This is another one I suspect you’ve seen by now, but just in case…
Link: https://youtu.be/tI3g_laToxE
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Link: https://youtu.be/tI3g_laToxE
by Link: https://youtu.be/tI3g_laToxE
by Donald Trump has nominated retired Marine Corps general James Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense. Genral Mattis has not been out of the service the required seven years and hence cannot legally serve in that post, but I think the Congress should and will grant him a waiver, because by most accounts he’s a good choice — intelligent, competent, decent, and courageous.
Another reason to like Mattis: Trump had been an open advocate of illegal torture until, according to Trump’s own account, Mattis explained to him that waterboarding really isn’t a productive approach to interrogation. It can make people talk, but it can’t make them tell the truth. (Wouldn’t you make stuff up to stop being tortured?) Years ago I read an article by a military officer describing SERE training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) in which he mentioned that those taking the course were pretty good at keeping secrets while subjected to waterboarding but often gave them up accidentally during questioning by a skilled and seemingly friendly interrogator. According to Trump, Mattis told him essentially the same thing.
Unfortunately Mattis is the exception. Too many other Trump appointments range from the merely unqualified (Nikki Haley as ambassador to the UN) to the spectacularly and admittedly unqualified (Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) to however you might classify chief strategist Steve Bannon (openly proud of having transformed Breitbart News from rightwing to “alt-right,” the current term for the extreme nationalist, racist far right).
Then there’s another retired general, Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor. A former Army lieutenant general, Flynn had a quite respectable military career and was noted for encouraging his junior officers to speak up and challenge his views. In 2012 was appointed by President Obama to head the defense intelligence agency. Unfortunately, according to various sources, his superiors and subordinates became concerned with his erratic management style and his tendency to believe a lot of nonsense, which his staff took to calling “Flynn facts” as distinct from regular facts. Apparently his receptiveness to wild rumors and conspiracy theories was nothing new, but previously it had been moderated by a willingness to listen to debunkings from subordinates. He was retired from the post in 2014, pushed out of the job after less than two years, and since then his public comments have reinforced the notion that he believes a lot of questionable things.
Flynn’s closest advisor is his son and business partner, Michael G. Flynn, who has a reputation for promoting conspiracy theories on social media and expressing confidence in such questionable sources as Paul Watson, who runs the InfoWars conspiracy site. The younger Flynn is fond of calling people and groups he disapproves of (Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, CNN, Saturday Night Live, et al) “communists” and “commies,” like a Bircher from the fifties. On the other hand, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are merely “socialists.” Conservatives not sufficiently pro-Trump are “cucks,” a term of art on the loony right for those deemed inadequately loony.
Kevin Drum, who had previously expressed concern about General Flynn in his blog on November 24, this morning points out more recent reasons for concern and urges more rational Republicans to do what they can to convince Trump to choose somebody else as his National Security Advisor. (The post doesn’t require Senate approval, so the Senate can’t just refuse to confirm the nomination.)
Also today, conservative commentator and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough complained that Flynn “has left a trail of crap behind him with retweets, retweeting something about Jews, retweeting something about Muslims, retweeting fake news,” adding, “He needs to apologize to Americans.” Panelist Mark Halperin agreed that Flynn should apologize and “not in a perfunctory way. It shouldn’t just be, ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I was careless.’ He needs to explain all of this in a way that’s detailed, because again, he’s not subject to Senate confirmation. He’s about to have a very big job. He’s not responsible for his son, but he’s responsible for himself.”
by This video does a nice job of highlighting some weird aspects of human vision in just three minutes.
Link: https://youtu.be/0NPH_udOOek
This first oddness it mentions is the blind spot, a place on the retina devoid of imaging cells where the optic nerve (which is really a big bundle of nerves) meets the eye. This is even stranger than the video suggests, because the optic nerve doesn’t just make contact there, it passes through the back of the eye so its various fibers can spread out across the retina and connect up with the light-sensitive rod and cone cells from the front.
This is true not just of human eyes but the eyes of all vertebrates — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, so you might suppose that there’s some necessary reason for it. But it’s not true of the eyes of a squid, octopus, or cuttlefish, that is, the cephalopods. Their optic nerves connect up to light-sensitive cells from the back, so there’s no need for a blind spot.
So why don’t vertebrate eyes work the same way? It’s probably just another of several examples of evolutionary accidents, things that seems bizarre from an engineering standpoint but are what you’d expect given evolutionary development.
by From a late July episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, a six-minute segment of advice to Hillary Clinton about how to present herself. (Usual caution to those sensitive to naughty language: This is Bill Maher speaking on cable.)
Link: https://youtu.be/7hBnwPycFUQ
Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is more than 2.5 million votes. A modestly higher Democratic turnout in three usually blue states would have given her the electoral vote as well. Maybe she should have followed Mather’s suggestions. Anyway, they’re reasonably amusing.
by For a long time people have talked about the problem of low-information voters, those who typically don’t care all that much about politics, rarely watch the news, and rely on general impressions. To varying degrees this has probably been true of most voters in most places throughout the history of voting.
Lately I’ve been thinking about another group, people care a great deal about politics, devote a lot of time to talking and reading about it, and consider themselves very well-informed indeed despite the fact that a large part of what they think they know is demonstrably wrong at the level of objective fact. There have always been a lot of these folks as well, especially on the political extremes, but there may be cause to worry that this problem is getting a lot worse. Here’s a two-and-a-half-minute example:
Link: https://youtu.be/9DEdpTIXuro
As multiple fact-check organizations across the political spectrum (and even Newt Gingrich) have pointed out, evidence shows that it’s extremely unlikely (to put it charitably) that millions of non-citizens voted in last month’s U.S. elections. It’s also not true that California “allows it,” and of course President Obama didn’t tell illegal immigrants to vote. But clearly some people believe such nonsense, and they haven’t made it up themselves; they’re getting it from somewhere. Some of the misinformation even comes from president-elect’s Twitter feed.
Of course, politicians have been known to lie, people to repeat rumors, and news media to get things wrong. But lately we’ve been seeing deliberately made-up, highly sensational fake new stories published on the professional-looking websites of what appear to be real news outlets. Some of the sites are owned by Americans, some of whom claim to be engaged in satire or shenanigans or social experiments meant to see just what people can be made to believe. (One admitted he targeted Trump supporters because they don’t bother to fact-check.) Interestingly, a fair number of sites are owned by a group of well-educated entrepreneurial teenagers in Macedonia. (For a flood of articles on that, just do a web search for “fake news Macedonia.”)
And we’re not talking about some esoteric little backwater of the Internet. In the run-up to the latest election people on Facebook shared more links to deliberately fake news stories than to real ones from actual newspapers and networks,
Facebooks and Google have promised to look into doing something about fake news. (I would hope this means flagging the links as questionable rather than blocking them outright.) Legitimate news sources have also devoted time to informing people about the existence of fake news, and more generally, the media seem increasingly willing to label false assertions made by politicians that demonstrably aren’t true.
By the way, this subject may put you in mind of a supposed quotation popularized by the film The Big Short: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The movie misattributes it to Mark Twain (whose birthday was yesterday, November 30, by the way), but the line doesn’t appear in Twain’s published works. Quote Investigator traces a similar line to another 19th-century humorist, Josh Billings.
On the other hand, as Alex Shepard pointed out in The New Republic (or its website, anyway), the book the movie was based on (The Big Short by Michael Lewis) accurately quotes Leo Tolstoy as saying something along similar lines:
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.
For a couple of previous rants about misinformation in the news see this post from 2012 and the short follow-up here.
(Updated 2016 January 04 to add the last paragraph and to note that the European center of fake news entrepreneurship is for some reason Macedonia, or what the UN calls “the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia” to avoid pissing off Greece.)
by Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, has some advice to journalists on dealing with the flood of false statements from Donald Trump.
(I’m going with “false statements” rather than “lies” because at least some of the time Trump probably believes what he’s saying, though other times he is pretty obviously lying.)
Basically, Noah says, Trump argues like a toddler, making stuff up as he goes along, like his entirely made-up claim that millions of illegal votes gave Hillary Clinton her victory in the popular vote (or the “so-called popular vote” as Trump weirdly called to it).
Link: https://youtu.be/9P1IVQJdVvE
Alas, while Noah is right that paying attention to Trump’s fantasy world takes away time from reporting on reality, his proposed solution isn’t likely to work. He suggests asking Trump questions the way one would a toddler. The problem is that Trump will simply ignore the questions or declare them evidence of media bias or some such.
by You’ve probably already seen this by now, but in case if you haven’t, it’s Saturday Night Live‘s take from the November 19 broadcast on Trump’s transition planning since the election.
Link: https://youtu.be/JUWSLlz0Fdo
Trump complained about the show on Twitter, as you’d expect, but news items Monday and Tuesday suggest the writers got several things right, including the decision not to try to jail Hillary Clinton as he’d promised his followers and a growing realization from Republicans that repealing “Obamacare” would hurt a lot of people, including many members of their own party.
by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog appears on Stephen Colbert the day after the election to discuss the results. I particularly liked the line about Trump’s plan to destroy ISIS (about 4:20 into the clip).
Link: https://youtu.be/rstLxJtQQ30
For more on Triumph see his Wikipedia entry.
by President Obama today awards the Medal of Freedom to Margaret Hamilton, not the late actress famous for playing the Wicked Witch of the West but a pioneering computer scientist who programmed computers for the Apollo missions to the Moon and is still alive and in business at the age of 80.
One of Hamilton’s most important contributions was in systematically anticipating problems including human error and developing error detection and recover code. Hank Green has a brief explanation of that in this video from June:
Link: https://youtu.be/PPLDZMjgaf8
For more on Hamilton see this article from MIT News and this one about the famous photo showing her standing next to a giant stack of printouts containing the Apollo software. If you want to see the code itself, it’s on line here.
The Medal of Freedom will also be awarded posthumously to Grace Hopper, who became a naval officer at the age of 37 during World War 2 and helped develop some of the first high-level computer languages and compilers. I met Admiral Hopper nearly 40 years ago while she was still on active duty and still somewhere have one of the “nanoseconds” she was famous for handing out, a piece of wire one light-nanosecond long. (That’s a hair under 30 centimeters, or just short of a foot.) I’m rather surprised she had not already received the Medal of Freedom. She died in 1992, still employed in her post-Navy job at Digital Equipment Corporation.
In her later years Admiral Hopper was best known as a witty and entertaining public speaker. Here’s her appearance on the Letterman Show shortly after she retired from active duty at the age of 79 in 1986, and you can see why people enjoyed her talks:
Link: https://youtu.be/1-vcErOPofQ
There’s more on Hamilton and Hopper in this article.
Other honorees at today’s ceremony include human rights activist Elouise Cobell (deceased), architect Frank Gehry, artist May Lin, athletes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan; educator Eduardo Padrón, entertainers Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Bruce Springsteen, and Lorne Michaels; former FCC head Newton Minow, scientist Richard Garwin, American Indian activist Elouise Cobell (deceased); sports announcer Vin Scully, and philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates. For more see this page on the White House website.
by Alton Brown, Stephen Colbert, and Science! Or engineering anyway:
Link: https://youtu.be/wkHJgJeo7xQ
“Any sufficiently commonplace magic will be deemed technology.”
— Nimblespheres’ Law
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