Corruption in Russia

An interesting piece here via Sky News about Putin and a recent report on the way corruption is done in Russia. 

It also features a photo of what appears to be a rather dangerous form of "celebration" in the backwoods

The caption reads:

A man tries to get a prize from a pole during a celebration in Krasnoyarsk last month

No need to add salt?

From the BBC:  Why a German lab is growing tomatoes in urine.

(Answer - to develop systems for future use by astronauts.)   It's more interesting than you might think.

Stroke your rodent

From the Improbable Research site - a serious study involving stroking mice, as type of mouse massage, to see how it affects their immune system.  (It does them good, it seems.)

Large scale clean power storage soon a reality?

Yeah, this guy was on Radio National this morning, saying that Tesla batteries are capable of being deployed on such a scale that they could have prevented SA losing power during that recent heatwave.

Quite remarkable, if true, and possible at acceptable cost:

Tesla's confidence of being able to plug gaps in grid power has been buoyed by its successful completion of a similar assignment in southern California last year, when it built an 80MW battery farm in 90 days after a gas peaker near Los Angeles leaked tonnes of methane and had to be mothballed.

Tesla was one of three battery companies to step forward when the California power system operator called for emergency storage and it is one of a large number of battery companies vying for the 1.6 million solar rooftop homes and businesses in Australia.
"We could install everything and get it up and running within 100 days," Mr Rive said at the launch of Tesla's Powerwall 2 battery in a converted substation at Newport, near Melbourne.

"We had a similar challenge in southern California ... We got 80MW up in 90 days. That's unheard of. You just don't get power plants running up and down that fast." 

Read more: http://www.afr.com/news/tesla-battery-boss-we-can-solve-sas-power-woes-in-100-days-20170308-gut8xh#ixzz4amuio0lU
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Cause for slight optimism

China's world-leading coal consumption fell for the third straight year in 2016, government data showed Tuesday, as the planet's biggest carbon emitter struggles to break its addiction to the heavily polluting fuel.

Coal consumption fell by 4.7 percent year-on-year in 2016, and the share of coal in the country's energy mix slipped to 62.0 percent, down 2.0 percent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a report.

Overall coal production also fell, dropping 9.0 percent to 3.41 billion tonnes in 2016.
The data suggests that "coal consumption probably peaked around 2014," according to a statement from environmental group China Dialogue.

It added that "there is still some concern about a 'rebound' in coal demand if China continues to stimulate its economy by infrastructure investment".

The link.

As the world turns...

I hadn't heard this before, and I don't know if the Indian commentator, writing in The Japan Times, is reliable, but according to him, Putin is getting friendly with the Taliban in Afghanistan, for his own reasons:

Almost three decades after the end of the Soviet Union’s own war in Afghanistan — a war that enfeebled the Soviet economy and undermined the communist state — Russia has moved to establish itself as a central actor in Afghan affairs. And the Kremlin has surprised many by embracing the Afghan Taliban. Russia had long viewed the thuggish force created by Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a major terrorist threat. From 2009 to 2015, Russia served as a critical supply route for U.S.-led forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan; it even contributed military helicopters to the effort.

Russia’s reversal on the Afghan Taliban reflects a larger strategy linked to its clash with the U.S. and its European allies — a clash that has intensified considerably since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea spurred the U.S. and Europe to impose heavy economic sanctions. In fact, in a sense, Russia is exchanging roles with the U.S. in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan used Islam as an ideological tool to spur armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. Reasoning that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the CIA trained and armed thousands of Afghan mujahedeen — the jihadi force from which al-Qaida and later the Taliban evolved.

Today, Russia is using the same logic to justify its cooperation with the Afghan Taliban, which it wants to keep fighting the unstable U.S.-backed government in Kabul. And the Taliban, which has acknowledged that it shares Russia’s enmity with the U.S., will take whatever help it can get to expel the Americans.

Something you don't read about every day

Tiny (and I mean tiny) people/aliens sightings - a wave of which apparently took place in Malaysia in 1970!

Jason Soon can perhaps inform us of his knowledge of these matters...

DNA data storage keeps getting better

I forgot to mention a month or so ago - one good thing (the only good thing?) to come out of having Trump as President is that the AAAS ran a big subscription campaign to get more people supporting science, which meant I now get full access to Science magazine for a year for the princely sum of $50 (US)!  

This week's edition had a story about new techniques being done to see how good DNA data storage could be - and the answer is very, very good.   From the free article about it:

Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks....

Erlich thought he could get closer to that limit. So he and Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, looked at the algorithms that were being used to encode and decode the data. They started with six files, including a full computer operating system, a computer virus, an 1895 French film called Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They first converted the files into binary strings of 1s and 0s, compressed them into one master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code. They devised an algorithm called a DNA fountain, which randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, to which they added extra tags to help reassemble them in the proper order later. In all, the researchers generated a digital list of 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long.

They sent these as text files to Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco, California–based startup, which then synthesized the DNA strands. Two weeks later, Erlich and Zielinski received in the mail a vial with a speck of DNA encoding their files. To decode them, the pair used modern DNA sequencing technology. The sequences were fed into a computer, which translated the genetic code back into binary and used the tags to reassemble the six original files. The approach worked so well that the new files contained no errors, they report today in Science. They were also able to make a virtually unlimited number of error-free copies of their files through polymerase chain reaction, a standard DNA copying technique. What’s more, Erlich says, they were able to encode 1.6 bits of data per nucleotide, 60% better than any group had done before and 85% the theoretical limit.

So, at 215 million gigabytes of storage per gram, I was curious as to how much information could be potentially stored in a human body's worth of DNA.

Googling the question "how much does all the DNA in a human weigh?" came up with estimates that seem to vary from around 6 g to 300g, but then there is also the question of DNA in all the microbes we host in our guts.  

But sure, it seems that, in theory, a human could be an enormous data storage device...

Some great Colbert

Like all late night chat show hosts, Stephen Colbert has some nights that are better than others, but I really thought this series of bits from yesterday's show, talking about the Republican's underwhelming reform to Obamacare, the rather odd Ben Carson, and spying on us through Samsung TVs, were all very funny:







I'm very pleased that he is now doing so well, ratings wise.

Rich and thick

Peter Thiel gave a talk the other night at some energy conference, and curiously, it has not yet been widely reported.

But here is what one site has quoted:

HOUSTON -- Peter Thiel, the technology investor and advisor to President Donald Trump, questioned the global push toward restricting carbon emissions as "group think" while speaking Tuesday at an international energy conference here.

"I'm not sure I'm an extreme skeptic of climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme ways that people try to push it through," he said. "Even if climate change is quite as bad as people think it is, if we group think we're more likely to misdiagnose the problem. Maybe it's methane emissions, and the real problem is eating steak."

I suppose I should be cautious and note that perhaps he is not being entirely serious with that last line.

But he supports Trump, so why should I give him any benefit of the doubt?  No, I'm going with the Greek yoghurt theory - he's rich and thick.

"Not an extreme skeptic" = fence sitting lukewarmer, happy to watch temperatures rise with no carbon pricing because "taxes - I hate taxes", and then say "well, they were right 30 years ago - too late to do anything about CO2 now.   Here, I've got this great geoengineering idea I can sell you.  Please pay in bitcoin to my floating island in Tahiti.  See ya." 

Update:   other reports don't repeat the "steak" comment, which is odd.  From Axios:

"I don't know whether I am an extreme skeptic on climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme way that people try to push it through, and I would say that I would be much more convinced of climate change, of the need to do something, if I thought there was a more open debate in which both sides were given a full hearing."

 And other sites point out that he has provided funding for some clean energy ideas (some sounding very improbable.)  

But no, he is simply not to be trusted on climate change.   Or anything much, in my books...

Bubble world

Surely this is what it feels like to an outsider visiting North Korea and hearing everyone endorsing how great their Dear Leader is doing?   Being told how He will protect them from the nefarious forces that want to harm them?

Because I have never seen anything like the self delusion that is accompanying those endorsing Trump.   Look at Steve Kates, with this fantasy today:

I don’t know whether this was what Trump intended but the stories about Russian hacking the election have gone absolutely dead, as have almost all stories related to Obama having placed some kind of phone surveillance on Donald Trump himself. Having become blindingly clear that the Obama White House had indeed initiated that surveillance, with the virtual certainty that none of it would have been done without Obama’s complicity, the entire episode seems to have vanished into air. Since there is nothing that can any longer be used in bringing Trump down, it has gone into hibernation across the media and will remain that way unless something happens that the left and the media believe can again be used to undermine Trump.

This is part of what disturbs me about the blog support network on the right. It is entirely defensive. A story that was utterly preposterous, that Trump and his associates had collaborated with the Russians was, and is, treated as a genuine issue that needs to be sorted out, rather than as a pathetic and disgusting ploy by a bunch of leftist loons and their scribes to harm Trump and short circuit his election.

The only way this can possibly be explained is that he lives in an absolute self imposed information bubble - only reading news from Fox or Breitbart (or worse) that he knows in advance will align with his pro-Trump stance.

In totalitarian states, the State has to impose the media control that leads to such brainwashing - in the West, citizens gleefully impose it on themselves, building self reinforcing belief systems impervious to outside information - because it is, by definition, not to be trusted.

The other thing to note is the paranoia and siege mentality involved - Kates is always beating it up into a "end of civilisation" crisis if Trump (or at least Republicans) lose control of their country.   And, indeed, Bannon is known as a "clash of civilisations" panic merchant, and Trump will use that language when it suits. 

As for Kates' claim that no one is talking about the Trump Obama tweets now, he obviously cares not to observe twitter on matters Trump, or read the NYT, where this account of Trump's mad tweeting Saturday was given (again, apparently leaked by people close to him):

That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor.

Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He sounded defiant in conversations at Mar-a-Lago with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen.

Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge.

Kates in his bubble world wouldn't have heard of this...

This won't fit neatly into the Conservative Catholic narrative

I think the Catholic Herald is pretty mainstream and moderate/conservative as far as Catholic media outlets go, so this story does not come from a liberal Catholic site:

A spokesman for Egypt’s Catholic Church has praised local Muslims for helping embattled Christians after a series of Islamic State attacks in Sinai.

Fr Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Coptic Catholic Church, said Christians must differentiate between ordinary Muslims and extremists.

“Ordinary Muslims are kind and try to help however they can – they’re often first on the scene, rescuing the injured and taking them to hospitals,” he told Catholic News Service March 3, as Christians continued to flee Egypt’s North Sinai region.

Fr Greiche said the attacks had affected only Coptic Orthodox Christians, but added that Catholic churches and schools in Ismailia had offered shelter to Orthodox families with help from Caritas.

Fr Greiche said Islamic State militants were now “strongly entrenched” in North Sinai, having been allowed by the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood organisations to use tunnels from the Gaza Strip.

It is, though, a worry to read how IS is running around the Middle East trying to find a new area to terrorise.  

The Daily Trump

Yeah, I get a bit sick of posting about Trump all the time too, but honestly, it's so incredible to watch this weird situation, falling as it does so close to unbelievable fiction, it's hard to stop.  So today's highlights:

*  I've really been enjoying John Cassidy's pieces on Trump at The New Yorker:  it's a calm style that is perhaps all the more effective for it.   Here, in his latest piece, he opines: 

Trump has learned a couple of things since the start of his Presidential campaign, in 2015. The first is that the media, especially the broadcast media, has an insatiable desire for “news breaks,” even fake ones, and thus is easy to manipulate. The second is that he can say virtually anything, however false or outrageous, without suffering any political consequences with his base. He can call a female journalist a “bimbo,” insult a political opponent’s wife, make bogus accusations of widespread voter fraud, say Obama founded ISIS, claim he won a bigger majority in the Electoral College than any President since Reagan—and none of it alienates his core supporters. Arguably, these outbursts make them like him more.

In his tweets this weekend, however, he may, just possibly, have gone too far. Trump has now added his voice to the calls for a proper public investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. The only way for Congress to properly assess the truth of Trump’s claim about Obama would be to call on Comey and other senior officials to provide a full accounting of the interagency investigation into alleged contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. Is that really what the White House wants?

He then summarises what we do know, from leaks and public comments, in a calm way, and how none of it backs up Trumps claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement.  With Comey's response, it is quite the opposite.

*   Back to the question though - who is manipulating who in Trump world?   As Axios notes, Trump has just made a series of Tweets directly about stories he was obviously watching on the teeth gratingly awful  Fox & Friends.     Now, are the editors of that show pitching stories to please Trump?    Does Trump believe everything they claim, uncritically?  

I think most people, with common sense, are concluding that yes, he does believe, uncritically, anything  which he thinks useful propaganda, because he's a dumb, insecure, narcissist.  If challenged, he will not "own" his own judgement, he'll just deflect by claiming "well, that's what other people say."

And some people think this is not something to be very concerned about.... 

What would happen if you actually had an experiment where someone at Fox put up a story that ran against a long held Trump belief or bias?    (Ha!  As if that will happen - there's no money in scaring away your nutty base.   All Murdochs are too cynical to put the interests of actually educating the viewers ahead of making money.)

*  Speaking of Trump re-tweets of Fox, here is The Washington Post on one of them:   You'll never guess who tweeted something false he saw on TV. 

*  If former CIA directors think things are bad, they probably are:

As Michael Hayden, the CIA director under George W. Bush, noted on Morning Joe on Monday, “We’ve been in continuous crisis now for 45 days, and none of it has been externally stimulated. This is all an intramural game within our own government. No one’s tickled us from abroad. So I can only imagine what this is going to look like when we actually start to get pressure, events start to happen, that do require that sober, methodical response from a government that doesn’t appear as if it’s gotten itself organized yet.”

 And in the same article, someone asked in December some good questions, the answers to which no one has a right to feel confident about:

In December, Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies decision-making in foreign policy, listed eight questions she had about how President Trump would handle an overseas crisis: Where is Trump physically, since he’s so frequently away from the White House? What is the state of Trump’s relations with U.S. intelligence agencies? Which of Trump’s staffers briefs him on the crisis? Which officials are brought into the deliberations about what to do? How many options are given to Trump and how are they described? Will those who oppose the preferred option express their concerns? Who will execute Trump’s decision? And will a record be kept of how the decision was made?

Message to JC

You're being stupid and getting sucked into the Catallaxy conspiracy zone.  Kates has gone down the rabbit hole completely - don't follow him.

Here are key points you conspiracists are ignoring:

*  the FBI was reported as being party to the warrant applications;

*  you have to be nuts (like Kates) to think that Comey is a Democrat stooge, given the obvious advantage it gave to Trump to declare that the email investigation was being re-opened, so close to the election;

*  Comey is already reported to have taken offence at Trump's claim - he is obviously prepared to stand up and be counted about the bona fides of the application for a warrant, and whatever it was it authorised them to do;

*  it doesn't matter if Obama knew what was going on - and he presumably was advised.   That is not corruption in any way, shape or form.   What upset Democrats, after the loss of the election - was the fact that Obama did know some of what was going on, and studiously avoided making any official comment on it.  Obama (if I recall correctly) even felt, post election, that he had to make it clear to his fellow Democrats that he just couldn't do that, due to perception that it would be an abuse of his position during an election.
 
Update:  CL, who is prone to partisan fantasy, calling it "bigger than Watergate" if Obama knew of the warrant and investigation, is just ridiculous.   (He is, clearly, becoming more and more ridiculous with what he will claim as he ages.)    If intelligence agencies believe there has been hacking and release of emails by a foreign nation with a clear intent to influence an election, and there is a string of contacts between Trump connected people and that foreign nation preceding a change in party policy more favourable towards it - of course the existing Presidential administration of any party should be concerned, and knowledge of further investigation about it is entirely appropriate.

Update 2:   A CNN report just out starts with:

FBI Director James Comey was "incredulous" over the weekend after President Donald Trump's allegation via Twitter that former President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of his phones during the campaign, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Update 3:  message to monty:  for goodness sake, can you just point out to them that the FBI and Justice Department are not the same entity as President Obama.   And yes - we do not know the details of the warrant, and what and who it authorised as the target.

But it is 100% clear, from Comey's reaction, that he is deeply offended at the suggestion - implicit from Trump's tweets that it was Obama personally telling them what to do -  that he was dancing to the tune of Obama.

Update 4:  Sheesh - CL is just like Trump:  will just say anything, completely and utterly without concern for detail and accuracy and established fact. Leaves the rest of us wondering if he's nuts, prematurely senile, or knowingly bloviating and trolling for deliberate effect? 

There is no point in engaging with such blowhards...

Juices, noted

Yesterday, I drank for the first time "cold pressed" mandarin juice, manufactured in Brisbane from Australian produce, apparently, and I thought it very nice.  

Which reminded me - a long time ago, in Malaysia, I bought watermelon juice, made in the juicer while I waited.  From memory, there was a sugar syrup added too, but I also recall it being very nice.

Is there a reason that, in Australia, despite the myriad of juice combinations you can now see on the supermarket shelf, none seem to contain watermelon juice?   Does it not preserve well?