Month: June 2024

From a New York Times article about the San Francisco Philharmonic:

The orchestra has begun the process of seeking permissions for a possible renovation; it is trying to get them approved before the building turns 50 years old, when it will acquire historic status under local law, making changes difficult.

San Francisco's concert hall was built in 1980. By 2030 it will be locked in place and difficult to renovate.

This is insane. You don't renovate a building when it's still new, after all. You renovate when it starts to show some age. But when that happens the historical preservation folks leap in and insist it's now a beloved old building.

I don't oppose historic preservation per se, but it's gone way overboard. Save it for buildings that are genuinely old and genuinely historic. The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is neither.

Julian Assange's endless fight with the US justice system is finally over:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge related to his alleged role in one of the largest US government breaches of classified material.... Under the terms of the new agreement, Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence — which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the US. The plea deal would credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country.

In all, Assange has been either in prison or holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for 12 years. Even if you think he's guilty of a serious crime—helping Chelsea Manning hack classified records—that's more than a long enough penalty to pay. It's well past time to make a deal like this.

Oh, you'd like a prediction about Thursday's debate? Happy to oblige. I predict that it will go normally. Trump will blather and lie while Biden will answer questions coherently with occasional enunciation problems. It will not swing voting intent by more than 1% or so.

Also, the moderators will ask at least one question about whatever the Supreme Court did that morning. I'm hoping it's about Chevron so we can find out if Trump has any idea what Chevron deference even is.

Any other questions?

I caught another SpaceX launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base last night. It launched just as we got home from a walk, so this picture shows it over our house. Well, over our neighbor's house, anyway. But they all look alike, so it doesn't make much difference.

What color is the sky?

Daytime or nighttime?

The color of the sky is determined by Rayleigh scattering.

I heard once that the color is different in the Southern hemisphere because the scattering is backwards.

I think it depends on what planet you're on.

Has it OCCURRED to any of you that color blind people might see the sky differently?

Actually, most people with color blindness (Deuteranomalia and Protanopia) see typical sky colors fairly normally.

Color is just a social construct.

Critical color theory.

Ha ha. But "color" is a problematic term in this context. There are better alternatives.

The color Nazis are here.

Homer said the Mediterranean was a wine red sea. I know that's sea, not sky, but what did he mean by that?

Maybe Homer was color blind.

Greek wines were made from grapes so dark that the wine looked almost black. So "wine red" probably just referred to a darkening sea.

That's a myth. Wines in Mycenaean-era Greece were very similar to today's red wines.

Ancient Greeks cultivated dozens of different varieties of grapes.

So they had red wines and white wines?

Yes, but they didn't have names for all the different colors. They classified colors by light or dark. Glaukos might mean either light yellow or light green wines, for example.

Was that just for wine?

No. That's just how they did color in general.

So in regular life what did glaukos usually mean?

Sky blue.

Huh.

The Congressional Budget Office has provided updated projections for the cost of maintaining expanded Obamacare subsidies:

It's about $30-40 billion per year. That's less than half a percent of the federal budget. It would be a crime to cut this off, but that's what will happen if Donald Trump is elected president.

It's the least of our Trump worries, I suppose, but multiply it by a few dozen and it's emblematic of what Trump and a Republican Congress would do to make life harder for people.

I guess it's time to to ditch Netflix. The shows aren't very good anymore. Many (most?) now have ads, and you know those will keep increasing until they've pushed it to the very edge of customer tolerance. And for some reason they refuse to explain, they're updating their app to prevent offline downloads.

Put this all together and it's really not worth it anymore. Any recommendations for what to replace it with? Or have all the streaming services gone down the same enshittification road?

MAGAland is obsessed with the idea that White House puppeteers are going to drag Joe Biden's listless body to Atlanta next week and then prop him up just before the CNN debate and shoot him full of meth or Adderall or something. Then they'll point to the stage and say "Go get 'em, boy," all the while praying they gave him a dose big enough to keep him standing for 90 minutes.

This schtick originated on Fox News after Biden's State of the Union address. Biden's performance was so good that even the Foxies couldn't quite manage to pretend he was the doddering old man they pretend he is, so they started desperately looking around for some way to save face. Ari Fleischer said Biden was "amped up." Sean Hannity upped the ante to "jacked up" and "over-caffeinated." Ronny Jackson said "they overmedicated him!" Later on Trump joined in, suggesting Biden had been high on cocaine.

This was all invented literally out of nothing, but the Trumpies had to supply some explanation for why Biden wasn't the comatose old man they'd been trashing for the past couple of years.

Now, of course, Trump is realizing at the last minute that Biden will once again be perfectly normal when he enters the debate stage next week. He might even win! So how can Trump explain losing to a feeble octogenarian? The best lie is one you repeat so many times that everyone starts to believe it, so he's going back to the well and explicitly accusing Biden of using drugs.

And why not? This bilge seems to work. His fans hoot and holler over it, the fence-sitters take it as just a harmless gag, and the press doesn't even bother reporting it anymore. What's to lose?

From the New York Times:

Columbia University placed three administrators on leave this week while the school investigated their conduct at an alumni panel discussion on antisemitism last month, according to a university spokesman. The administrators were placed on leave after leaked images emerged last week showing the trio sharing disparaging text messages during the event.

Hmmm. This refers to a story in the Free Beacon that was based on surreptitious pictures of a text conversation between Susan Chang-Kim, a Columbia vice dean, and three other deans: Josef Sorett, Cristen Kromm and Matthew Patashnick. I read the story when it came out and came away sort of puzzled because it didn't seem like the texts were especially derisory. But now that three of the deans have been suspended it's worth taking another look. In all, the Beacon published four snippets of the conversation. Here's #1:

Chang-Kim: This is difficult to listen to but I'm trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view.

Sorett: Yup.

That's fine. Here's #2:

Chang-Kim: Did we really have students being kicked out of clubs for being Jewish?

Patashnick: To my knowledge no one was actively kicked out. But groups signed onto CUAD and other pledges and many Jewish students didn't feel welcome.

This also seems unobjectionable. Chang-Kim apparently hadn't heard of Jewish students being kicked out of clubs and asked if it had actually happened. Patashnick says no, but adds that some campus clubs support pro-Palestine movements that demand Columbia cut all ties to Israel and divest from all Israeli-linked companies. That made Jewish students feel unwelcome. Now here's #3. It requires a screen shot:

This is some kind of reference to an op-ed written months earlier by campus rabbi Yonah Hain called "Sounding the alarm." It's followed by a vomit emoji.

I'm not sure what this means. I suppose the inference is that the panel speakers were being even more alarmist than Hain was. Finally, here's #4:

Patashnick: 20%?!

Chang-Kim: Urgh.

Patashnick: He knows exactly what he's doing and how to take full advantage of this moment. Huge fundraising potential.

Chang-Kim: Double Urgh.

We don't know what 20% means or who these texts refer to. At a guess, it was directed at something said by Brian Cohen, head of Columbia's Kraft Center for Jewish Life. He's the only one likely to be in the business of fundraising. And a text snippet published yesterday suggests that Cohen wasn't their favorite person.

In any case, this is obviously critical of someone who Patashnick thinks is taking cynical (?) advantage of a tragedy to raise money. That's not the nicest thing to say, but hardly out of bounds. It's no big secret that people who fundraise do this all the time.

So what's the story here? I assume these four texts are the worst ones the Beacon had, and they don't seem antisemitic or even all that disparaging, especially for a private conversation. The only exception is maybe #3. It's obviously meant as a clever remark but beyond that it's unclear.

So help me out. Am I totally out to lunch and just not getting it? Or is this 95% harmless, as I suspect?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes about its thousandth whack at California today:

California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read

Daniel Buck complains in this piece that California adopts all sorts of weird educational standards—true enough—but won't adopt a statewide requirement to use phonics in reading instruction. I'm sympathetic to this since there's a mountain of evidence suggesting that phonics and directed learning are the best ways to teach kids how to read.

Nonetheless, as I've said before, if you're going to base your op-ed on a single claim, you should at least check first to see if the claim is true. Here are California reading scores for 8th graders:

Among the 50 states, California ranks 13th in reading for white students and 9th for Black students. (But a weaker 22nd for Hispanic students.)

I too would like to see California adopt phonics guidelines, but the fact remains that California kids are fairly proficient readers compared to other states. It's just not true that California doesn't teach its children how to read.