the second reason, that's a NO:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Like, in Michigan, where MORNING CONSULT puts Trump's net approval at minus 12? Trump's Michigan numbers haven't been green in 26 months. MORNING CONSULT says he's doing two points worse than in October, before Republicans lost two House seats there and the governorship.
Trump's polling in Wisconsin? He's minus 13. In Iowa, minus 12, and his party lost two of its three House seats. In Pennsylvania, birthplace of former Vice President and possible 2020 rival Joe Biden, Trump is minus 7, a point worse than last fall. Democrats won the generic House vote in Pennsylvania by 10 points.
Just on those four, Trump's 306 2016 electoral votes fall to 254 (270 needed to win), and it's over. But as many as 215 Trump electoral votes could be in play, based on state-by-state polls.
END QUOTE
The Red states will vote for Trump, but he's not doing well in the swing states. The Democrats were listless in 2016, voter turnout being only 56%, when it had been 60% or better in the previous three presidential elections. The 2018 mid-term elections had unusually high turnout. The Democrats are determined to vote Trump out in 2020, and so the swing will be more against him than for him. Sure, as Mullaney admits, the race won't really heat up until 2020, and these early numbers are foggy. However, they're not likely to change much unless events make them do so. A war with Iran is likely to make them worse for Trump.
Reason number three ... Trump fans make much of the booming economy, but in yet another strangeness of the Trump Administration, it's not doing Trump much good:
BEGIN QUOTE:
When the unemployment rate goes to 3.6% from 9.7%, the guy who came along at 4.7% doesn't get the credit. Trump's whole case on the economy is that he should -- but wage growth, already unexceptional, is slowing. So is job growth, at a year-to-date monthly average 26% below 2015, the third year of the last presidential term. Manufacturing job growth has slowed too.
The stock market (Trump's favorite indicator) has stalled ... driven by Trump's on-again-off-again tariff wars. The Dow peaked in January 2018, the S&P last September. That we are back near the peaks shows only that the Federal Reserve has taken the wheel, moving toward more interest-rate cuts.
END QUOTE
Trump fans like to pretend that he turned the economy around from the economic disasters of the Obama Administration -- which is a preposterous lie, since any chart of economic indicators shows the US economy has been on a steady, gradual boom since 2009. The stock market has now peaked in an unstable fashion; it's only being supported by corporate buy-backs, which will dry up when profits go soft. Corporate inventories are rising, meaning sales are starting to weaken. Economic booms only last for so long, and the chances are fair this one will stall before the 2020 election.
Reason number four, Trump is a bumbler. As Mullaney puts it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Right now, Trump's meandering toward armed conflict with Iran. But wartime leadership requires trust, not telling 10,796 lies in office, Trump's count according to the WASHINGTON POST last week. That means Trump either climbs down (again) from his latest pseudo-crusade, or tries war without public support. Neither makes him more popular.
Next, he's throwing himself a July 4 rally at the Lincoln Memorial -- nothing tacky there. Trump will salute Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural, and the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, offering charity toward none and malice for nearly all. Stories about his lack of respect will follow as night follows day.
Then he'll mess with trade again, making your portfolio more volatile. Open more barbed-wire refugee camps. Lose some of their kids. Blow off subpoenas -- keeping investigations of his inauguration, foundation, taxes and Russian influence alive. He even says he'll try another Obamacare repeal bill, after 2017's failures handed Democrats the House. All winners.
END QUOTE
It is unlikely that another shot at ObamaCare repeal will go anywhere, Senate Republicans having made it clear they aren't going to dance with that elephant any more. Finally, reason number five -- in 2020, Trump won't have any targets as easy as Hillary Clinton:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The reason Trump is president is Clinton's e-mail scandalette. That and her family's history of diving for dollars, even taking $675,000 for Hillary's speeches at Goldman Sachs. But who's he gonna chant "LOCK 'EM UP" about this time?
Of the Democratic candidates, Elizabeth Warren's well off -- she wrote books, her husband has a good job, and their house is worth five times its 1995 purchase price. All legit. Bernie Sanders became a millionaire through book sales, begrudgingly. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper ran brew pubs. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has simple finances; he works, and his husband teaches at a Montessori Academy. Biden, who has unfortunately been cashing in on speeches too, made his tax returns public during his vice presidency, and surely will publish his 2016-2019 returns.
Not a lobbyist with his hand out, or foreign potentates staying in their hotels, to be found. Let alone a multi-year tax fraud, as asserted in Trump's case. Trump wants to make hay about Biden's son's businesses, but his own son-in-law met with potential lenders to his real estate business -- in the White House.
END QUOTE
Mullaney says that Trump needs to retire to Florida, since he's not welcome in New York City:
BEGIN QUOTE:
New Yorkers like you even less than Washington, so a cloister far from madding crowds is in order. You know the folks who would love you if you shot someone outside Trump Tower? They don't live here.
END QUOTE
* Locally, there's a movement in Colorado to get rid of our new governor, Jared Polis. The fuss, at least on the surface, is focusing on three bills that he signed: one to allow seizure of guns from people judged a hazard to themselves or others; another to regulate oil and gas exploration in Colorado; and a third to bypass the electoral college.
The first bill has raised the most controversy, with some sheriffs saying they wouldn't enforce it. It's really nothing radical, it just allows people who are worried that somebody they know is a clear and present danger to get a court order to have that person's guns seized.
The second bill followed one that was on the state ballot in 2018 that would have implemented very stiff regulations on oil and gas exploration, amounting to an effective ban. Polis opposed it. The new bill does add modest regulations, but its main thrust is to give localities more power over oil and gas exploration in their backyards -- and also give more power to private citizens, in the face of oil and gas exploration on their lands.
The third bill is trickier to explain. It involved Colorado signing up with the "National Popular Vote (NPV)" pact. The idea is that states that have joined the NPV pledge to give their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the majority popular vote. If states with half the electoral votes sign up, the electoral college is effectively neutralized. The NPV is about two-thirds of the way to that goal.
The amount of baloney the Right generates on the NPV is remarkable. "It's unconstitutional, and will be struck down!" Wrong, the Constitution explicitly allows states to handle their electoral votes any way they want. "Smaller states will lose their clout!" That one is particularly disingenuous. Only five presidents have won the electoral college vote, but lost the popular vote -- and none of them were Democrats. The Right's pitch on this is effectively: "It's only fair that our votes should count for more than yours."
With the reply: "Well, no." Besides, the third time a winner lost the popular vote was in 1888, with the fourth being in 2000; and during that interval of over a century, the electoral college was a non-issue. And another thing: why would anyone really want to be president when the majority of Americans are unhappy with the idea? It would seem like asking for trouble.
There's a fourth reason that the Right wants to get rid of Jared Polis: he's gay. He was my / our man in the House of Representatives for ten years, and I've voted for him repeatedly. I didn't know he was gay until the 2016 election, but then I didn't care. Not too much fuss is made about his sexual orientation in print, but one suspects it's a significant factor in the controversy ...
... such as it is. The push for a recall vote to get rid of Polis is working uphill, since they can't have a recall election until an official has been in office for six months, and they have to get a quarter of the people who voted in the original election to petition for the new election. Oh yeah, they also have to get the signatures in 60 days. "Good luck with that."
The real significance of this farce is that it gives a hint of what America after Trump will be like. Trump pumped up his voter base, giving them a sense of empowerment; they won't take his fall very well. How that plays out remains to be seen. It could be comical, it could be horrific; most likely, it will be mostly the first, and some of the second.
* Thanks to one reader for a donation this last month -- actually, it was in May, but I forgot to log it. Anyway, it is much appreciated.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE