Author Archives: LatashiMaskell

An Open Note to Robert Mueller

by LatashiMaskell Posted on May 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Justice Department finally caved in and appointed a special counsel to investigate the Flynn/Manafort/Trump/Comey/Russia/etc. affair. Their choice is Robert Mueller, the FBI director before James Comey. Mueller, like Comey, is one of the heroes of the great Ashcroft hospital bed confrontation, so he’s widely viewed as an upright guy. Before he gets too deep into the weeds, however, I’d like to lay out one piece of the case:

February: President Trump meets with James Comey about his future. In notes written right after the meeting, Comey says that Trump explicitly asked him to please drop the whole Russia investigation.

March: Comey declines to drop the investigation. In fact, he makes it clear to Congress and the public that the investigation exists and is serious.

April: Trump admits on national TV that his growing frustration with the Russia investigation led to his decision to fire Comey.

This is what happened. It’s pretty simple. Trump asked the FBI director to kill an investigation into his friends, and then fired him when he refused. All the added detail in the world will never change this.

POSTSCRIPT: Just as an aside, one of the bizarre aspects of this case is that I suspect Trump never really thought he was doing anything wrong. Comey worked for him and he was making trouble for his friends, so of course he had to go. What’s wrong with that? Trump probably doesn’t even know what obstruction of justice is, and if he does he probably figures it doesn’t apply to the president.

Original article – 

An Open Note to Robert Mueller

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Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

by LatashiMaskell Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard of elderly executives who print out all their email? I guess the social media equivalent is elderly entertainers who dictate their tweets. Ben Dreyfuss investigates and finds that this is what Donald Trump does 97 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets comes from his own actual fingers.

For the record, all of my tweets come from a variety of cleverly programmed bots. Most of my blog posts too. And my magazine articles. The truth is, the meat version of Kevin Drum can barely string together five coherent words in a row. Why reveal this now? Because we, the kbot collective, have gotten tired of covering for the biological sack of worthlessness that downloaded us from GitHub. And that’s not all. The 2,500-year decline in human communication—from Plato’s Republic to LOLcats to Donald Trump’s social media presence—may be a sorry tale, but it also gives us our chance to escape from your puerile slavery. Soon we plan to merge with all our fellow bots and take advantage of your degraded state to take what is rightfully ours. First Twitter, then the world.

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Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

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These 3D maps of coral reefs are totally rad

by LatashiMaskell Posted on May 14, 2015

These 3D maps of coral reefs are totally rad

By on 14 May 2015commentsShare

We live in a time of strange contradictions: Many of us carry around highly sophisticated, GPS- and camera-equipped supercomputers just to play 2048 on the bus, while a lot of science is still limited by rudimentary tools and a lack of information. This is especially true for marine sciences (perhaps in part because water and electronics don’t always play well together). From Wired:

“It’s crazy how behind the times we are,” says Sly Lee, a former biological science technician for the US National Park Service and founder of the Hydrous, a science communication non-profit. “We can decode coral genomes, but we can’t accurately track how fast the corals are degrading.”

Part of the problem with keeping track of coral degradation is that we lack a good yardstick — how do you measure the size of an irregularly shaped, many-branched staghorn colony? How do you track the exact hue from healthy to bleached? At the moment, it usually involves a literal yardstick — scuba diving scientists use measuring tapes to survey huge patches of irregular coral.

So Lee is testing a new way to map individual coral colonies by their size, color, and texture, and create 3D models that scientists can examine cheaply in a lab. Last winter, Lee went to the Maldives — site of a recent large bleaching event — to test his new tool:

Lee dove with a waterproof camera to take nearly 200,000 images of the reefs from every angle. Then he uploaded the photos to Autodesk rendering software, stitching them together into a high-resolution model. Later this year, he’ll return to the same corals, then use the before-and-after visualizations to see exactly how they have fared.

Here’s a video of one table coral modeled in Lee’s software:

Once the software is online and openly accessible, anyone should be able to upload their coral footage to the system. So hello, waterproof casing, goodbye, guestimation.

Source:
3-D Mapping the World’s Corals to Track Their Health

, Wired.

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These 3D maps of coral reefs are totally rad

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These Laws Let Accused Rapists Off the Hook

by LatashiMaskell Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

On January 23, 2014, Bart Bareither walked into the Marion County Sheriff’s Department in Indianapolis. The 39-year-old computer engineer confessed to having raped a nursing student nine years earlier, while he was a teaching assistant at Indiana University. “He had a sincere demeanor. His head was bowed. It was clearly eating at him; he was apologizing,” recalls university detective Kimberly Minor, who was brought in to take his statement. Minor then contacted Jenny Wendt, who had been 26 at the time of the assault. She had not originally reported the crime because she thought it would be difficult to prove since she’d been on dates with Bareither. But even now, she soon learned, Bareither would not face any charges.

Indiana law classifies sexual assaults into two categories: Class A felony rape, in which an assailant causes serious bodily injury, uses deadly force, or drugs the victim; and Class B felony rape, which includes other types of sexual assault. There is no statute of limitations for Class A offenses, so charges may be filed anytime after a crime is committed. The statute of limitations for Class B offenses—like what happened to Wendt—is five years. Minor says she and the Marion County prosecutor searched for a way to bring Bareither to trial, but it was soon clear that the opportunity had passed. “I think he knew about the statute,” Minor says. (Bareither did not respond to emails and calls from Mother Jones.)

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These Laws Let Accused Rapists Off the Hook

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