Sunday, November 19, 2017
A New Supreme Court Case Could Cripple Public Employee Unions
As much as I support unions in theory, there is too often a difference between theory in practice. In this case, my beef is that many union leaderships regularly sell out their members. I am particularly disgusted with the conduct of the unions with respect to CalPERS, where they get know-nothing, potted plants on the board who rubber stamp staff’s self-serving initiatives. Even worse, the SEIU’s Terry Brennard and CSEA’s David Low were cited by CalPERS staff as key players in getting its non-secret, tamper-friendly election procedures passed.
So if this decision goes against public employee unions, IMHO their leaders’ habit of power-seeking at the expense of the rank and file is a big part of the antipathy towards unions in America and laid the groundwork for cases like these.
Wisconsin provided early examples of scorched-earth labor policies. California unions took note.
Should Mark Janus prevail in his Supreme Court case, public-sector employees in California and other states who now pay agency fees instead of union dues will be able to opt out of any payment at all—even though they can still benefit from collective bargaining contracts and turn to the union with grievances, enjoying a free ride that drains union resources.
The ruling would undermine the ability of public-sector unions—about half of U.S. organized labor—to set standards for wage and workplace conditions. The resulting financial pressure will hamper unions from taking lead roles in policy debates on such issues as health care. “The short-term [goal] is to reduce the ability to collect dues,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs. “The long-term aim is to weaken collective bargaining.”
Anti-union forces, often funded by corporate-backed foundations, have been on the attack for decades. One stunning victory was the 2011 passage of Wisconsin’s Act 10, that state’s “budget repair” bill. Republican Governor Scott Walker, long a vocal enemy of public-sector unions, introduced it to address a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.
Act 10 gutted public-sector union collective bargaining rights, leaving unions unable to negotiate wages—except raises attached to the cost-of-living—along with pensions, work conditions such as hours worked, sick leave and vacations. In other words, all the things that, for many, make it worth paying union dues.
The law also loosened restrictions on local governments’ hiring and wage policies, while allowing wage freezes and requiring higher employee health-care contributions.
Act 10 knee-capped labor as a political force in an historically union state — the first to recognize public-sector unions. By 2014 the once-robust Wisconsin State Employees Union had lost 60 percent of its members; its annual budget dropped from $6 million to $2 million. Then came the defections. In 2013 the nearly 6,000 prison guards staffing Wisconsin’s correctional facilities voted to leave WSEU for the newly-created Wisconsin Association for Correctional Law Enforcement, which cut dues from WSEU’s roughly $36 monthly rate to WACLE’s $18. WACLE now represents approximately 5,900 state security workers.
“The two major public-sector unions both lost about 80 percent of dues-paying members,” Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of law and sociology, told Capital & Main. Rogers is also the founder of an organization called COWS, touted as “the national high-road strategy center” think tank. Shrunken union budgets hobbled the ability to operate effectively on policy issues and support labor-friendly candidates. “They are basically nowhere near what they were in terms of political forces,” Rogers said.
Employees whose livelihoods had taken a hit with budget cuts weren’t in a mood to pay dues to a union without collective bargaining power. So they quit—bleeding unions of funds.
“Which is what it was all about,” said Rogers.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
So if this decision goes against public employee unions, IMHO their leaders’ habit of power-seeking at the expense of the rank and file is a big part of the antipathy towards unions in America and laid the groundwork for cases like these.
***
By Bobbi Murray, a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. Originally published at Capital and MainWisconsin provided early examples of scorched-earth labor policies. California unions took note.
Should Mark Janus prevail in his Supreme Court case, public-sector employees in California and other states who now pay agency fees instead of union dues will be able to opt out of any payment at all—even though they can still benefit from collective bargaining contracts and turn to the union with grievances, enjoying a free ride that drains union resources.
The ruling would undermine the ability of public-sector unions—about half of U.S. organized labor—to set standards for wage and workplace conditions. The resulting financial pressure will hamper unions from taking lead roles in policy debates on such issues as health care. “The short-term [goal] is to reduce the ability to collect dues,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs. “The long-term aim is to weaken collective bargaining.”
Anti-union forces, often funded by corporate-backed foundations, have been on the attack for decades. One stunning victory was the 2011 passage of Wisconsin’s Act 10, that state’s “budget repair” bill. Republican Governor Scott Walker, long a vocal enemy of public-sector unions, introduced it to address a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.
Act 10 gutted public-sector union collective bargaining rights, leaving unions unable to negotiate wages—except raises attached to the cost-of-living—along with pensions, work conditions such as hours worked, sick leave and vacations. In other words, all the things that, for many, make it worth paying union dues.
The law also loosened restrictions on local governments’ hiring and wage policies, while allowing wage freezes and requiring higher employee health-care contributions.
Act 10 knee-capped labor as a political force in an historically union state — the first to recognize public-sector unions. By 2014 the once-robust Wisconsin State Employees Union had lost 60 percent of its members; its annual budget dropped from $6 million to $2 million. Then came the defections. In 2013 the nearly 6,000 prison guards staffing Wisconsin’s correctional facilities voted to leave WSEU for the newly-created Wisconsin Association for Correctional Law Enforcement, which cut dues from WSEU’s roughly $36 monthly rate to WACLE’s $18. WACLE now represents approximately 5,900 state security workers.
“The two major public-sector unions both lost about 80 percent of dues-paying members,” Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of law and sociology, told Capital & Main. Rogers is also the founder of an organization called COWS, touted as “the national high-road strategy center” think tank. Shrunken union budgets hobbled the ability to operate effectively on policy issues and support labor-friendly candidates. “They are basically nowhere near what they were in terms of political forces,” Rogers said.
Employees whose livelihoods had taken a hit with budget cuts weren’t in a mood to pay dues to a union without collective bargaining power. So they quit—bleeding unions of funds.
“Which is what it was all about,” said Rogers.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
X Marks the Self
In August, a man with a sword was arrested near Buckingham Palace on suspicion of preparing to commit an act of terrorism. Westminster Magistrates Court heard that the man, an Uber driver from Luton, had intended to go to Windsor Castle but his satnav directed him to a pub called The Windsor Castle instead. Without stopping for a drink, he drove on to Buckingham Palace. It isn’t clear if he was still relying on the satnav for the final stage of his journey, or whether rage at the mistake was a motivating factor in his alleged offence. Three police officers were said to have received minor injuries; presumably he hadn’t stopped to ask them for directions.
Greg Milner includes a few stories about satnav fails in Pinpoint, his lively history of satellite navigation technology – his central chapter is called ‘Death by GPS’ – but one of the eye-opening things about his book is quite how far-reaching the tech is. As well as guiding missiles and encouraging motorists not to pay attention to road signs or even to the road ahead of them, GPS is used in crop management, high frequency trading, weather forecasting, earthquake measurement, nuclear-detonation detection and space exploration, as well as the smooth running of countless infrastructure networks, from electricity grids to the internet.
GPS, which stands for Global Positioning System, was developed by the American military. The US Department of Defence currently spends more than a billion dollars a year maintaining it. There are 31 GPS satellites orbiting the earth, all monitored, along with hundreds of other military satellites, from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. For the system to work, a receiver on the ground – your mobile phone, for example – needs to have a ‘line of sight’ to at least four of the satellites (there are very few places on earth where it wouldn’t). Each satellite continously broadcasts its position, along with the time the signal left the satellite. The time it takes for the signal to reach you (measured in milliseconds) will tell you exactly how far away it is. Three of these signals provide enough information to pinpoint your position; the fourth confirms the time used in the calculations. GPS satellites, unlike mobile phones, carry super-accurate atomic clocks, which are continually synchronised with one another. This is necessary for the precision of the positioning system, but many of the applications of GPS make use of it primarily as a timekeeping device.
Since 1967, the second has been defined as ‘the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom’. A pendulum clock uses gravity to make a pendulum oscillate at a measurable frequency; a quartz clock uses electricity to make a quartz crystal oscillate at a measurable frequency; an atomic clock uses microwaves to make caesium (or similar) atoms oscillate at a measurable frequency. In the 1970s, the only way to synchronise your atomic clock with the one at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures was to take it to Paris with you and compare them side by side. Now it’s all done by satellite signals. GPS time is also what enables stocks and shares to change hands in microseconds, prevents power surges in vast electrical grids and keeps the internet ticking smoothly.
But before it was co-opted as the pocketwatch of late capitalism – a gift from the US government – GPS was developed as a way to help the US air force drop its bombs just where it wanted with as little risk as possible to American lives. As with any technological breakthrough, it took decades, with false starts, moments of inspiration, patient refinements, scepticism from the brass (‘We’re the navy, we know where we are’), inter-service rivalry and a more or less steady influx of government cash. Within days of Sputnik’s launch in 1957, two young engineers at Johns Hopkins University were using the Russian satellite’s radio signal to plot and then predict its position. GPS came of age in the 1991 Gulf War. (...)
There used to be two different GPS signals: a high-precision one, which only military receivers could decrypt, and a deliberately degraded one for civilian use, which gave your position to within a hundred metres or so. When US troops started shipping out to the Gulf after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, they had only 13 Manpack portable GPS receivers between them. Each one cost $40,000 and weighed 12 kg. The Department of Defence put in an order for thousands of Trimpacks, portable receivers built by a former Hewlett Packard engineer called Charlie Trimble (one of the many people Milner interviewed). But there still weren’t enough to go round, so a lot of soldiers ended up spending $1000 of their own money on mass-produced Magellan portable receivers, which were less accurate than Trimpacks but better than nothing in the middle of a hostile desert. The Magellans were made by Ed Tuck, an ex-military venture capitalist with a background in the tech industry. He’d imagined selling cheap (less than $300) GPS receivers to middle-aged men who didn’t like admitting they were lost or asking for directions, but many of his early customers were people with boats off the southern coast of Florida – drug dealers or people traffickers.
Because so many soldiers in Desert Storm were carrying GPS receivers that used the civilian signal, the military turned off the ‘selective availability’ software that degraded it. They turned it on again when the Gulf War was over, but amateur GPS enthusiasts would have noticed a sudden improvement in their receivers’ accuracy in September 1994, when US forces landed on Haiti to depose General Cédras and restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Meanwhile, commercial GPS receiver manufacturers were developing ways to overcome or work around selective availability, and make their products more accurate in spite of it. In May 2000 the military stopped degrading the civilian GPS signal. Sales of GPS receivers soared.
It isn’t just every phone and every Uber car that’s now fitted with GPS; in some parts of the world it’s every tractor too. And not because farmers need to be reminded of the way to their fields. Milner visited a sugar beet farm in Colorado, a few hours north of Schriever Air Force Base. Using GPS in combination with the Russian GLONASS system to achieve ‘sub-inch accuracy’, the beet farmer tills his field in strips, leaving a narrow band of fallow earth between each row to help keep water and nutrients in the soil. Each seed is planted in a precise, recorded position, with more of them in the more fertile parts of the field. Just the right amount of water and fertiliser is sprayed onto the beets. When they’re harvested, each and every one can be plucked entire from the earth (a broken beet is no use to anyone). Milner reckons that GPS is now worth billions a year to American farmers. An experiment in Uttar Pradesh, meanwhile, found that levelling the land on a two-acre farm using GPS nearly tripled the wheat yield. The farmer in Colorado told Milner that GPS gives him ‘intimate knowledge’ of the land, like his grandfather, who walked behind a horse looking at the ground beneath his feet. Still, hi-tech agriculture has its downsides. Not so many years ago, it took two men to harvest a beet field: one of them driving the tractor, the other operating the digger at the back. Now the tractor does almost everything itself; the driver merely has to turn it round at the end of the row. Soon, he won’t have to do even that. A former farmhand in East Yorkshire told me this summer that he had stopped driving tractors because he can’t understand the computers.
Greg Milner includes a few stories about satnav fails in Pinpoint, his lively history of satellite navigation technology – his central chapter is called ‘Death by GPS’ – but one of the eye-opening things about his book is quite how far-reaching the tech is. As well as guiding missiles and encouraging motorists not to pay attention to road signs or even to the road ahead of them, GPS is used in crop management, high frequency trading, weather forecasting, earthquake measurement, nuclear-detonation detection and space exploration, as well as the smooth running of countless infrastructure networks, from electricity grids to the internet.
GPS, which stands for Global Positioning System, was developed by the American military. The US Department of Defence currently spends more than a billion dollars a year maintaining it. There are 31 GPS satellites orbiting the earth, all monitored, along with hundreds of other military satellites, from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. For the system to work, a receiver on the ground – your mobile phone, for example – needs to have a ‘line of sight’ to at least four of the satellites (there are very few places on earth where it wouldn’t). Each satellite continously broadcasts its position, along with the time the signal left the satellite. The time it takes for the signal to reach you (measured in milliseconds) will tell you exactly how far away it is. Three of these signals provide enough information to pinpoint your position; the fourth confirms the time used in the calculations. GPS satellites, unlike mobile phones, carry super-accurate atomic clocks, which are continually synchronised with one another. This is necessary for the precision of the positioning system, but many of the applications of GPS make use of it primarily as a timekeeping device.Since 1967, the second has been defined as ‘the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom’. A pendulum clock uses gravity to make a pendulum oscillate at a measurable frequency; a quartz clock uses electricity to make a quartz crystal oscillate at a measurable frequency; an atomic clock uses microwaves to make caesium (or similar) atoms oscillate at a measurable frequency. In the 1970s, the only way to synchronise your atomic clock with the one at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures was to take it to Paris with you and compare them side by side. Now it’s all done by satellite signals. GPS time is also what enables stocks and shares to change hands in microseconds, prevents power surges in vast electrical grids and keeps the internet ticking smoothly.
But before it was co-opted as the pocketwatch of late capitalism – a gift from the US government – GPS was developed as a way to help the US air force drop its bombs just where it wanted with as little risk as possible to American lives. As with any technological breakthrough, it took decades, with false starts, moments of inspiration, patient refinements, scepticism from the brass (‘We’re the navy, we know where we are’), inter-service rivalry and a more or less steady influx of government cash. Within days of Sputnik’s launch in 1957, two young engineers at Johns Hopkins University were using the Russian satellite’s radio signal to plot and then predict its position. GPS came of age in the 1991 Gulf War. (...)
There used to be two different GPS signals: a high-precision one, which only military receivers could decrypt, and a deliberately degraded one for civilian use, which gave your position to within a hundred metres or so. When US troops started shipping out to the Gulf after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, they had only 13 Manpack portable GPS receivers between them. Each one cost $40,000 and weighed 12 kg. The Department of Defence put in an order for thousands of Trimpacks, portable receivers built by a former Hewlett Packard engineer called Charlie Trimble (one of the many people Milner interviewed). But there still weren’t enough to go round, so a lot of soldiers ended up spending $1000 of their own money on mass-produced Magellan portable receivers, which were less accurate than Trimpacks but better than nothing in the middle of a hostile desert. The Magellans were made by Ed Tuck, an ex-military venture capitalist with a background in the tech industry. He’d imagined selling cheap (less than $300) GPS receivers to middle-aged men who didn’t like admitting they were lost or asking for directions, but many of his early customers were people with boats off the southern coast of Florida – drug dealers or people traffickers.
Because so many soldiers in Desert Storm were carrying GPS receivers that used the civilian signal, the military turned off the ‘selective availability’ software that degraded it. They turned it on again when the Gulf War was over, but amateur GPS enthusiasts would have noticed a sudden improvement in their receivers’ accuracy in September 1994, when US forces landed on Haiti to depose General Cédras and restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Meanwhile, commercial GPS receiver manufacturers were developing ways to overcome or work around selective availability, and make their products more accurate in spite of it. In May 2000 the military stopped degrading the civilian GPS signal. Sales of GPS receivers soared.
It isn’t just every phone and every Uber car that’s now fitted with GPS; in some parts of the world it’s every tractor too. And not because farmers need to be reminded of the way to their fields. Milner visited a sugar beet farm in Colorado, a few hours north of Schriever Air Force Base. Using GPS in combination with the Russian GLONASS system to achieve ‘sub-inch accuracy’, the beet farmer tills his field in strips, leaving a narrow band of fallow earth between each row to help keep water and nutrients in the soil. Each seed is planted in a precise, recorded position, with more of them in the more fertile parts of the field. Just the right amount of water and fertiliser is sprayed onto the beets. When they’re harvested, each and every one can be plucked entire from the earth (a broken beet is no use to anyone). Milner reckons that GPS is now worth billions a year to American farmers. An experiment in Uttar Pradesh, meanwhile, found that levelling the land on a two-acre farm using GPS nearly tripled the wheat yield. The farmer in Colorado told Milner that GPS gives him ‘intimate knowledge’ of the land, like his grandfather, who walked behind a horse looking at the ground beneath his feet. Still, hi-tech agriculture has its downsides. Not so many years ago, it took two men to harvest a beet field: one of them driving the tractor, the other operating the digger at the back. Now the tractor does almost everything itself; the driver merely has to turn it round at the end of the row. Soon, he won’t have to do even that. A former farmhand in East Yorkshire told me this summer that he had stopped driving tractors because he can’t understand the computers.
by Thomas Jones, LRB | Read more:
Image: via:
[ed. I had a project that used some of the earliest commercial versions of GPS technology (around 1992) to map salmon streams in remote Alaskan back-country, then feed those locations in ArcInfo for mapping. Selective availability was a bitch and overcoming it required triangulation from several locations, some of which entailed a lot of frustrating bushwhacking to get to sites high enough on mountain sides to get good, reliable Sat signals. A lot of extra effort to overcome Defense Dept. paranoia.]
[ed. I had a project that used some of the earliest commercial versions of GPS technology (around 1992) to map salmon streams in remote Alaskan back-country, then feed those locations in ArcInfo for mapping. Selective availability was a bitch and overcoming it required triangulation from several locations, some of which entailed a lot of frustrating bushwhacking to get to sites high enough on mountain sides to get good, reliable Sat signals. A lot of extra effort to overcome Defense Dept. paranoia.]
Amazon is Becoming the New Microsoft
My last column was about the recent tipping point signifying that cloud computing is guaranteed to replace personal computing over the next three years. This column is about the slugfest to determine what company’s public cloud is most likely to prevail. I reckon it is Amazon’s and I’ll go further to claim that Amazon will shortly be the new Microsoft.
What I mean by The New Microsoft is that Amazon is starting to act a lot like the old Microsoft of the 1990s. You remember — the Bad Microsoft.
Microsoft in the Bill Gates era was truly full of itself, pushing competitors around, crushing enemies and occasionally breaking the law as a bevy of anti-trust settlements show. Microsoft was the second most valuable company on Earth after ExxonMobil and seemed to feel it could get away with anything. When I wrote something that displeased them, they’d summon me to Redmond for reeducation. Fortunately I didn’t give a shit — then or now — making me completely resistant to the technique.
Today in the public cloud space Amazon is behaving much like Microsoft did in the 90s. They are hugely dominant with more than 70 percent of the cloud market and growing. According to Gartner Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon have 80 percent of the public cloud market.
Understand there are only three players in the public cloud that matter at all — Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Forget about companies like IBM and Oracle because their market share is meaningless. Larry Ellison can talk about having lower cloud prices, but if he cannot support at least a million virtual seats (he can’t) his pricing doesn’t matter.
All three of the big public cloud companies are growing fast but Amazon is growing faster. This year AWS will spend $10 billion expanding. Microsoft and Google are spending billions, too, but not that many billions. Amazon may always be bigger.
And Amazon may always be faster, too. Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast. Specifically it can take over a minute for storage to come on-line and in the public cloud world a minute to access your Dropbox is 40 seconds too long.
This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times.
But what about Google? They are definitely in the hunt and competitive in terms of performance, which is why Salesforce — which sees itself as eventually becoming part of Microsoft — instead chose to balance AWS recently by allying also with Google. But beyond this one deal it is hard to see Google making cloud inroads. The problem is that Google’s biggest cloud customer by far is, well, Google itself, and that customer is so demanding that the commercial cloud division hasn’t been able to get its act together. This can change but I’ll guarantee that Google as a cloud customer won’t become any less demanding, so it may not change at all.
AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.
What I mean by The New Microsoft is that Amazon is starting to act a lot like the old Microsoft of the 1990s. You remember — the Bad Microsoft.
Microsoft in the Bill Gates era was truly full of itself, pushing competitors around, crushing enemies and occasionally breaking the law as a bevy of anti-trust settlements show. Microsoft was the second most valuable company on Earth after ExxonMobil and seemed to feel it could get away with anything. When I wrote something that displeased them, they’d summon me to Redmond for reeducation. Fortunately I didn’t give a shit — then or now — making me completely resistant to the technique.Today in the public cloud space Amazon is behaving much like Microsoft did in the 90s. They are hugely dominant with more than 70 percent of the cloud market and growing. According to Gartner Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon have 80 percent of the public cloud market.
Understand there are only three players in the public cloud that matter at all — Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Forget about companies like IBM and Oracle because their market share is meaningless. Larry Ellison can talk about having lower cloud prices, but if he cannot support at least a million virtual seats (he can’t) his pricing doesn’t matter.
All three of the big public cloud companies are growing fast but Amazon is growing faster. This year AWS will spend $10 billion expanding. Microsoft and Google are spending billions, too, but not that many billions. Amazon may always be bigger.
And Amazon may always be faster, too. Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t boot virtual machines quite as fast. Specifically it can take over a minute for storage to come on-line and in the public cloud world a minute to access your Dropbox is 40 seconds too long.
This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That’s why Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most sensitive to such slow boot times.
But what about Google? They are definitely in the hunt and competitive in terms of performance, which is why Salesforce — which sees itself as eventually becoming part of Microsoft — instead chose to balance AWS recently by allying also with Google. But beyond this one deal it is hard to see Google making cloud inroads. The problem is that Google’s biggest cloud customer by far is, well, Google itself, and that customer is so demanding that the commercial cloud division hasn’t been able to get its act together. This can change but I’ll guarantee that Google as a cloud customer won’t become any less demanding, so it may not change at all.
AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren’t enjoying themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.
by Robert X. Cringely, I, Cringely | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Orcas vs Great White Sharks: In a Battle of the Apex Predators Who Wins?
As a result, it is difficult to imagine a great white as prey. And yet, earlier this year the carcasses of five great whites washed ashore along South Africa’s Western Cape province. Ranging in size from 2.7 metres (9ft) to 4.9 metres (16ft), the two females and three males all had one thing in common: holes puncturing the muscle wall between the pectoral fins. Strangest of all, their livers were missing.
The bite marks inflicted, together with confirmed sightings indicate that orcas, Orcinus orca, were responsible for this precisely-targeted predation. Although the opening scene from Jaws II immediately springs to mind, in which an orca washes up with huge bite marks on it, the reality has turned out to be the exact opposite.
When comparing these two apex predators alongside each other, the stats read like a game of Top Trumps. Max length: great white 6.4 metres, orca 9.6 metres; max weight: great white 2,268kg, orca 9,000kg; burst swim speed: great white 45km/h, orca 48km/h. On paper, at least, it does seem that orcas have the edge.The diet of orcas is often geographic or population specific. Those populations predating in South African waters have been documented targeting smaller shark species for their livers. Cow sharks, blues and makos caught on longlines have had their livers removed by orcas, alongside the brains of the billfish also caught. Cow shark carcasses without livers have also washed ashore near Cape Town, and again, this followed nearby orca sightings.
With no doubt that orcas are using highly specialised hunting strategies to target the liver; the real question is: why?
Shark livers are large, typically accounting for 5% or more of a shark’s total body weight. They are oil rich, with a principal component, squalene, serving as an energy store and providing buoyancy in the absence of the swim-bladder found in teleosts (bony fish).
Analysis of white shark livers in particular shows an extremely high total lipid content, dominated by triacylglycerols (>93%). This results in an energy density that is higher than whale blubber. For the sharks this serves as an energy storage unit to fuel migrations, growth and reproduction (Pethybridge et al 2014). For the orcas this is like eating a deep fried Mars Bar with added vitamins. Generally speaking, livers contain vitamin C, vitamin B12, folate, vitamin B6, niacin, riboflavin, vitamin A, iron, sodium and of course fat, carbohydrate and protein energy sources.
Since the attraction of this delicacy to the orca is clear, how exactly does an orca go about removing a great white shark’s liver? The evidence we have shows that it is done with some precision – the shark carcasses were not obliterated.
During a 1997 encounter off the Farrallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, a group of whale watchers witnessed an orca ramming into the side of a great white shark, momentarily stunning it and allowing the orca to flip it over and holding it in place (ventral/belly up) for around 15 minutes, after which the orca began consuming its prey, much to the surprise of the whale watchers on board. A similar incident was captured on film off Costa Rica in 2014 – this time the orca’s prey was a tiger shark. And it’s not just sharks; orcas have been observed doing the same to stingrays too.
What the orcas were exploiting to their own advantage is a curious phenomenon known as “tonic immobility” (TI). This is a natural state of paralysis, which occurs when elasmobranchs are positioned ventral side up in the water column. For certain species of shark like the great white, which is unable to pump water across its gills unless it keeps swimming, the consequence of being maintained within this ‘tonic’ state for too long is final. Effectively, the orcas have learned how to drown their prey whilst minimising their own predatory exertion.
by Lauren Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Composite: Rex Features and Getty Images
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Bob Dylan
It's too hot to sleep and time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
There's not even room enough to be anywhere
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
Well my sense of humanity is going down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writin' what was in her mind
I just don't see why I should even care
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
Well I been to London and I been to gay Paree
I followed the river and I got to the sea
I've been down to the bottom of a whirlpool of lies
I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
I was born here and I'll die here, against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
Friday, November 17, 2017
Nota Bene #10: Notes on $450,312,500
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs
- The hammer price was a round $400,000,000, which means that the buyer's premium alone was more than $50 million. By convention, the buyer's premium goes to the auction house for its troubles, but you can be sure that Christie's grossed much less than $50,312,500 last night. The seller will have negotiated "enhanced hammer," which means that the Rybolovlev family will be receiving significantly more than $400 million. On top of that, the lot had a third-party guarantee, which means that Christie's has to split its profits with the guarantor. That said, even after a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, Christie's surely made a healthy profit on this lot.
- The last time this painting was sold by an auction house was only four years ago, in 2013, when Sotheby's sold it privately to Yves Bouvier for $80 million. That decision, to go with a private sale rather than a glitzy public auction, now looks very, very stupid.
- Bouvier then flipped the work to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. When Rybolovlev found out how much Bouvier made on the deal, he was furious, and basically gave up art collecting entirely. His decision to sell the painting was made in anger, out of pique that he had been ripped off. Now it seems he has made more money off one painting, in four years, than most art collectors dream of making in a lifetime. There's probably a moral here, but I have no idea what it is.
- The difference between the 2013 sale and the 2017 sale isn't just four years and $300+ million, it's also the difference between a private sale and a public sale. A public sale, at least when it's orchestrated by Christie's in the way that this one was, involves glitz and expensive marketing videos and hour-long lines and lighting worthy of a Thomas Kinkade store; it also ensures the ratification of maximum publicity for the final sale price. Which is to say: Rybolovlev didn't own a $450 million painting, he owned an $80 million painting which he overpaid for by almost $50 million. But the new owner absolutely owns a $450 million painting, the only one in the world.
- That said, he doesn't own a very good painting. Even if some part of it was actually painted by Leonardo 500 years ago, most of it wasn't, and there's nothing in the 2017 version of the painting which would, from a connoisseur's perspective, place Leonardo in any kind of artistic pantheon.
- Which explains, at least in part, why a centuries-old painting was sold in a Contemporary Art sale, rather than in the Old Masters sale where you'd think it belonged. The world of Old Masters is, still, a place where connoisseurship matters. In the Contemporary Art world, by contrast, the only people driving valuations are collectors. Christie's realized that they could bypass the cognoscenti and going straight to the art-buying public. That strategy, it turns out, can pay off handsomely. Especially since, at these levels, it's fair to say that Christie's has a personal relationship with every human being on the planet who's willing and able to pay $400 million for a painting. You can be sure that all of them were contacted by the auction house at some point over the past month. And you don't need to know anything about art to spend $450 million on a painting; all you need is $450 million.
by Felix Salmon | Read more:
Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images via NY Times
Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project
How do we make sense of our political moment?
There has been no dearth of commentary on the meaning of the 2016 American presidential election and its political aftermath. Pundits, scholars, and others have expressed alarm about the degree of fragmentation and polarization, the increase in vulgarity in political discourse and the loss of political civility, the weakening of traditional international alliances, the abuse of basic ethics in governing, and the resurgence of nativism, populism, isolationism, and nationalism, all of which could encourage authoritarian behavior among those in or seeking power. There are good reasons to be uneasy.
Yet beyond a pervasive sense of panic, one invariably encounters the belief that whatever problem we face, it is, in the end, fixable. Yes, our republic is deeply fractured and Washington is profoundly dysfunctional. Yes, there is a vast depletion of social capital. Yes, our public discourse is debased. Yes, for all of its power, late-modern capitalism has failed to maintain a steadily rising living standard for average people, making them fearful and politically angry. And yes, the culture of democracy, which has long been the glue holding Americans together, has begun to dissolve. But if we eschew the ideologies of left and right and focus instead on pragmatic solutions to core problems, we can find a way forward.
So, whether from the left, right, or center, the various analyses of contemporary political life unfailingly offer practical, sensible-sounding, step-by-step suggestions for fixing the problems: “If we just try harder, we can set things aright.” Such pragmatic optimism is, of course, a widely acknowledged American trait. As the historian Arthur Mann observed forty years ago, the people of the United States have long had confidence that American know-how can always convert problems into opportunities.
Nevertheless, while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?
These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.
Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”
What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.
The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.
This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment.
The Question of the “Center”
In this light, one can see that however factionalized, any kind of meaningful democratic politics presupposes certain shared understandings and commitments that exist prior to political action. These may or may not represent a social or political consensus on a range of policy issues. More fundamentally, they define the arena in which legitimate political discourse and action take place. This shared cultural space can range widely. At one end of a continuum, it might include a binding consensus on certain ideals that define the identity and aspirations of the political regime. At the other end are agreements usually concerning the administrative processes and procedures that mediate political action. However thick or thin, the social and political solidarity upon which democratic life unfolds is formed through these agreements.
In America, this set of understandings and commitments held in common has been talked about in a variety of ways. In symbolic terms, it has been referred to as the “unum” of the national motto, E pluribus unum. In popular terms, it has been referred to as “the American dream.” In scholarly treatises, it has been framed as “the American creed,” America’s “civil religion,” its “public philosophy,” or its “vital center.” In legal-rational terms, it has been discussed in terms of the binding power of the Constitution.
by James Davison Hunter, IASC: The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
There has been no dearth of commentary on the meaning of the 2016 American presidential election and its political aftermath. Pundits, scholars, and others have expressed alarm about the degree of fragmentation and polarization, the increase in vulgarity in political discourse and the loss of political civility, the weakening of traditional international alliances, the abuse of basic ethics in governing, and the resurgence of nativism, populism, isolationism, and nationalism, all of which could encourage authoritarian behavior among those in or seeking power. There are good reasons to be uneasy.
Yet beyond a pervasive sense of panic, one invariably encounters the belief that whatever problem we face, it is, in the end, fixable. Yes, our republic is deeply fractured and Washington is profoundly dysfunctional. Yes, there is a vast depletion of social capital. Yes, our public discourse is debased. Yes, for all of its power, late-modern capitalism has failed to maintain a steadily rising living standard for average people, making them fearful and politically angry. And yes, the culture of democracy, which has long been the glue holding Americans together, has begun to dissolve. But if we eschew the ideologies of left and right and focus instead on pragmatic solutions to core problems, we can find a way forward.
So, whether from the left, right, or center, the various analyses of contemporary political life unfailingly offer practical, sensible-sounding, step-by-step suggestions for fixing the problems: “If we just try harder, we can set things aright.” Such pragmatic optimism is, of course, a widely acknowledged American trait. As the historian Arthur Mann observed forty years ago, the people of the United States have long had confidence that American know-how can always convert problems into opportunities.Nevertheless, while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?
These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.
Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”
What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.
The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.
This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment.
The Question of the “Center”
In this light, one can see that however factionalized, any kind of meaningful democratic politics presupposes certain shared understandings and commitments that exist prior to political action. These may or may not represent a social or political consensus on a range of policy issues. More fundamentally, they define the arena in which legitimate political discourse and action take place. This shared cultural space can range widely. At one end of a continuum, it might include a binding consensus on certain ideals that define the identity and aspirations of the political regime. At the other end are agreements usually concerning the administrative processes and procedures that mediate political action. However thick or thin, the social and political solidarity upon which democratic life unfolds is formed through these agreements.
In America, this set of understandings and commitments held in common has been talked about in a variety of ways. In symbolic terms, it has been referred to as the “unum” of the national motto, E pluribus unum. In popular terms, it has been referred to as “the American dream.” In scholarly treatises, it has been framed as “the American creed,” America’s “civil religion,” its “public philosophy,” or its “vital center.” In legal-rational terms, it has been discussed in terms of the binding power of the Constitution.
by James Davison Hunter, IASC: The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: The Hedgehog
Open Season on Elephants
Trump Reverses Ban on Importing Elephants Killed as Trophies
Image: uncredited
[ed. Update: Trump postpones his administration's decision until he's able to "review all conservation facts". Let's be thankful the Scientist-in-Chief is finally on the case.]
Pictures of the Dead
The summer of 2005, I was twenty-four and running a punk bar in Wuhan, the biggest city in central China. During the school year, the place was packed with expats and local kids who came to see shows and mingle. There was something darkly utopian about it—moshing and chain-smoking mixed with the innocence of flirting and practicing languages. But by June all the revellers had left town. Most nights, I sat alone behind the bar until 4 a.m., drinking cocktails of my own invention from a limited supply of Western liquor.
Wuhan is notorious for hot, humid summers. Several nights a week, my neighborhood lost power. I had to drench my bedsheet in cold water, wrap it around myself, and lie down on the tile floor if I was going to sleep at all. I didn’t have an Internet hookup, and it was often impossible to reach anyone back in New York over the phone. I should probably mention that, in addition to cigarettes and alcohol, I was subsisting on a daily diet of one melon slice and four hours of exercise. This was all I knew how to do to try to make myself feel alive.
One morning, I walked around the corner to a dirt road lined with small shops, where you could find Popsicles, concrete mix, puppies, prostitutes, and the latest pirated DVDs. I went into an herbalist’s den, and asked for a tea “to wake me up.” The herbalist, an old man, got off his stool and peered into my eyes. He got closer to me than anyone had been in months. I wanted him to hold me, rock me gently in his arms, feed me tinctures that would soothe my nerves and crystallize my vision, tell me that I would soon be in the cool and easy swing of things. Instead, he sold me a prepackaged health tea and warned that I should quit drinking iced beverages. “Or else you’ll die,” he insisted.
“That’s O.K.,” I said, then paid and left.
I walked to an Internet café up the road. My anxiety at this time was both vague and maddening. It fed on itself, and spat out words for me to obsess over. That day, I sat down at a computer and Googled “death.” The first photos I saw were of mummified corpses—bodies shrunken, masklike faces gaping in silent horror. Then I found Victorian postmortem portraits—children propped up in chairs, perfect posture, only their dry eyes and lolling heads revealing the difference between strict obedience and extinction. Why preserve the dead, I wondered. What did these people know about life that I didn’t? Could I find it if I kept looking?
by Ottessa Moshfegh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Rembrandt via Wikipedia
Wuhan is notorious for hot, humid summers. Several nights a week, my neighborhood lost power. I had to drench my bedsheet in cold water, wrap it around myself, and lie down on the tile floor if I was going to sleep at all. I didn’t have an Internet hookup, and it was often impossible to reach anyone back in New York over the phone. I should probably mention that, in addition to cigarettes and alcohol, I was subsisting on a daily diet of one melon slice and four hours of exercise. This was all I knew how to do to try to make myself feel alive.One morning, I walked around the corner to a dirt road lined with small shops, where you could find Popsicles, concrete mix, puppies, prostitutes, and the latest pirated DVDs. I went into an herbalist’s den, and asked for a tea “to wake me up.” The herbalist, an old man, got off his stool and peered into my eyes. He got closer to me than anyone had been in months. I wanted him to hold me, rock me gently in his arms, feed me tinctures that would soothe my nerves and crystallize my vision, tell me that I would soon be in the cool and easy swing of things. Instead, he sold me a prepackaged health tea and warned that I should quit drinking iced beverages. “Or else you’ll die,” he insisted.
“That’s O.K.,” I said, then paid and left.
I walked to an Internet café up the road. My anxiety at this time was both vague and maddening. It fed on itself, and spat out words for me to obsess over. That day, I sat down at a computer and Googled “death.” The first photos I saw were of mummified corpses—bodies shrunken, masklike faces gaping in silent horror. Then I found Victorian postmortem portraits—children propped up in chairs, perfect posture, only their dry eyes and lolling heads revealing the difference between strict obedience and extinction. Why preserve the dead, I wondered. What did these people know about life that I didn’t? Could I find it if I kept looking?
by Ottessa Moshfegh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Rembrandt via Wikipedia
How to Give Mars an Atmosphere, Maybe
Earth is most fortunate to have vast webs of magnetic fields surrounding it. Without them, much of our atmosphere would have been gradually torn away by powerful solar winds long ago, making it unlikely that anything like us would be here.
Scientists know that Mars once supported prominent magnetic fields as well, most likely in the early period of its history when the planet was consequently warmer and much wetter. Very little of them is left, and the planet is frigid and desiccated. These understandings lead to an interesting question: If Mars had a functioning magnetosphere to protect it from those solar winds, could it once again develop a thicker atmosphere, warmer climate, and liquid surface water?
James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, thinks it could. And perhaps with our help, such changes could occur within a human, rather than an astronomical, time frame.
In a talk at the NASA Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at the agency’s headquarters, Green presented simulations, models, and early thinking about how a Martian magnetic field might be re-constituted and how the climate on Mars could then become more friendly for human exploration and, perhaps, communities.
It consisted of creating a “magnetic shield” to protect the planet from those high-energy solar particles. The shield structure would consist of a large dipole—a closed electric circuit powerful enough to generate an artificial magnetic field. Simulations showed that a shield of this sort would leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object. A potential result: an end to large-scale stripping of the Martian atmosphere by the solar wind, and a significant change in climate.
“The solar system is ours, let’s take it,” Green told the workshop. “And that, of course, includes Mars. But for humans to be able to explore Mars, together with us doing science, we need a better environment.”
Scientists know that Mars once supported prominent magnetic fields as well, most likely in the early period of its history when the planet was consequently warmer and much wetter. Very little of them is left, and the planet is frigid and desiccated. These understandings lead to an interesting question: If Mars had a functioning magnetosphere to protect it from those solar winds, could it once again develop a thicker atmosphere, warmer climate, and liquid surface water?
James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, thinks it could. And perhaps with our help, such changes could occur within a human, rather than an astronomical, time frame.In a talk at the NASA Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at the agency’s headquarters, Green presented simulations, models, and early thinking about how a Martian magnetic field might be re-constituted and how the climate on Mars could then become more friendly for human exploration and, perhaps, communities.
It consisted of creating a “magnetic shield” to protect the planet from those high-energy solar particles. The shield structure would consist of a large dipole—a closed electric circuit powerful enough to generate an artificial magnetic field. Simulations showed that a shield of this sort would leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object. A potential result: an end to large-scale stripping of the Martian atmosphere by the solar wind, and a significant change in climate.
“The solar system is ours, let’s take it,” Green told the workshop. “And that, of course, includes Mars. But for humans to be able to explore Mars, together with us doing science, we need a better environment.”
Is this “terraforming,” the process by which humans make Mars more suitable for human habitation? That’s an intriguing but controversial idea that has been around for decades, and Green was wary of embracing it fully.
“My understanding of terraforming is the deliberate addition, by humans, of directly adding gases to the atmosphere on a planetary scale,” he wrote in an email. “I may be splitting hairs here, but nothing is introduced to the atmosphere in my simulations that Mars doesn’t create itself. In effect, this concept simply accelerates a natural process that would most likely occur over a much longer period of time.”
What he is referring to here is that many experts believe Mars will be a lot warmer in the future, and will have a much thicker atmosphere, whatever humans do. On its own, however, the process will take a very long time.
To explain further, first a little Mars history.
More than 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had a much thicker atmosphere that kept the surface temperatures moderate enough to allow for substantial amounts of surface water to flow, pool, and perhaps even form an ocean. (And who knows, maybe even for life to begin.) But since the magnetic field of Mars fell apart after its iron inner core was somehow undone, about 90 percent of the Martian atmosphere was stripped away by charged particles in that solar wind, which can reach speeds of 250 to 750 kilometers per second.
Mars, of course, is frigid and dry now, but Green said the dynamics of the solar system point to a time when the planet will warm up again. He said that scientists expect the gradually increasing heat of the sun will warm the planet sufficiently to release the covering of frozen carbon dioxide at the north pole, will start water ice to flow, and will in time create something of a greenhouse atmosphere. But the process is expected to take some 700 million years.
“The key to my idea is that we now know that Mars lost its magnetic field long ago, the solar wind has been stripping off the atmosphere (in particular the oxygen) ever since, and the solar wind is in some kind of equilibrium with the outgassing at Mars,” Green said. (Outgassing is the release of gaseous compounds from beneath the planet’s surface.) “If we significantly reduce the stripping, a new, higher pressure atmosphere will evolve over time. The increase in pressure causes an increase in temperature. We have not calculated exactly what the new equilibrium will be and how long it will take.”
The reason why is that Green and his colleagues found that they needed to add some additional physics to the atmospheric model, dynamics that will become more important and clear over time. But he is confident those physics will be developed. He also said that the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter now circling Mars should be able to identify molecules and compounds that could play a significant role in a changing Mars atmosphere.
So based on those new magnetic field models and projections about the future climate of Mars, when might it be sufficiently changed to become significantly more human friendly?
“My understanding of terraforming is the deliberate addition, by humans, of directly adding gases to the atmosphere on a planetary scale,” he wrote in an email. “I may be splitting hairs here, but nothing is introduced to the atmosphere in my simulations that Mars doesn’t create itself. In effect, this concept simply accelerates a natural process that would most likely occur over a much longer period of time.”
What he is referring to here is that many experts believe Mars will be a lot warmer in the future, and will have a much thicker atmosphere, whatever humans do. On its own, however, the process will take a very long time.
To explain further, first a little Mars history.
More than 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had a much thicker atmosphere that kept the surface temperatures moderate enough to allow for substantial amounts of surface water to flow, pool, and perhaps even form an ocean. (And who knows, maybe even for life to begin.) But since the magnetic field of Mars fell apart after its iron inner core was somehow undone, about 90 percent of the Martian atmosphere was stripped away by charged particles in that solar wind, which can reach speeds of 250 to 750 kilometers per second.
Mars, of course, is frigid and dry now, but Green said the dynamics of the solar system point to a time when the planet will warm up again. He said that scientists expect the gradually increasing heat of the sun will warm the planet sufficiently to release the covering of frozen carbon dioxide at the north pole, will start water ice to flow, and will in time create something of a greenhouse atmosphere. But the process is expected to take some 700 million years.
“The key to my idea is that we now know that Mars lost its magnetic field long ago, the solar wind has been stripping off the atmosphere (in particular the oxygen) ever since, and the solar wind is in some kind of equilibrium with the outgassing at Mars,” Green said. (Outgassing is the release of gaseous compounds from beneath the planet’s surface.) “If we significantly reduce the stripping, a new, higher pressure atmosphere will evolve over time. The increase in pressure causes an increase in temperature. We have not calculated exactly what the new equilibrium will be and how long it will take.”
The reason why is that Green and his colleagues found that they needed to add some additional physics to the atmospheric model, dynamics that will become more important and clear over time. But he is confident those physics will be developed. He also said that the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter now circling Mars should be able to identify molecules and compounds that could play a significant role in a changing Mars atmosphere.
So based on those new magnetic field models and projections about the future climate of Mars, when might it be sufficiently changed to become significantly more human friendly?
by Marc Kaufman, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: NASA
Thursday, November 16, 2017
What About Separating The Work From The Worker?
In late October, as I wrote columns and tweeted about this wave of stories, I discovered that a male colleague had been hired here at New York despite documented claims of sexual harassment in a prior job. I’m angry not just because New York saw fit to bring him on. It’s also the impossibility of the situation now: Should the guy (who doesn’t supervise anyone) be let go, even though no one at New York has complained about him? Mostly I’m mad that he was chosen, at all, over at least two talented women who also were in the running.
Indeed, what do you do when you know about someone’s bad behavior that predates his position at your place of employment? Serial harassers are an unusual breed of off-the-books offenders—even if, say, this person were fired for sexual misconduct in the workplace with a direct report, what’s to keep someone else from hiring them for contract work? (Should there be anything to keep them from doing so?) Does keeping them specifically away from management positions do anything except keep the misbehavior off your premises? Who’s to say they won’t just become a freelance harasser rather than a workplace one? But what if he writes really great articles and makes interesting intellectual arguments? Does it matter that he hits his wife if he’s a gadget reviewer? I seriously doubt that Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct is only relevant because he tells so many jokes about masturbation and sex. So why do we have such a hard time accepting that someone’s conduct outside the workplace might be relevant inside it?It’s a curious thing, the idea of redemption, or What Comes Next, because it entails a certain amount of moralizing on the part of the employer. Do nothing, and you could be part of the problem, especially if someone warned you. Do something—fire someone or terminate their contract—and well, I don’t know, can they sue for some kind of prejudice or discrimination? At least we have rules for how we treat felons and convicted criminals when it comes to workplace rights, or loss thereof. What if you learn through the grapevine that a man sexually harassed his employees at his previous place of work but was never disciplined for it? What if he swears he’s changed, what if he’s sober now? What if women come forward and tell you stories of what he did to them two decades ago? Does any of it count, and if so, how much? What is the statute of limitations on sexual harassment, a subcriminal act? I don’t know, but I think we’re well on our way to finding out.
by Silvia Killingsworth, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Bodice Rippers and Old Skool Romance Novels
[ed. I'm not going to defend sexual harassment other than to point out that in our culture (our books, our magazines, movies, music, tv, the internet, etc.), what constitutes harassment vs. what might quaintly be called 'the dance of seduction' has never been clearly defined. Here's a good caricature of your typical "bodice ripper" ie., Romance novel: "Ohh baby", Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female." ~ Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. We've been fed this kind of junk all our lives.]
Psychology’s Power Tools
A few years ago, while attending a conference in Berlin, I went out one evening to catch up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. James lives in the United States and works in the field of psychology, but Berlin was the first time we’d been together in a good while. It was a beautiful evening and the city felt so alive, but James looked nervous. I knew he had something to tell me.
He started: ‘Brian is Briana.’
‘What?’
‘My son is my daughter. He is really a she.’
I didn’t need any more explanation to know what James was saying. His 18-year-old, formerly Brian, identified as a woman, and he was breaking the news to me.
‘Wow.’
‘I know. I know. He’s going to… I mean, she’s having sex-reassignment surgery in Singapore in December, and we’ve been doing hormone treatments for months. It’s been a wild ride.’
When James used the word ‘we’ to describe the hormone treatments, I knew everything would be OK. The ‘we’ in his sentence was a clue that that their family was not split apart by this news. Learning that your son is really your daughter is, for most people, life-changing news, and the few clients I had worked with in therapy around their gender identity were torn apart by how their families had responded.
James had learned so much in the past year about how to connect with his daughter as a trans-woman. Briana’s brother was turning his back on her, and James and his wife felt alone, as if they were walking on quicksand. Throughout the conversation, though, he kept saying: ‘It is what it is.’ James must have said the phrase 10 times, and it dawned on me that he was getting at something profound. With this aphorism, he could avoid getting sucked into potentially painful emotions and instead be present and available to help his daughter.
When I returned from Berlin, I was primed to hear the phrase everywhere I went. I am convinced I hear it at least once a day, and not only from my clients. I hear it from my wife, my friends, my colleagues, my students and, a few days ago, I heard it from the woman working the register at the gas station. I hear myself and others saying these words, but I hardly ever stop to reflect on their meaning. When it finally dawned on me to ask why everyone keeps using this phrase, the answer appeared quickly and with force: the phrase is a way to psychologically disarm powerful negative emotions. It’s an efficient means of distancing ourselves from difficult experiences, to create mental space and, potentially, to ignore – in a good way – percolating negative emotions. In short, this phrase represents what psychologists call an emotion-regulatory strategy.
Research in clinical psychology suggests that a key aspect of maintaining our emotional health is not deepening our connection to painful thoughts – that is, not getting ‘sucked into’ thoughts about inferiority, impossibility, or seeing the potential for bad outcomes around every corner. ‘It is what it is’ reflects the decision not to go down this road and, when we use it, we’re practising one of the best therapies around. Although there are many routes to emotional equanimity, it is the thoughts in our heads, and the words we choose to express them, that are the gatekeepers of our psychological wellbeing.
This notion is at the heart of cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, a proven collection of techniques that help us realign our thoughts so our emotions stay in balance and we successfully navigate life.
‘Could you spare a minute? We’re running a research study on how people perceive the natural environment. Would you like to participate?’
‘Sure, why not?’
This is when things get a little weird. The researchers have you don a backpack that weighs about 20 per cent as much as you do. Then they ask you to estimate the slant of the hill in front of you from completely flat to a vertical cliff. Can you zip up this hill with your backpack on, or did this small hill just become Mount Everest in your mind? Although I’ve glamorised it a bit, this is a real research study. Developed by the psychologist Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues at the University of Virginia, the ‘hill slant’ study is well-known, and has garnered an impressive set of findings about visual perception. It makes sense that people perceive the hill to be steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack, relative to when they’re not wearing one (That hill with this backpack? No way!), and that they perceive the hill to be steeper if they’re tired.
A more surprising finding emerged in 2008, when psychologist Simone Schnall, director of the Mind, Body, and Behaviour Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, found that people perceive hills to be less steep when they’re with other people or when they imagine a supportive significant other alongside them. Schnall reasoned that the availability of social resources might keep people from ‘being depleted’ when they donned the heavy backpack. It is hard to overstate the significance of these findings: social support alters how we perceive the demands of the physical world.
In fact, the hill-slant study illustrates one of the most important topics in contemporary psychological science: our evaluations of situations, events and people shape how we perceive, or appraise, the world around us. These psychological evaluations are often referred to as cognitive appraisals. When we’re with others we appraise the slant of the hill differently; we evaluate that mound of dirt as less foreboding.
How do you feel about work or school tomorrow? Smooth sailing or another headache? What about that weird look a colleague gave you this morning? Your kid is talking back and being a total pain. Why does it bother you so much after dinner compared with after breakfast?
These questions capture the essence of the calculus we engage in every second of the day. We’re constantly taking our own psychological temperature and evaluating whether we need to rest or spring into action. Our emotional lives hinge in large part on this appraisal process. Whether we feel happy, engaged and full of energy is derived from the belief that we are in harmony with the world around us.
We maintain this sense of harmony by viewing ourselves, others and the events around us in a relatively benign light: things are fine, we’re safe. When we perceive the slings and arrows of life as non-events – when we can say: ‘It is what it is’ – we can face difficult circumstances and effectively disarm potential emotional landmines.
When anxiety makes our thinking disordered, on the other hand, quite the opposite happens. Hills seem insurmountable, and the world becomes a scary and impossible place. As a brief example of appraisals gone awry, stop for a moment and think about what it would feel like to believe that you are absolutely worthless. You contribute nothing to this planet. Zilch! What if you were as certain of these thoughts as you were of the fact that you need light in order to read this article? Now you have an idea about what it’s like to be depressed.
Most of the time, however, these negative appraisals are distortions; they are misappraisals of the world around us based on automatic habits of thought that have rooted themselves deep inside our minds. CBT was designed to help people break these habits, to learn new ways to evaluate the reality of their appraisals and, in general, to think more flexibly about their lives.
[ed. I know CBT works, but it still seems kind of opaque to me (and I have read Seligman). Essentially, 'rewire your perceptions and think positive thoughts' (or avoid thinking disordered ones). But by suppressing some thoughts - even if they're negative ones, don't we create a sort of artificial construct of the world, even if it makes us feel better? And what if some of those negative thoughts are actually useful (e.g. for full emotional processing), or more acurately reflect reality? How to know without some future perspective? Finally, since humans are mostly bags of chemicals and water, when some of those chemicals get out of whack, no amount of positive thinking is likely to help (except perhaps as a coping mechanism).]
He started: ‘Brian is Briana.’‘What?’
‘My son is my daughter. He is really a she.’
I didn’t need any more explanation to know what James was saying. His 18-year-old, formerly Brian, identified as a woman, and he was breaking the news to me.
‘Wow.’
‘I know. I know. He’s going to… I mean, she’s having sex-reassignment surgery in Singapore in December, and we’ve been doing hormone treatments for months. It’s been a wild ride.’
When James used the word ‘we’ to describe the hormone treatments, I knew everything would be OK. The ‘we’ in his sentence was a clue that that their family was not split apart by this news. Learning that your son is really your daughter is, for most people, life-changing news, and the few clients I had worked with in therapy around their gender identity were torn apart by how their families had responded.
James had learned so much in the past year about how to connect with his daughter as a trans-woman. Briana’s brother was turning his back on her, and James and his wife felt alone, as if they were walking on quicksand. Throughout the conversation, though, he kept saying: ‘It is what it is.’ James must have said the phrase 10 times, and it dawned on me that he was getting at something profound. With this aphorism, he could avoid getting sucked into potentially painful emotions and instead be present and available to help his daughter.
When I returned from Berlin, I was primed to hear the phrase everywhere I went. I am convinced I hear it at least once a day, and not only from my clients. I hear it from my wife, my friends, my colleagues, my students and, a few days ago, I heard it from the woman working the register at the gas station. I hear myself and others saying these words, but I hardly ever stop to reflect on their meaning. When it finally dawned on me to ask why everyone keeps using this phrase, the answer appeared quickly and with force: the phrase is a way to psychologically disarm powerful negative emotions. It’s an efficient means of distancing ourselves from difficult experiences, to create mental space and, potentially, to ignore – in a good way – percolating negative emotions. In short, this phrase represents what psychologists call an emotion-regulatory strategy.
Research in clinical psychology suggests that a key aspect of maintaining our emotional health is not deepening our connection to painful thoughts – that is, not getting ‘sucked into’ thoughts about inferiority, impossibility, or seeing the potential for bad outcomes around every corner. ‘It is what it is’ reflects the decision not to go down this road and, when we use it, we’re practising one of the best therapies around. Although there are many routes to emotional equanimity, it is the thoughts in our heads, and the words we choose to express them, that are the gatekeepers of our psychological wellbeing.
This notion is at the heart of cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, a proven collection of techniques that help us realign our thoughts so our emotions stay in balance and we successfully navigate life.
***
Imagine you’re strolling across a lovely college campus on your way to grab lunch with a friend. You’re stopped by two students.‘Could you spare a minute? We’re running a research study on how people perceive the natural environment. Would you like to participate?’
‘Sure, why not?’
This is when things get a little weird. The researchers have you don a backpack that weighs about 20 per cent as much as you do. Then they ask you to estimate the slant of the hill in front of you from completely flat to a vertical cliff. Can you zip up this hill with your backpack on, or did this small hill just become Mount Everest in your mind? Although I’ve glamorised it a bit, this is a real research study. Developed by the psychologist Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues at the University of Virginia, the ‘hill slant’ study is well-known, and has garnered an impressive set of findings about visual perception. It makes sense that people perceive the hill to be steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack, relative to when they’re not wearing one (That hill with this backpack? No way!), and that they perceive the hill to be steeper if they’re tired.
A more surprising finding emerged in 2008, when psychologist Simone Schnall, director of the Mind, Body, and Behaviour Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, found that people perceive hills to be less steep when they’re with other people or when they imagine a supportive significant other alongside them. Schnall reasoned that the availability of social resources might keep people from ‘being depleted’ when they donned the heavy backpack. It is hard to overstate the significance of these findings: social support alters how we perceive the demands of the physical world.
In fact, the hill-slant study illustrates one of the most important topics in contemporary psychological science: our evaluations of situations, events and people shape how we perceive, or appraise, the world around us. These psychological evaluations are often referred to as cognitive appraisals. When we’re with others we appraise the slant of the hill differently; we evaluate that mound of dirt as less foreboding.
How do you feel about work or school tomorrow? Smooth sailing or another headache? What about that weird look a colleague gave you this morning? Your kid is talking back and being a total pain. Why does it bother you so much after dinner compared with after breakfast?
These questions capture the essence of the calculus we engage in every second of the day. We’re constantly taking our own psychological temperature and evaluating whether we need to rest or spring into action. Our emotional lives hinge in large part on this appraisal process. Whether we feel happy, engaged and full of energy is derived from the belief that we are in harmony with the world around us.
We maintain this sense of harmony by viewing ourselves, others and the events around us in a relatively benign light: things are fine, we’re safe. When we perceive the slings and arrows of life as non-events – when we can say: ‘It is what it is’ – we can face difficult circumstances and effectively disarm potential emotional landmines.
When anxiety makes our thinking disordered, on the other hand, quite the opposite happens. Hills seem insurmountable, and the world becomes a scary and impossible place. As a brief example of appraisals gone awry, stop for a moment and think about what it would feel like to believe that you are absolutely worthless. You contribute nothing to this planet. Zilch! What if you were as certain of these thoughts as you were of the fact that you need light in order to read this article? Now you have an idea about what it’s like to be depressed.
Most of the time, however, these negative appraisals are distortions; they are misappraisals of the world around us based on automatic habits of thought that have rooted themselves deep inside our minds. CBT was designed to help people break these habits, to learn new ways to evaluate the reality of their appraisals and, in general, to think more flexibly about their lives.
by David A. Sbarra, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Ascent Media/Getty[ed. I know CBT works, but it still seems kind of opaque to me (and I have read Seligman). Essentially, 'rewire your perceptions and think positive thoughts' (or avoid thinking disordered ones). But by suppressing some thoughts - even if they're negative ones, don't we create a sort of artificial construct of the world, even if it makes us feel better? And what if some of those negative thoughts are actually useful (e.g. for full emotional processing), or more acurately reflect reality? How to know without some future perspective? Finally, since humans are mostly bags of chemicals and water, when some of those chemicals get out of whack, no amount of positive thinking is likely to help (except perhaps as a coping mechanism).]
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