Author: Mark J. Heinicke

“Outraged We Were Deceived” – by The Inevitable

[UPDATE: This originally posted on March 21 2018. As of today (April 10) Zuckerberg is due to testify at a Congressional hearing.  Expect the usual evasions.]

Oh, poor Facebook

The typical reader of this blog probably expected this time would come, but just in case there’s any doubt, the raid on tens of millions of Facebook users’ data by an unscrupulous political propaganda operation (Cambridge Analytica [C.A.]) is merely a sign of the inevitable.

C. Analaytica’s hack used an “it’s only research” loophole to access a huge trove of personal data completely unsuspected by its targets.

Facebook’s official response to date (March 21, 5:22 pm EDT) has been they are “working around the clock to get all the facts and take appropriate action. . . . The entire company is outraged we were deceived.”  See FB responds to #deletefacebook

It is so Zuckerbergian to respond to a giant abuse of his customers with no apology – yet anyway – but rather indignantly to declare their outrage at what was done to them.  Not acknowledging their role as enablers .  Kind of reminds me of how Donald Trump feels misused whenever something goes wrong that is largely his fault.

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“They don’t understand how it works.” Information Technology and the Queasy Underbelly of Democracy

Politicians low on the tech learning curve

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and chief architect of the Trump-assisting “defeat crooked Hillary” campaign, commenting on his testimony before the (U.S.) House Intelligence Committee, said “They’re politicians, they’re not technical. They don’t understand how it works.”

The exploits of Cambridge Analytica in suppressing votes and unleashing torrents of misinformation and flat-out falsities upon the data rivers of social media got (as usual, excellent) coverage by The Guardian in this piece dated March 21, 2018: Cambridge Analytica’s Assault on Decency For more on Nix, the Facebook data breaches, and the “crooked Hillary” campaign.

This echoes a theme emerging from previous U.S. Congressional hearings dealing with social media: politicians are way out of their depth in advanced information technology. As Nix, says, they simply do not understand how it works.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 5: Voyager 1 Aces Another Test

Voyager 1: (almost) never say die

As you read this, the first human-made artifact to enter interstellar space is receding from us at a speed of 10.6 miles per second (50 times the speed of sound at sea-level on Earth). It is currently (the morning of March 16, 2018) about 141 times farther from the Sun than the (average) distance of Earth from the Sun. Impeded only by clouds of gas that are tenuous in our region of the galaxy, it should keep up this rate of speed for millennia. That sounds fast, but at astronomical scales it’s barely crawling—17,500 years to cover one light-year. Since it will probably not completely escape the Sun’s gravity until two light-years out, it won’t “really” exit the Solar System for another 35,000 years or so. For the finer points of what constitutes “interstellar space” check out: https://scitechdaily.com/new-data-confirms-voyager-1-interstellar-space/

(You may not be too surprised, if you went to that link, that the determination of Voyager 1’s official interstellar status depended partly on the readings of the “tsunami waves” that have smacked Voyager three times as a result of Coronal Mass Ejections from the Sun.  CMEs are those random ejections of solar plasma that pose a serious threat to our increasingly electrified way of life here on Earth, as discussed in my earlier post  https://www.markheinickewrites.com/2017/11/04/uncertainty-part-two-when-comes-the-big-shock/ . )

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Whose Children Are Getting Shot?

NOTE: THIS POST IS CURRENTLY INCOMPLETE (AS OF FEB. 28). I POSTED IT BEFORE FINISHING IT,  BUT I DID NOT WANT TO TAKE IT DOWN.  PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! 🙂

Mass school shootings – much less than half the story of gun deaths of children in the U.S.

As tragic as the most recent school shooting in Parkland was, the debate over assault weapons, bump stocks, and high capacity magazines is missing the much broader problem of gun deaths in the U.S.

Of course every possible effort should be made to stop mass school shootings. But the fact is that mass school shootings, on average, account for only 0.9% of child deaths by firearms in the U.S.

Here’s how it plays out in the U.S., for children 1-17 years old, by the numbers:
 –  child deaths by firearms, annually (2012-2014) : 1,297*
–  child deaths by suicide, annually: (2012-2014):  492
– child deaths by homicide, annually: (2012 – 2014) : 687
– child deaths by accident, annually: (2012 – 2014): 77
– child deaths by law enforcement, or undetermined,           annually:  2012-2014):  41
–  child deaths by mass school shootings, annually (2012-2017):  12**

Therefore, to figure out how and why all these kids are getting gunned down, we have to look elsewhere than mass school shootings.

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What’s Missing in the Gun Debate – What Works and What Doesn’t

Bad assumptions: myths and mistaken intuition

Some of what you may believe about gun violence is probably wrong. I refer first to an op-ed that appeared in the October 6, 2017, Washington Post, entitled “Five myths about gun violence.”  Five Myths about Gun Violence

In case you are kept out of the Post by a paywall, the Five Myths are:
(1) Gun violence in the U.S. is at an all-time high. (The peak was almost twice as high in 1993.)
(2) Background checks save lives. (What seems intuitively obvious fails, partially as a result of an inconsistent system. Requirements for licensing of purchasers might turn this around, but these are lacking or seldom enforced.) 
(3) Mental illness is behind most gun violence (Research indicates that only about 4% of violence against others [presumably gun violence as a subset] is caused by symptoms of serious mental illnesses.)
(4) Right-to-carry laws decrease crime. (As of October 2017, no armed civilians had halted a mass shooting. “Unarmed civilians are more than 20 times as likely to end a mass shooting than are armed civilians.”)
(5) Mass shootings are random.

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Yes, There is a There There: Now, What to Do?

Trump Inaction on Russia: the Clincher

For a long time, some of us were willing to give Donald Trump the slim benefit of a doubt as to why he is actively trying to smother the three investigations (DOJ, House, and Senate) into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.  The benefit was to accept that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the charge against Russia because it would have cheapened his electoral victory.

As disgraceful as the vanity explanation was, at least it tended to let Trump off the hook for being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, or, more seriously, being compromised by involvements with Russian oligarchs and business interests and/or the Kremlin itself.

Now that he has, grudgingly, admitted that Russia did meddle in the elections, he has taken to excoriating Obama for not doing more to stop it. That has been the pathetic extent of his leverage against Moscow.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 4: Discovery of Oldest Spiral Galaxy

The fascination of origins—the very long view.

Curiosity about personal ancestry has made Ancestry DNA and 23andMe booming businesses.   Marketing has grown this kind of curiosity into a lucrative appetite.  Indications are that the customer base is doubling annually.

Curiosity about cosmic origins might be growing more slowly, but the explosion of new information about the early universe thrills a lot of folks, without much money changing hands.  To consider where we come from on the largest time scales has a calming effect in  this tempestuous, maddening, frightening, and tragic moment in human history. Launching one’s imagination into the vastness of space leaves behind much of the craziness of our political, social, and cultural (melo)dramas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This is a very long post, perhaps of little interest to those who don’t share my fascination with cosmic origins. I present a table of contents of the sections below as a guide to what’s in store.

  • Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy.
  • The unmiraculous miracle of gravitational lensing
  • Implications of the age of the earliest spiral galaxy
  • Galactic structure, supermassive black holes, and a question of timing
  • Primordial black holes to the rescue!
  • An aside on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies
  • More on spirals
  • A Family Tree of galaxies
  • THE END
Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy
The Pinwheel Spiral Galaxy, shown for aesthetic effect- not the “oldest”

Don’t we just love our spiral galaxies?!?  It’s not so much love, it’s more like being awestruck by ineffable beauty, combined with the knowledge that each typically contains hundreds of billions of stars spread out across distances up to hundreds of thousands of light years.  (Another plus is that we actually live in one.) I’ve cheated a bit here by picking a particularly gorgeous example, the Pinwheel Galaxy—a kind of canonical form of which all spirals are variations on a starry theme. (For a spectacular collection of spiral galaxy images, follow the link: glorious spirals in abundance .)

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Is It still a Man’s World? Exhibits B-G: Recognition of Women’s Excellence

More women prominently in the news in politics, STEM, and business

News Item: Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong represented North Korean leadership at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It was she who communicated to the South Korean government an invitation to highest-level talks in North Korean capital Pyongyang.

News Item: the School Community Council of Salt Lake City decided to rename Andrew Jackson Elementary School to Mary Jackson Elementary School. (A poll had shown the public heavily in favor of the change.) Note this took place in the heart of Mormon country.

  • President Andrew Jackson was infamous for his racism (e.g., chasing escaped black slaves into Spanish Florida) and genocidal persecution of Native Americans.
  • Mary Jackson is famous for  becoming NASA’s first female black engineer, whose career included 34 years at NASA, and authoring or co-authoring 12 technical papers for NASA. Her character is one of the stars of the book(s) and movie Hidden Figures, which celebrate the key role black women played  in the space race.

News Item: in Virginia state elections in 2017, women won 11 of the 14 seats picked up by Democrats.

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Is It Still a Man’s World? Exhibit A: John Kelly

John Kelly’s working assumption on Rob Porter: what’s the problem?

Months ago, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly guaranteed that he would eventually bring down upon himself the ire of feminists and pro-feminists, when he allowed wife-beater Rob Porter to continue working in the White House. He did this despite having been warned by the FBI that allegations of domestic abuse made Porter a target for blackmail, and therefore he should not be given a permanent security clearance.

If Kelly thought that he could keep the allegations against Porter permanently under wraps, then he is even more politically naive than he has already shown himself to be on several occasions.

However, I hesitate to attribute even to Kelly that level of political clumsiness. Rather—as we now know from Kelly’s fulsome praise of Porter even after Porter’s terrorizing two former wives had been made public—Kelly had taken the news from the FBI  with an attitude that boiled down to “so what?”   It seems very likely that Kelly did not consider Porter’s spousal abuse a disqualification for a position in the White House—after all, Donald Trump himself had bragged about assaulting women, and then gotten elected President of the United States.   And maybe, just maybe, the women were lying.

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Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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