Reston From Nothing to Something

This post uses the example of Reston to show how USGeological Survey (home office in Reston) updates its maps, including the process of officially naming geographic features.

Guinness Record Set? Reversals in Congress

I doubt the Guinness people keep track of how quickly politicians reverse course.  If they did they'd have to distinguish between individual politicians, who can reverse on a dime, if a dime lasts 12 hours or one news cycle, and governing bodies, like Congress, who naturally take a big longer.

I suspect Congress just set a new record: on Monday the big budget deal included a cut on crop insurance administrative costs; by the time the deal had passed early this morning (in the Senate), the cut was dead as a doornail.

Shows the clout of the insurance agents, and the usual hypocrisy of those who rail against government subsidies.

Second Hand Clothing

ThinkProgress has a piece on second-hand clothing in Kenya. 

Two points:

• the import of such clothing and the fact it's not taxed undermines the Kenyan clothing/textile industry (that's in the piece)
•  the use and reuse of resources contributes to world efficiency, and thus is environmentally good (I'm assuming the costs of transportation from US to Kenya are more than offset by the reuse) (this is my point)

Given my background, I'm usually impressed by thrift, one of my parents' favorite favorable adjectives.

Humans Are Doomed: Robots Teach Each Other

That's my hysterical take-away from this Technology Review piece on how one robot at Cornell taught a different robot at Brown to do a task it had learned.

I've mentioned a point on self-driving cars before: once you get a car to handle a new situation, it's done, unlike humans who even if they don't forget what they've learned, only imperfectly learned the lessons of their elders. So learning for robots is one baby step, then another baby step whereas learning for humans is one step forward, one step forward, one step backward, and then the grave.

The Siamese Twins

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money has an interesting post on the original Siamese twins, who owned slaves and sired 21 children.

Farmers Take Two Hits

Two hits on farmers in the media:

1. the World Health Organization declares processed red meat to increase the risk of cancer (not IMHO a really serious risk, but the media will play it up).
2. the big budget deal between Boehner, McConnell, and Obama includes a hit on crop insurance companies, requiring renegotiation of the reinsurance agreement between RMA and the crop insurance companies.

Bad Gun Shops

A seemingly simple proposal on which many could agree: clamp down on the 5 percent of gun shops which sell 95 percent of the guns later used in crimes.

But, as one of my mantras says, "it's complicated".  I read another piece on the lawsuit against Badger Guns in Milwaukee (sold a gun to a "straw buyer" who turned it over to someone who shot two cops).  Too lazy to look it up, but probably the Times. I believe Badger Guns is now under new management, though the owner is related to the old one.  That's the loophole, one which FSA experiences with enforcing payment limitation: identity is often fluid, not fixed.  Today's gun dealer is tomorrow's bystander, even though common sense says there's a continuity there.  But the law does not incorporate common sense.  Common sense tells us a lot of bad things and we wish to do no bad.

Addiction Is Bad, But Human

To be human is often to be an addict.

One of my longest addictions is coffee.  I blame my parents; they drank coffee and I wanted to be like them (I know, that's weak).  As the youngest in the household, anything associated with age, with maturity was very attractive. Drinking coffee meant being an adult.

Over time I drank more and more coffee.  By the time I started with USDA I'd hit the office coffee pot every hour or so, just to keep something in my cup.  Over the next 25 years I got stomach problems, so my coffee habit was  balanced by a Maalox habit.  Eventually I started to replace the caffeine with decaf.

These days I'm drinking a bit less, but still on 20 ounces a day of Starbucks leaded, blended with Folger decaf.

Why this post?  I was afraid the doctor was going to tell me to drop the coffee today, but not so.

EU Migration and Global Warming

Over the years there have been a few articles trying to relate climate change and various kinds of political unrest.  You'll have to take that assertion on faith, because I don't have URLs.

Conservatives tend to doubt the immediacy of global warming and to argue that humanity can adapt to changed conditions in the future, just as we have in the past.

On an individual basis, I've great faith in the ability of humans to adapt to the worse conditions. I do think global warming/climate change is real and there's a strong case for trying to cap greenhouse gases.

The turmoil associated with the migration of people from the Middle East and parts of Africa into Europe doesn't make me optimistic about our ability to adapt.  Today the EU is struggling to handle millions (at most) of refugees.  What happens when Bangladesh is struck by a strong cyclone, generating many more refugees than the EU is seeing--do we think that India will be able to handle them?

[Update:  see this Grist piece on the subject of climate refugees.]

The Importance of Knowing What You Don't Know

One of the few lessons I learned at work is the importance of knowing what you don't know.  I remember assuring the state specialist for Arkansas of an answer, which I wasn't really sure of.  Naturally I was wrong, and the answer turned up in an OIG report.

Seems to me the same issue is cropping in with self-driving cars, as witness this Technology Review article on problems with the new Tesla software/hardware.  Apparently Google is trying to handle all situations, but the problem drivers are having with the Tesla is not knowing when the system is approaching the limit of its capability, i.e., not knowing what the Tesla doesn't know or isn't sure of.