Must post about something other than American politics....

 *  More good news for those of us (that is, me) who want to do the lowest possible amount of exercise for blood pressure:

Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.

Joint senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, Director of the ProPASS Consortium from the Charles Perkins Centre said: "High blood pressure is one of the biggest health issues globally, but unlike some major causes of cardiovascular mortality there may be relatively accessible ways to tackle the problem in addition to medication."

"The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure readings emphasises how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be for blood pressure management."

*  The space garbage problem:

 Astronauts on the International Space Station generate their share of garbage, filling up cargo ships that then deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Now Sierra Space has won a contract to build a trash compactor for the space station. The device will compact space trash by 75% in volume and allow water and other gases to be extracted for reclamation. The resulting garbage blocks are easily stored and could even be used as radiation shielding on long missions.

As I thought the ISS didn't have that much working life left, seems an odd thing to be spending money on right now.

*  Oh look, someone defending Kant from an unfair attack in a new book. Context, and translation, is everything:

At the risk of being labeled an apologist, I would like to defend Kant on just one of the many criticisms Wilson levels. In Chapter Nine, Wilson ascribes to Kant the genuinely abhorrent view that any woman who sells or rents her body forfeits her own dignity in such a way that makes it morally permissible for anyone to use her as a mere thing and thus, presumably, to enslave or even to kill her.^[3] As she writes with subtle but biting sarcasm, “[a]ccording to the Kantian metaphysics of morality and justice, a person turns herself into a thing by becoming a prostitute” (208). But could this really be what Kant thought?

The evidence Wilson presents for this interpretation is a single quotation from student lecture notes that has been mistranslated, taken out of context, and does not even concern prostitution. As quoted by Wilson, it reads: “As soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function. . .a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by everyone (27:386 [sic])” (208). The line is from the Collins lecture notes (27:384–5) as rendered in the outdated translation by Louis Infield and concerns not prostitution but rather the moral impropriety of sex in the absence of the sort of human affection wherein each aims to promote the happiness of the other. As the student in Kant’s lecture hall recorded him as saying, now as translated in the Cambridge Edition:

The sexual impulse can admittedly be combined with human affection, and then it also carries with it the aims of the latter, but if it is taken in and by itself, it is nothing more than appetite. But, so considered, there lies in this inclination a degradation of man; for as soon as anyone becomes an object of another’s appetite, all motives of moral relationship fall away; as object of another’s appetite, that person is in fact a thing, whereby the other’s appetite is sated, and can be misused [gemißbraucht] as such a thing by anybody. (27:384–5)

Taken in its proper context, the plain meaning of the passage is that when viewed exclusively “as the object of another’s appetite,” a person is being regarded by them as a mere thing and so as an instrument that anyone may “misuse” (not “use”). And this Kant claims is morally contrary to the dignity that a person, including a prostitute, actually possesses and certainly never loses by such an act. To my knowledge, Kant never states that sex in the absence of affection transforms a person into a thing in such a manner that it then becomes morally permissible for anyone to use them as a tool. Furthermore, when Kant does seem to raise the issue of prostitution a few pages after the line quoted by Wilson, his point is that it is morally wrong because through it a person’s “humanity is in danger of being used by anyone as a thing” (27:386; emphasis added). Kant may well be incorrect to regard prostitution as immoral; but he did not hold the abhorrent view Wilson so casually ascribes to him here and elsewhere in the book (see also, 267).