Michael Candelori/Pacific Press via ZUMA

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks it’s “insulting and ridiculous and frankly ludicrous” that people are questioning the Singapore agreement just because it doesn’t really say anything at all:

He said he was confident that the North Koreans “understand what we’re prepared to do, [the] handful of things we’re not likely to do. . . . I am equally confident they understand that there will be in-depth verification.”

“Not all of that work appeared in the final document,” Pompeo said. “But lots of other places where there were understandings reached, we couldn’t reduce them to writing.” That work, he said, was “beyond what was seen in the final document that will be in the place that we will begin when we return to our conversations.”

Now that’s frankly ludicrous. If you can’t reduce it to writing, it’s meaningless and he knows it. So do all the rest of us. And so do the North Koreans.

At this point, I suppose there’s little reason to keep writing about the Singapore summit. It obviously accomplished nothing, no matter how much Donald Trump tweets otherwise, and there’s nothing left to do except see if Pompeo and his team make any concrete progress in upcoming negotiations. If they do, then all kudos to them. But until then, stop insulting our intelligence.

Here’s a close-up of a red daisy in our backyard garden after a spring rain. This was taken from a couple of feet away with a long focal length, which is generally my preferred way of photographing flowers. It’s the best way of producing a nice, blurry background that makes the flower itself pop out.

Here are the latest results of the ongoing IMBIE team’s measurement of Antarctic ice sheet loss due to global warming:

In the 12 years between 1992 and 2004, the Antarctic lost about 50 gigatonnes of ice per year. In the 13 years between 2004 and 2017, it lost about 160 gigatonnes per year. In the past five years, that’s accelerated to over 200 gigatonnes per year. Chris Mooney has more:

Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday.

….“The detailed record shows an acceleration, starting around 2002,” said Beata Csatho, one of the study authors and a glaciologist at the University at Buffalo, in an email. Csatho noted that comparing the first and last five year periods in the record reveals an even steeper acceleration. “Actually, if you compare 1997-2002 to 2012-2017, the increase is even larger, a factor of more than 5!!”

Half a millimeter doesn’t sound like much. But if you triple it and triple it again, that’s about five millimeters per year. Over the next few decades this suggests that Antarctic ice melt could raise sea level by several inches—more than enough to turn the storm surges from hurricanes into routine catastrophes. Our kids are likely to be living in a world where it’s common to have a dozen Hurricane Harveys and Marias per year—and those will just be the normal hurricanes. Every few years we’ll have a really big one that will likely kill tens of thousands of people depending on where it hits.

The world doesn’t seem willing to make the sacrifices that would allow our kids to avoid that future. That means we’d better get working on those cheap carbon capture ideas and risky geoengineering schemes. We’re going to need them pretty soon.

Here’s a bit of statistical reckoning for you to ponder today. New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio wants to get more black kids into his city’s specialized high schools, which admit the top 5 percent of all students:

The problem is clear. Eight of our most renowned high schools — including Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School — rely on a single, high-stakes exam. The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed – it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence….Right now, we are living with monumental injustice. The prestigious high schools make 5,000 admissions offers to incoming ninth-graders. Yet, this year just 172 black students and 298 Latino students received offers. This happened in a city where two out of every three eighth-graders in our public schools are Latino or black.

Bob Somerby has been commenting on this for the past few days, and it got me curious: how many black students should we expect in these high schools in the first place? What if we ditch the results of the high-stakes SHSAT and instead take a look at the results of the low-stakes NAEP test? Here’s the mathematical skinny:

• For all NYC eighth graders, the average math score on the NAEP is 275 with a standard deviation of 41.
• The cutoff for the top 5 percent is about 1.6 SDs above the mean, which is a score of 340.
• For black eighth graders, the average math score is 256 with a standard deviation of 33.
• A score of 340 is therefore 2.5 SDs above the mean for black kids.
• New York City has 75,000 eighth graders, of which about 20,000 are black.
• 2.5 SDs above the mean is 0.6 percent of the total population. That’s about 120 black students.

If anything, New York City is currently admitting more black eighth graders than you’d expect. DeBlasio wants to increase this number by giving preferences to “economically disadvantaged students who just missed the test cut-off,” which will work but won’t significantly increase the numbers unless “just missed” is defined pretty broadly. Even if your goal were a fairly modest increase to 300 black students admitted each year, you’d need to let in kids with a math score of about 325, compared to 340 for everyone else.

That may well be both doable and fair, though it’s likely that these kids are going to need extra help to catch up with their famously competitive peers at New York’s specialized high schools. But if you want to do even more, eighth grade just isn’t going to cut it. It’s too late. The black-white test gap needs to close in primary school so you have a bigger pool of qualified kids to choose from once they get to eighth grade. The problem is that in New York City schools, there’s already a nearly three-grade-level gap between black and white kids by fourth grade:

Until we figure out how to fix this, there’s barely any chance of making any real progress at the high school level.

I feel like I need a breather from the “real” world I allegedly inhabit at the moment. So here are some stars:

I have no real excuse for posting this, but it is the result of an experiment and all experimental results should be published, right? Last night I went out to a semi-dark area for one final practice session with my tracking mount before I head off to northern California. I decided to see how well the tracker works with the lens at full zoom, and this is the result. The lens is zoomed out to 220 mm (600 mm equivalent) and the exposure time is about a minute. I have no idea what part of the sky this is. I just pointed the camera upward and took pictures at a few different spots.

Anyway, the tracking is not bad! There’s very little apparent motion even at full zoom. However, one minute is as far as it can go. I tried a frame at two minutes and it was clearly streaky.

Four of the stars have little plumes. Can anyone tell me what these are? Something real, or just artifacts of the camera? They all point in precisely the same direction, which makes me think they’re artifacts of some kind, especially since they don’t show up in an identical picture with a shorter exposure:

This picture has an exposure time of 9 seconds and there are no plumes. The arrow points to the star at the very bottom of the upper picture, which has a noticeable plume there. Any ideas what this is?

UDPATE: A reader suggests the plumes are vibrations from bumping the camera at the beginning or end of the exposure. That’s entirely plausible given my general ham-handedness around delicate equipment.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

The con being played here is, in its own warped way, magnificent:

Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

It’s not just that Trump spent a year threatening war and is now taking credit for war no longer being on the table. It’s more than that: North Korea is no longer even a nuclear threat, full stop. He’s basically claiming that the mere fact of meeting with Donald Trump has mesmerized Kim Jong Un into dismantling his nuclear arsenal.

The reality is that North Korea still has nuclear weapons. They still have ICBMs. They still have centrifuges. They still have testing facilities. And they’ve made no commitments whatsoever—neither explicitly nor in any other way—to so much as slow down their nuke program, let alone abandon it. And yet, their nuclear threat is over. “Sleep well tonight!” Trump says.

Next up: Trump shoots Justin Trudeau on national TV in the Oval Office and declares the Canadian dairy threat over. How will our nation’s news media report it?

Nancy Siesel via ZUMA

From the New York Times, on an attempt by rogue Republicans in the House to force a discharge petition on immigration legislation:

Mr. Ryan desperately wanted to avoid bringing those bipartisan measures to the floor.

Can you imagine? How dare anyone threaten Paul Ryan with the prospect of holding a vote on a pair of widely-supported bipartisan immigration bills? Will the gall of these RINO traitors never end?

Anyway, the upshot is that the attempt by the rebels to force a vote on these popular bills—which are also popular with the public—has been put to rest. Instead, we’ll get a vote on a conservative bill that will go down in flames and a moderate bill that will probably get so freighted down with compromise and minutiae that it will fail too. And that will be that. Immigration will live on to provide Republicans with plenty of fearmongering opportunities in the upcoming midterms. And that’s what matters, right?

Three pelicans on a sunny day in St. James’s Park in London. I suppose they must stock the lake with fish for these guys, right?

Yesterday I ran across a piece at the Intercept about a campaign to raise the minimum wage for tipped workers in Washington DC. It currently stands at a mere $3.33, which is justified by the belief that waiters and waitresses are able to make up for this low minimum wage via tips. But this got me curious. Counting all those tips, how much do waiters in Washington DC make? Luckily, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides the median wage in DC for 462 different occupations:

There you have it. Waiters make less than parking lot attendants. Less than cashiers. Less than telemarketers. They are the third-lowest paid profession in the entire city. So should they get a raise? It’s hard to see why not.

Terence Tan/MCI via ZUMA

From Donald Trump, on Kim Jong Un’s plans for his nuclear arsenal:

I mean he’s de-nuking the who-o-o-le place, and he’s going to start very quickly, I think he’s going to start now.

I feel like I’m in some kind of parallel dimension or something. Sure, there’s plenty of skepticism about what Kim is really going to do, but there’s also a lot of folks who are suggesting this is a “good first step,” or we’re “no longer on the brink of war,” or “maybe Trump really does have a new relationship with Kim.”

Have I lost it completely? Where is this stuff coming from? I’ll grant you that this entire process was driven by Kim, and there’s no telling for sure what he’s up to. It’s possible that he really does want to turn over a new leaf. Everything is possible, I suppose. But after reading the joint communique, which was as devoid of substance as a bit of cotton candy, does anyone seriously believe this?

I don’t. But once again we’re stuck in the weird netherworld of “maybe Trump has a bit of a point” after we discover some tiny kernel of semi-truth inside his interminable barrage of nonsense and babble. Why? The man lies about everything. His statements have no special relationship to reality at all. We know this. Everyone knows this. Why do we keep hoping that maybe this time is different?