That’s the name of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act: government agencies don’t have to reveal records if they are part of “the deliberative process”. Congressional subpoenas are limited by the same or a similar exemption, under the name “executive privilege”. But the reasons for these things are rather mysterious: when government officials are conspiring with each other (“deliberating”), isn’t that exactly the sort of thing the public should know? Or that Congress should know, in the case of “executive privilege”?

The authorities have recently been insinuating that the “flash crash” five years ago was caused by a guy in London who was trading on his own account from his parents’ house, trying to manipulate the market. Of course they have been careful to not say this explicitly, since it can’t really be true. There is an old jibe that “if people built houses the same way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization”. That’s unfair to careful programmers, but it’d be fair to apply it to the programmers of a stock market where trillion-dollar swings in valuation could be caused by the misdeeds of someone playing with mere millions of dollars. Not that there was serious reason to believe that even that happened; the announced link to the flash crash seems more like an attempt to grab headlines for a minor arrest than a real attempt to explain the flash crash. And the coverage from people who know finance (see, for example, columns by Matt Levine and by Michael Lewis) has indeed been appropriately skeptical.

Often in a controversy the things that are most interesting are the things that there isn’t any particular controversy about. Such is the case with the recent torture report from the Senate Committee on Intelligence. One of its twenty conclusions was:

A frequently given piece of advice for writers is to avoid long sentences. It’s one of the pieces of advice that I have always completely disregarded, as being obviously wrong: the thing to avoid is not long sentences, but complicated sentences. A sentence that is long can still be quite simple, if it doesn’t require the reader to remember previous parts of the sentence in order to parse the rest. Instead, each part of the sentence just extends the thought made in the previous one, with appropriate punctuation that shows the relationship between the two; a sentence of that sort can go on for many lines without confusing anyone. What is confusing is when a sentence does something like requiring the reader to remember which verb was used back forty words previously, before the sentence went off on a tangent. And the cure for such sentences is never as simple as just bisecting them. Often one can rearrange them to bring together the separated pieces of an idea; but if that doesn’t work, one has to drop the idea and then explicitly take it up again when one later comes back to it. Or, more brutally, one can axe the tangential remark; not everything needs to be said – or if it does need to be said, maybe it can be said somewhere else.

Most car recalls are pretty tame. But the recent Takata airbag recall is not one of them. It’s not your ordinary situation where something might malfunction in a mild way – say, a wire shorting out which might lead to a fire, which in turn might injure someone who handled the situation wrong. With these airbags, the risk is that when set off, they might explode and send shrapnel into you.

Something I’ve noticed a fair bit, recently, has been the use of the phrase “similar to” at the start of a sentence, where one would ordinarily use “like”. Say, instead of writing

When Donald Rumsfeld came out with his line about there being “unknown unknowns”, a lot of people laughed, and in response his defenders sneered at the laughers. But I didn’t see on either side a real appreciation of the phrase – indeed, I still haven’t, from anyone.

Trying to understand the immune system can seem like a neverending task. There are tens of different varieties or subvarieties of immune system cells, with new subvarieties being discovered every so often. For sending messages between those cells, there are tens (or is it hundreds?) of signaling molecules (“cytokines”, among others). A signaling molecule that turns up one part of the immune system may turn down another, as in (but almost certainly not limited to) the “Th1” versus “Th2” concept, itself a not very precise notion. There are also homeostatic loops in which the body reacts to its own reactions, damping an immune response when it has gone on for too long and threatens to be more damaging than it is worth.

One of the recent Snowden revelations was a catalog of spying items that the NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit had for breaking into bad guys’ computers. Most of the items weren’t particularly surprising. We already know that since they can’t break cryptography, they try to break into endpoints, where the plaintext lives – and even if we hadn’t known that from recent revelations, it makes complete sense for them to operate that way. What was surprising was the Tempest stuff.

8 parts almond butter
1 part soy sauce
1 part fresh ginger, destroyed