Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Hot air and ill-informed banter

We are aware of all internet traditions.

This is a big f—–g deal.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

Wetsuit optional.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

No one could have predicted…

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

What fresh hell is this?

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

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Major Major began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.

If My Brain Interprets It As Something Where I Fits, I Sits (Open Thread)

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It’s no secret that cats of all sorts love boxes.

If My Brain Interprets It As Something Where I Fits, I Sits (Open Thread)
(via imgur user theportraitssecretinattackmode)

Why, I cannot say, since I don’t have a very good handle on what it’s like to be a cat. But we do know that they love sitting in boxes so much, they’ll happily sit in a square you tape on the floor.

If My Brain Interprets It As Something Where I Fits, I Sits (Open Thread) 1
(via twitter user @MarleyDee1)

A new paper demonstrates that they will also plop themselves down inside a Kanizsa illusion ‘square’ you tape on the floor.

Recent trials have found cats to be much more cooperative research subjects if they’re studied at home, and that’s what this researcher, Gabriella Smith, did.

With paper, scissors, and some tape, the owners were instructed to create several different shapes for the cats. This included the typical square, but it also included the Kanizsa square illusion, a pattern of Pacman-like shapes that fool the human brain into seeing a fully outlined square. For their control, they created a similar Kanizsa shape, but one where the illusion isn’t possible.

Once the shapes were put down on the floor, in various arrangements, the cats would enter the room. If they chose a shape to sit or stand inside for at least three seconds, the trial would be considered a success and their choice would be marked down. To monitor the trials remotely, the owners were asked to record the cats via a camera and smartphone. And to avoid influencing the cats in any way, they were told not to interact with them and to wear dark sunglasses so no eye contact could be made.

Ultimately, 30 owners completed the experiment in full, which involved six days of trials. Of these, nine cats were cooperative, meaning that they actually made a choice at least once during the trials. And out of the 16 times a choice was made, cats sat on the square eight times, the square-like illusion seven times, and the control illusion once.

The actual finding here is that cats are susceptible to Kanizsa illusions, but gosh if they didn’t test it in the most adorable way. I think I’ll have to test this out on Samwise…

Open thread!

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Nothing Says ‘Free Speech’ Like Compelled Speech

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Roughly a year ago, social media giants began to pay a lot more attention to the content of the material their users post. This has taken many forms: throttling the spread of COVID misinformation like the Plandemic video; slapping a disclaimer on posts thought to be misleading about the election results; banning Parler from AWS; blocking the New York Post from posting anything at all after their articles about Hunter Biden’s emails came out; even banning the President of the United States. Regardless of what you think about these actions–my own thoughts are a little complicated–one thing is abundantly clear: they are all legal.

Conservative responses to these events have varied. Some, like rising star Josh Hawley, have gone full horseshoe and decided that Elizabeth Warren’s antitrust ideas are not only good but insufficient. Others have gone further and called for outright nationalization. Future Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance (remember him?) has suggested other remedies, against all sorts of companies, for daring to engage in speech he disagrees with. There are even conservatives who think tech companies’ obviously-legal actions ought to remain so, though I can’t find one at the moment. (This is not meant as an insult; they just don’t inspire the same degree of hate-bookmarking. I’ll happily update this if you share a good one in the comments.)

But leave it to Florida governor Ron DeSantis to be the first in the nation to, in response to this “problem”, sign a bill that criminalizes protected speech. It bans a wide variety of common content moderation practices, all of which are protected under the First Amendment and Section 230. (What is Section 230? Glad you asked.) Essentially, this new Florida law says that Internet companies must allow content produced by (or relating to) candidates for office to stay on their sites unmolested. In other words, it tells property owners that they must allow wide swaths of speech on their private property, which is generally not a thing we do in this country. (I’m trying to imagine a similar law about churches, and… can’t.)

Like most tech regulation bills, it was clearly drafted by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

(Follow below the fold to learn more…)

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Guest Post: Trans Day of Visibility

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Take it away, Sister Golden Bear!

Today is the annual Trans Day of Visibility, and for trans folks (and our non-binary/gender non-conforming siblings) it’s both the best of times and the worst of times.

I mostly post about the latter because the effort to eradicate — and I don’t use that word lightly — trans people from public life is hateful, alarming and requiring direct action to combat. The on-going hate-crimes murders of trans people, usually almost all trans women, usually almost all women of color, usually the vast majority Black trans women. The demonization of trans (girl) athletes — because it’s almost always trans women/girls who are targeted — by an unholy alliance between social conservatives and purported “feminists,” who are really Feminist-Approriately Reactionary Transphobes. (Because if you’re “feminism” aligned you with the Immoral Minority, then you’re doing feminism wrong.) State legislatures proposing — and passing — laws to criminalize providing trans-related healthcare to trans kids, to allow doctors to deny healthcare in general to trans patients.

Like the attack on voting rights, even when they fail these efforts are meant to intimidate us. They force us and our allies to expend time on effort that could go to more worthy purposes — such as reducing the shockingly high rates of suicide among trans teens. In a 2018 study, 85% of trans teens reported “seriously considering suicide,” while over half of them attempted suicide. Because life is that fucking tough for them. In another study, 78% of respondents reported being harassed, 35% attacked and 12% sexually assaulted. Trans adults have suicide rate comparable only to combat vets suffering PTSD, because yes, life is that fucking hard for too many of us as well. I only post about a fraction of this stuff, not only for my own sanity, but to prevent myself from becoming Janie One Note. Trust me, there’s a lot of other things that I’d rather be posting about. So if you know a trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming person, today is a really good day to show them some love, because although there’s now a lot of good things happening, there’s still all too much threatening and scary stuff going down.

It’s also the best of times. Like for many other minorities, the existential terror of The Former Guy’s administration is now gone. The current administration has our backs, and they’re walking the walk. They’re rolling back the hateful policies of the prior administration. The Biden administration became to the first to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility, while also today the Pentagon reversed the military’s trans ban. That’s a big Joe Biden Deal. (Even if presidential executive orders mean my rights are at the whim of who’s in power.) The love shown to Elliot Page shown when he came out. The increasing visibility of, and support for, trans men, who’ve traditionally flown under the radar (for better or worse).

Dr. Rachel Levine getting confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary of Health — the first trans person to do so. Dr. Levine’s accomplishment is a double victory, because like a lot of later-in-life transitioners, including myself, she’s “visibly trans” due to the unwanted changes testosterone wreaked on her body. Previously the high-profile trans woman activists, like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock were less threatening: they fit the cisgender heterosexual norms of beauty, they’re attracted to men. Which is not to knock their activism, far from it. But life is different when you look like, well Laverne Cox. I still regularly get “sirred” by store cashiers and others. I’ve resigned myself to always being “sirred” on the phone. I’ve learned to let roll off my back since it’s often not worth correcting them, but for part of me it’s still always another slice in the death of a thousand cuts. (If you don’t think pronouns are important, try misgendering a cisgender person’s pet.) I don’t know Dr. Levine’s sexual orientation, but since she was married to a woman (the married didn’t survive transition), I suspect that like many later-in-life transitioners, including myself, she’s attracted to women. (Sexuality attraction being independent from gender identity.)

Dr. Levine doesn’t really have a choice whether she’s visibly trans. Myself, I blend in more often than I’d hoped for, and for the most part I’m treated as the woman I am. But I still choose to be visible for those who can’t be. (Yes, I’m one of the examples that yes, it does get better, and I have enough privileges to be visible.) But I’m hoping that being trans ends up being the third or fourth most-interesting thing about me. That said, not everyone can be, or wants to be visible. (If you don’t think you know any trans people, trust me you do.) There are many reasons. Some don’t feel safe doing so, some are trying to keep jobs or preserve marriages, some feel it’s nobody else’s damn business. But regardless of the reason, it’s totally cool, and they’re just as trans (or non-binary or gender non-conforming), just as valid, as those who are out.

But in the spirit of visibility, I’d encourage you to check out FORGE’s series of short videos where trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming folx share their experiences and feelings about being seen. In particular my friends Helen Boyd and Rachel Crowl. (Helen is an incisive thinker about gender, amazing writer, and fierce advocate — buy her books!, and check out her Trans 101 talk. Rachel is a bad-ass actor, musician and photographer who got stellar reviews for co-starring in an award-winning indie film, and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — cast her!)

To my trans sisters and non-binary, and gender non-conforming sisters, brothers and siblings, to their partners (who are too often unsung heroes), to their families. I’d like to give a shout out to all those on the trans spectrum who don’t socially transition and therefore never go public for various reasons (most don’t feel the need to transition and are happy being “just a crossdresser” etc.), and often are deeply, deeply closeted—there’s probably 10 of them for every public transitioner, making them the vast dark matter of the trans universe. Unfortunately many of them are looked down upon not only by society at large, but also too often by other trans people. Yes, I see you, and yes, you’re “real enough” too. To quote Helen, you’re amazing and you’re awesome. Love to you all. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Many thanks for writing this up, SGB.

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Are NFTs As Stupid As They Sound?

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Pretty much.

What’s an NFT, you ask? Oh sweet summer child. Join me for a stroll through the garden of crypto idiocy while I try to explain this new and exciting form of money laundering.

What is an NFT?

An NFT, short for Non-Fungible Token, refers to a unique cryptographic token with its ownership and provenance verified by a blockchain. This makes them loosely equivalent to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Indeed, many (most?) NFTs are managed by the Ethereum blockchain. However, there is a key difference between an NFT and a Bitcoin, and it’s right there in the name: they’re non-fungible. One NFT does not equal one NFT. It’s tied to a specific digital file. Files like this $3,600 Gucci ghost:

Are NFTs As Stupid As They Sound?

One obvious problem with NFTs, which I just illustrated, is that the file in question is… a digital file. I can copy it. I just did. Christie’s just auctioned off a .jpg for $69,000,000. Here it is (warning: very large file). Now you too can own a copy. I just saved you millions of dollars–you’re welcome.

Wait, then what are people buying?

A certificate of ownership. In other words, nothing that couldn’t be a row on a spreadsheet. While blockchains have some advantages for storing certain kinds of data, those don’t really apply here. A blockchain is intended to facilitate agreements between people who cannot trust each other. They do this by incentivizing users to verify each other’s transactions. The incentive? If you pick the right random number while you’re doing this, you get a tranche of the currency. Or, to put it flippantly,

As the tweet alludes to, these computations are very resource intensive. It’s perhaps less bad than it once was, as more and more “miners” move to renewable energy sources, but it’s still pretty wasteful. NFTs piggyback on this system, but not for any good reason, informationally speaking. A password-protected spreadsheet that Christie’s owns would be just as trustworthy. But that wouldn’t be very cool, now would it?

Wait, this is only a thing because they’re cool?

Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are cool, they’re hip, they’re allegedly untraceable (they’re not). And, just like their physical counterparts, crypto-backed art pieces are fantastic for money laundering. I don’t have a link for that, since the exposés are presumably still being written, but it’s not very hard to write one in your head for now. In the modern world, art is good for many things, including washing your dirty cash. This is known.

Where the hell did these things come from??

CryptoKitties. You read that right. In 2017, a Canadian studio introduced a new kind of virtual pet that was stored on a blockchain. Much like their contemporary descendants, CryptoKitties soon went full tulip, and the rest is history.

What’s next for NFTs?

I don’t know, but there’s one thing you can take to the bank: it will be even stupider. Some have joked that cryptocurrencies are a solution to the Fermi paradox; that they are a great filter that prevents intelligent life from becoming spaceborn; that life invents cryptocurrency and then destroys its planet “mining” the stuff.

May this remain in the land of jokes!

Open thread, I suppose.

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Recommended Reading: Some Cosmic Perspective

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

Recommended Reading: Some Cosmic PerspectiveSo goes the epigraph of Katie Mack‘s excellent new cosmology book, The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). It is an entertaining and curiously enlightening read about how the universe might end. At 240 pages, it’s a quick and accessible read that somehow manages to cover a great deal of ground. Among its topics:

  • What might the universe be?
  • Where might it have come from?
  • What the heck happened during those first fractions of a second?
  • How might the universe end?
  • Where do universes go when they die?

These first three points are critical to understanding the rest, and Mack, a theoretical cosmologist and science communicator, does an excellent job explaining them. But she spends most of the book drilling down into these last points. She discusses, among other things, the big crunch, heat death, the big rip, bouncing ‘branes, vacuum decay, and life after (heat) death.

I’d always found heat death–the irreversible transformation of all things into tepid soup–to be deeply depressing. Entropy, an unstoppable juggernaut that slowly makes things less organized, will simply have its way with everything. But the things I read in this book really made me reconsider that.

First, heat death is far from guaranteed. The big crunch–a reversal of cosmic expansion–was assumed to be the fate of the universe until George W. Bush was president. Who’s to say this won’t change again? Is another shift in thinking in fact inevitable?

Second, even if the universe’s final form is a uniform just-above-absolute-zero puddle, there’s no reason to believe this is its truly final form. Random quantum fluctuations can theoretically produce any arrangement of particles. At infinite time horizons, one could argue that these fluctuations will produce any arrangement of particles. Including a very temporary consciousness that believes itself to be a human reading this blog post on the Internet. Or a singularity… and we know where those can lead.

Even freaky apocalypse scenarios like vacuum decay, where a change in the Higgs field suddenly creates a bubble of quantum annihilation that spreads inexorably outward at the speed of light, don’t sound so bad in Mack’s telling: there’s plenty of universe out there that’s traveling away from us even faster. In fact, for all we know, this has already happened a bunch of different places. And, at the end of the day, it would be a painless way to go, and literally impossible to see coming.

So, if you’re in the mood for some surprisingly uplifting eschatology, why not pick up a copy? I got mine from the library, but if you’re looking to buy, this Amazon affiliate link will send some scratch to the blog.

What have you been reading lately?

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Afternoon Respite: Lunchin’ on the Grass

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Samwise just loves “cat grass” (wheatgrass), but I rarely get it for him. The ones they sell at the pet store are really easy to knock over, and he’s good at making a big dirty mess. So a friend of mine got him this handsome wheatgrass planter! It will be no surprise to anybody who remembers the first sentence of this post that Samwise loves it.

Shuts him right up between mealtimes. (Yes, I know that cats can get a little sick eating this stuff, which is why he always does so supervised.)

What non-political good things are going on in your neck of the woods? And does anybody have suggestions for cat-friendly indoor plants? Our windows face north. Respiteful open thread!

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Facebook vs. Australia

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As you may know, news publishers are very mad at Facebook and Google. They blame the tech giants for the hollowing out of their industry. Aggregators like Google News, they say, steal content from journalists, by showing the headline and a blurb for free. They very much dislike what they see as Facebook’s stranglehold on content. Facebook was the driver behind everybody’s infamous “pivot to video”, which was based on Facebook’s lies. Facebook continues to lie about the number of people their ads can reach. The way news feeds work is encouraging publishers to focus on clickbait. Sorting algorithms are so opaque that people don’t know how to optimize their content from one day to the next. The list goes on.

In response, Australia, at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, has gone and done a silly thing. They are nearing passage of a law that would force these companies to come to an agreement with publishers for paying said publishers whenever an Australian clicks a link to an Australian news source. The law would prohibit ‘discrimination’ on the basis of whether such an agreement has been negotiated with a given outlet, or how much the payment is. The law would require these companies to notify said outlets fourteen days in advance before making any changes to newsfeed or search algorithms.

The law is very dumb. Let’s start with the dumbest part–the algorithm notifications. First of all, newsfeed algorithms change all the time, and we want them to be changeable quickly, for example in response to objectively harmful viral content like the Plandemic video. Second, these are digital algorithms–it’s not a person sitting there with a checklist, it’s an opaque and ineffable neural network. “In fourteen days, we will change hyperparameter X19z to a value of 0.3.” Does that sound like it helps anybody? This is a very strong signal that the drafters don’t know what they’re doing.

Next up: cui bono? News Corp. They wrote the bill and are getting their money’s worth.

[Google] struck deals in recent days with Australia’s major publishing companies, including on Wednesday with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay for some of their news content. The deal came in exchange for avoiding the most stringent parts of a new law in Australia…

Stories from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Sunday Times and other News Corp publications from the United Kingdom and Australia will show up in special panels on the Google News app, on the search home screen on mobile phones and on Google News on desktop computers.

Interestingly, Google took the opposite tack in responding to a somewhat similar Spanish law a few years ago: they shut down Google News in Spain. You would think that news publishers would have been overjoyed–finally, Google is going to stop stealing from them! But they weren’t overjoyed, because as it turns out Google does not steal from them. The study the publishers commissioned found that

[I]n the short-term, the study found, the law will cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million, which would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers. Consumers would experience a smaller variety of content, and the law “impedes the ability of innovation to enter the market.”

The study concludes that there’s no “theoretical or empirical justification” for the fee.

Facebook, however, has chosen to go this route this time around. They have now prohibited Australians from posting links to news, and everybody else from linking to Australian news sources. Yes, this is hardball, a capital strike–but it’s not quite as audacious as it sounds. More below the fold.

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