Commenter Archive

So why did they trek across the Atlantic for African slaves...

It's been an awfully long time since I read on the subject, but my recollection is that Americans didn't, for the most part. Coastal Africans handled the initial capture and subjugation. Mostly European-flagged ships carried slaves to the Americas (South much more so than North), although I believe this changed after laws against the Atlantic slave trade began to be more seriously enforced. From the perspective of someone looking to buy slaves, they just "appeared" in the port cities like a keg of nails or bolt of cloth.

The phrase "uses no fuel" in the article is misleading. What they mean is "uses no reaction mass". The generated force requires rather prodigious amounts of electricity -- the current claimed force can be conveniently measured in micro-Newtons per kilowatt. Electricity generation in the kind of form that would make this interesting for getting mass to LEO very definitely requires fuel. Probably also tens or hundreds of Newtons per kilowatt to be really interesting. Call it eight orders of magnitude. We've spent decades trying to make that kind of jump with controlled nuclear fusion, and that was starting from a point where there was no question but what fusion was occurring in the experiments.

Although these days, when I want to be depressed about space possibilities, I read pieces about Kessler cascades.

Spot on. The NFL game you see on TV in your living room bears only a passing resemblance to what you see live in the stadium. The thing that struck me the most is just how much dead time there is at the stadium.

When I took analysis in grad school at UT-Austin, it was the math department's fail-out class* for new grad students. By the end of the first week, I had a Walkman-sized cassette recorder running while I simply transcribed what went up on the board. Later in the day I would replay the tape while I read my notes.

* Under Texas statute at the time, anyone who graduated from an accredited four-year Texas state school was deemed qualified for graduate study in their major field, and the UT schools were required to accept them. A substantial number of undergrad math majors who didn't get accepted at out-of-state graduate schools wound up in Austin. There was no way the faculty could properly shepherd that many through, so one of the first-year required classes was a fail-out class made as difficult as possible. The lectures didn't line up with the assigned text, obscure material was included, etc.

There's a growing body of evidence in recent studies that taking hand-written notes has a strong effect on retention of material. The same effect doesn't occur when notes are taken using a keyboard.

If you fail to attract top faculty to the university, the graduate experience you are offering declines uncomplicatedly with that decline. The value and experience of graduate degrees, or in any case certainly doctorates, essentially depend entirely on the quality of the top research faculty at an institution.

Indeed. In many fields, it's not which school you got your Ph.D. from, it's who supervised your work. Which carries all sorts of risks for the graduate students. Anyone who has spent time in a graduate school that offers Ph.D.s has encountered people who went through the disaster of having their highly-regarded supervising professor die/retire/move to another school.

At least from my perspective, the interesting technology challenge was "How close can we come to that kind of informal real-time interaction?" Based on a variety of unpublished experiments that were conducted in the mid-1990s, the order of importance for the media is audio, then some soft of sophisticated still image manipulation (my description was always "smart shared paper"), then video. Our results for fully distributed sessions indicated that people used the video as a body-language signaling channel. The kind of life-size face-only video windows common in many conferencing tools weren't as helpful as a waist-up shot that included all the hand gestures and fidgeting.

For some, it looks like an extension of the hidden purpose of high school -- keep a bunch of young workers out of the job market, which is already overly full. Much like the GI Bill after WWII, one purpose of which was to keep several million soldiers and sailors from flooding back into the civilian job market too quickly.

Broncos - Packers from Denver tonight. I'm hoping that the camera crews spent the last couple afternoons up in the high country getting plenty of snow shots. The Front Range is getting kind of crowded, and we don't need more people who might be thinking about relocating see the last two afternoons of 70-ish and brilliant sunshine...

Nice piece.

I've been an online classroom advocate for something over 20 years now, going back to the time when I was doing research on protocols to implement versions of real-time multi-party multi-media communication over TCP/IP networks tailored for specific applications. My goal, as it turned out, wasn't a distributed form of the giant lecture hall, but a distributed form of a small upper-level class, even seminars. For me, the RSM factor wasn't on the professor side, but the student side. My belief was and still is that there is a lot of unserved demand for such classes from non-traditional students -- they can't come to campus, they're not working on a degree per se, but they're sharp and interested and make the class better for the other students. An online version provides one enormous advantage over the in-person version -- it's trivial to record the entire session and go back to visit some part of it later.

One of the biggest hurdles, I thought -- probably because I was a techie at the time -- was the lack of a really good piece of smart shareable paper. It had to be a high-resolution digitizer on top of a good display. Writing, drawing, sketching, using specialized notations like math and music -- to do those things well seems to require the feedback loop of hand, brain, and eye working on a single image. Still can't buy one at a reasonable price.

Add to that the fact that BIA seems to have "misplaced" on the order of billions of dollars of assets held in trust...

To quote from Wikipedia:

In preparation for Oklahoma’s admission to the union on an “Equal footing with the original States” [3] by 1907, through a series of acts, including the Oklahoma Organic Act and the Oklahoma Enabling Act, Congress unilaterally dissolved all sovereign tribal governments within the state of Oklahoma, transferred all tribal lands by Land patent (or first-title deed) to either individual tribal members, sold to non-tribal members on a first-come basis (typically by Land run), or was held in trust by the Federal government for the benefit of the members of the tribes.

If your land is held in trust by the feds, there's little you can do except wait for BIA or BLM to act. You probably have a better chance of getting them to act today than you've had for 50 years.

When I wear my western secession hat -- which I do, from time to time -- I say that if the Army needs to take another big chunk of land to ruin with live-fire tank exercises, then it's long past time for the states east of the Mississippi to pony up. Ditto for any "spent" nuclear fuel repositories, as the vast majority of the commercial reactors are east of the Mississippi and those have never delivered watt one to a western state.

If it takes a more incendiary comment to attract rebuttals, let me know :^)

If I were to guess -- and I have learned that guessing on BLM matters is largely a waste of time -- I would guess that the case will come down to something like "Under the Texas theory, over the years the area of Texas has increased by 90,000 acres and the area of certain Indian lands guaranteed by the federal government has decreased by 90,000 acres. Despite any other agreements Texas may have reached with Oklahoma, neither Texas nor Oklahoma have authority to claim 90,000 acres of federal territory."

If BLM, Indian Affairs, and the tribes decide to use the land to create wilderness areas along the river that require certain minimum flows to preserve, the Red River Compact dividing up the water between four states also gets major changes.

Things get rather confused when the state consists of multiple parts at different levels. The collective we in the form of the State of Texas defined and defended a property right. Now the collective we in the form of the BLM asserts that the Texas-we lacked the authority to make that decision. I won't predict how it will shake out eventually, but will say that there is a body of case law going as high as the SCOTUS that says the federal-we can assert property rights for itself that overrule the property rights that have been defined by the state-we decades after the state-we acted.

A considerable part of the ongoing animosity of western states (at least among the political class) toward the federal government is because of such late-to-the-party assertions of property rights. Backed up by, as I recall one state legislator saying, "they have nukes and we don't."

The courts are usually reluctant to change anything where there's a long-standing mark. The Four Corners physical marker where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah come together is generally agreed now to be about 1,800 feet off from where statute specified, which would translate into a fair number of square miles being in the wrong states. The SCOTUS ruled that the marker is correct for border purposes. Georgia and Tennessee are fighting again over their boundary. Georgia cites the original statute, contemporary measurements, and writing by the surveyor back in the day that says "I measured it wrong." The correction would give Georgia some border in the right place along the Tennessee River that would allow them to divert a billion gallons of water per day from there to Atlanta. So far the courts haven't bought it.

Three sides. The Red River Boundary Compact adopted by Congress in 2000 sets the boundary between the two states as the vegetation line on the south bank of the river. With a couple of exceptions, the boundary moves when the river moves. One of the exceptions is at Lake Texoma, where the boundary is fixed by survey. The other exception is lands that fall under the sovereignty of federally recognized Indian tribes on either side of the river remain under Indian (hence BLM) control whether the river moves or not. I believe that BLM's interpretation of the law is that those Indian boundaries that were fixed by survey never moved with the river. So when the river moved north over a few decades, land that had previously been "in" Oklahoma but controlled by the tribes was now "in" Texas but still controlled by the tribes, and that Texas deeds to that land were improperly issued.

G2: I have been told that one of the common refrains heard at the Western Governors Association meetings is "Do you know what those d*ckheads at the BLM have done now?" Having spent time in the state government of a western state, I have to be careful these days because Black Lives Matter is never what springs to my mind when I see BLM in print. 90,000 acres is a relatively modest amount -- the US Army's efforts to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Area in Colorado was after 6.9 million acres.

This guy, who normally guards the programming languages section of my bookshelf, is offended by your remark about rhinos and cuteness.

Even in the larger environment, there's the issue of ongoing support. At my last full-time gig, neither the budget director (my boss) nor the IT director were willing to add support for a real database application to their list of responsibilities without an authorized headcount increase. I didn't blame them. The IT director had been burned in the past with the cost of taking over half-assed but now mission-critical apps built by staff organizations. And while it was true that my boss had, at that point in time, two people on his staff who could have handled development and maintenance, turnover was relatively high and he didn't want to have to constrain his choices about budget staff so that he would always have a part-time developer available.

I'm trying to get my head around the idea of unit tests for a piece of code embedded into a spreadsheet that gets replicated by copy-and-paste sans any notion of repository or version control...

At the risk of being over the top, things change when the only hospital within 30 miles of the home of a hypothetical state Rep. Bond has closed, and leadership responds with, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect your children to die!" Based on geography, such closures are more likely to occur where the state capital is west of about 100° longitude, where by my informal (and sloppy) tracking the red/redish states are moving towards adoption in some form. Much more so than in the Midwest and South.

It may take a few more years, but I expect all states will eventually accept the Medicaid expansion -- their hospitals, particularly their rural hospitals, will demand it. The ACA changed the way funds are supposed to flow to hospitals with relatively more indigent patients, with more of the money coming through Medicaid rather than as direct payments to the hospitals. IIRC this change is being challenged in the courts, but it seems unlikely to me that the SCOTUS will rewrite any more of the law at this point in time.

The cynic in me says that CJ Roberts had this in mind specifically when he tossed conservatives the bone of "voluntary" Medicaid expansion.

One of the interesting things about Idaho is that the Republican governor's staff analysis said that the Medicaid expansion would be cheaper than the state's current state- and county-funded indigent care programs. My interpretation of the legislature's reason for not doing the expansion -- and reasonable people can disagree with this -- is "At the national level, our party may screw the states."

If you really follow regular order and allow bills that pass out of committee of record to reach the floor, you lose the ability to enforce the Hastart Rule unless all your committee chairs are willing to follow orders all the time and block votes there. Two-three years ago, a Senate immigration bill passed out of the House committee with a number of Republican votes and would almost certainly have passed on the House floor (Democrats plus the same moderate Republicans represented on the committee). Instead, it was bottled up in the Rules Committee until the end of the session.

The Speaker can also avoid the embarrassment of looking weak. IIRC, some of the budget bills passed out of Rep. Ryan's committee were left to die in the Rules Committee after a number of more moderate Republicans came back from a recess and told the Speaker that they would lose their seats if they passed a budget that included the severe social services cuts included in the bill, so would be voting against them. There was nothing "nutty" about those cuts -- they were just at the level that had been called for in the House budget resolution. It's easy to vote for social welfare cuts in the abstract, but rather more difficult when you have to vote for specific real cuts.