Boids

A team of Hungarian programmers struggle to teach autonomous drone copters to use alignment, attraction, and avoidance to simulate the flocking behavior of birds.

Can they ever be taught to behave as beautifully as these roosting starlings near Oxford, England?

Evolution of Species

For those of you who followed YAG's and my long discussion of whether there really is such a thing as "species" outside the human mind, an article on translating Darwin into Arabic, which lacks a word for species. How do you begin to convey the concept?

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
And:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.

It's strange to think that Tennyson was wrong, but perhaps -- at least in animals -- the single life is all there is. It is different in plants. You can take a cutting off a tree and graft it to another, often even one of a very different 'type.' You can pluck a green twig and put it in the right compound, and it will grow a new tree.

Perhaps we could do that with adequately advanced technology even with people. Presumably if I took your right arm and made a new you, it would not be the same person. The seat of consciousness would differ, and that alone means you are not the same. Do trees have consciousness? Somehow they know the sun.

Fear and Awe

Perhaps it's no surprising that I gave a minute to this 'test,' because is built strictly around mythology.

What Kind Of Mythical Creature Are You?

You got: Dragon

You inspire fear and awe, and you’re fiercely protective of the people and possessions you cherish. You’re a creature of comfort, you enjoy living luxuriously, but you’re by no means lazy. If provoked, you’re a fearsome enemy, but you’re not easily angered. You enjoy time to yourself, but you also require intellectual stimulation, because behind all that raw power, you’re also sharp as a tack.

Friday Night AMV

Ain't no rest for the wicked. Another appropriation(?) of old film noir style.

They vote, too

As usual, I administered the primary election in my precinct earlier this week.  There were two face-palm moments.  First, there were the usual handful of voters who took the news that they would have to choose between the Democratic primary and the Republican primary as if it were an immobilizing jolt from a taser.  After meeting with a frequently hostile response to greeting each voter with the opening question "Republican or Democrat?" we tried asking them whether they preferred to cast a Republican ballot or a Democrat ballot.  "I'm not really affiliated with any party," many responded.  "That's OK," I would reply.  "Texas doesn't have closed party registration, anyway.  It's no one's business but your own what party, if any, you identify with.  But there are two separate elections today, and you can vote in only one of them."  For most people, this was enough.  A few took the opportunity to examine the two sample ballots and make the decision, apparently for the first time, which one they were most interested in.  This puzzles me, because I'd have guessed that the only people who bother to vote in primaries are fairly plugged into the process.  What's more, there's very little point in voting in a Democratic primary in Texas, especially in a county where no candidate for a local office has a snowball's chance of winning unless he prevails in the Republican primary; once that's over, he's likely to be running unopposed in the general election.

One guy couldn't assimilate the news.  He was furious.  "I don't vote for the party, I vote for the man," he protested.  Gosh, then a primary is the place for you, buddy, because party affiliation won't help you at all in deciding which candidate you want to represent a particular party in the general election come November.  All you can possibly do is vote for the individual.  Not good enough.  How dare we infringe his right to pick and choose among the races, switching back and forth between the ballots?

Don't get me wrong.  A very good case can be made for open, non-partisan primaries and the breaking of the stranglehold of the two dominant parties.  It just can't be made very effectively on election day.  No matter how much sympathy I might have for his underlying political point, I couldn't give him two ballots to vote on Tuesday.  "I just won't vote, then!" he shouted, and stomped out.  Anyone would think the whole issue was taking him totally by surprise.  And yet this was no youngster but a man in his 60s, who I happen to know owns his own business.

(This flip-side of this confusion is expressed by at least one or two voters in every primary over why they can't just vote a straight party ticket, which is so much more convenient.  But they're rarely angry about it, and generally can be brought quickly to understand why that won't work in a party primary.)

The second moment came when we were trying to reconcile the number of people who had signed in to vote with the number of unused ballots remaining when the polls closed.  This being a primary, I was only one of two judges for the day.  My fellow judge had been issued only 25 ballots for the whole day, because this is a small precinct in a county with very few blue voters.  Our ballot-scanning machine report indicated that 6 Democratic ballots had been cast, but only 18 unused ballots could be found.  The judge came up with the idea that she'd been issued ballots with serial numbers from XX251 through XX275, which by her reckoning meant she'd started with only 24 ballots.  I posited that ballot numbers 251 through 275 made for 25 ballots.  She thought I was nuts:  275 minus 251 clearly is 24.  "Suppose you had ballots numbered 1 through 10," I suggested.  "Would that be 10 ballots or 9?  You've got to subtract the two numbers, then add one.  Otherwise you'll be leaving out one of the other of the endpoints."  She still thought I was nuts.  But hey, I don't have to sign her paperwork.

Living over retail

I'm a suburban-turned-exurban gal.   Only once in my life have I ever rented an apartment in a commercial district, with shops downstairs.  I absolutely loved it:  instant access in the morning to latte ad a bagel, then a 2-minute drive to the office.  The Wall Street Journal reports that, until about four years ago, "shopkeeper" apartments went for 20% below what otherwise would have been considered market value.  Today they're selling like hotcakes, which I can easily understand.

When I was a kid, I was awfully fond of a nearby shopping center built like a European village, with winding streets, quaint shops and restaurants on the ground floor, and apartments upstairs.  It's an enduring disappointment that it didn't catch on, replaced instead by a lot of interchangeable air-conditioned malls with interchangeable chain stores.

I think these are the apartments I lived in part-time a few years ago, when I was spending so much time working in Houston that it was worthwhile renting a small space to spend most weeknights.  If not, they're much the same, and in the same area:  just southwest of Houston's business district.  No bigger than a hotel room, but much less depressing, and cheaper in the long run.

Obama is not a Keynesian, he's an American!

MikeD linked to this thoughtful YouTube clip at Cassandra's place.  I missed it when it came out in 2012.



"You must think Americans are stupid!"

The man-in-the-street interviews are a well that never goes dry for me.

A Little Celtic Punk for the Weekend

Went and saw the Dropkick Murphys the other night. Good music to kick off the weekend.

Numbers can be misleading

So it's understandable that the HHS is not prepared to release any figures on the number of previously uninsured Americans who have become insured under Obamacare.  They've got figures on lots of other stuff, though, so we have that going for us.

Identity politics

If Bill Clinton was the first black president, and Obama is the first woman president, what will Hillary!^TM be?

Speaking of isolationist mindsets

No doubt we've all been reading starry-eyed editorials about how Putin grasps the enormity of his error and is only seeking a face-saving exit strategy.  Here's another view:

Far from thinking that its incursion was a foolish blunder, Russia appears to be acting in the belief that it has inflicted a humiliation on the West and made solid gains on the ground in Ukraine.  It is doubling down on the policy, and as far as one can read the mixed signals from the Kremlin, appears to be saying that the West must swallow the annexation of Crimea or watch as Russia further destabilizes eastern Ukraine.

Or maybe the West must swallow both.

Are we going the way of the Ming?

The Ming dynasty famously went into isolationist decline towards the middle of the second millennium, after an impressive run.  Noah Smith at The Week believes the U.S. is in danger of the same fate, in part from its isolationism, in part from a neglect of STEM studies, but mostly because from the complacency that besets civilizations that perceive themselves in a "Golden Age."

A remarkable aspect of Smith's piece is the complete avoidance of market forces.  Maybe that's part of the STEM studies that, as he acknowledges, too many people find too hard to tackle.  He has a glimmer of a notion that civilizations deteriorate when they try to insulate themselves from competition, but he doesn't seem to see the economic implication.

It's everywhere

Something in a FireDogLake post made me ask the question:  is the Defense Department seriously including a Climate Change analysis in its published reports these days?   Sadly, it is true:

Across each of the three pillars of the updated defense strategy, the Department is committed to finding creative, effective, and efficient ways to achieve our goals and assist in making strategic choices.  Innovation – within our own Department and in our interagency and international partnerships – is a central line of effort.  We are identifying new presence paradigms, including potentially positioning additional forward deployed naval forces in critical areas, and deploying new combinations of ships, aviation assets, regionally aligned or rotational ground forces, and crisis response forces, all with the intention of maximizing effects while minimizing costs.  With our allies and partners, we will make greater efforts to coordinate our planning to optimize their contributions to their own security and to our many combined activities.  The impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities, while at the same time undermining the capacity of our domestic installations to support training activities.  Our actions to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resiliency of our installations and help mitigate these effects.

What a humdinger.  Just count the buzzwords: creative, effective, efficient, goals, strategic choices, innovation, partnerships, paradigms, assets.   Slip in a little something about climate changes increasing something or other, possibly.  Can we suppose the author really had anything in particular in mind, or was he only checking boxes?

The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.  These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.

There must be people who spend their whole military career on this kind of thing, unless someone has had the good sense to farm it out to civilian content suppliers.

Decoding school marketing slogans

From a homeschooler who calls herself an "unschooler."

Kids out of the box

Unexpected test answers.  I particularly like the one about the coin and the dice.

"We don't have to go high school with him"

I don't quite know what to think about this parent's story, never having raised a teenager of my own.  What does ring a bell with me is the idea that you can't do the caring about school for the school-aged kid.  One way or another, he has to care on his own.  I liked the way this family at least negotiated a solution to the problem of his refusal to get up and out of the house on a schedule that didn't disrupt everyone else.

I don't remember school ever being optional, to the point where I simply never gave it a thought.  In any case, in a million years my parents wouldn't have sat still for my turning the household on its head every morning. Though less strict than their own parents had been, they were not pushovers by any standard.  They were up and out of the house before I was, and never considered it their job to make sure I got to school or even that I woke up at any particular time; if I wanted a ride instead of biking or walking, I conformed to their schedule.  As an adult, I figured out how to get jobs where I could set my own hours.  Alarm clocks have always been reserved for special occasions.

They raised a kid with a lifelong, almost involuntary habit of sabotaging institutional discipline whenever it's encountered.  I wonder sometimes if I'll end up in a nursing home and how I'll handle it.

Bad relationship news

How can you tell when that special someone may not be marriage material after all?

Normally it would be preferable to get this information before you go into labor.

In other news.  ("Would women really opt for this invasive surgery?" "Are you kidding?")

Failure to launch

This story from New Jersey is a little confusing.  A judge has been called on to decide whether parents must continue financial support of a child of 18.  What factors should we be considering?  Is it enough for you--as it is for me--to know that she had left home?  Should it matter that she was defiant of her parents' objection to a bad-apple boyfriend?  Is it important that she wants to keep attending a private high school that costs $5,300 a year?

My parents were good enough to continue supporting me as long as I was in school, until I married.  Pretty simple rules.  We didn't have a lot of control battles about it, but I knew perfectly well that if I offended them deeply enough and undermined their faith in my judgment, they were free to cut me loose financially.  I never lived at home after I turned 18, and always paid my own expenses when not attending school full-time.  It seemed like a generous arrangement.

I have several relatives and acquaintances who've struck a very different deal with their adult children.  It's very puzzling, and the children, far from feeling grateful, appear aggrieved:  stuck in a long twilight of post-adolescence.

Anyway, if the courts have to be brought in to adjudicate a quarrel between parents and their children, that's a serious problem all by itself.

"All this beauty at our expense!"

Theodore Dalrymple deplores not so much the graft as the vulgarity of kleptocrats' use of public money:

Extreme wealth, whether honestly or dishonestly acquired, seems these days to bring forth little new except in the form and genre of vulgarity.  Mr. Ambani’s skyscraper tower home in Bombay is a case in point:  His aesthetic is that of the first-class executive lounge of an airport.  Mr. Ambramovich’s ideal is that of a floating Dubai the size of an aircraft carrier.  Only once have I been invited to a Russian oligarch’s home, and it struck me as a hybrid of luxurious modernist brothel and up-to-date operating theater.  I saw some pictures recently of some huge Chinese state enterprise’s headquarters, and it appalled me how this nation, with one of the most exquisite, and certainly the oldest, aesthetic traditions on Earth, has gone over entirely to Las Vegas rococo (without the hint of irony or playfulness).

H/t (again) Maggie's Farm.

Boyz'n'Carz

Dr. Helen reports that men in hot cars find it easier to pick up hot women.  It's hard to dispute the cited study, but it got me to thinking about whether in my innocent youth I'd graded men "up" on the basis of their cars.  Back in the Pleistocene, before the advent of the NPH, I was attracted to other men from time to time.  I can't remember any of their cars.  I don't think most of them even had cars.  I might have been impressed by their cool bicycles, though I don't quite remember.  Their rock-star hair, certainly.  Their preference for natural fibers over polyester.  IQ and independence of mind, absolutely--opinions that wouldn't induce eye-rolling--as well as a willingness and ability to support themselves.  A sort of non-frat-boy quality that's hard to define and may have had little value in screening out the real wankers.  But not their wheels.

Isn't it possible that the guys most interested in cars were most interested in trying to win the attention of the kind of chicks who were most interested in guys' cars?

H/t Maggie's Farm.