May 28 2015

The Breakfast Club (You Know My Methods)

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpg“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

This is the essence of deductive reasoning, the elimination of the impossible.  Inductive reasoning (which is just as reasonable) argues from similarity- because the sun rises in the east every day it is not unreasonable to assume that this replicatable experiment (get up some morning and watch) also expresses truth in the sense that science understands it.  Testable conjecture, experimental evidence that confirms it, theory that relates it to what we already know to be true enough.

You know all that hype about a holographic universe?  What serious physicists mean when they say that is that their equations that predict the observable perfomance of the universe can be resolved using only two dimensions which really says more about the math than the universe.

And why is math the arbiter?  Well, because equations give predictions that should be testable by experiment and give duplicatable results.  No, Karl Rove does not get his own very special kind of math where one and two make five.  Brother Maynard, read us from the Holy Book of Armaments-

There you go. 5 is right out.

So this problem should be a piece of Π.  Expressed algebraicly-

a+((13*b)/c)+d+(12*e)-f-11+((g*h)/i)-10==66

Didn’t get that?  Well, you’re not alone because there are over 100 unique solutions.  Be careful about the maths because they are tricksy and in some cases (Economics anyone?) simply represent fictional concepts reduced to Cartesian curves (the Universe is a hologram!).

Today’s problem is deductive.  The solution is to eliminate the impossibilities one by one.

Albert, Bernard and Cheryl became friends with Denise, and they wanted to know when her birthday is. Denise gave them a list of 20 possible dates.

17 Feb 2001 16 Mar 2002 13 Jan 2003 19 Jan 2004
13 Mar 2001 15 Apr 2002 16 Feb 2003 18 Feb 2004
13 Apr 2001 14 May 2002 14 Mar 2003 19 May 2004
15 May 2001 12 Jun 2002 11 Apr 2003 14 Jul 2004
17 Jun 2001 16 Aug 2002 16 Jul 2003 18 Aug 2004

Denise then told Albert, Bernard and Cheryl separately the month, the day and the year of her birthday respectively.

The following conversation ensues:

Albert: I don’t know when Denise’s birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know.

Bernard: I still don’t know when Denise’s birthday is, but I know that Cheryl still does not know.

Cheryl: I still don’t know when Denise’s birthday is, but I know that Albert still does not know.

Albert: Now I know when Denise’s birthday is.

Bernard: Now I know too.

Cheryl: Me too.

So, when is Denise’s birthday?

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

This Day in History

News

Sepp Blatter Avoids Appearing in Public as FIFA Corruption Case Rages

By DAN BILEFSKY, The New York Times

MAY 28, 2015

Blatter was otherwise keeping a conspicuously low profile, as top European soccer officials debated whether to boycott an election on Friday that was widely expected to see him win another four-year term in office.

Blatter, 79, faces the toughest challenge of his long career after the American authorities announced a sweeping investigation against current and former soccer officials and marketing executives who they said had engaged in corruption over two decades, including murky deals and $150 million in bribes. Blatter was not among the 14 people indicted in the inquiry.

…

UEFA, which oversees soccer in Europe, held an emergency meeting in Warsaw on Wednesday and has called for the vote on Friday to be postponed. The Asian Football Confederation, however, said on Thursday that it “reiterates its decision” to support Blatter’s candidacy and called for the election to proceed, and it was joined later in the day by the Confederation of African Football, which said in a statement that it was opposed to any postponement.

UEFA has characterized the arrests and investigation as a “disaster” for FIFA that has tarnished the image of soccer as a whole. In a statement issued after its meeting in Warsaw, it said there was a need for the whole of FIFA to be “rebooted.” It said members of the body’s Executive Committee were convinced that “there is a strong need for a change to the leadership of this FIFA.”

A Region’s Soccer Strongmen Are Facing a Hard Fall

By SIMON ROMERO, The New York Times

MAY 27, 2015

After rising as a governor under Brazil’s military dictatorship, José Maria Marin became such a towering figure in the world of Brazilian sports that the headquarters of the nation’s soccer federation was recently named in his honor.

Now, Mr. Marin, 83, is one of 14 senior sports officials and executives across the Americas charged by the United States Justice Department with taking part in a sweeping bribery and kickback scheme within FIFA, the governing body of global soccer.

Of the 14 men named as defendants in the indictment, all but two of them are citizens of Latin American and Caribbean nations, a reflection of the investigation’s focus on corruption in the hemisphere.

From soccer powerhouses like Brazil and Argentina to smaller countries like Nicaragua and Trinidad and Tobago, the case offers a rare glimpse into the sort of arrangements and deals that have long come under withering criticism but have rarely led to criminal convictions.

Flagging America’s Cup Receives Lift as Louis Vuitton Expands Sponsorship

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY, The New York Times

MAY 27, 2015

The move, a surprise in some sailing circles, is a significant boost for the venerable event, which has lost commercial and sporting momentum in recent months because of challenger withdrawals and hotly disputed rule and design changes.

…

“We had told them that they would need to come back to us with a compelling story this time and a compelling proposal so we didn’t have to face those issues again,” Michael Burke, chairman and chief executive of Louis Vuitton, part of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Only three teams took part in the Louis Vuitton Cup in 2013: Artemis Racing from Sweden, Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa Challenge from Italy. Artemis was uncompetitive and missed the early stages of the event, after a delay linked to a training accident in May 2013 in which one of its catamarans flipped, causing the death of the sailor Andrew Simpson.

There were races during the Vuitton preliminaries in which only one yacht sailed the course, which hardly made for must-watch television. The Vuitton Cup was won 7-1 by Team New Zealand over Luna Rossa. But the America’s Cup match itself between Team New Zealand and Oracle was perhaps the most riveting in the history of the event, which dates to 1851. Oracle – one race from defeat – rallied from a 1-8 deficit with eight straight victories to retain the trophy 9-8.

“The final kind of made up for all of it,” Burke said. “I think that kind of repaired some of the frayed feelings with the public, and that gave the organizers a chance to come back with what was good about it. What was good was of course innovation. What was great was the on-shore viewing. What was great was the unpredictability.”

Washington wisdom on data collection shown up by Justice Department verdict

by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 28 May 2015 07.00 EDT

For all the acrimony over the future contours of US domestic surveillance, a consensus has emerged: the expiring portions of the Patriot Act that do not govern the mass collection of US phone records are critical counter-terrorism tools.

The only dissent from that consensus: the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, which has found that a provision heralded by everyone from across the political spectrum to be at best marginally useful.

…

“While there is considerable heat on eliminating the collection of bulk data, which is good, advocates need to be thinking about the back door which is still propped open under the USA Freedom Act,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Just about every broad power and collection methodology that we now agree is harmful and should be removed was deemed ‘necessary’ by people who pushed forward Section 215 years ago.”.

“There’s no evidence that the authorities are necessary or effective, and they have raised significant constitutional concerns,” said ACLU legislative counsel Neema Singh Giuliani.

The USA Freedom Act preserves all the non-domestic bulk phone records aspects of Section 215. That provision permits the FBI, outside of typical warrant or subpoena channels, to collect tax, medical, library, educational and other so-called “business records”. By design, the bill’s architects traded the end of bulk phone records collection for the retention of the rest of Section 215, using the leverage of Section 215’s expiration at midnight on 31 May.

But a Justice Department inspector general’s report released on Thursday confirmed that the FBI uses the Patriot Act provision to collect much more than business records. It gives the FBI “large collections” of Americans’ internet metadata, as long noted by journalist Marcy Wheeler, including the to/from lines of emails, texts, instant messages, web addresses, and probably internet protocol addresses.

The report stopped its review in the year 2009 and warned that large-scale FBI access to domestic internet metadata was growing, adding that it had outstanding questions about specific FBI policies to protect Americans’ privacy.

Yet all the controversy surrounding Section 215 has been overshadowed by that surrounding the bulk phone records collection revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently ruled illegal by a federal appeals court.

Instead, politicians on all sides of the surveillance debate have lined up to praise Section 215. Surveillance reformers in particular have been energetic in their defense of the provision, part of their gambit to ensure the end of the bulk US phone records dragnet.

…

“While there is considerable heat on eliminating the collection of bulk data, which is good, advocates need to be thinking about the back door which is still propped open under the USA Freedom Act,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Just about every broad power and collection methodology that we now agree is harmful and should be removed was deemed ‘necessary’ by people who pushed forward Section 215 years ago.”.

“There’s no evidence that the authorities are necessary or effective, and they have raised significant constitutional concerns,” said ACLU legislative counsel Neema Singh Giuliani.

The USA Freedom Act preserves all the non-domestic bulk phone records aspects of Section 215. That provision permits the FBI, outside of typical warrant or subpoena channels, to collect tax, medical, library, educational and other so-called “business records”. By design, the bill’s architects traded the end of bulk phone records collection for the retention of the rest of Section 215, using the leverage of Section 215’s expiration at midnight on 31 May.

But a Justice Department inspector general’s report released on Thursday confirmed that the FBI uses the Patriot Act provision to collect much more than business records. It gives the FBI “large collections” of Americans’ internet metadata, as long noted by journalist Marcy Wheeler, including the to/from lines of emails, texts, instant messages, web addresses, and probably internet protocol addresses.

Chelsea Manning reveals threats of ‘disappearing’ at Guantánamo Bay

by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Wednesday 27 May 2015 10.43 EDT

Writing in the Guardian from prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence, Manning marked the fifth anniversary of her military custody on Wednesday with the most personal first-hand account she has yet given of the “physical and emotional rollercoaster” of a whistleblower behind bars. She describes her initial arrest, her harsh treatment at a US marine brig in Virginia and her ongoing legal battle to be allowed treatment for gender dysphoria, which has reached the highest levels of government.

After her arrest on 27 May 2010, a then-22-year-old Manning “expected the worst possible outcome”, she writes, but was still unprepared for the intensity of the US government’s wrath. She recalls being flown under guard to Kuwait and then caged in a large tent, only to grow extremely depressed, fearing that she would be “disappeared” by US officials hell-bent on branding her the enemy.

…

“I began to fear that I was forever going to be living in a hot, desert cage, living as and being treated as a male, disappearing from the world into a secret prison and never facing a public trial.”

Manning, now 27 and a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian, discloses in her op-ed that she was threatened from detention in Kuwait by some of her navy captors with interrogation “on a US cruiser off the coast of the horn of Africa, or being sent to the prison camps of Guantánamo Bay”.

Waffel House (much more later)

Waffle House to commit culinary crime with ‘fanciest’ location in New Orleans

by Jim Gabour, The Guardian

Wednesday 27 May 2015 15.20 EDT

There are three Waffle Houses in New Orleans, one about 20 blocks from my house. I have never eaten in any of the three. This is, after all, a city where even a panhandling Bourbon street wino can knowledgeably discuss the difference between the béarnaise and the bordelaise at Galatoire’s grande dame eatery.

Eat at a Waffle House? Unthinkable. At least never in the city limits. Not possible … under normal circumstances. I know of no resident who would admit to such a culinary transgression. But I ate at one just a week ago. And was happy to do so.

So when this week I get a news release that the Atlanta-based chain has chosen to build “the fanciest Waffle House you will ever see” right on Canal street, one of the City’s main drags, described as a quintessential “New Orleans Waffle House”, complete with a “bistro courtyard” and wrought iron fence, I question my sin.

Did eating at the Henderson branch of the chain send my beloved hometown a step down the road to Food Hell? Am I responsible?

OMG, no … Emeril, please, please say it ain’t so.

Tea is a national disgrace

by Joel Golby, The Guardian

Wednesday 27 May 2015 10.00 EDT

Tea is shit. We don’t examine this enough in England. We just putter along, thinking tea is good; but it’s not good. It’s a lukewarm mug of leaf water, presented as a cure-all for life’s ills. “Nice cup of tea,” people say, when you’ve watched a vivid car accident or been given a terminal diagnosis, or gone for a walk and it’s started raining. Whether the mafia has kidnapped you and made you kill a man with a gun to win your freedom or if you’ve done quite badly in an exam, someone will say: “Let me get you a nice cup of tea.”

We argue about how best to make tea. “Milk first!” some people say, wrongly. “No,” others say. “Milk after.” People are basically willing to raise fists over this. They are ready to duel to the death over how long a bag should be left in a mug, or whether a bag should even see a mug in the first place, whether a bag should be locked in the prison of a teapot and squeezed of its blood through a spout. “No sugar!” people shout, as you waddle off to make another interminable cup of tea for them. Another will chime in: “A hundred sugars!”

Academics have recently uncovered the oldest tea in Britain, proving once and for all that we have been tea bores for more than 300 years. If you do not think we are collectively boring about tea, offer to do an office tea run right now. Someone will hold up one single finger while they rootle about in a desk drawer for a bag of green tea. Someone else will pass you a tiny carton of sweeteners or some agave. You’ll have to carry all of this to the kitchen, where there is someone you vaguely remember from the Christmas party waiting to make small talk with you. You have to go down to reception and ask if they’ve seen “the tray”. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that doing the tea run in the office is one of the worst punishments that can be inflicted on a human being.

Fifa arrests: how a well-placed insider and stashed cash helped US build case

by Dan Roberts, The Guardian

Wednesday 27 May 2015 15.05 EDT

The long arm of American law enforcement first caught up with what US attorney general Loretta Lynch calls international football’s “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” corruption racket while chasing a mobility scooter down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Inside the scooter was Chuck Blazer, a suburban soccer dad who had risen near to the top of the sport’s governing body, Fifa, and by 2011 was living the high life in two apartments above Fifa’s regional office in nearby Trump Tower: one for him and one, reputedly, for his cats.

Behind him were agents from the US Internal Revenue Service and FBI who called out Blazer’s name and wanted to know why he had not paid tax on his share of $151m of alleged bribes and kickbacks said to have been sloshing through Fifa’s hands for two generations.

“We can take you away in handcuffs now, or you can cooperate,” said one of two agents, according to a vivid account of the incident first published by the New York Daily News last November.

Just how cooperative Blazer proved only became apparent on Wednesday, as plainclothed Swiss police acting on behalf of the FBI burst into the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich at dawn to arrest seven other Fifa officials and reveal charges against seven further defendants.

The Tanker Market Is Sending a Big Warning to Oil Bulls

by Naomi Christie and Bill Lehane, Bloomberg News

7:01 PM EDT May 27, 2015

A sudden surge in demand for supertankers drove benchmark charter rates 57 percent higher in the two weeks through May 20. OPEC will have almost half a billion barrels of oil in transit to buyers at the start of June, the most this year, while analysts say about 20 million barrels is being stored on ships in another indication the glut has yet to dissipate.

…

Spare tanker capacity in the Middle East has seldom been tighter. The combined excess of ships competing for the region’s exports stood at 6 percent last week, the lowest for the time of year in Bloomberg surveys of shipbrokers that started in 2009. While that expanded to 12 percent this week, the monthly average was still the lowest on record for May.

…

OPEC pumped about 31.3 million barrels a day last month, and will probably maintain its official output target of 30 million barrels a day when members meet in Vienna on June 5, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts and traders. The group decided in November that rather than cut supply to prop up prices, they would keep pumping to hobble higher-cost producers.

…

The capacity of the global tanker fleet has been further constricted by investors storing oil at sea, seeking to profit from longer-dated futures contracts costing more than near-term supply. About 20 million barrels are being stored, according to the average of three estimates from analysts.

To see why Amtrak’s losses mount, hop on the Empire Builder train

By Ernest Scheyder, Reuters

Thu May 28, 2015 9:25am EDT

Following Amtrak’s May 12 fatal derailment in Philadelphia, the 86-year-old line sums up its problems – and its promise. Running most of its length near no major highways, the Empire Builder reaches into some of America’s most rugged, remote and rural regions. A coach ticket between Spokane, Washington and Williston, capital of North Dakota’s oil boom, costs $111, much cheaper than flying.

Its supporters include both Republican and Democrat politicians, illustrating how the often-vicious partisan rancor over Amtrak in Washington evaporates in sparsely populated areas of the country that need it most.

…

Many seats remain empty. When a Reuters reporter traveled from St. Paul, Minnesota to Williston, several sleeper cars were vacant at various intervals. In the coach cabin each passenger had at least a two-person seat to themselves for most of the trip.

To pay for its money-losing routes, Amtrak peels funds away from its profitable ones such as the Northeast Corridor, where its high-speed Acela and Northeast Regional trains saw a combined $484.7 million profit in its last fiscal year.

That’s stoking debate over the future of Amtrak and how far Washington should foot the bill for upgrades to aging infrastructure and safety technology at the federal railroad that has bled red ink since its 1971 creation. Of its 48 lines, only five make a profit and one breaks even.

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