Auto-nomy

Dau.I and D1SO are off to Amerikay this month! They're going to hang out mostly with their pals in Boston; although I'm hoping that my pals will find time to buy them dinner. The lure of NYC is too much for the Yoof and they had planned for a weekend in The Big Apple. Since they booked with Norwegian, shit has happened with Boeing 737max planes, and their outgoing flight (which was on such a 737Max plane) has been consolidated with one flying to JFK, so they're hitting NYC earlier than anticipated. Dang!

Q1. What's with 737s?
A. Nothing
Q2. What's with 737maxs?
A. It's a kludge.

It is a design upgrade and proposed replacement for 737NG Next Generation. It seems that with carbon footprint and the cost of aviation fuel jangling the industry's chain, Boeing installed new fuel efficient engines on the original design. These big boys needed to be installed at a more forward part of the wing and that tended to perk up the nose of the aircraft when climbing - from take-off, [R 737MAX taking off at Farnborough Airshow 2016 - movie has to be seen to believed] .say. If the nose goes up tooo far the wings lose their capacity for aerodynamic lift and the plane falls out of the sky - it's called a stall. Competent pilots can recover from a stall  . . .  if the ground isn't too close. Stalling being seen as the problem, the Boeing engineers had a 'fix' which was to nudge the nose downwards by twitching the tail flaps. This was all to be done automatically with a software fix called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) which took data from the Angle of Attack AOA sensors on the front of the plane. In Ethiopia, and previously in Indonesia, the AOA seems to have jammed in the up position; MCAS kicked in to lower the nose; the pilots tried to keep the nose up while frantically trying to work out why their plane was going weird on them; the MCAS won and everyone died. I'm getting some info from Juan "Oroville" Browne at Blancolirio [dam-prev], a qualified pilot and following my nose [keep it Up, Bob, you're not going to stall] to fill in the backstory. Boeing engineers have been mandated to lather on another layer of fixes to fix the fixes  - because it is too expensive to go back to the drawing board and design the whole plane better. There were nearly 400 of these 737MAXs disaster-waiting-to-happens out there (until they were [reluctantly] grounded) and 5,000 on firm order.  We'll see if Boeing can recover from the reputational damage / PR disaster. Wendover Prods explains this better than I can - with pictures. And latest on cost-to-Boeing from Blancolirio.

Because flying is magic [Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur C Clarke] to the most of us, we take the words and deeds of designers, engineers (and pilots) on trust. Somehow we feel that, as drivers, we have locus standi to have an opinion on driverless cars - whether they are A Good Thing and how they should deal with Edge Cases.  I've put out my utilitarian stall on trolleyology in several guises before - and I've also mentioned driverless cars before as a sort of inevitable future for us. Radio Canada put out a nice little essay with cute super-primitive cartoon movies about where utilitarian maths might be programmed into driverless cars to have the best possible outcome if things go wrong:

• five people privileged over one
• pregnant women [two people?] privileged over other people
• innocent bystanders privileged over jaywalkers
• they can be legit killed if crossing the street away from a ped-Xing
• children privileged over pensioners
• the 'driver' privileged over The Other
• people privileged over property. 

Now then, who is going to write the software to implement all these choices? Programmers, is who. I've been a programmer, I've lived with them, worked with them, gone drinking with them. Many of them, incl. self, are on The Spectrum with blunted affect and so able to add body counts into their algorithms but not really able to empathise with dead bread-winners in a distant future city.
It's a nice conundrum and the story was picked up by Metafilter where lots of people rowed in with their own perspective on the matter. The Metafilter co-operative crowdsource is really rich in viewpoints.

• Those nerdnik programmers will be working for a company and that company will have a legal / litigation department who will be looking forward to the first case against the company. It's not going to look good, if the attorney, for someone your software has killed, find that your engineer has preferred a swerve into someone rather than just slamming on the brakes. The Just Brake sub-program is going to be easier to write also; rather than trying to reliably machine-learn pregnancy vs obesity.
• And WTF are we at with the tyranny of the car? Why should people careering around in a metal box be allowed to damage bollards & trash-cans, let alone running over pedestrians and cyclists?
• If we are going to have cars, though, let's not have them driven by drunken yahoos, txtn their slobby pals. Those creatures kill 100-200 people a year in Ireland and 100 people a day in the USA. Surely, a six y.o. robot could do better.

I've shown the Psychopath 2 y.o uh-ho! take on trolleyology before.

Finally and as a salutary antidote, before you next rev off in your metal box to buy some useless old utensils, spend 20 minutes watching this story of 4 carpenters spending a week making 8 x 13m rafters for a medieval church. The last rafters lasted 800 years - I put it to you that there is nothing you can buy at the end of your carbon-tax-free car-journey that will last even 800 weeks.

Jeremy Bentham

I was listening to a repeat of Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk FM this week as he interviewed Caitlin Moran. She was, as ever, both funny and provocative and made a telling point: if you ask a sufficiently young child what they think about how society treats women (or blacks) they cry out "That's not fair" with the implication that, just as soon as they are able, they'll go and do something about this manifest inequity. As someone who never properly grew up, I start to get all het-up when I hear people saying that homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married. It's the mirror of making jews live in a ghetto, or that if women are not exactly the property of their husbands all their property is. Tsk tsk, that's all in the past you may say but The Boy told me yesterday that a more or less equally qualified woman in his engineering firm unaccountably brings home about 20% less than him. When you discount the utility of, or dispossess, women, blacks, wheelchair-people, homosexuals you prevent them contributing to society in creative ways. Moran floated the idea that countries with the most repressive regimes are, for this reason, stupider countries - less creative, less productive, less affluent and more preyed upon by multi-national capital. We have so many planet-fakkin' problems to deal with globally and nationally which have developed under the watch of straight white males, that it is squandering the resources for a possible solution if we SWMs fail to enable and empower everyone.

This reminds me of a recent visit of Nobel laureate James "DNA" Watson coming yet again to Ireland to be presented with another honorary degree.  During his speech, Watson proceeded to make so many sweeping, disparaging & offensive remarks about large swatches of humanity (women, chinese, blacks, children, pensioners, handicapped, gays) that the smart boys at the back started to compile an impromptu Venn diagram to see if there was anyone left who hadn't been dissed.

I think I'm probably a Utilitarian, because I'm quite superficial in the efforts I'm prepared to put in to teasing out difficult philosophical problems. I'm straight utilitarian in my answers to trolleyology problems - when presented with the, rather artificial, dilemma about whether it is ethical to pull a lever which kills one man remotely to save the lives of five people then I come down on the side of the greatest good for the greatest number.  Yes, and I do so even in the more immediate case where you are only able to save the Five but seizing a fat man by the lapels and tumbling him over the parapet of a bridge to block the trolley-track.  Many people baulk at doing violence directly but are happy enough to press a utilitarian button.

In following the logical without being squeamish about the actuality, I am trying to walk in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).  He developed the Principle of Utility: Act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.  Governments do this all the time when they attempt to allocate the limited resources that we the tax-payers are prepared to stump up for their common-good schemes.  Most governments are are actually a long way from the utilitarian principal because rich people, white people and male people get better access to things than the poor and the dispossessed.  Worryingly, rich 'people' includes corporate persons like MegaCorp Multinational.

I like Bentham for exposing fuzzy wishful thinking in his rejection of Natural Rights. When Jefferson started off his US Constitution with "We hold these truths to be self-evident  . . .", Bentham thought "Whoa! Do we?". He famously critiqued La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 as "nonsense on stilts", at least partly because he recognised that our ideas of what is correct, ethical and moral behaviour is hopelessly constrained and massaged by the family and society in which we grew up. Darwin, for example, saw the natural world as a metaphor for entrepreneurial capitalism, because that was how everything looked to him, not least because he married a Wedgwood of the megarich multinational pottery family. Bentham's position was that any statement about what rights were was in reality a claim about what rights should be.
What Bentham proposed instead was an extension of legal rights and he was years ahead of his time on the necessity to legislate for universal suffrage (including women!), freedom of written and spoken expression, free of sexual expression, freedom (as in anti-slavery).  He wanted to abolish the death penalty which,  in his time, was handed out like visiting cards at a Japanese business meeting. He was also repelled at lesser examples of physical violence all the way down to smacking a child. For an insight into how totally off the wall these his ideas seemed to his contemporaries, when he suggested that it would be meet and proper that his body should be stuffed and displayed in a cabinet in University College London, that idea was added to the list.  Indeed it was implemented (R) decades before most of the rest of his cranky ideas which we are only now getting to adopt.

In contrast with Louis Brandeis, of whom I treated two days ago, Bentham was not big about privacy. Indeed he rated transparency, not only the virtue of, say, a journalist exposing the shenanigans of a public servant, but also in everyone of us being scrutinised by our neighbours to ensure that we are working for the common good.  Whoa, not me thanks Jeremy! Whatever about that Big Brother nightmare, Bentham invested years of time and money promoting the spanopticon, a prison were the perps were to be kept in a goldfish-bowl perpetually under the gaze of their warders.

You can make the philosophical conundrum one-dimensional by setting Bentham's morality of actions determined by their consequences against Immanuel Kant's idea that we should be guided by some extrinsic ideal Right to determine what we do, regardless of the actual consequences.  It is wrong to tell lies because honest dealing is the basis of any functioning society therefore we should never tell lies; that is the sort of Kantian authoritarianism that, for example Michael Sandel thinks is probably a good idea. I loath Kant, insofar as I understand what he has to say: his black-and-white world of moral rectitude lacks both sense-of-reality and compassion.  Bentham wanted us to be kinder to the dispossessed but recognised that we couldn't always achieve good without doing some harm along the way.  Finding the balance between these competing claims is hard work but ultimately more forgiving than when it is claimed that X has an inalienable right to Y.

announcements

Cue Freddie Delius in the background for this announcement: I just heard the first cuckoo Cuculus canorus of Spring, at 0640hrs as I was rousting the sheep out of bed for another hard day eating grass.  That's a full two weeks later than last year.  No, I don't think this slippage is driven by climate change. That's all I have to say on the matter or for the record.

But I'll add a tuthree links, which I enjoyed recently and you might too. They have been cluttering up the launch-pad here at Blob Central because I couldn't think of anything clever to say about them.

• Robert Trivers is someone who has had a lot more than three good ideas in science.  In the early 1970s, when he was just turning 30, he turned out a series of extraordinary theoretical papers applying genetics to behaviour.  When I was in graduate school ten years later the ground was still reverberating for us eco- evo- etho-biologists in the basement of 2 Cummington St, Boston University.  He's just issued a mighty slag-fest, giving his candid if catty opinion on the giant shoulders [Gould, Lewontin, Hamilton, Williams] of the field who were a little older than him.  I dunno if these big cheeses still feature in the curriculum nowadays, so I don't know how relevant this will be to anyone under the age of 50 and/or who isn't an evolutionary biologist.
• Paul Bloom is an articulaterudite psychology professor from Yale. His research focuses of how the infant develops into the thinking child. It's amazing what you can do if you ask the right questions: those that can be answered with science.  You can find his complete Psychology 101 course on the web if you look.  It was an early example of putting the performances of the best university professors out there for we the masses.  That course is very interesting and I got through about one third before I started generating web[lob]-content myself - far too busy now.  Here's a short hour on some universally interesting topics: compassion, racism and sex.  Don't have an hour?  Try 4 minutes of the Socratic method on your stroppy teenage children.
• That led me, probably via the youtube side bar, to an hour of Steven Pinker, whom we met before as recognising The Curse of Knowledge. Pinker is a professor at Harvard who has published several profound but accessible books about language and other aspects of human behavior.  Here he is using language as window on the human mind. Brilliant: you'll feel cleverer for watching.
• Last June, I touched briefly on trolleyology: a key set of gedankenexperimenten, thought experiments, which get to the heart of utilitarian philosophy. Satire has a way of exposing things that we know to be true to the light of an alternative view-point.  The best satire adds meat to the debate. Trolleysatire by Kyle York.

Enough of this, it's not raining today and I'm off to find that cuckoo.

On letting die

 Science is A way of knowing. We owe it for successful contraceptives; clean water; a myriad of health-care interventions: titanium hips, dialysis machines, MRI, corona vaccines; long bridges, tall buildings, railway signals; superglue, toasters, ballpoint pens. But in general science doesn't have much to say about living your best life. For that you may need help from religion or philosophy. I had a great deal of religion when I were a nipper - heck I won the Junior Scripture Prize - but gave it all up as soon as I started thinking for myself. I've had a pretty good life [so far!, I'm not feeling terminal, here], I don't have much bad on my conscience and, like Othello and Charles J. Haughey have done the state some service.  So I don't need help to live better.

Or don't I? Maybe if I read more philosophy, I'd realise that I've been deluding myself as a naive utilitarian and that I could do better - as all my teachers wrote on all my reports through school! I won't read Kant, however, his smug certainties have no place in my shades-of-grey ethics. Judith Jarvis Thomson [L] died last week in the fullness of her years. Never 'eard of 'er! probably because I've read a lot more green penguins than books by philosophers; and certainly because my prejudice is that philosophy is windy and impractical. Even when it espouses matters of life and death, it still seems to make the issues more complex than they need to be. I've ruminated for years on trolleyology, (the ethics of killing one to save five) and find that philosophers over-egg the pudding by dragging rights into the frame. Even a cursory study of anthropology will call question on pretty much all the rights of which the American founding fathers said We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . whoa, not so fast Jefferson, not self-evident to the rest of humanity, let alone the rest of the living world.

Turns out that Thomson had a long riff on The Trolley Problem 1985 which was invented by Phillipa Foot, although she didn't have the last word. Thomson was famous in philosophy circles for the precision of her language. Still takes her 20 pages and I couldn't work out what the/her bottom line is.

Thomson is even more renowned for A Defense of Abortion 1971 in which she created the Metaphor of the Violinist to tease out the competing rights to life and bodily autonomy; and also the difference between killing and allowing to die. As well as the insensate but wonderfully talented Violinist who needs your kidneys, Thomson invokes 

• Society of Music Lovers, who are shadowy agents for The Violinist
• the cooling hand of Henry Fonda;
• two brothers and one box of chocolates; 
• Kitty Genovese;
• "seed-people" who are liable to blow in the window and hatch in your soft-furnishings [it's a room for womb metaphor]
• Three Samaritans: Good, Splendid and Minimally Decent

These people aren't all on stage at the same time, but Thomson uses them to bring to our attention the Edge Cases that should cause reasonable people to question their certainties and think with a tad more compassion and empathy. She allows that you can feel squeamish about something without forbidding other people to deal with it. She is also comfortingly grey and pragmatic about rights and decency. It's not, in her Fonda-fantasy, reasonable to expect the actor to fly in from California to help you out but it's churlish if he won't cross the room to lay on his hands. "It's rather a shocking idea that anyone's rights should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him." A boy may be boorish, greedy and disagreeable if he refuses to share chocolates with his kid brother but that doesn't necessarily make his selfishness unjust. Thomson's arguments will fall on deaf right-to-life ears, but helped me marshal my arguments into a more coherent order that I can live with. We've Repealed the Eighth but the Oireachtas still has to legislate on the practicalities: if more people read Thomson, we'll get better law.

via MeFi

Frontline decisions

What's the point? We're scheduled on the planet for three-score-and-ten . . . and a good bit more on account of antibiotics and clean water: we have to make the best fist of it that we can. Although the World is technically our Oyster, constraints of birth and early upbringing rein in the realm of the possible. If you're born Catholic you almost invariably are shriven to die Catholic; it's difficult for Patriarchs to be postmen [altho I did briefly achieve this]; not many options for kids born in mining villages in West Virginia or up the Rhondda; navy brats know about Service. And a disconcerting number of doctors have doctoring parents - it all rather shows a want of imagination (and opportunity). David Nott's [prev] father was an Anglo-Burmese doctor, who married a Welsh nurse. An only child of unhappy parents he wanted to please and scraped into Medical School at the second attempt. Remarkably [and hats off] he was able to realise his boyhood ambition of becoming a commercial airline pilot as well. 

Random inspirational events steered him into general, especially vascular, Surgery. Like Dr Kay, he climbed the ladder while learning his trade: a lot of varicose veins, haemorrhoids, lipomas, hernias and appendectomies with occasional more exciting "clamps!" aortic aneurisms. In 1993, at the age of 37, he signed up for Médecins Sans Frontières for a stint in Sarajevo during the Balkan War. He discovered a couple of things: he got a rush from dodging bullets; he could keep calm and carry on in shocking poor conditions. Keeping calm is at least as important as knowing where to cut. In war zones, patients / casualties come in lumps - all at once and then none at all. Effective triage is often the key to maximising survival; someone has to decide where the surgeons can leverage their skills to best effect. It's like Goldilocks: some casualties are too bad; some are not critical; some get the next slot on the operating table. Some of the last will come back to theatre when things calm down so that the doctors can tidy up the mess.

For the rest of his career as a consultant surgeon he'd see-saw between his lucrative London work and really terrifying, exhausting, thrilling, effective stints in an alphabet of war-zones: Afgho, Bosnia, Chad, Darfur . . . leavened with natural disasters in Haiti and Nepal. I know all this because I've just finished War Doctor, Nott's autobiography, on Borrowbox. It is read by the author, which is usually more convincing. As a fainter, it is probably not the best book to "read" while driving. The line of those whose lives he has undoubtedly saved will stretch down the street and round the block. But triage decisions have consequences too: one young man used up every unit of transfusable blood in Aleppo and died anyway. Those 20 units eked out for several less exciting operations could have saved different lives: trolleyology [multibloboprev] with consequence.

Did I say leverage their skills? I did. At one particularly dodgy third world posting, thinking he might be killed that night, Nott sent a you're cute txt to a younger woman of his passing acquaintance in London. They were married in 2015. Elly Jupp used to work for a think-tank, The Institute of Strategic Studies, so she knows how to get the best bangs for the buck. Apart from two children she has brought The David Nott Foundation into the World.  There are many ways in which you can contribute to the good work. Mr Nott, for all his skills and experience, cannot bilocate like an electron. But he can teach his skills with medics from war-torn, dispossessed countries, so that they can more effectively cope with medical trauma back home. His Surgical Training for Austere Environments (STAE) has upskilled so many doctors that the lines of the saved are starting to fill stadiums.

Squeeze me up, Sapolsky

I promised I'd write a bit more about oxytocin and vasopressin; the Squeeze Hormones. In my original piece, I was struck by the fact that the genes for these two neuropeptides are next door to each other  on human chromosome 20. It is a classic example of gene duplication: in non-mammalian vertebrates there is a single gene in that position with some variation among taxa and a few different names - vasotocin, mesotocin, isotocin - to reflect this. Robert Sapolsky in his book Behave devotes quite a few of then 700 (!) pages to these short proteins and their receptors. <duh!>, me. If I'd thought about it for 45 seconds I would I realised that it takes two to tango. Hormones are at nothing - just whoooshing round the circulatory system - until they dock with their receptor; THEN things kick off inside the cells whose receptor is thus jangled.

It seems that a number of different genetic variants of OXTR, the oxytocin receptor are present in the population of normal adults and researchers are beginning to tackle how, if at all, these changes impact the health and happiness of those who have them on board. They may drive:

• the amount of oxytocin required to induce labour [PMID 28456503]
• ADHD and social interactions [PMID 28478728]
• receptiveness to MDMA [PMID 26787430]
• dealing with grief [PMID 29353531]
• effective affective trolleyology [PMID 27497314]
• whether your dog loves you [PMID 28765081]

If these funded research topics make you think hmmmm IgNobel awards, then you are not alone. But then the whole point of IgNobels is first they make you laugh, then they make you think. That last one is interesting because it may be an example of co-evolution and explain the, frankly peculiar, affiliative relationship between humans and dogs. When your pooch looks all big-👁y👁s at you there is a rush of oxytocin at both ends of the stare. Somehow, both species have extended the limits of Us to the exclusion of Them. I see now (I tell ya b'ys, I've forgotten more blobbery than I can remember writing) that I covered this puppy luv phenomenon 5 years ago.

Within this our own species, oxytocin's effects are not indiscriminate. The standard research protocol in neuropeptide research is to spritz a solution of oxytocin up the punter's nose and then test them for implicit racism, or recognising and remembering the emotional state shown in a series of photographs. It turns out that a shot of oxytocin makes you bond more strongly with Us [family first, but also neighbours / people with the same tan as you] but brings out the worst in your assessment of black people [or travellers, if you're Irish]. In that sense oxytocin [and testosterone in a different but parallel tale] makes you more so of whatever your natural proclivities are. Some of your ways of being and interacting with others are genetic (OXTR variants?) but others are learned and that's a whole of can of nature / nurture worms. Sapoxytocsky  in the classroom and bloke-talking with Joe Rogan.

As a black and white sorta bloke, I've had vasopressin nailed as having two quite different but weirdly related functions: 1) it causes smooth muscles of the arteries to contract 2) wearing its anti-diuretic hormone ADH cape it slows water loss through the kidneys. Both of these serve to drive up blood-pressure and ensure that your brain gets enough oxygen to work under a wide variety of [adverse?] circumstances. But that's not all! vasopressin, like its sister oxytocin, also modulates behaviour. In fine, it increases human risky cooperative behavior and probably a rake of other peculiar attributes of the human condition. SADHpolsky in the classroom; where inter alia he kites the idea that autism runs in families that have a particular vasopressin receptor variant which, in other species, correlates with low levels of attachment. As Sapolsky says - it has to be more complex than that; and it is. But ya gotta put a few ideas Out There if we're ever going to shake up our complacency and make some progress in science.

Making a killing

Only psychopaths kill without compunction. We have seen in the ethics of trolleyology that most 'normal' people are content to do utilitarian maths [killing one person to save five] if they can do this by pulling a lever to switch the run-away trolley to the other line. But far fewer are prepared to seize a fat chap by the lapels and heave him over the parapet to achieve the same trolley diverting solution. We should really make ourselves responsible for the consequences of our actions: it helps if we're forced to do distasteful things ourselves rather than pay someone else to do it for us. Make a total mess of a public toilet - hey, it happens to the loosest of us - but don't walk away from it expecting the poor [minimum wage poor] janitor to tidy it up. That's the difference between being an adult and an incontinent infant. Out of kindness, the adult/child rules should be bent for the sick, the demented, the dying. Being drunk doesn't count.

In 1981, Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor had a neat idea for reducing the chance of starting WWIII. On inauguration day, an aide to the incoming President would have the nuclear codes surgically implanted next to his heart. If a Strangelove Armageddon situation developed, another aide would hand a butchers knife to The President and invite him to go get the codes. It would concentrate the President's mind on what an innocent death was about.

I was thinking along these channels because the red states in the USA are at the death penalty antics again. In particular, the state of Nebraska wishes to kill Carey Dean Moore, who was convicted of a double murder in Omaha in 1979. Jesus, Mary & Joseph that's forty years ago when Mr Moore was only a kid. Of the 15 perps who have been offed in the USA this year, the shortest time between conviction and execution is 10 years.  It costs $35,000 a year to keep a body encarcerated in Nebraska each year; more for the deluxe accommodation of death-row.

Moore is scheduled to die by a lethal injection protocol Tuesday 14th August 2018 [NYT]. But now Fresenius Kabi, a German pharmaceutical company, is in court for a stay of execution: citing reputational damage if its healthcare products are used for such a foul purpose as judicial execution. Their global reputation is the provision of i.v. solutions and dialysis products. It will be their contention that the vials of potassium chloride to be used as the final step in the Nebraska dance of death, were manufactured by Fresenius. They will also claim the manufacture of the muscle relaxant atracurium. Both drugs were distributed on the strict proviso that they could only be used in healthcare. Nebraska must, therefore, have obtained their supplies in a protocol with a muddied audit trail. That is not good for reputation of the state government. STOP PRESS: the stay of execution was denied by the US District Court on Saturday 11 Aug 18 [CNN]

I've ranted before about the sciencification of the death penalty under the ludicrous hunt for a humane way to terminate a human life. As if banging up a human being in a cage for 40 years is somehow more conscionable? If you tried that on a horse, however bad-tempered, the local branch of the SPCA would be down to you pretty damn quick. That's Nebraska State Governor [L] he's a Republican, wants to keep the right to bear arms, is vehemently For the death penalty and is not above going down to the Tecumseh State Penitentiary to talk to state employees and also inmates. He seems like a man who talks the talk on correctional policy. Do you think he has it in him to cut through all this super expensive bureaucracy and legal quibbling about German reputational damage? Could he go down to death row with a butcher's knife and quickly and cleanly dispatch Mr Moore? Save the state $1,000,000!?

Second half

First is A thru M

• Nighthawks 1942 [prev]
• Opera in the street
• Poffertjes
• Québecoise - jurons
• Rotterdam - hoofing on a steel barge
• Streetfood
• Trolleyology [try watching sound OFF]
• Redemption
• Up up & away with airline points
• Vegetation en suite - Bunbeg, Co Donegal [still above].
• Williams, Hank - cold cold heart
• X-agon topology 
• Yokozuna 横綱
• Zealand, New - wool woes

Sunday Misc 110916

Some movie clips so you don't have to read:

• Harvesting firewood from a flash flood: no PPE or safety ropes in India
• Planking and felling: oddly satisfying timber.
• Same but with 1946 technology. More wood in water.
• Trolleyology for toddlers - The Almaric Solution! via Tywkiwdbi

Yes Repeal the Eighth

On 25th of May, we-the-people are having another chance at Government By Referendum. The mechanics of it are quite simple: we are going to repeal the Eighth amendment to the Constitution by replacing Article 40.3.3. It's all on refcom2018.ie
The Present Article 40.3.3
The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right. This subsection shall not limit freedom to travel between the State and another state. This subsection shall not limit freedom to obtain or make available, in the State, subject to such conditions as may be laid down by law, information relating to services lawfully available in another state.
The Proposed Article 40.3.3
Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.

The short answer is that I'll be voting Yes because that's what my daughters want. I got my relevant ethics from my PhD mentor "Your rights end where my nose begins". You can work away with your version of a life-well-lived so long as it doesn't impinge on mine.  Dau.I and Dau.II defend themselves with "Your rights end where my uterus begins".  It's not about abortion-on-demand, which will be a long long time coming in rear-window focussed Ireland, it's about choice.  Dau.I was caught protesting by Newstalk Radio and featured on the 6 o'clock news a few days ago "I feel really frustrated by the whole way the referendum is going. With the marriage referendum [3 years ago] the arguments from every side seemed to be much more fact-based than this referendum which seems to be entirely about feelings". Starting with John the Bastard, son of the Laird and the red-headed cook,  our family has a long tradition of  unexpected pregnancies, only a quarter of which ended up with a child raised by two parents of different sex. In one of the other three cases, The Man [well he was only a chap really, although his plumbing worked] fucked on, contributed his teaspoonful and then fucked off. That's about the level of support a women can expect from The State or any of those people who are talking large about the rights of the unborn. In fairness, incubators women get really good care, paid for by the state, during their pregnancy so long as they continue pregnant. But 48 hours after delivery, they are on their own for the 12 or 24 years it takes to raise a child.

In one of my remedial maths classes in March, I overheard a chap say that he was going to the polling station on 25th May 2018, because he believed in participation in the democratic process; but he was going to 'spoil his vote' because he didn't have enough information about either side. I thought that was commendable and rational: like Dau.I's deprecating this referendum which seems to be entirely about feelings. But one of his female classmates was having none of it: "You should @&*$ing well go and get yourself informed about the issues before the day, so". At which he started inarticulating about how He didn't think that a young woman should be able to easily shuck off the responsibility for falling pregnant. I tell ya, The Patriarchy starts before you leave your teens. His attitude - I won't dignify it as reasoning - is wrong on at least two counts.

1. He, no more than I, doesn't have any standing on the matter. The goings on in someone else's uterus - a rather extreme example of parent-offspring conflict; about which I knew something when I was his age 40 years ago - is none of his, or my, business.
2. He has entirely the wrong demographic image in mind when he's laying down the law. The most common class of  the 4,000 [almost certainly an underestimate] Irish women who travel to the UK each year because Ireland won't deal with its own pregnancy terminations is not young wans who get drunk, get lovin' and get unlucky in the lottery of their menstrual cycle. The majority [54%!] are rather women who already have a child or children; know from years of experience both the burden and the joy of the status of motherhood; and believe that the whole family will suffer financial, emotional and psychological loss if they bring another child into the world. There are many other burdens a woman and her family can suffer beyond drawing a fatal fetal abnormality card in the lottery.

If you ever bother to listen to the safety announcements as you prepare for take-off you'll remember the exhortation to put your own oxygen mask on before you start helping those dependent on you. Because if you-the-adult flake out from oxygen deprivation while you trick about with Little Jimmy's mask then you're both dead. In the natural world, where propagating your genes into another generation is one of the most powerful drives we know about, parents have to make conscious and unconscious decisions about whether continuing to invest in this particular offspring is the 'best' option at the current time. Humans too! - you may, with advantage, read Nisa by Marjorie Shostak: the eponymous hero falls pregnant too quickly after the birth of her first child and is told that extra burden will likely kill them all in the marginal desert land they inhabited. As an evolutionary biologist and a utilitarian, I have a particular take on matters of life and death: I cannot accept that the right to life is a black and white issue. You just have to engage with a bit of trolleyology or follow the ethical reasoning of Peter Singer to see where I'm coming from. Yes, you have to read the back story because Ethics Is Hard.

I put it to you that Pro-Lifers [vote No to the proposed change] are following Immanuel Kant with his belief in absolutes of Right and Wrong. For Kant telling a lie is wrong and therefore on the same floor as kicking a dog or setting fire to a church full of people. By showing small-but-perfectly-formed aborted foetuses on their campaign posters, they are trying to elicit a sense of human empathy with something that is about the size of a kidney bean [8 weeks on the fruit and veg comparison]. But the No-change position is that all humans of whatever size, shape or colour have a Right to Life even if that life has a disastrous effect on all around it/him/her. I loath Kant: smug, priggish and detached from the realities of life in his ideal Platonic cave. It's not perfect, but Utilitarian - greatest good for the greatest number - reasoning is practicable for many normal circumstances. There are so many of them that awkward crisis pregnancies are part of normal life and here too Utility works for me. I'm by no means Certain of my position, but women should have a choice about what happens down there.  Shipping the problem to England is just contemptible.

You and I are entitled to a position on either side of a debate. It's better if we think the consequences through. Better still if we listen with care and attention to what The Other has to say. But diversity rules apply: me, I'll have compassion for a poor woman in trouble. Too few of us give a €2 damn about a small black baby dying of infectious diarrhoea over there; too many of us affect to care for a small pink kidney bean over here that we have no intention of supporting.