D Gary Grady

Smithsonian.com’s tribute to Rocky and Bullwinkle

Posted on 2017-09-11 by GarySeptember 11, 2017

I highly recommend “How Bullwinkle Taught Kids Sophisticated Political Satire,” an article by Beth Daniels posted September 7 at Smithsonian.com. It begins,

“Mr. Chairman, I am against all foreign aid, especially to places like Hawaii and Alaska,” says Senator Fussmussen from the floor of a cartoon Senate in 1962. In the visitors’ gallery, Russian agents Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are deciding whether to use their secret “Goof Gas” gun to turn the Congress stupid, as they did to all the rocket scientists and professors in the last episode of “Bullwinkle.”

Another senator wants to raise taxes on everyone under the age of 67. He, of course, is 68. Yet a third stands up to demand, “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” The Pottsylvanian spies decide their weapon is unnecessary: Congress is already ignorant, corrupt and feckless.

I’m reminded of the time Rocky and Bullwinkle were in a jet airliner that ran out of fuel. To stay aloft, Bullwinkle read The Congressional Record into a microphone with the sound piped into the engines. This provided enough hot air to keep them running.

Daniels recalls watching the cartoons in reruns as a child (see was born in 1964) and talks about some of the voice actors involved, including the recently deceased June Foray, but there’s one major omission: anything about creator Jay Ward. Still, the article is worth reading, not just for fans of the classic animated series but also for those not yet familiar with it.

There’s a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle on YouTube, for example here:

Link: https://youtu.be/XujPnUNcB74

The administration restocks the swamp

Posted on 2017-09-09 by GarySeptember 8, 2017

One of Donald Trump’s applause lines during the campaign was his call to “drain the swamp” in Washington, attacking corruption and decreasing the power of special-interest lobbyists.

Draining real-world swamps often isn’t a good idea — it turns out they have a lot of benefits — but draining the political swamp is another matter. This was an idea just about everybody could get behind, even people who otherwise can’t stand Trump.

It’s hard to say whether Trump meant it when he said it. He’s acknowledged saying things he thought would get him elected, such as calling for Hillary Clinton to be “locked up.” But whatever his intentions, in practice he hasn’t drained the swamp at all. Quite the opposite.

At the end of August, ProPublica, a non-parisan independent investigative news website, released a report by Derek Kravitz, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marina Affo identifying numerous industry lobbyists now in government positions that let them continue to protect the interests of the corporations and industries in question, not necessarily to the benefit of the rest of us. I strongly recommend checking it out. In many cases they had to do some serious digging to identify the political appointees in question, which suggests the administration is well aware how bad this looks and would rather the public not know too much about it.

How U.S. teachers teach about global warming

Posted on 2017-09-09 by GarySeptember 8, 2017

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) recently published an interesting report (PDF) of a survey of U.S. science teachers that gives an idea how they are talking about climate change.

The good news is that the subject is fairly widely taught, despite the potential political pushback. On the other hand, most teachers haven’t had much formal training about it, and many, even those who realize that global warming is caused by human activity, aren’t aware how strong the consensus is in the scientific community. Some political and business interests are still succeeding in sewing doubt about what is now a pretty well established fact.

The NCSE website has a page of links to other relevant polls on its website. Gallup, for example, reports that as of 2014 a fourth of Americans question global warming (likely because they’re misinformed about it, I suspect), convinced that any warming is the result of natural variation. That percentage has doubled since 2001. The deniers were outnumbered by the 39 percent who were aware of and accepted the strong science evidence human activity is responsible for the currently observed warming, but that percentage had declined from just under half in 2001. The rest of the public is unsure what to believe or whether global warming is a problem. Two-thirds of the skeptics are men, and 80 percent are Republican. Curiously, years of education doesn’t seem to correlate with opinion on this.

Somewhat more encouraging opinion data come from Yale University’s climate communication website. A lot of people who aren’t sure about the science nevertheless think prudence requires doing something about the at-least-potential problem, for example.

Pew Research also finds that in most of the world outside the U.S., recognition of the problem tends to be much stronger. This may be tied to the fact that from what I’ve read, most conservative as well as moderate and liberal parties recognize the need to address global warming, with the U.S. Republican Party the only notable exception. That’s incidentally a recent development; many Republican politicians supported doing something about global warming until pretty recently, and I think Trump is the only party’s first president to call global warming a “hoax.” One exception: The Chinese appear even less concerned than Americans about the dangers of climate change. China and the U.S. are of course the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, though in China the government has lately taken steps to reduce them, and the U.S. is also on target to meet is obligations under the Paris Accords despite the fact that President Trump started the process of withdrawing from that agreement effective immediately after the next presidential election.

Well, that kinda is what they look like, part 2

Posted on 2017-09-09 by GarySeptember 1, 2017

When Stephen Colbert shows a photo of someone in the news, he routinely gives an alternative description based on how they look in the picture, as in “Senior policy advisor and young Gargamel Steven Miller.” Here’s a collection of them running just over two minutes:

Link: https://youtu.be/fUJS6tE8jjE

You can find the previous collection at this link.

Were you affected by the Equifax hack?

Posted on 2017-09-08 by GarySeptember 8, 2017

As you’ve probably heard, the major credit reporting bureau Equifax had its database broken into by criminals a couple of months ago and sensitive personal information was stolen for nearly half the U.S. population. Equifax has a website where you can check whether your own information might have been compromised, and if so you can initiate sign-up in a credit monitoring service for one year:

https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com

Once you’ve read the page above, click the Potential Impact button at the bottom and provide your last name and the last 6 digits of your Social Security number (that is, leave off the first three digits). If your information was likely to have bene part of the data breech, click the Enroll button to sign up for free credit monitoring. Note that the monitoring doesn’t start immediately. You’ll have a to make a note to yourself to visit a website they’ll give you on a future date about a week away (at least in my own case). I assume this is because the service providing the monitoring can’t over 140,000,000 people contacting them at once.

If you prefer, you can phone 866-447-7559 7 am to 1 am (07h to 01h) Eastern Time seven days a week, but my guess is you’ll find the website easier to reach.

According to Equifax, signing up for the credit monitoring service will not block your ability to sue Equifax, no matter what the terms of service seem to imply.

I obtained the Equifax site link from a report on the NPR website, so I think it’s legitimate, and I got the telephone number above from their website. But for safety’s sake you might want to verify that yourself. In fact, that’s good practice in general. Avoid trusting links in emails and websites you aren’t sure of. I mean, I’m pretty confident in the information I’m supplying here, but how do you know you can trust me? This is one area where a little paranoia can come in handy.

New York City’s historically low crime rate

Posted on 2017-09-05 by GarySeptember 6, 2017

A conversation I had yesterday prompted me to look up some data on crime in New York City. This is the short version: New York has the lowest violent crime rate of any large American city, and the rate continues to fall. In 2016, for example, the number of shootings was the lowest since the city began keeping count.

The murder rate was down as well. It fell to a record low in 2013, declined a small amount more in 2014 to set another record, rose slightly in 2015, and in 2016 tied with 2013, just a little above 2014. For comparison with the other three largest U.S. cities, in 2016 Chicago had 28 murders per 100,000 residents, Houston had 13.15, and Los Angeles 7.25. New York had 3.91. (For more see this article from January in New York magazine.)

The fall in crime has continued this year. In the first quarter serious crimes were down five percent from the same period in 2016. Through the end of July, murders and shootings were down a remarkable 17 percent in comparison with the first seven months of last year.

A related subject that came up in yesterday’s conversation was the city’s “stop-and-frisk” policy, under which police officers would stop people they thought looked suspicious and search their persons for weapons, drugs, or other contraband. One way you could look suspicious was to be black or Latino. Seriously, the city’s own data showed that more than half of those stopped were black and around 80 percent were either black or Latino.

This wasn’t an occasional thing; in several years the total number of such stops exceeded half a million. Moreover, every year 80 or 90 percent of the stops turned up no illegality. Some might take that as evidence that stop-and-frisk was working, since it was intended as much to deter crime as to catch bad guys in the act. But actually comparing the number of stops against various sorts of crime data over time showed no significant correlation, which makes it unlikely the policy helped reduce crime in reality.

In 2013 a court told the city to cut it out, because the Bill of Rights says police can’t just search people without a real reason. The city was going to appeal the ruling, but at the start of 2014 Bill De Blasio became mayor and kept his promise to do away with stop-and-frisk. Since then, as noted above, crime has remained lower than the years stop-and-frisk was in effect.

See this Washington Post article for more on stop-and-frisk.

Julian day odometer rollover

Posted on 2017-09-03 by GaryDecember 1, 2017

Today, 2017 September 3, is Julian day 2,458,000. The last three digits just rolled over to all zeros. Granted, it’s not as dramatic as rolling over to Julian day 3,000,000 (which won’t happen for nearly 15 centuries), but it’s something.

In business, the term “Julian date” is often misapplied to the day of the year, as in, today is the 246th day of 2017. But the actual Julian day number is a count of days since the start of the year 4713 BCE as reckoned by the Julian calendar. More precisely, it’s number of days since noon Greenwich Mean Time on the start of January in the year 4713. Keeping track of events in terms of Julian day numbers make it easy to work out the number of days between the events by simple subtraction.

When astronomers calculate the positions of planets, moons, asteroids, and spacecraft, it’s usually much easier to work in time units of fixed length, which rules out months and years, and given the time spans in question on the scale of the solar system they prefer to work in days rather than shorter units. For these purposes a day is always 86,400 seconds long. Leap seconds are occasionally added to civil timekeeping, mainly because the Earth’s rotation is very gradually slowing down, but since they would hugely complicate the computations we’re talking about, they’re ignored.

Under the Julian day system, a specific time is given by a decimal fraction appended to the day number. For example, 2,456,293.520833 was the Julian date or Julian day number for thirty minutes past midnight GMT on January 1, 2013 (with the date reckoned by the current Gregorian calendar).

The idea of using 4713 BCE as the starting point was proposed by French historian Joseph Scaliger in 1583, which was when the Gregorian calendar was just being introduced and had people thinking about such things. Scaliger wanted to get rid of the complication of dating much of ancient history backwards from the supposed birth of Jesus. He might have simply shifted the starting point by a nice round 10,000 years (so 2017 would be the year 12,017, for example), but given the complications of the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar with an accompanying shift of New Year’s Day (formerly March 25, believe it or not), this wouldn’t be quite as simple as it sounds.

What makes 4713 BCE interesting is that it’s the last year when three historically interesting cycles were all starting over at the same time under the Julian calendar. These were (1) the 15-year indiction cycle for revaluation of land for property-tax purposes in the late Roman Empire, (2) the 19-year Metonic cycle after which full moons return to the same sequence of calendar dates, and (3) the 28-year solar cycle, after which the Julian calendar repeats with respect to days of the week. (If you’re missing a calendar for a given year, you can just recycle one for 28 years earlier.)

Scaliger’s proposal never caught on with historians, possibly because it would in practice be confusing. (It would be much easier to shift the starting point back by 10,000 years for both Julian and Gregorian dates. It seems an obvious idea, but I’ve never seen anyone else suggest it. If anyone decides to adopt it, feel free to calling Gradian dating.) But in 1849 astronomer William Herschel proposed adopting a variant idea, namely assigning a number to each day counting from the starting date Scaliger suggested. A few decades later astronomers adopted Herschel’s idea except for using Greenwich as the reference point. Herschel had wanted to reckon days from noon mean solar time in Alexandria, the home town of Ptolemy, a brilliant mathematical astronomer of the classical era.

Why start the day at noon? Doing so is a longstanding tradition in astronomy. As long as the sky is clear and you’re not too near a pole at the wrong time of year, it’s easy to establish local noon by checking for maximum height of the sun over the horizon, and starting the day at noon avoids having the date change interrupt your nighttime viewing — at least provided you’re on the side of the Earth centered on the longitude of Greenwich — which is after all when astronomers in Europe do their observations of the stars. For people in the U.S. eastern time zone, the new Julian day starts at 7 in the morning Eastern Standard Time, or 8 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

(Revised a bit 2017 December 1 in an attempt to add clarity to the last paragraph.)

How the Trump administration is still trying to sabotage Obamacare

Posted on 2017-09-02 by GarySeptember 2, 2017

On July 18, as Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed in the Senate, President Trump declared at the White House that the new plan was to “let Obamacare fail.”

But it isn’t likely to fail on its own. As the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation noted in a report released July 10, the individual insurance market has continued to improve for insurance companies and appears to be stabilizing. In 2018 every American will have access to health insurance through employment, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, their family’s policy, some other group plan, or the individual market. A large majority of people buying their own policies will have a choice of them from multiple insurance companies. (It’s true that there are a fair number of counties with only one insurer, but for the most part they are rural counties with sparse populations. The great majority of Americans live in a county that has multiple insurers.)

It’s true that premiums are continuing to rise, but except for those at the highest income levels, people buying individual policies are sheltered from those increases because of the way Affordable Care Act subsidies are computed. High deductibles are a concern, but there are efforts — in fact, finally bipartisan efforts among some members of Congress — to address such problems, and it wouldn’t be too terribly difficult to fix them (as noted in this earlier post). For more on how things stand, see this August 4 Kaiser Family Foundation overview of the status of the 2018 health insurance market. Basically, while it isn’t perfect, Obamacare is for the most part working and gradually getting better.

Or that was the case until the Trump administration started doing things to destabilize it. As I mentioned in a post August 14, a blogger named Charles Gaba looked at proposed premium increases in 20 states that more than 2/3 of the additional costs were attributed to politics, not the healthcare market itself.

One item of good news is that the administration does seem to have backed away, at least for now, from its threats to stop cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments, probably because a lot of Republicans, even including Freedom Caucus head Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), had opposed Trump on this. Governors of both parties don’t want Obamacare to go away.

But the administration has announced a greatly reduced time frame for signing up for 2018 health coverage, and rather than taking steps to alert people to the fact, it has slashed the budget for paid ads to inform the public about their healthcare options by 90 percent and has likewise cut in half spending for “navigators,” trained advisors who help people sign up for policies that meet their needs and budgets.

In late July The New York Times published this overview of how the administration is already undermining the Affordable Care Act and other steps it might take later.

A poll conducted in early August by the Kaiser Family Foundation (I reference them a lot because they’re pretty credible) found that by 78 to 17 percent, those surveyed wanted the administration to do what they can to make the Affordable Care Act work rather than try to make it fail. Among self-identified Trump supporters, 51 to 39 want them to try to make it work. (I do find it a little troubling that 39 percent advocate trying to make Obamacare fail, but perhaps they don’t grasp the potential harm to people needing medical care.)

Well, that kinda is what they look like

Posted on 2017-09-02 by GarySeptember 2, 2017

When Stephen Colbert shows a photo of someone in the news, he routinely gives an alternative description based on how they look in the picture, as in “Alabama Senator and albino Smurf Jeff Sessions.” Here’s a collection running just over a minute:

Link: https://youtu.be/CCyXdJ_KHTk

(Colbert is stretching the truth when he claims the letters in “Reince Pribus” can be rearranged to spell “Penis Rice-a-Roni.” The closest you can get is “Penis Rice Rebu.”)

The professor and the friendly squirrel

Posted on 2017-09-01 by GaryAugust 31, 2017

Dr Lynn Owens, a lecturer in broadcast and electronic news at the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism, was driving home Tuesday evening when she felt something moving on her foot. She looked down and saw a squirrel climbing her leg. Despite driving on a freeway at over 70 miles an hour she managed to remain calm and even shoot some video with her cell phone. So did the squirrel — remained calm I mean — who wound up sitting on her lap the rest of the drive home, even when she stopped to pick up her two little girls en route.

The young squirrel proved very friendly to everybody, and the kids naturally wanted to keep him as a pet, naming him Mr Nuts. Her husband, a journalist himself at WRAL in Raleigh, made sure the story made it on the air that night.

But Dr Owens decided that the squirrel needed to return to campus. So she drove him back to Chapel Hill the next day. When she released him near some trees, however, he looked upset and ran back up her leg. She gave up and took the squirrel to her office, where Mr Nuts sat on her shoulder. She had record numbers of students stop by for office hours. At the end of the day she took the squirrel to a wildlife rehabilitation facility here in Durham, where the squirrel, assumed to be an orphan, is drinking milk from a bottle, socializing with other young squirrels, and taking squirreling classes to prepare for life in the trees.

For more, including video of the squirrel, here’s the original report that aired on WRAL Tuesday evening:

And here’s an update broadcast Wednesday:

The WRAL page on the story can be found at this link.