Not a Potted Plant

A Midwest-focused puzzle this week, in honor of our recently-concluded Leaguefest:

Iowa has 29.40%, putting it far ahead of North Carolina (13.77%) and Minnesota (11.92%). No other state reaches the double digits in terms of percentage. Single-digit percentages, in descending order, are Illinois (6.73%), Indiana (5.65%), Nebraska (4.87%), Missouri (4.49%), Oklahoma (3.61%), Ohio (3.14%), Kansas (2.80%), South Dakota (2.00%), Pennsylvania (1.72%), Michigan (1.61%), Utah (1.15%), Colorado (1.11%), and Texas (1.02%).

The remaining 5.02% in the United States is spread out amongst the states not yet named.

Data unavailable for the territories and is current through 2010, except as to two states in the “remainder bin,” whose 2010 numbers are amalgamated and any disparity would not elevate either above the 1% “reporting threshold” build in to the question.

Patrick is almost exactly wrong about The-Government-Has-Been-Collecting-Information-On-All-Our-Phone-Calls-gate:

Look, people, you don’t want this stuff going on any more?
Look up your Congressional representatives’ voting records and act accordingly.
Your Facebook memes are useless.

Actually, your Facebook memes are probably the only useful thing you can do.

Radley Balko tells us what we should already know: what the Fourth Amendment (and, indeed, much Bill of Rights) says is immensely unpopular policy both within Congress and among the public.

[I]n early 1995, [a representative named] Watt introduced the following amendment to [a] bill:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That of course is the exact language of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The House killed Watt’s amendment by nearly a 3-1 margin.

There have been a number of public opinion polls over the years showing majorities of American opposed to the Bill of Rights when they aren’t told the language they’re being polled about is actually from the Bill of Rights.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have nothing more to say to Congress on this issue than “good job”. Even if a vocal minority were able to kick their representatives out, their replacements would probably be just as opposed to the text of the Fourth Amendment.

If you support civil liberties, you actually want the will of the people to be contravened. The people generally think that the only people who have something to worry about are the ones who have something to hide and that any prospect of crime justifies whatever the government might want. Further, as articulated by Dennis Sanders this morning, civil liberties are perceived as expenses to be continually justified rather than hard constraints that the government must abide by:

Whenever I hear libertarians complain about this, I have to wonder what they think is the proper response when terrorism happens. More often than not, the answer is that such things like 9/11 won’t happen again or the chances of terrorism happening to us are slim. I would agree that a 9/11-style attack was probably a one-shot deal. But in the years following 9/11 we have had other smaller scale threats such as the Christmas Day attempt to blow up an airliner over the skies of Detroit, or the guy that wanted to set off a car bomb in Times Square and of course, the Boston Marathon bombings. So, how does government best respond to these threats? How do we try to protect the American people and yet uphold the ideals we cherish? How do we keep the balance?

Facts about Dennis’s concerns:

1. They put the onus on civil libertarians to justify why the rights they care about matter, with the implication that if the answer is not convincing, then the only practical action is to abandon those rights.
2. They use any evidence of attempted crime (let alone terrorism) as proof that rights need to be rescinded even among people who have done nothing to merit suspicion. No attempt is made to evaluate the costs of lost rights compared to the direct costs of the crimes to be averted. (If an attempt is made, the costs of the crimes perversely include the very overreactions by the government that civil libertarians argue against.)
3. They are well-intentioned and sound totally reasonable to anyone who isn’t a civil libertarian.

If your Facebook memes educate your friends about the importance of privacy even among the law-abiding, they are probably more effective than identifying yourself to Congress as a weirdo who needs to be added to a watch list. A sea change in public opinion must happen first before the government can be reasonably expected to change its tack.

It’s a shame we have to leave Leaugefest 2013 early. But so it goes. We’ve taken a whole week and most of it was with family. Family time is important but not always relaxing. Neither, as it turns out, was much of the bloggy get-together.
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“We show, and the NSA confirms, there are no nuclear devices on the Canadian border. There are no nuclear devices in Albania. Albania has no nuclear capacity. Our spy satellites show no secret training camps in the Albanian hinterlands. The Border Patrol, the FBI, the RCMP report no – repeat: no – untoward activity along our picturesque Canadian border. The Albanian government is screaming its defense. The world is listening. There is no war.” – CIA Agent Mr. Young

Galaxy:

[G1] A whole lot of our atmospheric water vapor comes from plant transpiration, which could be important as we look for other worlds to someday inhabit.

[G2] io9 explores why in the world aliens would want to invade us, anyway? And why are we inviting them?

[G3] Scientists have released a 3D map of the universe. 43,000 galaxies!

City:

[Ci1] A slideshow of million dollar houses across the country.

[Ci2] Can, or should, police assist in urban design?

[Ci3] Rapid urbanization is making us more vulnerable to natural disasters. LeeEsq mentioned something to the effect that in a world with superheroes, ruralia would start to look a lot more attractive.

[Ci4] For once, I side with the big bad federal government (and Britain!) over local communities: Down with the apostrophe! Okay, maybe not entirely. I’d still support it in contexts where Matt Malady is ready to let it go.

Psychology:

[P1] It’s not just the pencilnecks. Jocks, too, are subject to stereotype and discrimination.

[P2] The world is becoming a more addictive place.

[P3] Did we really need scientists to tell us that we can decipher dog emotions? That part about dog people being less adept at it than not-dog-people is pretty interesting, though.

[P4] Lousy sleep sucks.

History:

[H1] The practical considerations of de-extinction. De-extinction could lead to a new era of hybrids.

[H2] An anthropological look at garbage men.

[H3] Birds evolving to avoid cars.

[H4] Australia is one of those places I really want to learn more about the history of. Here’s a start. Also, Mayans!

Education:

[Ed1] A lot of politicians are advocating longer school days. The Economist presents a contrary view. I’m less concerned about the hours in a day than the huge gap in between school getting out and school starting back up again.

[Ed2] An interesting look at learning differences between the sexes. Among the findings, the sex differences in math are insignificant at the bottom but wider at the top. The differences in reading, though, are insignificant at the top but significant at the bottom.

[Ed3] It should come as no surprise that I agree with this piece on how we should make fixing things cool.

[Ed4] I’m coming around to the idea that advertising may be bad for youngsters.

Employment:

[Em1] The top five regrets of dying. Shockingly, none of them involve spending more time at the office.

[Em2] When robots and humans work together, we often think of it in terms of humans directing the robots to complete repetitive tasks. What if the future is the other way around. Maybe we’ll even become friends.

[Em3] Confessions of serial job hoppers. My own job history is pretty long and winding, though not for the reasons discussed. I have actually been burned more than once for not job hopping. Loyalty, as they say, is not always a two-way street.

[Em4] Seventeen really stupid office rules, that companies allegedly actually enforce.

[Em5] On the one hand, I am sympathetic to this piece from Linkedin, which says that we should move away from “work hours” as a metric of work and towards being paid for actual work done.. On the other hand, I tend to view unfavorably what I see as an abuse of overtime-exempt (salary) employment.

Technology:

[T1] Before the Internet was supposed to be the next big thing, virtual reality was supposed to be the next big thing. George Dvorsky looks at why that didn’t pan out.

[T2] I don’t understand why Samsung’s latest phone has a better resolution than its latest tablet.

[T3] Sabotage Times looks at driverless cars. Greg Beato looks at the potential for driverless cars, but doesn’t like what he sees.

[T4] Ellis Hamburger thinks that the proliferation of messaging platforms will leave us disconnected. I am somewhat skeptical because at some point people will successfully Trillian it, and we may have more in-points and out-points, but the latter will all be in a singular place.

Culture:

[Cu1] Next time I fail to win the family bowl challenge (where we bet on all the bowl games) and I lose, I’m just going to point out that gambling success has nothing to do with actual knowledge.

[Cu2] Winnie Cooper was pretty amazing. It says something odd about myself that I sympathized more with Becky Slater.

[Cu3] Jim Edwards has a piece on the cartel-like behavior of broadcast TV. I think it’s overlooking some things, but more importantly I am not sure why I should care. I kind of want the networks to have money so that they can make things with big budgets.

[Cu4] For entrepreneurship to rise, the big boys must fall.

[Ci5] The case for canned beer.

World:

[W1] Cell phones in prison are a persistent problem. But they’ve got dogs on the trail.

[W2] National Journal looks at New Orleans’s rebound.

[W3] Phillip Levind and Melissa Kearney argue that our focus on contraception and abstinence don’t work. Instead, we need to focus on economic opportunity.

[W4] By some metrics, Alaska is one of the happiest states in the country. It’s interesting that Greenland would be so miserable.

[W5] When I read about China’s copycat architecture, it makes me think of Las Vegas. I actually think the concept is neat. I mean, it has to look like something, right? Why not something cool? Speaking of China, rapid construction, and cool, this looks kinda cool.

[W6] Albania has a lot of war bunkers and no idea what to do with them.

So, a weird story out of Texas:

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert’s defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn’t to kill. Gilbert’s actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.

Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago’s escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.

Apparently, the law in question did not specify that the defense does not apply to transactions that were illegal in the first place?

So Mrs. Likko and I are in Chicago. And I feel SUPER lame. On the one hand, we’ve already had some great food. If you follow my Yelp account you’ll see where we were. (Same name as my pseudonym.)

But man. After staying at my grandmother’s and gardening for her and a lot of driving around rural Wisconsin and suburban Milwaukee, and eating all that dairy food “up nort,” we are exhausted. We went out to the Navy Pier because that’s what tourists do and I got vertigo on the Ferris wheel. That’s never happened to me before.

I feel energized from the big city on the one hand, but nearly a solid week of family and driving on the other, along with a lot of food and wine, here it is at 8:30 in one of America’s truly great cities and we are crashing in out hotel room. A part. Of me wants to send out a broadcast to any other Leaguefesters who might be around to get a drink — but my goodness, are we tired. And lame.

The New York Times had an interesting article on the LDS Church’s relationship with Hollywood, and how they’re making inroads:

The typical B.Y.U. student doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Hollywood. Mormon culture tends to see the entertainment industry as both a reflection of and contributor to our “morally bereft society,” as one alumnus put it. Many of the students I met rarely, if ever, watch R-rated films and could name the handful of exceptions they had made. One 27-year-old junior remembered seeing the Civil War drama “Glory” in high school. Another was working part time at a company in Salt Lake City that cleaned up Hollywood films and released family-friendly versions on DVD. Recently, the student told me, he digitally replaced a cigarette in a character’s hand with a pretzel.

The B.Y.U. program is designed to be a similar kind of ethical counterweight: it’s trying to unleash values-oriented filmmakers into the industry who can inflect its sensibility. “Without being preachy about it,” Adams told me, “if we can add something to the culture that makes people think about being better human beings — more productive, more kind, more forgiving — that’s what we want to do.”

That’s really a smart thing on the part of BYU (and, by extension, The Church). It’s part of a larger thing, which I’ll get to in a minute, but entertainment is a great example of using institutions to further not just the religion, but the culture the religion stands behind. The same extends to any cultural movement, really.

It’s noteworthy that this project isn’t about making movies by Mormons for Mormons. It’s Mormons influencing films for mass consumption.

There is actually a cottage industry for Mormon-to-Mormon entertainment. I was introduced to it when I lived in Deseret. I was, by and large, unimpressed. But then, why would I be? I’m not the target audience. I am not particularly religious. Though I share concern about sex in entertainment, I like a lot of the dark and morally complex stuff that is anathema to a lot of Mormon entertainment. But… I do like a fair number of “family” movies. I can imagine a lot of movies from the Book of Mormon that would interest me[1].

Richard Dutcher’s Brigham City walked the line pretty nicely. On the face of it, it’s a movie about a Utah town[2] that is faced with a serial killer. Mormonism plays a role in the film, but it manages to place it in a context that is engaging for gentiles. The movie did not have all that much success because it was tagged “an LDS film” and was an indy film to boot, but as a blueprint for introducing the faith and worldview[3] without overwhelming people who are not particularly interested in seeing “a Mormon movie.”

Aside from the LDS Church itself, this is something that conservatives in general should take to heart. The LDS Church, of course, has BYU and conservatism is not top-down enough to have much in the way of formal institutional support. But interested parties can invest in Liberty University’s film school. Those Catholic colleges that are still actually Catholic colleges can improve. This should be more of a priority than it has been[4], and shifting in this effort could easily pay dividends.

If you want to reach minds, create art. The best way to do that is to create artists and cultivate their works.

I found this by way of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who wonders why the Catholics don’t have their own BYU.

[1] Though, for non-Mormon audiences, it might be better to put a bit of a veil over it to allow for more creativity and be a little less off-putting to those people uninterested in attending a 90-minute sermon. (Note: it won’t work if it’s a 90-minute sermon, veiled or not.) Not as thick a veil as Battlestar Galactica, necessarily, but I’d guess there would be some reluctance within the church to get too fictional while purporting to be a reflection of a work from God.

[2] The City of Brigham, not Brigham City which you can find on a map. I know this because not a single person in the movie complains or comments about the terrible, terrible odor from that town. Oh, plus the county name is different.

[3] Not all of which was flattering. There is a scene where hero sheriff goes house-to-house. The words “search warrant” are not mentioned. And yet that was not entirely incredible, as I am not sure who, in a town full of Mormons, would actually demand the sheriff (who is also the local bishop) produce a search warrant. And non-Mormons would be outnumbered.

[4] Bitching and moaning about popular culture doesn’t actually constitute making it a priority.

LiveScience explains why penguins stopped flying:

To learn more about the energy costs that eventually grounded flighted penguin ancestors, researchers looked to penguinlike seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere that still use their wings to dive and to fly. The team studied thick-billed murres in the Canadaian Arctic, outfitting them with location trackers and measuring their energy expenditure with injections of tracer isotopes, which are variations of an element with different numbers of neutrons.

They found that the double life takes its toll. The murre’s flight cost was much higher than expected, the researchers said. In fact, the energy needed for flight was higher than the flight cost of any bird, surpassing the previous record-holder, the bar-headed goose, which makes a demanding migration over the Himalayas.

Compared with birds that propel themselves with their feet to swim, like pelagic cormorants, the murres used less energy when diving. The murres, however, still had higher energy costs for swimming than penguins do, the researchers said.

I have started reading to Lain. Mostly we’re in the habit of trying to read her to bed. Which is a bit difficult, since she is at the point where she is as interested in eating the book as she is in listening to me read from it. I’ve had to sideline attempts to use the Android tablet to read ebooks to her because “Look, brighty bright! Must touch the brighty bright! Must put the brighty bright in my mouth!” and I get only a few minutes before she is more frustrated that I am keeping the brighty bright away from her than she is soothed or made happy by my speaking.

Anyhow, one of the books that I read is about wings. Wings on birds, planes, and so on. There is a part where it says something to the effect of “wings are there to make things fly” and on that page, it shows a penguin. So every time I read her the book, I feel the need to correct it “Wings are there to make things fly – unless you’re a penguin.” It mentions the wings on a chair later, and I also mark that as an exception to the “wings are there to make things fly” rule.

Eventually we’ll start talking about the aerodynamics of the wings on the angel and how it is unlikely those wings are sufficient to allow the angel to fly. But that can wait until she’s older.

So Clancy and I are looking for places to live in Queenland. Stonebridge, where the job is, has a limited number of units available to rent. And it’s expensive. I want to save her from a commute, though. So we’ve had to decide whether to get a larger and/or more affordable place out of town, or live in town in a smaller and/or more expensive place.

That was, until an ad popped up on a mobile home. I was immediately interested. Clancy, however, was skeptical. She had two concerns. First, the mobile home was in a trailer park and that created some concerns about the neighbors. Second, tornadoes.

Wouldn’t you know it, though, very shortly after having discussed this, we had an intruder. Heightening our sense of insecurity despite living two blocks from the sheriff’s office and in a generally better neighborhood than we lived in before.

And then, of course, another round of tornadoes hit Oklahoma.

So it’s pretty clear that our inebriated intruder and Mother Nature are conspiring against my designs on that mobile home.

I was a little bit late getting to bed a couple nights ago. It was around 2am. I laid down, wrapped a scarf around my eyes, and then turned on my audiobook to relax before going to sleep. Clancy was out in the living room, planning to come to bed soon.

Before long, I heard some burping and hiccuping. I wondered what was up with Clancy. Before long, I heard Clancy’s voice. I thought that maybe the hospital had called and she was on the phone. It was when I heard a man’s voice that my attention was grabbed. Clancy doesn’t watch television. I doubted she was on speakerphone. What was going on?

So, I walked out to the main room and there was a man in our living room, talking to Clancy. He looked around college age. He seemed to be saying that we were in his house. He wasn’t angry or irate. He was drunk, and confused. It was apparent that he had entered our house by mistake. Clancy was talking to him patiently, explaining that he was, in fact, in the wrong house. It was only a few minutes later – albeit a couple of long minutes – before he conceded that he was probably in error. “Maybe I should go out and try to find my house.” We were supportive of the conclusion that he had reached. He left.

He then started walking to the back, where I’d later found out that he had come from. We have two entrances to the house. The front door, and through the garage in back. The garage is as loud as all get-out. And the bedroom I was in was right next to it. I couldn’t believe that he had opened the door without my hearing it. Clancy should have been able to hear it from the front.

We have been thinking about it ever since, and we simply cannot figure out how when he entered the house. We had the sinking suspicion that he had actually been there for a while. We’re not sure how long. I think shorter, he thinks longer. We think he may have been in the recliner in the guest room.

We really don’t know. What we do know is that he ate my wife’s leftover tacos from the fridge. Which means that he was in the living room at some point. Since I had gotten the tacos at 8:30, it means that somehow he entered the kitchen, went to the fridge, and got some tacos while Clancy was on the sofa. Without her noticing.

We cannot figure out how what apparently happened actually happened. He was evidently too drunk to realize he was in the wrong house, but sober enough to go undetected throughout the house. To stealthily enter through the garage, get food from the fridge, and so on.

Maybe we’re both a whole lot more sleep deprived than we think.