How Did I Celebrate Becoming American? Protesting Trump https://nyti.ms/2nKn0XX

Hmm.

Been saying this for a few years. The current aesthetic for hip restaurants is raw space, exposed utility pipes, etc, lots of acoustically shiny parallel hard surfaces.  I miss the old hushed velvet-covered banquette.

An idea for the acoustics of restaurants http://scripting.com/2017/03/22/anIdeaForRestaurantsThatServePeople.html

The baying for the resignation of Gorka is illegitimate.  The trigger was the claim of membership in a historically pro-Nazi organization by one of it’s members, a claim denied by Gorka, his appearance in public with a Hungarian medal on his chest and a rummaging through his parents’ past.

These are dangerously insufficient reasons to sack an individual.  What better way to smear someone whose views you dislike than by claiming he’s a fellow traveler (as I recall, this happened frequently in the McCarthy era)?  As for the medal, I’ve worn in public a Soviet-era border guard medal that I picked up in the former Eastern Bloc, but I don’t claim it to indicate anything about my political views.  I’ve seen lots of people wearing Soviet kitsch without being accused of being reactionaries.  Finally, guilt-by-association, while a great rhetorical device for manipulating opinion, is not a valid argument.

Investigate, by all means.  Ask the man for his views, and vilify him for answers you don’t agree with.  Be wary, and skeptical of his pronouncements.  Publicize any bigoted, racist polemic that he utters, and call him on it.  But you can’t call for his resignation without good cause, and inuendo is not good enough.  There are plenty of other Trump appointees that have already done more than enough to be turfed from office.

The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down.

Nice piece from Alex Steffen, whose “WorldChanging” blog I used to follow.  An inveterate optimist, with more than charged words to back it up.

When the Big Lie Meets Big Data – Scientific American Blog Network.

This one’s in Scientific American.  In the conclusion:

Cognizant of the Pandora’s box that data scientists have opened, the scholarly journal Big Data has issued a call for papers for a future issue devoted to “Computational Propaganda.”