Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, July 30, 2022
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49 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Another Freaterday Night and I ain’t got nobody.
As predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
This must be what conservatives call “being responsible for one’s actions.”
For all the baseball nerds out there:
This is the kind of arcane shit I love about baseball.
0430 hrs here. 72°F/ 82% humidity. Finally cooled off enough for a short walk and a cigar. Carry on, that is all.
Look out House of Windsor:
@Flat Earth Luddite: We’re looking for a high of 80 today. Don’t worry tho, summer returns on Monday and it’s back into the blast furnace for us.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Supposed to hit 102 today, and the humidity ain’t dropping. Should remind Cracker of his time in S Korea.
Weather like this is not why I live in Oregon.
But it was a very nice cigar!
@OzarkHillbilly:
I recall Diana once being quoted as saying “Will’s like his father, very calm and intelligent, and Harry’s a hysterical airhead like me.”
@OzarkHillbilly: The Agassi autobiography, Open, was very good. I’m not a tennis fan, but the book is an excellent read that put flesh and bones on a figure I knew mostly from the Canon camera ads.
@Flat Earth Luddite: @Flat Earth Luddite:
A lot of whining going on here. In San Antonio.
May. 5 days over 100.
June. 17 days.
July (so far). 20 days.
@Flat Earth Luddite: We’ve been in hibernation for weeks until yesterday, 110 degree real feel and air you could wear, the humidity is so high. Uggity-ugh. Go outside and get drenched in sweat in minutes, even in the shade. Hospitals seeing a lot of victims of heat stroke.
We got a respite yesterday, and got out on the lake. Life was good again. At least, u but back to purgatory Monday.
Interesting that recently our local abc weather guys announced they would be talking about climate change and how it’s impacting our weather. Better late than never, I guess.
Yesterday, Jay said this:
@Jay L Gischer:
I don’t disagree, and in fact have said similar things myself. But, just thinking out loud, I wonder if this is actually true. Perhaps justice is a natural outcome of existing processes.
We now know that animals that exhibit intelligence do exhibit an understanding of “fairness” and seem to put a value to it. Perhaps fairness (and it’s more complex cousin, “Justice”) is an inevitable outcome of evolution. I’ve wondered for years why there seems to have been a progression of man’s societies to be ever more rule based. We see that however halting the progress on a local level, the societies that value the rule of law prosper better in the long run than the ones who never developed it or have abandoned it.
All this makes me wonder if “fairness” is just a result of the march of evolutionary pressure, with the secondary and tertiary benefits of a society based on fairness and justice outweighing the benefits of giving in to the individual and immediate primary motivations of individuals. If this is the case than a sense of justice evolved as a quick way for individuals to balance a dilemma in the moment, where the complex “what is good overall” can be immediately balanced against the “what is good for me right now.”
As an example, if an individual who saw a neighbor leaved a desired object unguarded for a moment, and they were absent a senses of justice, they would have to balance, “on the one hand if I take that I might be discovered and while I can take my neighbor in a fight he has a younger cousin who is growing into a giant of a man and by next year my neighbor could send that young tough to give me a drubbing, and on top of that if I look at the effect that would have on my standing in the tribe…” versus “That is a shiny object and very pretty. I’ll just nip over and take that then.”
@Scott:
That’s why I don’t live in SA. Also why I gave up bucking hay 50+ years ago.
Mostly I was kvetching about having to wait until my cigar wouldn’t self ignite (snark).
But unlike the homeless people in the area, this retired Luddite has a/c.
@MarkedMan: You know, I don’t really disagree with anything you wrote today.
Social animals do develop some sort of rudimentary sense of reciprocity, for sure. See grooming among primates. And I think justice and fairness springs from reciprocity.
I think I know at least a bit about what the countervailing pressure to rule of law is.
I don’t think that any set of laws, no matter how complex, is going to map exactly to our internal intuition of what is fairness or justice.
There’s a cost to making laws more complex, in that one has to be able to remember them all and track them all in one’s behavior.
To make law operational in nature and apply equally to all requires some fairly arbitrary choices – for instance speed limits. The speed limit is 50. It could be 45, it could be 60. Deciding on 50 has some inputs, but there’s also some somewhat arbitrary choices going on. Which, to my mind, makes a democratically based process the most appropriate. This arbitrary nature makes such rules/laws harder to track, and seem less “legitimate”.
Nevertheless, most of the world is slowly accumulating more rules, just as you describe.
@Jay L Gischer:
(Gets out calendar, marks today with a red letter)
😉
@Scott:
I could tell how ugly it is in central Texas without looking, just based on the general strength of the monsoon here this year. Almost 2.5″ of rain out of the thunderstorms this week. Flash flood warnings up in the mountains a very regular occurrence. Looking forward to seeing the changes in the drought monitor map this coming week, for the areas in the main monsoon path.
@CSK: I really don’t know because I really don’t care. I have barely paid any attention to them at all. The headline piqued my curiosity and the subheader’s hint at future histrionics dragged me in.
I won’t be buying the book or getting it from the local library but I will watch the headlines for any rotten tomato throwing, because who doesn’t like a good food fight?
@OzarkHillbilly:
I won’t be reading it, either. I find Harry and Meghan rather tiresome.
@CSK: The royals are tiresome. So often the spats sound little better than a shouting match over the fence between 2 of the neighborhood drunks.
@CSK: and they’re the good ones!
@OzarkHillbilly:
Alex Jones tried that once before, didn’t work then and won’t work now. He also
sued himself. Hilarity ensued.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Brit royals popping up in the news starts the Addams Family theme song playing in my head. It’s the damnedest thing…
@OzarkHillbilly:
That they were. I never could understand the adoration Diana seemed to evoke.
@Flat Earth Luddite: When I step out of a building into ~100 degree temperatures, monsoon rain, and my glasses fog up, THAT will remind me of Korea. So far, even with the heat, I’m not wearing 3 different shirts in a day, so no, not much like Korea.
Having said that, daym, it’s hot.
@Flat Earth Luddite: The bucking hay comment reminded me of a time in grad school (in Ellensburg, WA just north of the Yakima Valley) when one of my professors was complaining that all the irrigation for hay cultivation really wrought havoc for the climate. Seems in got really terribly muggy there in the summer when the humidity soared as high as 20 or so %.
I actually liked Ellensburg in the summer. Fairly comfortable despite the heat. But 100+ degrees is HOT wherever you go.
@CSK: I always assumed that it was because she was the one who got Chuck to commit to producing an heir. (And he was the dependable, non-scandalous son.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I never thought Charles was interested in marrying Diana; it’s just that at age 32 he knew he had to marry someone, and by that point there weren’t too many eligibles left. Pity he couldn’t have wed Camilla, but Earl Mountbatten apparently put the kibosh on that.
One thing I will say for Diana is that she had the good taste to spurn Donald Trump, although he told Howard Stern after her death that he could have boinked her.
Fat chance, Donald.
I’ve been thinking. Considering the Drake equation, we knew the first term, rate of formation of new stars, fairly well for some time. the second term, fraction of stars with planets, was a big blank unknown until the ongoing explosion in exoplanet discoveries. We can say it’s close to 1. That is, almost all stars have at least one planet.
So, the third term, the fraction of habitable planets (meaning planets with conditions where life could arise or live, not the planets where there is life; those would be inhabited planets), remains a mystery. We know of one for sure, because we inhabit it right now. We think Europa and Enceladus qualify and may be inhabited, but we don’t know. We also think titan may qualify, but more for some exotic, different kind of life. These are not planets, but satellites of gas giant planets. Still, they are worlds and we can count them. For one thing, we’ve found a lot of giant exoplanets, and they will have satellites of their own.
The reason to include Europa and Enceladus is that they have liquid water, albeit under incredibly thick ice layers. Titan has liquid methane, and water ice.
Fair enough. But we know that Mars had liquid water at some point, and maybe Venus did too. So if we’d evolved a few eons earlier, we’d count them as habitable.
As far as finding currently existent alien civilizations, past habitability doesn’t count (aside. maybe someday we’ll find ruins of extinct civilizations in either of these worlds). But for finding life, it might. It’s possible microbes in wither Mars on Venus might still be around, maybe deep underground (we’ve found such things on Earth), protected from the current planetary surface conditions closer to the surface. It’s even more possible fossils of extinct life might be found, though microbial fossils are not exactly common.
So, shouldn’t we also consider the length of time a planet is habitable?
@CSK: I have a “funny’ Diana story. I came back from a caving expedition and was leafing thru the pile of old NY Times my roommates had acquired in my absence. One Headline leaped out at me: PRINCESS DIANA DEAD!!! (or some such) I looked at the date to see when this atrocity had occurred. 3 weeks prior. Old news. Tossed that one back on the pile and searched for something a little more current.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Congratulations on missing all the unseemly caterwauling that occurred after her demise.
My BiL would’ve disagreed with you and I would tend to agree with him. When he and my little Sis first moved out to Sanders AZ he was out in the desert behind their house doing some target shooting in the middle of a July day. Say it was 104. His neighbors came out to say he was crazy for being out in that heat. He said, “Heat? I’m not even sweating.” Of course, we both know he was but the dry air was so efficient at evaporating it he felt just fine. When I went out for a visit some years later in July, I found it similarly comfortable.
I was working out at Fort Lost in the Woods during one heat wave when the temps were consistently hitting 105 and above. One day after work I got into my car and turned on the radio. They said the temp had hit something particularly absurd (109?) and I thought, “No F’n way!” It had been warm that day but nowhere near 100 much less 109. First thing I did when I got home was look at my thermometer: 108. What??? Then I looked at the *hygrometer: 18%. Shiiiiitttt. No wonder.
*and for the record, yes I had to look that up. I only had that combo thermometer/hygrometer for a few years before it went south. Haven’t seen one since.
@CSK: Back then when I still had a life, I missed quite a bit of not really very important earth shattering news.
@Kathy:
IIRC recent BBC programme presented by Brian Cox pointed out that both Mars and Venus may have been eminently habitable (i.e. plenty of liquid water on the surface) for hundreds of millions of years for Venus, to billions for Mars.
(I knew about Mars, but the data for Venus was a surprise)
So length and stability of habitability must be a big factor in the equation, especially re. intelligent life.
It would be very interesting to get data on the element makeup etc, and then model likely system formation, for average early generation K type stars, given they have longer stable stellar output than G, and higher output than M.
What we really need, in the longer term, is telescopic data on non-stable atmospheres, and if possible whether that correlates to having a large satellite.
My personal opinion remains: life may be common, but given the sole evidence base we have, the statistical average is unicellular.
Even land macro-life appears to have got on fine being roughly as smart as snakes for hundreds of millions of years.
There is not much evidence, beyond us being us, for a driver to technologically capable species/cultures.
Even Homo sapiens seems to have been stable on paleolithic level for almost half a million years, the bulk of our species existence.
And hominids generally for 5 million?
My BiL would’ve disagreed with you and I would tend to agree with him. When he and my little Sis first moved out to Sanders AZ he was out in the desert behind their house doing some target shooting in the middle of a July day. Say it was 104. His neighbors came out to say he was crazy for being out in that heat. He said, “Heat? I’m not even sweating.” Of course, we both know he was but the dry air was so efficient at evaporating it he felt just fine. When I went out for a visit some years later in July, I found it similarly comfortable.
I was working out at Fort Lost in the Woods during one heat wave when the temps were consistently hitting 105 and above. One day after work I got into my car and turned on the radio. They said the temp had hit something particularly absurd (109?) and I thought, “No F’n way!” It had been warm that day but nowhere near 100 much less 109. First thing I did when I got home was look at my thermometer: 108. What??? Then I looked at the *hygrometer: 18%. Shiiiiitttt. No wonder.
*and for the record, yes I had to look that up. I only had that combo thermometer/hygrometer for a few years before it went south. Haven’t seen one since..
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Years ago I was commenting about how humid it was in New Jersey in the summer. One guy at the table said he found the summers quite comfortable, so I asked where he was from. Windward side of Taiwan.
Found this over on Rex Chapman’s twitter feed:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Having experienced 40C in the UK for the first time ever a week ago, it was not fun.
Especially unfun was the nights being in the upper 20’s and humid as a sauna.
Yuk.
I’ve been in Spain when temps were pushing 40, but at least there it was far less humid, and by midnight was actually comfortable for sleeping even without air con.
Though the house being built of massive concrete blocks, with a white mortar finish, tiled floors, shutters, shading trees, and a cooling breeze from the Sierra, all helped.
Prob. much less fun in an apartment block in Madrid.
British houses are not built with prolonged temperatures above 30 in mind.
At least the unprecedented heat has shut up the climate sceptics, for a while at least.
First cool weather we get in Autumn, you can be bet they’ll be back, like an annoying chorus of marsh frogs and midges.
@JohnSF:@Kathy:
Viruses? Even if we exclude them from the definition of life, they are a type of replicator. They evolve.
It seems that looking for them in local areas with harsh conditions may be a pathway to some estimate.
Complex – – > intelligent life? Trickier, but the size of the universe is so vast that miniscule likelihoods result in many instances. On one hand, shit happens. On the other hand, shit happens.
@OzarkHillbilly: Hmmmm… Maybe they mean plasma? Or some part of his blood with the rest returned? Because now that I think about it when I was still able to donate blood the max was once every 6 weeks (??? or something like that).
@Kurtz:
Thing about viruses (viri?) is they need other organisms to piggy-back their replication process on.
Some biologist seem to think they are the product of a simplification process acting on replicator elements (DNA or RNA) and/or “parasitic” prokaryote bacteria.
At any rate, as (IIRC) no virus can extract energy from the environment by chemical &/or phototropic means, or replicate without a host, they are probably not an indicator of anything much in themselves.
OTOH there is so much we simply don’t know about replicators and phages in a primitive early ecology.
All we see today is the product of billions of years of competitive “replicate and chomp”.
The preserved indicators are not as informative as we might wish for hard data on how Archean life functioned.
@JohnSF:
Some experiments, as well as the discovery of amino acids in meteorites and organic molecules elsewhere, suggest that life will arise given the right conditions. Not may, but will. The problem is finding out what these are exactly, or what range.
So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found fossils of very old bacteria or other microbes on Mars, Venus (assuming we can do any research in that hellhole), and even in the moons of the gas giants.
The other thing about duration is the Sun’s been getting brighter, and therefore hotter. Assuming there was never any life in places like Europa and Enceladus due to insufficient solar energy, it may arise billions of years from now. By then the Earth would not longer be habitable.
@Kurtz:
@JohnSF:
Yup. Viruses depend on other organisms for their continued existence.
BTW, I try to sidestep the debate by classifying viruses as non-metabolizing lifeforms.
Anyway, I know of no viral fossils. The closest thing, so to speak, are genes found in human and animal genomes which seem to code for viral proteins. It’s thought they were left by retroviruses long ago.
@JohnSF:
But they do play a role in horizontal gene transfer, right?
Also, simplification as in devolution (de-evolution?)?
(I looked it up because viruses doesn’t seem correct. Apparently, it is.)
@OzarkHillbilly:
Mrs. Sleeping Dog and I were staying in a Boston hotel the night Diana was killed. A Brit got on the elevator, obviously destraugt, and asked if we had heard,we hadn’t. Now SD has been known to engage his mouth before his brain and this was such an occasion. “Well the Queen finally got her” I offered. The poor Brit was appalled and Mrs SD elbowed me so hard it hurt for a couple of days.
@Kurtz:
Yes.
That appears to be the consensus of the development of viruses.
Replicators that used the cellular machinery, and resources, of other, more complex, organisms, to reproduce as an optimal replication route.
re. viral gene transfer, best ask an expert; I’m just an amateur historian. 🙂
@OzarkHillbilly: Okay. I’ll take your word on it. I didn’t find Ellensburg uncomfortably hot either. And eventually, I got used to Korea, but that wasn’t as difficult because there was aircon everywhere.
@JohnSF: When I lived in Daegu, I learned about a weather phenomenon called “tropical nights.” For days on end, it was 40 or so during the day and the temperature would drop all the way to 39 or 38 overnight.
I’d experienced the same thing in Spokane during times we had an inversion layer but it didn’t last as many consecutive days. I remember one day where the overnight low was higher than the previous daytime high. The next daytime high was a couple of degrees higher, so it made sense. (Sort of…)
@Sleeping Dog: HA!