Later On

I just saw an excellent science-fiction movie that captures much of the spirit of 50′s-era science-fiction stories of a certain type—specifically, I suppose, the type of stories written by "Lewis Padgett" (as pseudonym, as explained at the link). No surprise, since the movie (The Last Mimzy) is based on a Lewis Padgett story. Timothy Hutton is in it, but the stars are the two young actors who play the Hutton character’s children. Really a satisfying family drama, which keeps on giving. Good stuff.

I had to read up on Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, which I had to give because of the move to Win 7 64-bit.

So first is what I believe are cherry blossoms in bloom:

Read the rest of this entry »

Good explanation by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

The news of the day, as I mentioned earlier, is that Richard Shelby has decided to place a hold on everything that eats, breathes or moves unless Alabama gets a couple billion more in pork. Before we take a step further on this, it’s worth noting that Shelby is doing exactly what Ben Nelson did, but attaching a larger price tag to his demands: He’s threatening to obstruct Senate business unless his state gets billions in giveaways. Nelson settled for hundreds of millions. Nebraskans must be pissed.

But put all that aside: Shelby is putting a "hold" on all of Barack Obama’s pending nominees. So, uh, what’s a hold?

The first thing to understand is that there’s no such procedural move as a "hold." It’s not something senators have in their special senatorial utility belts. Instead, a "hold" is shorthand for a promise to obstruct all further consideration of a particular piece of Senate business.

The best explanation of how this works came from David Waldman, and I encourage you to read it in full. But here’s the short version: The Senate generally uses unanimous consent agreements to set the rules for a bill or a nomination. A hold, in its simplest form, is a promise to object to unanimous consent.

Okay, then what?

The action in question can still come to the floor. But all bets are off. In practice, this means a filibuster of some sort is on. Let’s say that Shelby doesn’t have 40 other Republicans lined up to stop all Senate business unless Alabama gets its pork. In theory, that means Harry Reid can just call a cloture vote and break his filibuster. Problem solved, right?

Sort of. People think of the filibuster in terms of defeating a bill. But they don’t think about the power it has to keep the Senate from doing anything else. But that’s the power the hold uses. To break a filibuster, the majority leader has to file for cloture. Then there’s a two-day waiting period before a vote. Then there’s a 30-hour post-vote debate period. And voting on one bill might require breaking multiple filibusters, because the motion to proceed to debate can be filibustered and the amendments can be filibustered and the motion to vote can be filibustered and each filibuster requires the same lengthy workaround. Even if you can crush every one of these filibusters without breaking a sweat, you’ve still just seen a whole week — or maybe much more — of the Senate’s time chewed up.

That’s why holds are effective on bills and nominations that people don’t care about: The majority doesn’t want to waste that much time breaking the obstruction of the minority…

Continue reading.

Sure sounds like it.

We’re starting to figure out what color dinosaurs were. Carl Zimmer in the NY Times:

Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.

“This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.

That discovery prompted British and Chinese scientists to examine fossils of dinosaurs that are covered with featherlike structures. The 125-million-year-old species Sinosauropteryx, for example, has bristles on its skin, and scientists found melanosomes in the tail bristles. They concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail.

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. “We had a dream: to put colors on a dinosaur,” said Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale.

Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.

The researchers removed 29 chips, each the size of a poppy seed, from across the dinosaur’s body. Mr. Vinther put the chips under a microscope and discovered melanosomes.

To figure out the colors of Anchiornis feathers, Mr. Vinther and his colleagues turned to …

Continue reading.

The GOP just can’t seem to stick with the truth—and in fact, I don’t think the GOP even tries. Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Congressional Republicans really thought they were on to something. All they had to say was that the Obama administration mishandled Abdulmutallab’s failed terrorist plot and undermined our national security interests.

The GOP attacks quickly fell apart when confronted with reality. Republicans said officials only interrogated Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes. That turned out to be untrue. Republicans said he "stopped talking" after having been told of his rights. That turned out to be untrue. Republicans said Abdulmutallab began cooperating "in the context of plea negotiations." That turned out to be untrue. Republicans said there "was no consultation with intelligence officials" about the questioning. That turned out to be untrue.

And now that the entire offensive against the administration has turned out to be a rather pathetic joke, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has decided to trash FBI officials. Here’s what McConnell told Fox News:

"This was a person who was trying to blow a plane out of the air from Nigeria. It’s clearly a case for the military and for our intelligence people, not for the U.S. court system. What happened? He was given a 50 minute interrogation, probably Larry King has interrogated people longer and better than that."

In Grown-Up Land, McConnell doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The federal law enforcement officials who have interrogated Abdulmutallab have actually done a fantastic job, and have had considerable success acquiring valuable, actionable intelligence. FBI and other counter-terrorism officials deserve the nation’s thanks.

But instead they’re getting blasted and ridiculed by the top Republican in the Senate. As Adam Serwer explained, McConnell’s remarks are "unconscionable": "The men and women of the FBI put themselves on the line every day to protect the people of the United States from terrorist attacks, while politicians like McConnell puff out their chests and act like tough guys. They don’t deserve to be disparaged by some high-ranking politician groping for a talking point on cable news. McConnell owes the men and women of the FBI an apology."

Quite right. I’d just add that in May, Speaker Pelosi said the CIA had misled Congress years ago on the use of waterboarding. She happened to be right, but Republicans were apoplectic about the remarks, and said the House Speaker had "gone to war" with the CIA. Fox News and Newt Gingrich, among others, suggested Pelosi should resign over the comments. The media establishment treated this as a huge political story for weeks.

Seven months later, Mitch McConnell casually mocks officials who’ve put their lives on the line to keep Americans safe, and who’ve done excellent work on a difficult case. Where’s the outrage?

And it’s true. And tax cuts are what the GOP wants, so why are they giving him a hard time?

Of course the fact that January was so hot sort of disrupts the "now-it’s-cooling" narrative the deniers are trying to push, but once they see that January was in fact the hottest ever, they’ll understand that they’re wrong. Not.

For graphs and more info, see this post at ClimateProgress, which begins (after a graph):

Yes, the mid-Atlantic region appears headed toward an epic snow storm as “amazing moisture feeds into what is already a gigantic system,” according to the Capital Weather Gang.

But while the anti-science crowd will no doubt tout that as evidence we aren’t warming — just as they did with the “cold snap” in early January — in fact, climate science predicts we will see more extreme precipitation events year-round as warming puts more moisture into the atmosphere [see Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?].

Indeed, the January “cold snap” not only didn’t prove the case for (nonexistent) global cooling — it turns out that January was uber-hot around the globe!  As leading anti-science guy Roy Spencer posted Thursday (including the figure above):

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record….

Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.

Of course, right now we’re only in a moderate El Nino.  In 97-98, we had a monster El Nino.  And Spencer doesn’t mention that this record is especially impressive because we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”

The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformation campaign of the anti-science crowd, it’s getting hotter — thanks primarily to human emissions.

The satellite record itself clearly shows the long-term warming trend, especially when you remove the stratospheric cooling influences.

You can plot the UAH temperature data yourself: …

Continue reading.

Via Open Culture:

Hitchcock regularly played a small cameo role in his films, and they’re always fun to spot.

Sen. Shelby just placed a block on EVERY nomination of Obama’s that has yet to be confirmed—not because any of the nominees are unqualified. He’s just going to hold them up until he gets some big projects for his state. This is extortion, pure and simple, and it is the GOP’s idea of how to govern.

These holds are almost never about the nominee’s qualifications—it’s just a good way to screw up governing or, as in Shelby’s case, extort funds or projects.

Martha Johnson, for example, has just now been confirmed as head of the Government Services Administration. Here’s Steve Benen’s post at Political Animal:

The General Services Administration has been without a permanent administrator for nearly three years. Given the GSA’s role in helping the basic structure of the federal government operate — managing federal contracts, finding office space, providing materials and supplies to various agencies — it’s a bad idea to leave the department with no leadership for so long.

President Obama nominated Martha Johnson to head the GSA nine months ago. Her background and qualifications made her a terrific choice; Johnson had even served previously as a chief of staff for the agency. She knows the complex GSA system inside and out, and was ready to get to work. Her nomination was approved at the committee level with unanimous support from both parties.

But the Senate couldn’t vote on her nomination. Sen. Kit Bond (R) of Missouri put a "hold" on Johnson because he wanted the administration to spend more money on a federal building in Kansas City.

And so Johnson waited. And waited some more.

Today, literally nine months to the day after being chosen by the president, Martha Johnson’s nomination was allowed to come to the Senate floor. She was confirmed — 94 votes to two.

When there’s a 94-2 vote, it tells us that this was a fine nominee, who shouldn’t have had to wait nine months for an up-or-down vote.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer described this ridiculousness as "a perfect example of why Americans are so frustrated with Washington."

Martha Johnson is hardly the first nominee to fall victim to this trend of opposition for opposition’s sake. Nine of the President’s nominees found themselves stuck in this same situation only to be confirmed by 70 or more votes or a voice vote. Several nominees, including two members of the Council of Economic Advisers, had cloture withdrawn and were passed by a voice vote.

Maybe votes on these nominations were delayed as a bargaining chip for someone’s pet project — more likely it was part of a political strategy of opposition and obstruction at all costs. Whatever the reason, it’s obvious from the margins of the final votes that it had little to do with their qualifications. [...]

What’s clear from all of this is that we need to change the way business is done in this city.

Truer words were never spoken.

Now Shelby has taken the hold to a new level. Josh Marshall has a good post on this insanity, and Steve Benen also comments on it.

Today’s shave was, in its essentials, purloined from Steve of Kafeneio: see this post. The Palmolive shave stick worked as well for me as for him, with the Emperor 3 Super creating a great, thick lather. My Edwin Jagger ebony-handled Chatsworth (with the new head designed with Mühle) and the newish Astra Keramik blade it held did a fine job, and after the third pass I rinsed and put a few drops of Jojoba oil in the palm of my left hand and rubbed that over my beard area—and then one last polishing pass for a completely smooth visage. One final rinse, a rub with the face towel, and a nice splash of Blenheim Bouquet to make me ready for the day.

Thanks, Steve! It was a fine shave.