Obsidian Wings

Ishiguro and the Nobel

by liberal japonicus
Just a short post to let folks talk about this. Some speculation below the fold

A confession

by liberal japonicus
I'm a fast reader. Too fast sometimes, and when I drop into ObWi, it's often more to see that people aren't reenacting Lord of the Flies. So when the Count started to post single names, my eyes went right over them. Janie joined in. I didn't notice until an offlist email from Janie, saying that she was grateful that he did that. I assumed it would be a long list of names and looked thru the comments for something like that. I had to write back to ask and Janie pointed me to the first one, here.

I also see that Russell had picked up on it, pointing out that one name was from just down the road from him.

I googled each name, it's just started, so there are still more to come. I went back and using the admin powers, I added a link to each person's name, ideally something from a local paper/news site. It's like the opposite of a treasure hunt, you aren't looking to find some treasure, you search around to find something you've lost and will never recover.

If the Count and Janie object, I'll go back and delete the links. But if they don't mind, I would like to keep doing it, possibly as a bit of penance, possibly as a way to support the Count and Janie, perhaps as a way of trying to do something that doesn't involve screaming and getting in arguments.

o brave new world, that has such gizmos in it....

by russell

a follow-on, perhaps, to a side discussion in the beautiful thread about software and the people who write it.

from the Atlantic Monthly, a discussion of complexity and risk in software, and how folks are trying to deal with it.

the technical lead of my development group circulated this, as being of interest to us, because we are in the middle of developing and visual logic editor for stuff we do where I work.

a long, but interesting, read.

enjoy!

A fairy tale

by liberal japonicus

This story recently caught my eye

https://www.salon.com/2017/10/03/nypd-cop-who-assaulted-tennis-star-james-blake-is-suing-him-the-city-and-many-many-more/

In "Ways of Grace," Blake details the arrest, using it as a springboard to talk about broader issues of social justice and how law enforcement treats black Americans. Frascatore said that he became "very angry and upset while reading it," telling the Post and that he plans to sue for emotional distress and slander.

The suit, or more specifically, the threat of it, prompted the fairy tale below the fold

Helping Puerto Rico and the other islands

by Doctor Science

Here's something you can do to help Puerto Rico right now: process satellite images to map where the damage is. The Planetary Response Network at the Zooniverse just put up a new batch of low-resolution images for wide-scale mapping. Tomnod is using high-resolution images to pinpoint damage. I've been working on both projects from time to time since Irma came through. I've also helped analyze images from Barbuda, the Virgin Islands, and Dominica at the Zooniverse; they have a lot of volunteers, so they can process images very quickly.

These crowd-sourced maps of damage are used by relief organizations to plan where to go (and how to get there: which roads are blocked, which bridges are down). Participating is a way to help, and it's also a way to get a real sense of the scope of the problem. For instance, here's a location (from Tomnod, which doesn't give the latitude/longitude so I don't know what part of PR this is from): "before" is from earlier this year, "after" is from September 22.

You can see how massive the destruction is: mudslides, flooding, roads impassable, most buildings damaged, and at least half of the trees knocked down. I've seen many Tomnod images of Puerto Rican forest, and in many of them *all* the trees are down, it's just a heap of sticks.

There are many ways to donate to relief efforts for PR and the islands. Lin-Manuel Miranda is working with the Hispanic Federation, which is taking trained NY-area first responders down to PR. PBS has a good list of other charities you can support. Please, do NOT support the American Red Cross: they have a very bad track record in recent years.

The most important thing Americans can probably do is to call your Senators & Representative, which your fellow citizens in Puerto Rico (and the American Virgin Islands) can't do. The islands need massive logistic aid of the sort the US military is *really* good at -- at least when they get started early enough.

And for the longer term, Fred Clark the Slactivist is right: Jubilee.

Any possibility of Puerto Rico's bondholders one day profiting from those debts was washed away in the hurricane.

So it's time for Jubilee. Cancel the debt. Erase it from the books.
...
Jubilee says that while, yes, creditors have a claim to repayment, debt must never be perpetual and permanent. A creditor's claim of perpetual obligation is illegitimate. It is untrue, unreal. A lie. There is a limit on how much can be squeezed, forever, from the indebted.

Otherwise we'll be looking at disaster capitalism, with the islands being re-shaped for the benefit of rich people and corporations who will privatize the profit, while socializing the increasing, climate-change-driven risks.

---

ETA: As I suspected, Fox News covered the crisis in PR much less than other networks did. This was crucial because President Trump treats FN as his most important news source. I don't know if anyone with White House access was pounding on tables, trying to get attention and resources directed toward PR, but it's not clear that it could become a WH priority until FN showed Trump some pictures.