I can't stop Prisma-ing

 

 

The American floods and climate change

Flooding, Extreme Weather, and Record Temperatures: How Global Warming Puts it All Together - The Equation
I haven't posted anything about the recent American floods and climate change, even though I saw the occasional report referring to that question.  This article, though, does confirm that the rainfall intensity that lead to them was exceptionally intense, and a climate change link seems obvious.
Unless, of course, you're a Right wing, science and evidence rejecting twit from America, or Australia, who can write things like this (Hinderaker, from Powerline blog):

Is the debate over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming over? In one sense, it is. One thing we know for sure is that the models that are the sole support for alarmism are wrong. The substantial heating they projected has failed to materialize. Having been falsified by observation, we know that they are no good. The alarmists will have to come up with something better than these discredited models if they want to convince the rest of us.

Yet, again, this is the chart he is evidently unaware of (or refuses to believe over what climate non-scientist Anthony Watt and his man-shed "scientists" publish): 

Sad that the Right has become so self deluded on this matter.

It's a (ultra-Orthodox) man's life

The ultra-Orthodox Jews combining tech and the Torah - BBC News

I didn't know that this was how some Orthodox Jewish life worked (or "didn't work"):

Like many of his friends, Slaven grew up expecting a life of quiet
learning. Haredi men are expected to spend most of their time studying
the Torah and Talmud, Judaism's sacred texts, leaving their wives to go
out and work. About half of Israel's Haredi men live this way.

But while the cost of living has risen in recent years, child benefit has
been cut - bad news for Haredi families, which often have eight-to-10
children and rely on benefits to make ends meet.

In other suicide news...

Is Pokemon Go helping prevent deaths at one of Japan’s most notorious suicide spots?

Guns and suicide

When a Smaller Military Means Fewer Suicides - The Atlantic

Some strong evidence given here that if you decrease access to guns, you decrease the suicide rate.  A nice, clear, article.

More Friday Physics

Backreaction: Sorry, the universe wasn’t made for you

Here's a post by Bee H about the anthropic principle, and objecting to the idea that the universe was "fine tuned" for life.  

Lots of false equivalence noted

The media’s coverage of NBC’s Trump-Clinton forum was a disaster.


Donald Trump's proud ignorance reveals his contempt for the presidency


Fear of a female president


Last night, Clinton got 6 questions on her emails. Trump got zero on his Iraq lies.

A look at an obvious Trump feature

Donald Trump’s Shortest Attribute Isn’t His Fingers - POLITICO Magazine

Lots of evidence provided from lots of people that Trump has always had a very, very short attention span. Given that there have been many examples from the campaign where can barely articulate a thought in a full sentence before going onto some other thought, this is far from surprising.

I also see that Snopes has already called out as false the conspiracy  theory (promoted on twitter by actor James Woods, of all people) that Clinton was wearing an ear piece yesterday.

She may be reluctant to give them the attention they crave, but I don't think it would hurt Clinton to go in, boots and all, in calling out a substantial slab of Trump's supporters as being reality challenged, very gullible people who need to get a grip.

How about playing the tape to him at the Presidential debate?

Donald Trump just lied about opposing the Iraq War before it started. Here’s proof. - Vox

The article notes that there is a recording of Trump saying in 2002 (without much enthusiasm, but still) that he supported the Iraq War.

The rest of the article bemoans how the media knows that a serial repeat liar who continues repeating a lie, will more or less get away with it.

But really, why should this be:  why cannot a reporter play the audio to his face and say "why have been repeatedly lying about this?"  Why not do it as part of the Presidential debate - just play the tape, and see how he tried to deal with it?

 

The "no jack" scandal (talk about your First World problems)

Funny to read this wanky, typically Apple, explanation noted at Slate about why the new iPhone has no ear phone jack:

Apple’s own explanation for the change was a little baffling. Schiller said the rationale for jettisoning the headphone jack could be summed up in one word: “courage.” What kind of courage? “The courage to move on, and to try something new that betters all of us,” he elaborated. OK then!

Further down, it is said that there is something the phone gets from not having one:

Well, for one thing, you can now drop your iPhone in the toilet. I mean, you could do that before, but now when you get it back out, there’s a decent chance it will continue to function. Eliminating the headphone jack enabled Apple to seal the phone at last, making it “dust and water resistant,” albeit not fully waterproof.

But wait a minute - the Samsung Note 7 (yes, I know - it can explode) has been heavily promoted as being waterproof to a similar degree, and it has an audio jack.

Why is Apple not able to use a similar water resistant jack?

I'm still sticking to my Samsung allegiance - even though my first experience with their cheap, early Tab 2 tablet was not great.  (Known bugs that were never fixed with any update.)  It's been made up for by my very, very pleasing Tab S, and a cheapo phone that is still pretty damn reliable.  I always have liked the look of the round edged Galaxy 7, too, but I'm not willing to spend that much on a phone.

Only 104 years ago

Once you get past 50, events that happened 100 or so years ago no longer sound all that far in the past.  Only twice your lifetime...that's not so long ago!

So, as I was walking around the Rydges Hotel at the Exhibition grounds last Saturday (it's my routine now, and I really like its Paddock bar for coffee or, later in the day, their house beer), I noticed this metal history note around a tree:

The first flight in Brisbane was "only" 104 years ago at the Exhibition grounds.   This deserves a look at a real photo of the event:

Not the best photo to see what's going on, but what I like the next one is that you can clearly see the grandstand that is still there, and within sight of the Paddock bar.

The State Library blog post that I got these from notes that the plane crashed on landing. "Wizard" Stone was OK, though.

Incredible to consider the advances in aviation since then. 

Resistance to weed

In Colorado, a revolt against legalized marijuana - The Boston Globe

I'm not at all sure, of course, that the local anti legalisation activists are credible in all that they claim, but that said, I understand opposition to things like this:

She hates that her kids’ school is near several dispensaries. She’s
frustrated by the full-page ads in the local paper with huge photos of
buds and coupons for $1 joints with a purchase of $20 or more. 

Yes, surely a large part of the potential problem with legalisation is the accompanying capitalist urge to expand the market.   If it were ever legalised here, I would certainly hope that it is the subject of severe advertising restrictions of at least the same severity that tobacco faces.   Apparently, the Americans couldn't see their way to do that with marijuana.

There are also claims in the article that the period of legalisation has been accompanied by an increase in youthful homelessness - something you might expect to see in increased cases of schizophrenia that is likely to accompany increased youthful use.

Political correctness and the Republicans

Conservative Movement & Republicans -- ‘Establishment’ Is Only the Beginning of Their Problems | National Review

Gee, here I am recommending an article at National Review.  I thought this part was especially true:

There’s a lot to be said for refusing to be hemmed in by political
correctness, but we’ve gotten to the point where many conservatives have
embraced the idea that if political correctness is bad, then anything
that’s politically incorrect must be good. This has created an
environment where saying foolish and inflammatory things can be a major
career enhancer for conservatives. If you can say something that makes
liberals talk about how much they hate you, but conservatives won’t walk
away even if you make them cringe, that’s a recipe for selling books
and getting on TV. This may be great for the careers of a few people,
but it also gives the public at large a terrible impression of
conservatives. Even if they say some things you agree with, the last
thing that anyone who cares about the conservative movement should want
is for the public to base its opinion of it on people who are trying to
offend as many people as possible to get attention.

The moral panic continues

Under the odd headline which seems to me to be somewhat of a failure if it's meant to conjure up moral outrage (Schools told to teach kids that sex varies like the weather), I see that The Australian, and some politicians, are doing their best to drum up a moral panic over the fact that some sex education material now refers to the (rather obviously true) fact that some people over their lifetime experience somewhat varying sexual preferences:

Education Minister Adrian Piccoli yesterday ordered his ­department to withdraw the ­sexual and gender diversity ­resource for teachers, which ­appears to have been heavily based on the Safe Schools program. Alerted to its existence by The Australian, he said he was “very angry” the resource had “got out”. “I have directed the ­department to take it down ­immediately and review the ­material and all links,” he said.
“Safe Schools materials are only to be used strictly in accordance with the revised guidelines established by the federal ­government. I am furious this policy has not been adhered to and have demanded a full explanation from the (departmental) secretary.”
Launched quietly this year, the 17-page teacher toolbox for delivering content relating to ­diversity of sex, sexuality and gender contains a list of resources the educators can refer to in their teachings. One recommended activity invites Year 10 students to consider a range of characters, such as “Joseph”, who is married with three children but “when he masturbates, fantasises only about men” and “is attracted to several of his male friends” and “Alex”, who had sex with girls as a teenager but developed a relationship with a man after moving to a country town.
Students are asked to determine each character’s sexuality and whether they fit into ­“traditional binary thinking” ­regarding sexuality.

Given that it's rather likely now that in any given school of significant size, there is going to at least one  kid who has a parent who has moved into a same sex relationship (after a heterosexual one), I find it rather difficult to see how the material quoted there is doing much more than confirming what a lot of kids already know or guess sometimes happens.  (And it's also worth noting again that just because something is suggested in a teacher's manual does not mean that teachers will use it in exactly that fashion.  Hence, I wouldn't be surprised if many don't refer specifically to what the "Joseph" fantasises about, for example.) 

As I have suggested before, acknowledging that bisexuality (or fluid desire?) exists does not even necessarily imply support for same sex marriage - if we're going to be like ancient Greeks and Romans, who had little problem with sexual desire for some being "non binary",  a modern person can also take their view that marriage is primarily about heterosexual reproduction, and no matter that some people fall in love with people of the same gender, the State or society has no particular interest in recognizing those relationships as "marriage".

A simple suggestion

As much as the Trump supporting Right is the dumbest and most gullible block of voters since, well, I don't know that I can think of any valid comparison in my lifetime, the news playing up Hillary's recent coughing is, unfortunately, something she should address.

To me, it usually has sounded like a simple case of a cough induced by post nasal drip, which is nothing to write home about.  But we're talking image here, as well as the stupidest political movement in history, and I would suggest she simply has her doctor talk about it, noting that it is not serious, and that Right wing nut jobs talking about her virtually being on her death bed are being ridiculous.

Prion diseases discussed

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged : The Salt : NPR

I didn't realise that the PNG highland matter of cannibalism of the dead used to be so, um, thorough:

As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects."

Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who
did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.

"So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body — taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary
ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.

But women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. "Snacks," says Lindenbaum. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain
age and went off to live with the men. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."

Foreign Correspondent on China's kids

What a sad episode of Foreign Correspondent last night, looking at the issue of Chinese kids, particularly in rural areas, left in the care of grandparents (or other relatives) while their parents move away for years at a time to work in city areas.   And, of course, this does not always work out.

By the way, is it just me, or does it seem to others too that rancorous arguments within Chinese families sound like some of the nastiest you'll ever hear?  It seems that if kid's don't live up to expectations, they'll be really demeaned for it.

Testing Prisma 4 - another filter

(I really think this is awesomely good. As my son noted, it's the way it makes the lines on the more distant buildings a bit crooked that makes it look hand made.)

Prisma testing - the original photo

Testing Prisma 3 (this actually is Tokyo, run through the Tokyo filter...)

Testing Prisma 2

Testing Prisma

Well, this hardly seems fair...

Is sex in later years good for your health?: Having sex frequently - and enjoying it - puts older men at higher risk for heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems. For older women, however, good sex may actually lower the risk of hypertension.

That's according to the first large-scale study of how sex affects heart health in later life. The federally funded research, led by a Michigan State University scholar, is slated to be published online Sept. 6 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

"These findings challenge the widely held assumption that sex brings uniform health benefits to everyone," said Hui Liu, MSU associate professor of sociology.

Liu and colleagues analyzed survey data from 2,204 people in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. Participants were aged 57-85 when the first wave of data was collected in 2005-06; another round of data was collected five years later. Cardiovascular risk was measured as hypertension, rapid heart rate, elevated C-reactive protein and general cardiovascular events: heart attack, heart failure and stroke.

Older men who had sex once a week or more were much more likely to experience cardiovascular events five years later than men who were sexually inactive, the study found. This risk was not found among older women.

"Strikingly, we find that having sex once a week or more puts older men at a risk for experiencing cardiovascular events that is almost two times greater than older men who are sexually inactive," said Liu. "Moreover, older men who found sex with their partner extremely pleasurable or satisfying had higher risk of cardiovascular events than men who did not feel so."

How to deal with a jerk

Obama cancels meeting with ‘colorful’ Philippine president - The Washington Post

Fear of not dying

Apeirophobia: The Fear of Eternity - The Atlantic

What a great article here, about people who get all anxious and sweaty at the idea of living forever in heaven.

Just goes to show, there's no pleasing everyone.

The article does go on to explain, however, that it is related to the fear of infinity, or at least vastness, as explained in this paragraph:

There shouldn’t be too many atheists who fear of eternity, since they
reject the idea of an afterlife, Wiener says. But that doesn’t mean
that those who aren’t religious are immune to existential anxiety.
Infinity, after all, doesn’t pertain only to time; it can also apply to
space. “I feel that we are all insignificant compared to the universe,”
wrote Jamie Adkins, a nurse and longtime friend of mine, in response to
my Facebook post. “When I start to think beyond our solar system, it is
as if my thoughts automatically stop to protect myself from having some
form of a panic attack. The knowledge of black holes will give me
nightmares for days. The thought of the distance between galaxies is
unbearable.”

She likened the experience to Horton Hears a Who. “We are on this tiny flower and can be blown away any second.”

Yeah, I did have a brush with that, once, when I was around 7 or 8.  As I recall, a brother who had gone to the Council library when I couldn't borrowed a book for me, and it was one about space or astronomy, but was primarily about galaxies and the vastness of the universe.  There were lots of pictures of galaxies.   It actually upset me, because it conjured an image of such cold, lifeless, vastness in my mind.  My brother was puzzled, saying he thought I liked books about space (and I did - this was the era of Apollo and I followed it very closely in the papers and on the news.  I also read kid's science fiction, of which there was a lot - all of it optimistic - in that decade.)  But what I liked was the idea of life in the universe, making it home.  And I still do.

But as for heaven:  well, I think right from early childhood I've accepted the view that it's a basically unknowable thing: to be experiencing something like life but without the cycles, limitations and uncertainties with which we know it on Earth.  Reunion with loved ones (at least initially) has become a widely accepted part of the commonly believed experience of it, and who (or at least, the majority of people who have loving relationships during their life) can object to that idea?   As for what goes on for the rest of eternity:  who knows;  does  the ego continue indefinitely, rather than being subsumed into a greater thing sooner or later (or even temporarily.)   I don't mind the idea that you can spend a hell of a lot of time observing (or influencing) life on Earth, or in other parts of the Universe. It can all be fun to imagine, but it's unknowable. 

As I said recently, this is a positive feature of Christianity, not a bug.  Keeping it vague and unclear is actually a good thing, if you don't want people doing all sorts of evil things on Earth with the justification that it'll all be sorted out in the afterlife.  

Transgender skepticism that's not religiously motivated

I stumbled across this transgender skeptical blog (which mainly concentrates on the issue as it relates to pre-adulthood) some months ago, and forgot to mention it here

Transgender issues are not something I care to devote that much thought to, and the whole problem with complaining about transgender activism is that it's embarrassing to be identified with religiously motivated  conservatives and the way they chose to talk about the issue.   (As I have posted before, the whole issue of transgender use of toilets is one which I think is massively overblown in importance by American conservatives.)

But, I don't have much doubt that transgender activism has reached an amazing peak of influence, and in particular, the issue of how to deal with children who feel they are the "wrong" gender is a particularly vexed one.  Hormonal treatment to delay puberty for a mental conviction that might be strong at the moment, but for how much longer?   How do you know that the influence of hormonal changes will itself not lead to eventual change of mind about gender?  You only have to read Rupert Everett's (pretty amazing) disclosure that for a long time as a child he wanted to be a girl (and then became a very promiscuous gay man - although he did sleep with the occasional woman too) to be alerted to the fact that some people change their gender identifying views.   (A counter view, arguing that the quite large number of children who act out as the other gender who do not transition is not really an argument against "genuine" childhood transexualism can be found here.)

Anyhow, the 4thWaveNow blog was apparently started by a woman with this experience:

4thWaveNow was started by the mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a “trans man” after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs.  (The daughter has since desisted from identifying as transgender.) After much research and fruitless searching for an alternative online viewpoint, this mom began writing about her deepening skepticism of the ever-accelerating medical and media fascination with the phenomenon of “transgender children.”....

I created this site because mine is a viewpoint that is seldom publicly heard: that of a left-leaning parent who is critical of the dominant paradigm regarding transgender politics and treatment. My primary concern is children, teens, and people in their early 20s, particularly girls who are contemplating medical transition. While I may disagree with their views, I do understand that consenting adults have the right to do what they choose with their own bodies and minds.

 I haven't read many of the posts on the blog, but as far as I can tell, the skeptics who comment there frequently do identify as left leaning, and do not usually sound at all like being religiously motivated.

There is, though, I must say, some stridency in some material that (unfortunately) smacks of the language of conservative critics.

Interestingly, I see that they do talk about concern that there is presently a significant element of "social contagion" in the experience of teenagers who have never before seemed to have gender identity issues, but who suddenly announce they do. I really suspect that this is likely true, and a subject worthy of some detailed research.  But as the blog often complains - transgender activists (often men who transitioned late in life, oddly enough) are usually vehemently opposed to research that seems could question transgender desire as something fixed since birth, effectively.

Anyway, it's interesting to see skepticism on this issue that isn't embarrassing to be associated with.

Art apps

Prisma And Artisto: These Apps' Creations Sure Look Like Masterworks, But Is It Art? : All Tech Considered : NPR

I don't spend much time trying apps with photo filters, and the "art" filters usually give less than impressive results.  But this Prisma app looks a bit more promising.

Update:   see my posts above for my tests of it on a couple of my recent photos from Japan.   It really does very impressive "art" conversions....

Paleolibertarianism, racism and Trump

Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians. - The Washington Post

Interesting material in this article that's sure to get some libertarian noses out of joint.

Waterfront on the move

Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun - The New York Times

This is a pretty good article talking about the already increasing coastal flooding in America.

I am very curious as to whether economists with their "future costs of climate change" work can really have any firm basis on calculating the obviously high potential cost of works to hold back the sea.  We're not talking little old Holland here, with its puny length of coast line.

Crime in America

A few crime stories caught my eye on the weekend:

*  Anchorage, Alaska, with a population of about 300,000, has had 25 homicides this year, with 9 of them unsolved.  The unsolved ones seem to mostly be in parks and trails around the city.  

The article says that 25 was the total number of murders they had there in 2015, although going back to 1995, they had 29 in a year. 

Doesn't that seem high for a city of 300,000?    Looking at a story about Australia murder rates, yes it is:

According to the latest AIC figures, the homicide rate for the NT was 5.5 per 100,000 people. This is five times the national rate and almost four times the second highest state, Western Australia, which had a homicide rate of 1.4 per 100,000.

News.com.au examined 10 years of data from the institute’s National Homicide Monitoring Program and found the NT consistently had a higher rate for murder and manslaughter than anywhere else in Australia. In 2001-02, the NT’s rate was almost six times higher than the national average, 11.5 compared to 1.9. By 2011-12 it had improved significantly to 5.5, but was still higher than the rest of the country.

According to Matthew Willis, research officer from the AIC, the number of actual murders and manslaughters in the Northern Territory is far lower than bigger states such as NSW or Victoria, which both have larger populations. But when those numbers are calculated per (100,000) head of population, the statistics are staggering. Even when compared to smaller states such as Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, the NT is high. All those states sit around the 1 to 1.4 rate.

 So, even compared to recent figures in the Northern Territory, the Anchorage rate is high.   I wonder if they have alcohol problems, too?

 *  The Washington Post ran a lengthy article looking at the only known black lynching that took place on a military base in World War 2.   Never solved, it appears clear that people closed ranks, and it once again paints a picture of a black man killed for being too assertive (or perhaps, too friendly to white women.)   A depressing story, but worth remember the legacy that current black America carries in living memory.  

*  Vox's long article about the issue of whether "black culture" is responsible for violent crime in America is very good - and really, it covers more than just that theory - it looks at the whole matter of the uncertainty as to why violent crime has actually dropped dramatically over the last few decades. 

Good to hear

JTB, Panasonic, Yamato to test new ‘hands-free travel’ service for visitors to Japan ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I mentioned in my posts about Japan a couple of months ago how the country has a fantastic luggage courier service.  Good to see they are trying making it more accessible to the non Japanese speaking tourist.

More on DNA and data storage

I don't recall posting much about this before, but reading about DNA and its great potential for data storage does make you wonder if there is anyone trying to decode human DNA just to make sure that an alien Creator class has not left us a message.   Perhaps a contact address for warranty claims?

Here are three relevant articles:

If You Were a Secret Message, Where in the Human Genome Would You Hide? (I see this was published on 1 April 2015, but I don't think its a joke - although I haven't read it carefully.)

An Alien Code May Be Hidden Inside Our DNA!

Quest For The Hidden Alien Message Embedded In Human DNA Continues (OK, it's a flaky looking website, but this article seems OK.)

End this now

Calls for restrictions on Medicare access to IVF subsidies for older women: A decade after the IVF industry defeated the federal government's attempt to restrict Medicare access to older women, the president of its peak body has says there is little taxpayer value in subsidising the treatment after a woman turns 45.

Statistics on fertility treatment outcomes released on Friday show that 73,598 women started IVF cycles in 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available, and one in five of them (19.8 per cent) delivered a live baby.

This represented a 10 per cent improvement in the live birth rate
over five years, which has been attributed to better freezing
technology.

But the success rate dwindled to 6 per cent for women aged 40 to 44, and less than 1 per cent for women aged over 45.

If our current Coalition government cannot push this saving measure through now, they're good for nothing.

Sometimes it pays not to be an early adopter

Samsung Electronics is expected to announce a global recall of the large-screen smartphone Galaxy Note 7 because of faulty batteries that catch fire, South Korea's largest news agency reports, citing an unidentified company official.
The world's largest smartphone maker will announce the results of an investigation and a plan to deal with the issue as soon as this weekend, according to news agency Yonhap.

Link here.

As with Apple and its bend-y phone, I'm not sure it is ever a good idea to be in the first rush to get a new model phone.

Telling it like it is

Billionaire GOP Donor Wants Trump's Head Checked | Mother Jones: "As a Republican who has contributed millions of dollars to the party's causes, I ask: Why has our party not sought a psychological evaluation of its nominee?" Fernandez writes in an op-ed published in the Miami Herald on Thursday.

Under the headline "I'm a Republican and I'm With Hillary Clinton," Fernandez attacks Trump as responsible for "a neverending spiral of vulgarity, intellectual dishonesty, invective, abuse, misogyny, racism, intolerance, bullying, ignorance and downright cruelty." Fernandez says he takes particular issue with the way Trump has implied that if he loses, it will be because Clinton cheated.

"This is insanity and dictatorial machinations at best," Fernandez writes.

GMO fanboys, take note

How GMOs Cut The Use Of Pesticides — And Perhaps Boosted It Again : The Salt : NPR: One of the study's conclusions is straightforward and difficult to dispute. Genetically modified, insect-protected corn has allowed farmers to reduce their use of insecticides to fight the corn rootworm and the European corn borer. There is, however, concern that this effect won't last. Corn rootworms have evolved resistance to one of the genes that has been deployed against them.

When it comes to weedkillers, though, the picture gets more murky. For one thing, the effect of GMOs has been different in corn than in soybeans. Farmers who switched to glyphosate-tolerant corn also switched herbicides, and used less total herbicide than farmers did on conventional corn — for a while. In the years since 2007, however, glyphosate-tolerant corn got sprayed with more weedkillers, as measured in kilograms per acre, than corn without that GMO trait.

Farmers who are growing genetically modified, glyphosate-tolerant soybeans, meanwhile, have been using more weedkillers than their non-GMO neighbors. In fact, that gap has been widening in recent years.

Edward Perry of Kansas State University, a co-author of the new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, says farmers may be using more herbicides on glyphosate-tolerant crops in recent years because they have to fight off an increasing number of weeds that have evolved to become resistant to glyphosate.

 Disclosure:  I think organic farming is a crock.  I also think that common sense always suggested that GMO for foodstuff resistance to herbicides was always doomed for failure, and was mainly about a company making lots of money in the process of eventually making a biological problem worse.

A detailed look at white voter demographics

Everyone Gets It Wrong About Donald Trump and White Voters - Rolling Stone

Interesting stuff.

More generally, Trump's non pivot on immigration this week presumably means he has killed off any hope of an increase in his Hispanic vote once and for all; and as for the black vote - isn't he supposed to be turning up in some black neighbourhoods soon?  That'll be a laugh. 

The basic argument, that there just aren't enough angry, white, poorly educated Southerners to compensate for everyone else thinking he's an offensive dope seems as strong as ever. 

DNA storage

Interesting feature article at Nature about the potential for DNA data storage.  How's this, for this example:

That is one reason why permanent archives of rarely accessed data currently rely on old-fashioned magnetic tapes. This medium packs in information much more densely than silicon can, but is much slower to read. Yet even that approach is becoming unsustainable, says David Markowitz, a computational neuroscientist at the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in Washington DC. It is possible to imagine a data centre holding an exabyte (one billion gigabytes) on tape drives, he says. But such a centre would require US$1 billion over 10 years to build and maintain, as well as hundreds of megawatts of power. “Molecular data storage has the potential to reduce all of those requirements by up to three orders of magnitude,” says Markowitz. If information could be packaged as densely as it is in the genes of the bacterium Escherichia coli, the world's storage needs could be met by about a kilogram of DNA (see 'Storage limits').

It also features this graphic:

Some amusing psychology for the day

What your choice of smartphone says about you: Miss Shaw and her fellow researchers conducted two studies of personality differences between iPhone and Android smartphone users. Lancaster University was also involved in the study.

In the first study the researchers asked 240 participants to complete a questionnaire about characteristics they associate with users of each smartphone brand.

In the second study they tested these stereotypes against actual personality traits of 530 Android and iPhone smartphone users.

The results from the first study showed that Android users are perceived to have greater levels of honesty and humility, agreeableness and openness personality traits but are seen as less extroverted than iPhone users.

The results from the second study showed that most of the personality stereotypes did not occur in reality, as only honesty and humility was found in greater amounts within Android users.

However, they did find that women were twice more likely to own an iPhone than an Android Phone. When measuring the characteristic 'avoidance of similarity' which describes whether people like having the same products as others, Android Users avoided similarity more than iPhone users. Finally, iPhone users thought it was more important to have a high status phone than Android users.

Based on what my daughter tells me (she really, really notices iPhones when walking down the street), yes it is true that they are very big with girls/women.   I think it's because men are more likely to want to tinker with things, and there's a hell of lot of tinkering that can be done with an Android phone.

Yay for contraception - perhaps

The Pill, the Condom, and the American Dream - The Atlantic

I would prefer that teenagers not be having sex at all; or at least, not without foresight and preparation for the possibility of having a child as a result of it.  To put it another way - I'm all for sexually active teenagers using contraception, but I'd prefer that they not be sexually active at all if they can't cope with the prospect that, despite their best effort to avoid a pregnancy, no contraception is foolproof and making babies is kinda what it's really all about, as far as bodies (if not brains) are concerned.

New York at the local level

I very much enjoyed the episode last night (on SBS) of Michael Portillo's Great American Railroad Journeys, (episode 3, I see - dang it, I have missed the first two!) as it wasn't about any lengthy trip at all, but all about the very local rail of New York and (in particular) Long Island.
Here on the other side of the world, we read a bit about Brooklyn and Long Island as areas where a lot of people who work on Manhattan live, and the Hamptons as a place where the uber rich buy mansions and party (I believe even Spielberg has a house there), but any tourist type TV show rarely goes out of its way to show these places. 
Well, Portillo's show did, and it was very good to finally see them, and get some of their historical background. 
It'll be on SBS on demand for a while, and it seems some people are putting up slabs of the series on Youtube, too.

The "bad passenger" problem

BBC - Autos - Driverless taxis' human problem

So yeah, they are starting to think about how to stop driverless taxis being used for things you don't want passengers using them for:

The presence of a taxi driver also dissuades a variety of illicit
passenger behavior, including vandalism, drug use, and, of course,
self-expression of a sexual nature. During NuTonomy's Singapore taxi
test, says the company, an engineer will ride along "to observe system
performance and assume control if needed to ensure passenger comfort and
safety." Eventually, though, it will be just car and passenger. Are the
cars ready for responsibility?

"None of these problems require
particularly high-tech solutions", says Dr Richard Alan Peters, a
professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt
University in the US. Peters, who serves as the chief technical officer
for the artificial intelligence software company Universal Robotics,
suggests that driverless taxicabs could use features like automatic
door closers and cabin sensors to ensure seatbelt use or tattle on
smokers who light up in the car. And some tasks formerly undertaken by a
human driver — discovering a forgotten parcel or a pool of vomitus, for
instance — could fall to customers, "who would then alert the car",
says Peters. The question, therefore, may not be whether the cars are
ready for the responsibility, but whether passengers are ready for it.

How do Queensland's top judges come up with such decisions?

High court reinstates Gerard Baden-Clay's murder conviction | Australia news | The Guardian

I didn't post about it at the time, as I wanted to:  the Queensland Court of Appeal's decision on the Baden-Clay murder conviction just didn't make any sense to me.   It seemed that if you took its view, you could virtually never get a murder (as opposed to a manslaughter) conviction in cases where there was no witness to the death, especially if the defendant gave evidence that it was an accident.  But it seemed particularly risible in a case where the accused himself had given evidence that there had been no fight of any kind, the jury had clearly rejected it as being untruthful, but then the defence argued effectively on appeal "so he lied, but you still can't find anything more than if he did cause her death, it might have been an accident".

The report of the High Court decision indicates that my instincts on this were right:

It noted that Baden-Clay at trial denied fighting with his wife, killing
her and then dumping her body, which was found under a bridge at Kholo
creek 11 days after she went missing.

“His evidence, being the evidence of the only person who could give
evidence on the issue, was inconsistent with that hypothesis [of
manslaughter].

“Further, the jury were entitled to regard the whole of the evidence
as satisfying them beyond reasonable doubt that the respondent acted
with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm when he killed his
wife.”

Yes:  if a jury considers a defendant is lying through his teeth, they are under no obligation to then give him or her the "benefit of the doubt" as to the next most innocent explanation, at least (or especially) where there is clear evidence of motive for intentional killing. 

Ever since the Pauline Hanson conviction was overturned by the High Court Court of Appeal, I have wondered how it is that Queensland's judges manage to make such wrong decisions.  (I'm pretty sure that in that case, the appeals court  was again unanimous that the trial judge were just obviously wrong.)

How do we manage to get judges here that seem so capable of poor decisions? 

Hi Tech car thieves

Savvy car thieves harnessing new technology ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I've wondered sometimes about whether, with the right electronics, modern cars can still be stolen.  Seems the answer is "yes":

Even models that utilize electronic keys can be stolen by use of a
so-called key programmer, which can be easily made by modifying easily
available materials.

Earlier this year, police in Ibaraki Prefecture arrested a gang of
car thieves using such a device, which is small enough to fit in the
palm of one’s hand.

“A modified key programmer is used to enter the car’s internal
computer, and then rewrite the program, making it possible to start the
engine,” a police investigator was quoted as saying. “In the past this
required 30 minutes or longer to accomplish, but the newer types can do
it in about 10 minutes. The thieves are able to obtain key programmers
made in China for around 100,000 yen.”

The modified key programmers are unable to open a car’s door, and up
to now the thieves had to break a window to get access to the vehicle’s
interior. More recently, however, new techniques for popping open care
doors have become widespread.

“Using the technique of ‘dempa-jack’ (electronic hijacking), they can
release the door locks from a distance,” a staff member of Protector, a
firm that specializes in car security, tells the tabloid. “They do this
by intercepting electronic signals emitted by the car and copying them,
then transmitting them back. This method is common overseas and
recently has started to be used in Japan.”

Dealing with the plebiscite

John Quiggin - An offer he can’t accept

JQ's suggestion as to how Shorten could best deal with the attempted wedge on Labor about the plebiscite (really, by a reverse wedge - but one which makes sense) sounds like a good political move to me.  I wonder if Shorten will take it up?

Interesting despite one glaring error

The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture - The Atlantic

Well, I suppose magazine editors don't have to know much about science, but I'm still surprised that this article was let through with a paragraph that talks about a laser shooting electrons.

Nonetheless, it's worth a read. 

[I'm not saying it's particularly well written, by the way, but it eventually raises some interesting issues.  It's getting a drubbing in comments, where I am also surprised to not yet see anyone grinding their teeth on the laser/electron thing.]

Seem like good questions to me

Some questions for those who are cheering Gawker's demise / Boing Boing

All at sea - The Conspiracy

I strongly recommend this recently published account in Popular Mechanics of a reporter (and her photographer) going on a cruise with a bunch of conspiracy nutters.  It turns into a real problem when they become the victims of paranoia.

Most surprisingly - Andrew Wakefield (he of the discredited autism/vaccine link) was one of the speakers, and while he is only a bit player in the article, he really does not come out looking good.

Reading this reminded me of something I perhaps didn't say here before - the absolute worst aspect of the new series of X Files was its incorporation of a secret government vaccine conspiracy (not Scully's unflattering hairstyle.)   Yes, even worse that its having a conspiracy broadcaster who actually was onto something, I reckon it's a disgrace to give any encouragement at all, even in fiction, to any dimwit watching  (and they are out there) to the belief that vaccines are evil and to be avoided.

"What - me worry?" Ridley

The prominent lukewarmer Matt Ridley is given a run in The Australian today (reprinting an article from The Times) in which he argues that a completely melted Arctic ice cap each summer wouldn't matter much anyway.  Quite benign, in fact.

The article quotes some research I haven't read about, so I'll wait for actual scientists to address that.  But clearly, the article relies heavily on reasoning that goes over well with the silly and gullible:  that a large climatic change like (relatively?) ice free summers in the Arctic in previous millennia were not bad for the wildlife (and humanity) then, so why would it be so bad for them now?    I feel the flaws in such reasoning are so obvious, it is hardly worthwhile putting them down on paper.   But someone will, I have no doubt, and I'll link to them instead when I notice it...

Trump and the Catholics

I always thought that US Catholics would have trouble with Trump, and I'm pleased to see that they emphatically do:

Back in 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney lost the Catholic vote by just 2 points, 50 percent to 48 percent. And the GOP has actually won the Catholic vote as recently as 2004 and in 5 of the last 10 11 presidential elections.

But Trump trails among Catholics by a huge margin. A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released this week shows him down 23 points, 55-32.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released earlier this month painted an even worse picture for Trump’s Catholic support. He was down by 27 points, 61-34.

It's only conservative Catholics who like to engage in the culture wars they've already, by and large, lost who would vote for him for tribal, anti-Clinton reasons alone.   (See the conservative Catholics of Catallaxy, for example.)  There is nothing Catholic friendly, in terms of consistency with Catholic social teaching, in Trump's threats-which-pass-for-half-baked policy.

About as evil as you can get

Father identifies British boy 'killer' seen executing a captured prisoner in Syria � | Daily Mail Online

Of all the atrocities of Islamic State, I think I find myself most appalled by the ones like this - where they get boys to do executions of what the rest of the world would call prisoners of war.  Absolutely shocking and appalling.  The links shows photos, but of course, I would not watch the video. 

The Vox alt-right explainer

The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder. - Vox

One thing I have wanted to say about Milo Y:  I've only read a couple of things apparently written by him on Breitbart, and I thought they were, from a stylistic point of view, very poorly written.   (I see it is claimed that he has minions who do much of his writing for him, and perhaps that explains it.) 

I didn't watch his Andrew Bolt interviews, but why anyone would be impressed by him is beyond me...

Monday disease

41 cases of locally transmitted Zika confirmed in Aljunied Crescent cluster, 34 fully recovered, Health News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

I wonder if Singaporeans themselves are surprised, given its general super clean image, that the island state has reported scores of cases of locally transmitted zika disease.   It can't be great news for their tourism sector.

See the story above from the local paper, showing great clouds of insecticide being deployed.   I would bet there is a lot of that going on over the next few weeks.

A trilogy of diseases

Time for 3 stories of unpleasant diseases I noticed this week:

*  a terribly depressing situation with tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea.  Drug resistant TB there continues to spread, and a quarter of cases are in children who, if they survive (it kills one in 10, apparently) may well have life long disabilities in a country with next to no services for them.

*  The Guardian reports that doctors are starting to worry about treatment resistant fungal infections.  And the resistance may be coming from a surprising source:

More than a million people die of fungal infections every year, including about 7,000 in the UK, and deaths are likely to increase as resistance continues to rise.

Researchers say the widespread use of fungicides on crops is one of the main causes of the rise in fungal resistance, which mirrors the rise of resistance to antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections in humans.

As for medicines available: there aren't many:

“There are more than 20 different classes of antibacterial agents. By contrast, there are only four classes of anti-fungal agents. Our armoury for dealing with deadly fungi is much smaller than the one we have for dealing with bacteria.

“We cannot afford to lose the few drugs we have – particularly as very little funding is being made available for research into fungi and fungal infections.”

 The article also mentions the case of an apparently fungal lung infection that killed a bagpipe player.

*  And for this final round of unpleasant thoughts:  I guess I had heard before that people can get a gonorrhoea infection in their throat or mouth, but I'm not sure I had realised that it could be carried there, without symptom, for weeks or months, and be transmitted on via that common bedroom activity that's not intercourse.   A doctor thinks, based on some early tests, that gargling with ordinary commercial mouthwash might be helpful in preventing its spread, although I don't think he thinks it will kill off entirely.

Gee, I wonder how the Listerine company might cope with that information in advertisements. 

The French and toast

My wife made French toast for a Sunday morning treat today (and she makes it very well - using a French stick cut thickly, and the bread soaked in the milk and eggs overnight.)

We eat it with maple syrup, which led to the question - do the French eat French toast, 'cos the syrup makes it seem more like an American meal.

So off to Wikipedia it is, where the French toast entry is not as detailed as I feel it deserves, but it at least tells us the recipe pre-dates France quite considerably.  (Basically, it goes back to Roman days, and has been seen in many countries as a good way to make stale bread palatable.)

This entry on the history of the dish at "Today I Found Out" (a site which has a very appealing name for someone like me) is much more readable.  The site says this:

Indeed, the name for French toast in France itself is “pain perdu”, which literally means “lost bread” (it is also called this in Belgium, New Orleans, Acadiana, Newfoundland, and the Congo, among other places). It’s interesting to note, for the naysayers who like to cling to the belief that it came from France, that before the French called it pain perdu, they called it “pain a la Romaine” (Roman bread).

And this: 

In France itself, French toast is highly sweetened and is served as a dessert item, rather than served for breakfast, as in America and many other places.

So, now we know. 

The French and swimwear

I can't be bothered working out a position to take on the French attempting to enforce smaller swimwear on women, except to remind people that the country has a history of being very prescriptive about swimwear in a way that leads to foreign men, at least in  public pools, also being forced to wear less than they otherwise might in their own country.   And, as I noted not so long ago, up until about the 1960's, many boys and teenage guys in many parts of the US were forced by their State school system -or if they were learning at a YMCA - to take swimming lessons nude.  Go back further, and England had to ban men bathing nude - at the beach - in the 1860's, and this coincided with bans on mixed bathing, as well.

Yes, I know, both of the first two examples are about alleged hygiene concerns in pools, not the ocean.   But just wanted to note that the history of regulation of bathing suits has taken many peculiar turns, in many countries, one way or the other over the years...

Paging Dr Nick

One of the more amusing things to come out of the Trump/alt right conspiracy mongering about Hillary's health is a re-examination of the Trumpian sounding letter from Trump's doctor.

As I said in comments recently, the letter put me in mind of Dr Nick from the Simpsons (and I bet I'm not the first to think that), and as it turns out, the doctor does at least look a little unconventional.  (See story at the link.)   The funniest suggestion in the WAPO story is that a "positive" medical test often means something bad..was Trump's doctor trying to tell us something?   It's logic worthy of the alt right itself, but pretty funny. 

Sensitive Tim and gay marriage

Oh, so newly elected walking selfie Tim "Send in the water cannon" Wilson is now taking to re-tweeting rude tweets from lefties?   To show up the intolerant Left?  Seems a bit rich...

As to the whole same sex marriage plebiscite - what a mess this issue is.  While I think a plebiscite is actually not a bad idea for everyone for a major social and legal change, I would expect it to be conducted conveniently (and economically) with an election day vote.  But this seemed to have been beyond Turnbull's ken to get going in time for the last election.  Do we blame deals with his conservative Coalition base for that?  I'm not sure.

Now with the Greens going all "principled" again (they manage to delay a lot of useful things to their side of politics by doing this) it seems there won't be one for years.  Actually, I wonder if it's more likely now that we won't have one at all, and gay marriage will just come in via a new Labor government.  But I could be wrong.

It's one of those issues where everyone's annoying - gay activists by carrying on too much about how dire it will be for gay teens to hear rhetoric against it;  conservatives for going on about how it will be a cultural disaster that will see people locked up for refusing to marry same sex couples.  And Tim Wilson for criticising the Greens, when members of his own party are interested in delaying the inevitable, including undertaking not to be bound by the result anyway.  

And for the record, again:  I would favour civil unions over gay marriage.  If the plebiscite had been held at the last election, I would have likely have voted "no", but with the expectation that the "yes" vote would win, and without any great concern that it would end Western civilisation.  (Or perhaps, I would just have voted informal on this - that's probably the better line for someone like me to take, given my preferred option is not on the table.)   Give it another couple of years of listening to argument about it, though, I might be persuaded to vote "yes" for gay marriage, just so I can stop hearing about it....

A funny line about Coulter

The Great Ann Coulter Immigration Bamboozle

From The Federalist, of all places:

“I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper,” Coulter tweeted last August, calling Trump’s immigration plan “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” At the time, due to my longtime understanding that Coulter is 85 percent ratings-and-book-sales-related shtick and 15
percent the amalgamated ghosts of old cigarettes, I shrugged and rolled my eyes.

Robot babies

I see that an evaluation of one of those "here, look after this demanding, crying, robot baby and see what a pain baby care is, so you'll know not to get pregnant" programs with teenagers in WA actually ended up with more of the robot carers getting pregnant.

I'm a little puzzled by this.  Haven't these programs been tried in the US for many, many years?  They've featured in some sitcoms for a long time, I'm sure.  Were those programs properly evaluated?  Or does it depend on the location of the teenage population (with, for example, teenagers in remote towns with little to do finding that even caring for a robot or real baby is better than being bored?)

The Hillary health campaign

The Trump/Guiliani/nutty Right wing conspiracist reliance on ridiculously concocted "evidence" of Hillary Clinton being seriously frail just goes to show what intense gullibility has swallowed up significant sections of the Right in the US, as well as the dearth of genuine good policy they have on which to run.   Just as they would prefer to believe that climate change is a self serving fabrication of money hungry scientists and/or socialists of the UN, rather than believe the hundreds of professional science bodies and the evidence of record temperatures before their eyes, they show little in the way of common sense, let alone good policy judgement, and swallow the silliest suggestions whole.  I am still inclined to blame the internet for this - I just don't think conspiracies used to get the hold on as large a part of the Western public in the pre-internet decades as they do now.

And it seems to me that the Trump campaign is probably facing a backlash for this - with one poll now showing a 10 point lead for Clinton, and ridicule of the health conspiracy finally making news.   Or maybe it's the Trump flip flopping on his populist immigration policy.  Who knows. 

And why haven't those in the GOP who want their party to have a skerrick of credibility been calling out Trump on this health conspiracy issue?  Are they just figuring that the only way the party can rise again is to see it first burn to the ground when the nutty element takes control?

More comedy stylings from the escapee from 1950

Spotted at Catallaxy, from someone who has become the walking definition of hysteria about homosexuality and the matter of gay marriage:

The video, incidentally, shows the weakest "firestorm" of violence since, well, I dunno, readers can up with their own comparison for wannabe violent confrontations that weren't anything to write home about. 

Providing for the dead

China's ghost weddings and why they can be deadly - BBC News: Police in north-west China have charged a man with murdering two women with mental disabilities, alleging that he wanted to sell their corpses to be used in so-called "ghost weddings".

It has put a spotlight on the ancient shadowy ritual, still practised in certain parts of China, which aims to provide spouses for people who die unmarried.

Read the whole thing - it's fascinating.

Yet more on (very odd) Japanese management ideas

The ‘handsome weeping boys’ paid to wipe away your tears - BBC News

This will, no doubt, be the oddest story about Japan you will read today.

Putin and the Noosphere

What is the Mysterious “Nooscope”? Let’s Ask Putin’s New Chief of Staff | Mysterious Universe

Russia has long been the home of crank-ish spirituality; although, as it happens, I'm quite fond of the idea of the Noosphere myself.  The possibility of an orbiting nooscope, though?  Sounds like something out of Philip K Dick.

What it means for Putin to be elevating someone who seems to take these ideas very seriously is anyone's guess.

More about "Japanese Schindler"

Documentary sheds light on Japanese who helped Jews escape Holocaust | The Japan Times

I've mentioned him before on this blog, way back in 2008.

The problem of regional predictions

Global climate models do not easily downscale for regional predictions | EurekAlert! Science News

Zhang and Michael Mann, Distinguished professor of atmospheric
science and director, Earth System Science Center, were concerned that
the direct use of climate model output at local or even regional scales
could produce inaccurate information. They focused on two key climate
variables, temperature and precipitation.

They found that projections of temperature changes with global
climate models became increasingly uncertain at scales below roughly 600
horizontal miles, a distance equivalent to the combined widths of
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. While climate models might provide
useful information about the overall warming expected for, say, the
Midwest, predicting the difference between the warming of Indianapolis
and Pittsburgh might prove futile.

Regional changes in precipitation were even more challenging to
predict, with estimates becoming highly uncertain at scales below
roughly 1200 miles, equivalent to the combined width of all the states
from the Atlantic Ocean through New Jersey across Nebraska. The
difference between changing rainfall totals in Philadelphia and Omaha
due to global warming, for example, would be difficult to assess. The
researchers report the results of their study in the August issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The problem has been well known for some time, but I guess this is putting some more specific details into it.  Also, it makes it clear what nonsense it was for the head of the CSIRO to suggest we could afford to move on from climate modelling work.

Things you probably didn't know about airplane tires

Airplane Tires Don’t Explode on Landing Because They Are Pumped! | WIRED

The article ends by noting that it's really hard to make an airplane tire explode by overinflating, because they are designed to be so strong.  I presume they are better now than tires on Orions in the 1980's - as I am aware that an airman lost his legs due to an accidental overinflation explosion in Adelaide in that decade.

In other natural disaster news

Giant, deadly ice slide baffles researchers : Nature News & Comment: One of the world's largest documented ice avalanches is flummoxing researchers. But they suspect that glacier fluctuations caused by a changing climate may be to blame.

About 100 million cubic metres of ice and rocks gushed down a narrow valley in Rutog county in the west of the Tibet Autonomous Region on 17 July, killing nine herders and hundreds of sheep and yaks.

The debris covered nearly 10 square kilometres at a thickness of up to 30 metres, says Zong Jibiao, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITPR) in Beijing, who completed a field investigation of the site last week.  The only other known incident comparable in scale is the 2002 ice avalanche from the Kolka Glacier^{1, 2}
in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, says Andreas Kääb, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. That catastrophic event killed 140 people.

I hadn't even heard of these, until now...

Roman earthquakes

Can an Earthquake Bring About the Fall of Rome? - TIME

With news of the deadly Italian earthquake, not all that far from Rome, I was curious about whether Rome itself has ever suffered a lot of damage from a major quake.  The answer appears in that Time article from 2012.  Seems from historical precedent that the city is not all that likely to ever be reduced to rubble; but sure, it has had some earthquake damage, and could get a moderately large shake again.

Man, he's childish..

Just had a look at the Trump twitter feed:

Don't any of his advisers have the gumption to say to him - "Boss, I suggest you stop using these 'people are saying' and 'virtually everyone agrees' lines - they're seen as transparently self serving and a silly rhetorical device"?

Money for access

For people who like to accuse the mainstream media of liberal bias, aren't they are little surprised that the New York Times and the Washington Post both have had articles playing up the concern about the Clinton emails and the "access for money" issue they raise?

I find it hard getting too worked up about this:  money for access to politicians (via political donations and attendance at exorbitantly priced fundraisers) is so common now that it seems beyond winding back.  True, from little I have read, it seems that the Clinton arrangement incorporated an indirect - but only just - wealth enhancement to the Clintons personally (via Bill being paid by his own foundation?), and I can understand why people think this is a bit rich (ha!)   But as for how bad it is for good governance - isn't the problem that to get too horrified by it, you have to show that the payment did in fact lead to corrupt and bad decisions?  As far as I can tell, so far, no one has pointed to a clearly egregious example of such a decision as a result of donation to the Clinton Foundation, which lead to an email to Hilary, which led to a meeting, which led to a bad decision that would not otherwise have been made.  But I stand to be corrected.   It seems from the most recent articles that donors who contacted Hilary or her staff for help often didn't get much "value for money"; sometimes getting responses that were more "I dunno.  Good luck with that one.  Oh, and thanks for the donation, again."

Anyhow, here's the choice:  a candidate who has a long history of doing very well personally out of politics and political connections - sometimes in dubious fashion - but who appears basically sound on matters economic, understands foreign affairs (even if you don't agree with every decision she made - but let's face it, it's frequently a case of not being able to win no matter who you support when it comes to foreign policy, especially in the Middle East), and believes scientists when it comes to climate change - the global issue of the century with dire planet wide risks.

On the other hand - a narcissistic flip flopping ignoramus, with terrible judgement as to who to take policy advice from, who still thinks decades later that his being able to use hairspray with CFCs was more important than fixing the ozone hole.

It's just not a realistic comparison.

Update:  I think I can say that this BBC summary of the issues with the Foundation over the years supports my general take on the matter.

Update 2:  and here's the Slate take on the matter.  Pretty much along the same lines - the Foundation was sort of asking for trouble; or at the very least, doubts.  Perhaps the best line in this article is this:

You don’t need to believe the Clintons orchestrated some sort of pay-for-play scheme to know that there is something wrong with a dynamic where it is nearly impossible to prove whether they did or did not.   

 But this is still not the same as showing the Clintons were corrupt in any highly serious way.

And it's not as if people shouldn't have doubts about Trump's ability to remain a cleanskin.  If anything, his refusal to be upfront about his tax returns, and the connections with Russian money (that do indeed go to the matter of direct benefit to him and his businesses), as well as his generically self centred, immature attitude to everything, show him to be a fertile field for future corruption and secret dealings.

Update 3:  Here's the Michael Yglesias take on the matter at Vox, more defensive of Clinton than other media.  Key point:

Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.

Japanese management style

BBC - Capital - Why you don’t give praise in Japan

This all sounds about right, from what limited amount I have heard about the Japanese workplace. It is all rather odd, from a Western perspective:

Traditionally, the Japanese language had no word for feedback because
it just wasn’t something that anybody did, says Sharon Schweitzer, CEO
of Protocol and Etiquette Worldwide, and an expert on how managers can
assimilate in foreign countries. So they had to make up a word, fīdobakku.

Yet, it’s still simply not something that’s done. “If you don’t hear from
your Japanese manager, you’re doing well,” Schweitzer says. “If your
manager asks for an update on your project, that means you’re not doing
well.”

Managers in Japan aren’t likely to ask for an update because
employees are expected to constantly provide them. It’s a process called
hou-ren-sou and it involves subordinates sending their boss
emails, all day long, about when they’re going to lunch, the percentage
of the project they’ve finished, when they’re taking a coffee break,
everything.

For foreign managers, the temptation may be to reply
with accolades, congratulating them on finishing 32% of the project. But
don’t, Schweitzer cautions. “If you reply and tell them good job, you
will lose face and they will lose face. Just say thank you or don’t
reply at all.”

A second series of Adam

Adam Ruins Everything, And For That We Thank Him - MTV

Yeah, I find this show (which was on SBS on Demand for a long time) good and entertaining, even if I don't always agree with his take on things. 

The American opioid problem

This city saw 26 opioid overdoses in less than four hours

I prefer my fish cooked

It's been quite a while since I've noticed any article about catching parasitic worms from eating raw fish, but here's one which goes into a lot of interesting detail:  

Parasitic Worms Burrow into Walls of Woman's Stomach After Meal: The worms can burrow into the walls of the stomach or the small intestine, though it is much more common to find them in the stomach, Fuchizaki said. About 95 percent of anisakiasis cases are in the stomach, he told Live Science.

When the worms burrow into the walls of the stomach, the symptoms usually develop within several hours of eating contaminated fish, Fuchizaki said. If the infection occurred in the small intestine, however, the symptoms wouldn't start until one to five days later, he said.

Some people may notice the worms even sooner than a few hours after eating raw fish — in some instances, people actually feel a tingling sensation in their mouth or throat while they are eating, which is caused by the worm moving around there, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some people may be able to remove the worm with their hand or by coughing, the CDC says. Vomiting, which is often a symptom of anisakiasis, can also expel the worms, the CDC says.

In most cases, people experience pain and other stomach problems because the worms are damaging the tissue of the digestive tract, Fuchizaki said. But some people may be allergic to the worms, and experience an allergic reaction if they eat them, he said.

Because the worms do not reproduce in humans, they eventually die and cause an inflamed mass, according to the CDC.

A problem unsolved

I see via a Jason Soon tweet that the matter of "shy bladder" in men's public toilets is still the subject of articles, this one in Vox.  

I first posted about this topic in 2007, and made the very reasonable observation that, with modern public toilet design for the last few decades going nearly always with the individual ceramic urinal, it is dead easy to give each user a bit of privacy by installing simple, solid dividing screens to the wall between each one.  They don't have to be floor to head high; and I would assume that you'd really have to have a very serious aiming problem to ever miss the urinal so far that you could dirty one.   On the occasion I have been to a toilet incorporating such a design, I liked the additional bit of privacy, and I'm sure I would not be alone.

But yet, I have noticed over the intervening years that, even with new toilets in renovated shopping centres, this is pretty rarely an option taken up.

Why? 

As the Vox article notes, and as any male knows, there is a lot of use of the toilet stalls by men who only want to urinate, causing dirtier toilets because of poor aim, etc.  

This is a well known and understood issue, so why is one obvious, useful and cheap design addition to public toilets routinely ignored?

Clearly, this is some bizarre failure of the free market, and it calls for government regulation!   (An approach Jason Soon would surely endorse - ahahahaha.)

A good conceit for a novel

Book Review: 'Ghost Talkers,' By Mary Robinette Kowal : NPR

The new opiate of the masses

The Virtues of Reality - The New York Times

Interesting idea put forward here by Ross Douthat - that some of the "old" problems associated with youth (rate of violence, unwanted pregnancies, etc) are getting better because they're happy to live in an internet/cyberworld of games and porn. 

And he deals with the theory in a non-panicky way.