Tax and the rich

To be honest, I'm in no position to judge the modelling work in the paper, and "common sense" is a tricky thing when it comes to economics, but this certainly sounds worth looking at:

We Need To Tax The Rich But Instead We'll Do The Opposite

What’s the scale of the problem? The paper notes that in the U.S., “the share of overall wealth held by the top 1% has increased from around 25% in 1980 to over 40% today; for the top 0.1% it has increased from less than 10% to over 20% over the same time period.” Economic mobility has severely declined during the same time period as well, which means that our country today is far more unequal and offers far less opportunity than it did a generation ago. When the very wealthy double their share of the pie at the same time when it is harder than ever to achieve a better living standard than your own parents, people will naturally get frustrated, even if they can’t put their finger on who or what is thwarting their dreams.

The new study uses an economic model to examine several possible drivers of inequality in the past 35 years, including the decline of progressive taxation (meaning that the rich are being asked to give less of what they earn back to the public), increases in wage inequality (the growing gap between how much high and low earners are paid), and the rise of the capital share of income (how much of our national income comes from capital, rather than from wages for labor). Their findings: It’s the taxes, stupid.
 

Warming oceans and toxic shellfish

From NPR:

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found a link between warming ocean conditions and a dangerous neurotoxin that builds up in sea life: domoic acid.

Seafood lovers got a glimpse of that threat in 2015, when record high ocean temperatures and lingering toxic algae blooms raised the domoic acid in shellfish to unsafe levels, shutting down the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery from Alaska to Southern California for several months. Though less dramatic, the problem emerged again this season, when harvesting was again delayed for portions of the coasts.

Domoic acid is a toxin produced by Pseudo-nitzschia, a micro algae which can accumulate in species like Dungeness crab, clams, mussels and anchovy. It can be harmful to both humans and wildlife, including sea lions and birds....

Although we're starting to hear about domoic acid more often, it's been on the radar of public health officials since a Canadian outbreak in 1987 killed three and sickened over 100. In mild cases, it can cause vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. Severe cases can cause trouble breathing, memory loss, and even coma or death.

And, of course, the AGW link:

And a future with more frequent domoic acid events seems likely, says says Bill Peterson, a NOAA senior scientist and co-author of the study. "We're having more and more of these warm ocean events and we're going to have more domoic acid blooms each year. It might become a chronic problem," he says.

The Trump problem

If true, it just confirms the gigantic problem with Trump - he's a shallow intellect who doesn't have a clue as to who to take advice from:

President-elect Donald Trump met Tuesday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to discuss “vaccines and immunizations,” and after the meeting Kennedy announced that Trump had selected him to lead a commission looking into “vaccine safety.” This should worry just about anyone who believes in science, public health, and dispelling myths about vaccines:

 

What a guy

The latest allegations against Bill O'Reilly, combined with a reading of the some lowlights of his personal life at Wikipedia, are really amazing.     How gullible would the average Fox viewer have to be to not believe there is at some disgraceful behaviour behind all of this? 

It's pretty extraordinary that he manages to maintain his career at Fox at all.  

An alcohol flavour I didn't know existed

From NPR:

Though the great outdoors becomes more inhospitable when winter winds rise and temperatures drop, there's nothing like wandering through an evergreen forest as snow squeaks underfoot. And once people have trudged stiffly back inside, they can keep those forests with them by imbibing one of the world's many pine liqueurs.

These liqueurs have been a longtime fixture in European hotels and ski lodges. Under the umbrella of "schnapps" (essentially any strong, clear alcoholic drink with little resemblance to the sweetened stuff marketed as schnapps in the United States), Austrians have been brewing their own pine-flavored varieties for generations. Yet it wasn't until the early 2000s that these evergreen spirits finally made their way to America — 2005, in particular, seems to be the magic year. Call it good market research or just good timing, but at least three major pine spirits made their U.S. debut that year.

A possible concern re virtual reality

I missed the original Atlantic article which Michael Prescott posts about, but he quotes a lot from it anyway.

Does sound a bit like good VR gaming in the future might create a lot of teenage depressed zombies.   As if sitting around the house all day watching Youtubes or Netflix all day isn't bad enough.  (I just got back from lunch at which I urged my local teenagers to do something else - build a model, read a book, anything other than staring at the screen.   I was ignored.)

A licence to print money

I see that Rogue One (still unseen by yours truly) has already made $914,000,000 globally - in less than a month.  (And it made $22 million last weekend in the US - so the total is soon going to hit a billion.)

An amazing licence to print money, this franchise. 

About champagne

A good summary of how it's made, and its history, is up at the TLS.   Here's some esoteric history for your next dinner party:

No single person can be credited with the invention of champagne, but the English can take some of the credit. In 1657, a book by Ralph Austen, a cider manufacturer from Oxford, described adding a “walnut” of sugar to cider bottles to make the drink sparkle. In December 1662, the physician and scientist Dr Christopher Merrett gave a lecture to the Royal Society which described how to make wines “brisk” by the addition of molasses. In France, champagne had always been enjoyed as a still wine; the occasional sparkling bottle was considered flawed. But the taste caught on, from Britain to France, and such research made it possible to replicate the effects in the production process itself. In the meantime, the famous courtier and adventurer Sir Kenelm Digby had been experimenting with making bottles strong enough to withstand the additional pressure brought about by fermentation.

Digby’s experiments showed foresight. The main problem facing the Champenois in the early nineteenth century was the casse – broken bottles. Without a proper understanding of how much sugar was needed to create an adequate sparkle, or mousse, and without proper temperature control in the cellar, bottles would explode under the pressure of excessive carbon dioxide. In 1828, for example – a year known as la grande casse – eight out of ten of all champagne bottles were smashed.

The problem was definitively solved in 1837 by André François, a pharmacist from Châlons-en-Marne, whose work had an incalculable effect on the history of champagne. François worked out the precise formula needed to ensure that enough sugar was added to create the mousse, but not enough to create excessive fermentation. As the official “notes on the history of champagne” presented at the 1899 Exposition Universelle proudly stated: “Since M. François’ important discovery, the sparkling wine trade has considerably expanded”.

Brisbane River sharks, revisited

Last week there was a report of a large hammerhead shark being caught near the mouth of the Brisbane River.  But from what I saw, how close was a bit of a mystery.

Now, however, I see that the bull sharks, which are known to swim all the way up to Ipswich, are also in the news:

A young rower had her scull attacked at the weekend while training near the Kurilpa Bridge in the CBD.
Coach Peter Toon said teeth marks were left on the rower's craft after the attack.
"She saw the fin and it went around and gave it a big snap on the stern of the boat," he said.
"It put some big gouges into it and it upset her quite a bit as you could imagine."
Mr Toon said despite the scary incident, the rower had been back on the water this week.
"I've been coaching for over 25 years and I've never heard of an incident where a bull shark has attacked a rower."

Yikes.  There's a photo at the link if you want to see the damage to the boat.

I wrote a lengthy post about bull sharks in the river in 2010.  

And wrote science fiction in his spare time...

I never took much interest in the story of Casanova, so it's handy to have a review of a new biography about him to fill in some gaps in my knowledge:

Casanova moved with ease in all strata of society. As well as hordes of nobility, he met Benjamin Franklin, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Pope Clement XIII, Rousseau, Voltaire and Mozart. He mixed with financiers, ambassadors, Freemasons, magicians and government ministers, in addition to an awful lot of gamblers, rakes, actors, dancers, courtesans and common prostitutes.

Perhaps his most famous exploit was his escape, after 15 months of miserable incarceration, from one of Venice’s state prisons, known as I Piombi, to which he was confined in 1755 at the age of 30, ostensibly for irreligion. This was the story he was most often asked to tell, and the account of it he published in 1788 was one of the few literary successes of his lifetime. He also wrote poems, a translation of Homer into ottava rima, librettos, some pamphlets on mathematics, historical studies on Poland and Venice and — among other things — a five-volume work of science fiction set in the Earth’s interior. He envied the literary fame of Goethe and Voltaire, and could not quite understand why they were more highly regarded than he was.

The desire for renown as a man of letters came early for Casanova, as most things did. By his account, it arrived around the age of 11, when he stunned the diners at his tutor’s house with a risqué Latin witticism. At about the same time, the tutor’s younger sister gave him his first taste of sex. The other achievements of his adolescence included a doctorate of law awarded at the age of 16, expulsion from a monastery, a spell as a trainee priest, a love affair with a putative castrato (whom Casanova correctly believed to be a girl in disguise), a stint in the army, various other affairs and the start of his mostly unsuccessful gambling career.

We'll leave the story before we get to the incest; maybe readers already know about that?

He took her advice...

Kellyanne Conway wants people to look into Donald Trump’s “heart,” not “what’s come out of his mouth”

News from Tanzania

Sometimes, when I am at a loss for something novel to post about, I pick a random country's news website to see what's happening there.

Today, therefore, I can inform you that the hot news in Tanzania (which, incidentally, seems to be hosting several Chinese government officials - I think China is going to own that continent soon enough) includes the following:

Two top Mtwara Coop officials held over ‘lost’ cashewnuts

THE Prime Minister, Mr Kassim Majaliwa, yesterday ordered the arrest of four officials, including two from the Masasi-Mtwara Cooperative Union Limited (MAMCU), following the loss of over 2,000 tonnes of cashewnuts.

The company deals with reserving the crops in warehouses. The four are accused of laxity, which has led to 2,138 tonnes of cashewnuts to go missing.

Mr Majaliwa gave the order during a meeting he had convened in Songea that brought together officials from MAMCU, owners of BUCO storehouse and a group of six farmers from Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Societies (AMCOS) in Mtwara and Masasi.

In other news, capital works are badly needed for one village:

ABOUT 29,000 residents of Majimoto village at Mamba Division in Mlele District, Katavi Region are in severe shortage of water to the extent of buying a bucket of the liquid at 1,000/-.

Report from the area shared with the ‘Daily News’ showed that water that is commonly fetched in the village is drawn from Majimoto hot spring, but is unsuitable for human consumption because it has a lot of volcanic ashes, besides having unpleasant taste and smell.
According to Majimoto Ward Councillor, Mr Nyangoso Serengeti, who is also Mpimbwe Council Chairman, the residents of the area have been suffering for so many years without any alternative to provide them with safe and clean water. He said that the residents as a result are forced to walk a distance of seven kilometers to the neighbouring Mamba village to draw water especially women and children. “Majimoto hot water spring is the only source of water we have at Majimoto village for all sorts of domestic purposes including washing clothes, utensils and cooking.
But it is not safe for drinking,” he pointed out. He said that the situation has forced cyclists fetching the liquid from the neighbouring village to sell it locally to other villagers at 1,000/- a bucket. But for the poor, he said that they are forced to drink it since affording 1,000/- per bucket for an ordinary household is expensive.

 And finally, if you can make any head or tail of this columnist's column, please explain it to me...  

Suicide best option for ex-village mate

Telephoning the dead

A nice post here about Japanese taking comfort from telephoning the departed.  

Seems to me to be the making of a good movie in there, somewhere...

What if tornadoes increased anyway?

Back in 2011, Roy Spencer wrote disparagingly of the suggestion that global warming was likely to increase the number of tornadoes in the US.  Wrong, said Spencer: if anything, global warming suggests fewer tornadoes.

I assumed he might be right on that; but then again, it seems Nature may not have got the message:

The frequency of large-scale tornado outbreaks is increasing in the United States, particularly when it comes to the most extreme events, according to research recently published in Science.

The study by researchers including Joel E. Cohen, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, finds the increase in tornado outbreaks does not appear to be the result of a warming climate as earlier models suggested. Instead, their findings tie the growth in frequency to trends in the vertical wind shear found in certain supercells—a change not so far associated with a warmer climate."What's pushing this rise in extreme outbreaks, during which the vast majority of tornado-related fatalities occur, is far from obvious in the present state of climate science," said Cohen, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at Rockefeller University and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, who conducted the research while a visiting scholar in UChicago's Department of Statistics.

It reminds me of the not entirely unforeseen, but not as widely expected as it might have been, phenomena of the AGW-primed wandering polar vortex sucking cold air further South in NH winters, while the Arctic has exceptionally warmer Christmases.  In other words, a case of a bit of a topsy-turvy effect of AGW.  Just the potential for the Atlantic currents to slow and make England and Northern Europe colder in winter, too.  (See a few posts back, if you missed it.)

Climate change is perhaps a bit, um, lumpier than some may have expected. 

Or, it may be a case of Spencer being wrong, but for the right reason?  Which makes a break from his general AGW line of being wrong for the wrong reason.

Missing the point, somewhat

I see that China is making an effort to improve its toilets, which don't have the best reputation amongst tourists.  (I have never been there, but yes, I have read of this problem, I'm sure.)

Here's the photo of the best in the land, apparently:

Now that is a pretty fancy male toilet, and although I appreciate their effort toward the inter-urinal privacy screen (something of which I have long been a proponent, and lament the frequent failure of new public toilets in Australia to incorporate), making the screens transparent seems to be missing the point, a bit...

Long memory

Wow, Tim Blair has a long memory.  I see that he has linked to a post here from 2006 in which I did something I haven't done for a very long time - defend Mark Steyn.

For some, this will no doubt raise the question of how much my political colours have changed since I started the blog.   It has certainly long irked Catallaxy commenters that I maintain "conservative" in the title of this place, despite my support of the Gillard government, disdain for Tea Party and "conservative" politics of America, dismay at the election of Trump, and full support of climate change action (ideally, by a carbon price - but I remain skeptical of emissions trading schemes).

Now I have been through this exercise before, but it doesn't hurt to re-state it:

People should remember that  I was completely unimpressed by Kevin Rudd from the start, and was calling out his apparent personality issues long before their true extent became clear;  I have never resiled from basic support of the Howard government; I still think much of the criticism of George W Bush was overblown even though the Iraqi intervention turned out to be something of a disaster; I would much prefer that gay relationships were recognised as civil unions rather than marriage; I'm pretty skeptical of the way many now think of transexualism, too;  I'm leery of IVF and certainly against the mooted "brave new world" of things such as three parent babies; I think much of pro-decriminalisation of drugs argument is ill founded and continually oversimplifies the issue, and I would be perfectly happy if we could maintain the one legal drug of alcohol, with appropriate constraints;  I've been as dismayed as anyone about the rise of ISIS and the ongoing fallout the world is suffering from an internal Islamic dispute stemming back more than 1,000 years.   I've posted quite a few times about the seemingly peculiar susceptibility of Islamic societies to conspiracy and rumour; although since the rise of the importance of fake news to the Trump voter, clearly I can now be called out as being a bit unfair in singling out the Islamic societies in that regard.

Here's the thing:  it's the American Right (and its Australian followers) that has moved since the start of this blog from a position of "reasonable" conservatism to one of unreasonable, ideologically based positions that are no longer pragmatic, but in fact aggressively dismissive of evidence.

The prime bell-ringer of this change is global warming, of course, where Mark Steyn and his ilk have basically been conned by a mere handful of contrarian scientists and a much larger body of amateur self-aggrandising wannabe scientists and propagandists (Monckton, Watts, Inhofe, etc).   It's the climate change denialists who have moved from mere skepticism about the exaggeration of some forecasts of the imminent effects of climate change  into the world of dishonest or disingenuous cherry picking of graphs and quotes, and conspiracy belief about how science works, and thus unwisely decided to double down rather than admit they were wrong.  Steyn in particular fully deserves to be sued for defamation by Mann, who I hope succeeds in his action.   Andrew Bolt is similarly impervious to evidence.

The same thing can be said of economics, too:   the American Right can't get over belief in Laffernomics, despite recent and older examples of its failure.   In a sense, though, their gullibility on this is more explicable than it is on climate change - as I noted recently, there is so much going on in societies that economics presents a wealth of opportunity to come up with multiple explanations for current economic success or failure.  I don't think that climate change science allows even half way plausible alternatives.

And then there is the issue of Islam.  It is a serious problem, of course, whenever a group of immigrants seek to bring illiberal attitudes, violence or crime into a society that is prepared to given them a home.   But the likes of Steyn have, I think, lost historical perspective on the matter, and are now prone to exaggeration on the risk of terrorism.   Furthermore, it seems to me that anyone on the Right who supported the Iraq invasion has some gall if they try to shift the blame for the humanitarian crises we see subsequently from the Islamic Middle East onto a Left which never supported the de-stabilising effort in the first place.

I think Andrew Bolt is particularly offensive with his "who let them in?" dog whistles whenever there is migrant crime in Australia.   There is no doubt humanitarian immigration is something worthy; there is also no doubt that sometimes it comes with  gang related problems, for a time.  And there is also no doubt there is no magic detector for working out which migrant families may harbour future gang members.

Other examples of the ways in which the American Right has come to dismay me:  the barely disguised racism underpining much of the Right wing populist attack on Obama, and their non common-sensical approach to gun control which would consider Ronald Reagan to be a Lefty on the issue.

So there you have it - it's so called American Right wing conservatism which has walked away from the reasonable, under the influence of  a variety of self serving interests;  not me.   And Mark Steyn is a prime example of someone who has followed this sad path.   

Update:  the blips on my hit map alert me to the fact that Mark Steyn has picked up on Tim Blair's post, and in doing so has linked to my old post too (and referred to this blog by name.)   Obviously, Mark is not a regular reader here...and nor will many of his referrals if they look around the modern incarnation of the blog!

Russia, Putin and how we got here

Tom Switzer (a bit to my surprise) has a go at Putin/Russian apologetics in Fairfax today.   They're not so bad, he argues, just making sure their borders are well protected by things like, well, being prepared to annex neighbours on the other side of the border.  (I think that's how the argument goes.)  Colour me skeptical of the effort.

For a bigger picture of what Putin wants Russia to be, in future geo-political terms, the end of year article at The Interpreter has some good links, several arguing he wants a kind of return to the past.  The pre-revolution past. 

But the best thing I have read is this lengthy article at Foreign Policy by someone well on the inside of the Obama approach to Russia, who argues how things went well for a while, but fell apart, with a fair bit of Russian paranoia being the cause.  A very convincing read, it seems to me...

I've been thinking...

...about free will, determinism, etc, as you do when you want a good intellectual headache. 

One thing that occurred to me is that, if your allegiance is with the libertarian strand of politics, and as such left wing identity politics gets up your nose, (I'm looking at you, J Soon), you don't really have much to complain about if you're also happy with "there is no such thing as free will" arguments being run by your scientist atheist pals (who, incidentally, are quite likely very liberal politically) all the time.  Because it sure seems you're endorsing the key thought behind most of it, namely the immutability of "identity".

Secondly, I see that there is a (former?) astronomer (Bob Doyle) who has spent years pondering the question, and created a very extensive website that seems well worth reading - The Information Philosopher.   He's also published a book about it (although I think self published, which is not usually a good sign.)  I suppose he counts as a very enthusiastic amateur philosopher, but doesn't present as a nutty one.  I like some of his historical perspective on the whole question, too.  Jerry Coyne doesn't like Doyle's solution to the issue, but Coyne reads as a bit of a jerk to me, so I'm not sure I should worry.

I see that a professional philosopher last year published a book  How Physics Makes Us Free, which is a good title.   A guy at Forbes reckons it's the science book of the year, and a very detailed (and largely positive) review appears here.

I think the author may be onto something...

It's physics/philosophy time!

*  A fairly lengthy essay by Steven Weinberg is at the New York Review of Books, with the alluring title "The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics".   Not bad.

*  I see, via Jason Soon, that there is a long collection of short science pieces by various science-y people, many famous, at Edge.org.   A couple of them bring up some topics long of interest:  David Christian writes about the Noosphere (a great word, and concept, I think);  and the old "is he is crazy, or not?"  Omega Point physicist  Frank Tipler (who supports Trump and is a climate change skeptic, so the "crazy" verdict is starting to look pretty convincing) gets to write again about parallel universes of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics and free will.  Here's the argument:

The free will question arises because the equations of physics are deterministic. Everything that you do today was determined by the initial state of all the universes at the beginning of time. But the equations of quantum mechanics say that although the future behavior of all the universes are determined exactly, it is also determined that in the various universes, the identical yous will make different choices at each instant, and thus the universes will differentiate over time. Say you are in an ice cream shop, trying to choose between vanilla and strawberry. What is determined is that in one world you will choose vanilla and in another you will choose strawberry. But before the two yous make the choice, you two are exactly identical. The laws of physics assert it makes no sense to say which one of you will choose vanilla and which strawberry. So before the choice is made, which universe you will be in after the choice is unknowable in the sense that it is meaningless to ask.

To me, this analysis shows that we indeed have free will, even though the evolution of the universe is totally deterministic. Even if you think my analysis has been too facile—entire books can and have been written on the free will problem—nevertheless, my simple analysis shows that these books are themselves too facile, because they never consider the implications of the existence of the parallel universes for the free will question.

He's less sure what the Everett scenario of ever branching universes means for the problem of evil, but he does say:

No analysis of why evil exists can be considered reasonable unless it takes into account the existence of the parallel universes of quantum mechanics. 

 I also liked Jim Holt's short entry on the mistake Einstein made in not calling his theory of relativity "invariant theory" instead.

OK, seeing Tipler brought up free will, I also can't go past commenting on the problem with  Jerry Coyne's article asserting that there is no free will (and which physicist Bee endorses without reservation).  The consequence, he says, is (my bold):

Now this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t punish criminals. We should—in order to remove them from society when they’re dangerous, reform them so they can rejoin us, and deter others from apeing bad behavior. But we shouldn’t imprison people as retribution—for making a “bad choice.” 

Um, in what sense can their be "reform" of criminals if it is not involving the idea of them using free will to not re-offend?  Lobotomy?  Operant conditioning?  

See, if you don't believe in free will being behind personal responsibility, it logically opens the way for the State to seek to exert control over criminals/dissents via direct biological methods - the Clockwork Orange scenario - because that's the way the universe operates.   You can't rely on logic and persuasion to work - indeed, if think they do work, aren't you re-opening the very question of free will that you deny?  

CS Lewis wrote an essay about this back in (I think) the 1950's, and I still fail to see how the "no free will" atheists seriously address the issue.   The essay contains a line which many conservative/libertarians love to quote (and rather irk me when they do so) - this one:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The problem is, they cite it for trivial matters - a complaint about restrictive smoking laws, for example;  they use it as if there is no valid Christian interest in governments making laws for the common good.

But despite that gripe of mine, it makes the argument against treating punishment as only being about reform or deterrence as relevantly today as it did when it was written.

Some optimism for Friday

*  From the CSM:

Gigafactory begins battery production: Start of something big for Tesla?...

Tesla has said the Gigafactory, said to cost $5 billion and expected to be one of the largest buildings in the world once it is complete, will significantly lower the cost of its products. The start of production there, then, marks progress for the ambitious goals of the company and its chief executive, Elon Musk, to revolutionize energy use....

The Gigafactory is currently operating at 30 percent, but is forecast to eventually transform battery production on a global scale. When it is expected to reach peak production capacity in 2018, the Gigifactory plans to produce 35 gigawatt hours per year of lithium-ion battery cells, nearly as much as the rest of the entire world’s battery production combined, the company notes. Put in other terms, this scale of production could power New York City for about three years, Tesla has previously said.

 *  At least some newspapers are bucking the trend?:

The Washington Post expects to hire more than 60 journalists in the coming months — a sign of remarkable growth for a newspaper in the digital age.

After a year of record traffic and digital advertising revenue, the Post newsroom will grow by more than 8 percent, to more than 750 people. The extent of the newsroom expansion was first reported by Politico. The Post will add a "rapid-response" investigative team, expand its video journalism and breaking news staff, and make additional investments in podcasts and photography.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post in October 2013 and reportedly invested $50 million in the company last year. That investment is paying off, according to a memo from publisher Fred Ryan that said the Post is now "a profitable and growing company." Ryan said the Post's online traffic had increased by nearly 50 percent in the past year, and new subscriptions have grown by 75 percent, more than doubling digital subscription revenue.

Meanwhile, subscriptions at The New York Times have also surged. Times CEO Mark Thompson said on CNBC that the paper added 132,000 new subscribers in the 18 days after the election, a tenfold increase over the same period a year ago. The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal also reported record growth in subscriptions.

*  Cancer death rates (in the US, but I'm sure in most Western countries) are way down:

Cancer death rate has dropped 25 percent since 1991 peak

The drop is the result of steady reductions in smoking and advances in early detection and treatment, and is driven by decreasing death rates for the four major cancer sites: lung (- 43% between 1990 and 2014 among males and -17% between 2002 and 2014 among females), breast (-38% from 1989 to 2014), prostate (-51% from 1993 to 2014), and colorectal (-51% from 1976 to 2014).

 *  Bizarrely, my long time preferred priority for a space program - a lunar base - may end up getting traction under a Trump presidency.   (He'll still be a disaster, though.)

An underestimate of an important effect of climate change?

Oh my.  Until relatively recently, it seemed that there wasn't that much concern in the climate change science community about increased temperatures and glacial melt causing (at least any time soon) a major slowdown in the Atlantic overturning currents that help keep England and Northern Europe relatively warm.  But last year, it was noted that the current is already slowing down, which did raise some eyebrows as to whether it was part of a temporary cycle, or a sign of something worse.

Now, from Real Climate, looks like some detailed analysis shows the risk of a major shutdown has been underestimated.

What's not explained is how serious for parts of Europe the cooling (in winter?) may be. 

A chemical problem I hadn't heard of...

Quite a fascinating article appeared at the Atlantic recently, explaining the dire health effects of carbon disulphide, an important chemical in some industrial processes, but which I had never heard of.

As usual, the poor workers of 19th century factories which first started using it (in rubber manufacture) were the ones worst hit.  In 1887, for example:

Peterson had heard of carbon-disulfide insanity in Europe, so he alerted his colleagues in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now known as The New England Journal of Medicine) that the problem had come to America. In England, the new term “gassed” had arisen, defined in the Liverpool Daily Post as “the term used in the India rubber business, and it meant dazed.” The British physician Thomas Oliver had recalled watching as people working in rubber factories left after their shifts and “simply staggered home,” apart from themselves. The effect could be deadly. “Some of them have become the victims of acute insanity,” Oliver wrote, “and in their frenzy have precipitated themselves from the top rooms of the factory to the ground.”

Obviously, occupational health and safety wasn't a thing that travelled fast in the 19th century, since the  dangers of the chemical had been known about in Europe for over 20 years:

Evidence piled on in 1856, when a professor of medicine at the University of Paris named Auguste Delpech reported several cases of carbon disulfide poisoning to the French Academy of Medicine. The symptoms ranged from disturbing dreams to compromised memory to mania. The cases were so fascinating that he turned the focus of his career to carbon disulfide. In a medical newspaper, he told of a 27-year-old who, after just three months of working with carbon disulfide in the rubber industry, appeared prematurely aged and whose “sexual desire and erections were abolished.”

By 1863, Delpech had accrued enough case studies to write a 100-plus-page paper on the dangers of carbon disulfide, particularly among workers in balloon and condom factories. He observed two distinct phases of intoxication: a period of mental disturbance followed by disruptions of the distal nerves, causing weakness and numbness in the extremities. Hypersexuality gave way to impotence, bypassing the middle ground. Chronicling these effects put Delpech at the front of the emerging discipline of the science of the mind.

Mitochondria replacement risks

No, it's not just conservative reservations about fiddling with genetics that makes me annoyed that this line of work is being pushed by some scientists.

Plenty of scientists worry that it is risky to the potential child.

I can't for the life of me understand why people don't see the problem with this:   when did the interests of  adults who know they have a inheritable major health problem to nonetheless have a child with their own genes start over-riding the obvious moral problem of experimenting in a way that runs a serious risk of creating a child with serious health problems as a result of the experiment? 

The moral thing to do, surely, is for that very small part of the population to not insist on propagating their own (or, particularly, the mother's) genes:  adopt or use egg donation.   With the latter, the mother still gets all the experience of pregnancy, even. 


 

More bad jellyfish news

We're up to 10 Fraser Island area irukandji stings (all requiring hospitalisation, I think) this summer holiday.

As I said a few posts back, if this keeps spreading south, it's a real worry for summer tourism.

If I were the State government, I would be putting plenty of money into research on the matter. As the Guardian's report on the 9th sting indicated, it is difficult to be 100% certain that it is irukandji or a jellyfish in the same family.  More needs to be known before any hit further south and the really busy beach areas.

Another underwhelming dystopia

For some reason (he must have read somewhere that it was good, but I don't know where) my son has been pestering me to rent the 2006 dystopia movie Children of Men.   I vaguely recalled that it had been well reviewed, even if a box office dud, so despite my general dislike of the dystopia genre, we watched it last night.

It is, by my reckoning, a deeply unpleasant film with nothing to recommend it.  Well made, sure, but with no character to particularly care about, a pretty silly premise (it's 18 years since the last baby was born, and the world still doesn't have a clue as to what's going on?   Come on - give science some credit.   It's a scenario that could readily have a scientific explanation - after all, they have been working on the idea of genetically engineering viruses to make pest mammals infertile for some time.  But apparently the director doesn't like  movies that explain too much - hence virtually nothing in this film is explained properly.)

It did, though, confirm in my mind why it is that I can't take to the dystopia genre - with 1984 being my prime precedent.   It's because they routinely fail to make how the world got there in any way plausible. 

Sure, small individual countries with the breakdown of government and a reversion to tribalism (but armed with modern weaponry), or fanciful social experiment, can fall into dystopia for a time.  But global dystopias where everything has collapsed, and/or all government has become authoritarian, and/or all happiness has been sucked out of the world, on an apparently permanent basis - now that takes some explaining.  There's no true historical precedent, and, so often, these scenarios just show too many humans acting with no humanity.   Dystopia novels or movies never get me over that plausibility line.

A fan of the genre could argue, I suppose, that plausibility is not their main point:  it's the warnings they give about human nature, or the nature of power, or some such.   But sorry, for me, that just doesn't cut it.  Set your lesson in some example of a real temporary dystopia, if you will (I'm thinking The Last King of Scotland, for example), but why create a fake, implausible world?

Unimportant news

I did not care for the season opener for Sherlock.  And, from reading the lengthy comments at The Guardian, it seems many other people agree with my assessment that the episode was an underwhelming mess, with busy-ness substituting for quality.   It did have some of the the worrying hallmarks of the fate of post-Tennant Dr Who, which became unwatchable.

Also, as with many at The Guardian, I had no concern over the fate of a certain character, whose "secret life" subplot had never been convincing.  

Blending in

This is really bad news...

From The Guardian:

Swimmers are being urged to take extra care in waters off Queensland amid warnings the deadly irukandji jellyfish is moving further south.

Four people have been taken to hospital since Wednesday after suffering suspected irukandji stings off Queensland’s Fraser coast.

The irukandji – the world’s smallest and most venomous box jellyfish – is usually found in waters north of Mackay, about 700km further up the coast.

The James Cook University associate professor Jamie Seymour said it was clear the species was following warming sea temperatures south.

“We’ve got good data now that shows quite nicely that irukandji has been spreading down the east coast of Australia, moving slowly but surely southwards,” he told ABC radio.

“It’s only a matter of time before they get to the southern end of Fraser Island down to the Sunny coast.”

If irukandji become an annual problem at my favourite Australian beach area - beautiful Noosa - I suspect it could mean a big hit to its tourism industry.

As for the number of people stung around the Fraser Island area - I see that a few years ago, there were 6 people hospitalised for it, so the numbers are staying pretty constant recently.

I've only ever had one decent bluebottle sting in my life, on my forearm, and the welts and pain from that were pretty excruciating.  I hate to imagine how painful and distressing a sting from a jelly fish that routinely puts people in hospital must be.  And, according to that last link, the sting effects can be somewhat delayed:

...the irukandji can take days before its effects are fully felt.

The initial sting is typically mild, followed by vomiting, profuse sweating, headache, agitation, rapid heart rate and high blood pressure. 

The increase in blood pressure may be life-threatening and can be associated with abnormal heart beat and heart failure.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, it is more commonly only about 30 minutes before the pain and distress hits in.  And note the unusual psychological effect it seems to have:

 Because the jellyfish is very small, and the venom is only injected through the tips of the nematocysts (the cnidocysts) rather than the entire lengths, the sting may barely be noticed at first. It has been described as feeling like little more than a mosquito bite. The symptoms, however, gradually become apparent and then more and more intense in the subsequent five to 120 minutes (30 minutes on average). Irukandji syndrome includes an array of systemic symptoms, including severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, tachycardia and pulmonary edema.^[4][11][12] One unusual symptom associated with the syndrome is a feeling of "impending doom".^[13] Patients have been reported as being so certain they are going to die, they beg their doctors to kill them to get it over with.^[14] Symptoms generally abate in four to 30 hours, but may take up to two weeks to resolve completely.^[6]

A creature best avoided, that's for sure.

A few movies noted

We still haven't been to the cinema since Christmas, but I've watched at home:

*  the 2016 Ghostbusters.    Pretty harmless, pretty dumb, comedy;  in other words, pretty much like the first one.  I think the climatic fight in this one was better, actually.  Being surprised by the number of cameos from the original cast was fun, too.  Still, nothing to get excited about either way, just like the first one.  As was entirely to be expected, the alt.right, 4chan twerps were getting their testicles in a twist for no good reason.

*  The Secret Life of Pets.   Going by the credits, much of the animation for Illumination is still done by the French, and they really have an impressive Pixar/Disney quality look about their product now.  The story is very charming and cute, especially if you like dogs.  Enjoyable.  (Also, it's the first rental I've done using the Google Play app on the smart TV.  It worked a treat, with high definition looking great.)

*  Moon.  Found on Google Play, I've been wanting to watch this 2009 film by Duncan Jones (famously, son of David Bowie) for quite a while, given its mostly good reviews.  (Also, I had been very impressed with Jones' second feature, Source Code, which I commented on in 2012.)  Well, sad to say, I was pretty underwhelmed.

Complete spoiler!  Avoid if you don't want to know      Unlike Source Code, the basic explanation of what is going on is just stretches credibility too far, and in a broad sense, the concept had been much more interestingly dealt with in Bladerunner.    (It doesn't hurt that visually, if not narratively, Bladerunner looks like it is happening in a much more distant future, when the improbable technology behind both films seems more vaguely plausible.    The other film with which it invites comparison, Oblivion, also had the advantage of it being aliens who had the "clones with implanted memories" technology available.  Again, it was a much more enjoyable film.)  

It just doesn't pass my sniff test to think that it would ever be worthwhile to use this type of technology to caretake a moon mine, when Earth is so close by and rocket technology is clearly meant to be very advanced.  

I want Spielberg taken to a secure location until 1 January

So, the 2016 terrible run of relatively early deaths of entertainers who a lot of people liked continues, with Carrie Fisher dying today.   She was, apparently, very likeable in person; but to be honest, I didn't follow her post Star Wars career all that closely.  (Didn't read any of her autobiographic books, or see the movie based on the first one, for example.)

There is much speculation on Reddit and the like that she may well have had heart trouble due to her earlier years of cocaine and alcohol abuse.   Seems a reasonable guess.  Google shows me that she was a smoker, too, both when young and even quite recently.  I also see she said she started smoking marijuana at 13 - probably well before it was so well recognised that using it at such a young age is the most dangerous time for developing serious mental health issues.   Again, one of those cases where it's hard to know whether the drug use led to the problems for which she later "self medicated" with more drugs.

As for her later disclosures of drug use - I assume she didn't seek to glamorise it at all, but there is always the worry that any reformed drug abuser who talks too much about their past use inadvertently signals to some people that it's OK to overuse it for a while because they will be able to recover, after having their youthful fun.  However, given that I don't really know how she wrote or talked about it, I don't know whether she ever had that effect or not.

I see this morning that there is increasing speculation that George Michael had gotten back into serious drugs (heroin) in the last year.

And although it seems his death was accidental, pain killing drugs were behind Prince's death too.

So, while all of this deaths have saddened many, many fans, I hope at least that some people, particularly the young, are taking some lessons about drug abuse from them.

Celebrity and unhappiness

I've written on this general topic before, but anyway...

I noted a couple of posts back that I knew little of George Michael's private life, but obviously, those gaps are being filled in now by the media attention following his death.

He really seems a prime example of how celebrity and happiness are so often strangers to each other, and how hard it is to know which way the causation flows in any individual case.  Does the personality type that makes public performance in any field an attractive career mean they are already primed for future depression?  (That seems an especially likely scenario for modern comedians who base their act - as so many do now - on "confessional" comedy about their problematic personal lives.   Older style comedians, who didn't rely on milking their own family or failed relationships, don't give the impression of having been so prone to being unhappy in real life.)

Or is it that financial success and celebrity attention exacerbates any dissatisfaction in relationships and life to such an extent that someone who otherwise might not have developed depression gets it anyway?  One obvious contributing factor to that is the ease with which money gives access to drugs (and the popularity of their use within the entertainment industry.)   Michael apparently had a very big marijuana habit, and also took "party drugs"; but as a means of "self medication" for depression, it seems even pro-cannabis websites are very cautious about it being a good idea. 

As for relationships and sex:  of course, The Guardian's gay writer Owen Jones thinks he shouldn't be criticised for only "coming out" after an arrest made it more or less inevitable, and also notes the rather shameful media reaction to it, which just shows how far England has changed; and this is fair enough.   Yet Jones also seems to think there is something admirable about Michael subsequently reacting by wearing anonymous sex and having open relationships on his sleeve as a honest advertisement for gay people being able to chose to live however they want.

Yet, oddly, Jones doesn't mention perhaps the most problematic thing Michael even said about his sex life, namely that had given up being tested for HIV because he was afraid of the results.  This was in 2007 in an interview that Stephen Fry was going to use in a documentary, but which Michael subsequently asked not to be used.  (It got into the media anyway.)

Now, he apparently said he had stopped being tested since "at least 2004", and his gay partner had died of AIDS long before that, so it appears he did not catch HIV from him.   It would indicate that he had a fear of catching HIV from his promiscuous sex life after that boyfriend's death.

Of course, this seems a very irresponsible attitude, but there are a couple of ways of mitigating it, I suppose:  first, he did have depression for a long time, it seems, and that alone can affect judgement.  Secondly, although I think this is pulling a long bow:  a person who is scrupulous about safe sex might feel their status is irrelevant if they are always going to only engage in the safest sex activities.  But really, how likely is it a drug taking depressive is going to be that careful during every sexual encounter?

And more generally:  Michael's defiant attitude to gay promiscuity is very close to the view expressed by Freddie Mercury, who nonetheless made sad comments towards the end of his life that being surrounded by people all the time does not mean you can't be lonely.  I always found it hard to read that as anything other than an admission that throwing yourself completely into sexual hedonism is not a reliable path to happiness, but it seems a particularly hard lesson for some gay men to accept.

And no, I am not convinced of this attitude being a case of "straight" hypocrisy - you know, the sort of argument that people think a man who sleeps with scores of women over a few years is just a "lad" having fun, whereas the same thing in a gay man is disgusting irresponsibility.   First, I think many people do draw a mental line as to how responsible it is for straight men to bed a different woman every week or two.  But also, in many cases, I think there is a bias, but one which is hypocritical in the other direction - that people don't criticise cases of gay promiscuity when they would if it were straight encounters.   It's the attitude of "well, that must be what's good about being gay - men know men can have casual encounters with no emotional baggage, so why wouldn't they have lots and lots of sex?  I would."

But don't cases like Michael and Mercury indicate the dubious credibility of that?   Sure, it is understandable that gay men think differently about casual sex, but let's be real and admit that excessive hedonism of any kind is probably not good for the emotional life of anyone, and is nothing to be admired....

Update:  of course, to be fair, it appears he was pretty generous with charitable donations, and there are many people speaking well of him.   I'm not trying to paint him as a bad man, but he was certainly a troubled one who openly admitted to having a "self destructive" impulse.

The silly, simple capitalist

The election of Donald Trump has brought out a burst of "ain't capitalism grand?" commentary by certain economists, and amongst them is the always annoyingly simplistic Deidre McCloskey.

Her recent column in the NYT carries the message of "don't worry about inequality in the US, you can never fix it, and trying to do so only makes things worse" is chock full of over-generalisations of the most irritating kind.

She doesn't address criticism of inequality by economists such as Stiglitz and Piketty, she just ignores them outright, and goes on to talk as if any attempt to address inequality is akin to the full blown Socialism of Russia and China in the 20th century:

 Another problem is that the cutting reduces the size of the crop. We need to allow for rewards that tell the economy to increase the activity earning them. If a brain surgeon and a taxi driver earn the same amount, we won’t have enough brain surgeons. Why bother? An all-wise central plan could force the right people into the right jobs. But such a solution, like much of the case for a compelled equality, is violent and magical. The magic has been tried, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. So has the violence. 

 McCloskey distinguishes herself amongst Right wing straw man loving economics writers only by seeming to accept that climate change is real (oh, and perhaps by accepting that it is appropriate for the State to pay for education to year 12).  So why does she not devote any time to criticising the abject failure of the American Right to accept the need for capitalist friendly policies (obviously, a price on carbon) for the problem that is bound to have vast economic consequences and affect the growth she loves?  Instead, let's just write a swooning love letter to capitalism.

Yes we know, Deidre, capitalism has done a great job in many respects and outlived the doomed to fail examples of Russia and nearly every other communist state.  And free trade has helped drop poverty levels globally - even Krugman is a fan of it.

But stop pretending that inequality critics are Communists, and that inequality counts for naught in nations like the US, where examples of the working poor are legion, in comparison to other successful capitalist nations that manage to reduce inequality by policies that haven't killed their economy and don't stop the rich being rich.

Failed conversions

Ross Douthat's Christmas column, about his interest in "secular moderns" who have supernatural seeming experiences, but who don't come out of it with any particular conversion to belief in the supernatural, is  interesting.  I like reading about those sort of experiences too.  

He links to a recent article by The Exorcist director William Freidkin, who visited (out of curiosity, really) the Vatican exorcist to see how accurately his film reflected real life exorcisms.   I don't find the case he follows particularly convincing of anything, but one of the stories a New York psychiatrist tells him is more interesting:

LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

As for The Exorcist itself:  I think I have mentioned before that I have never watched more than perhaps 10 minutes of it on TV, and found it too over the top to be scary or convincing.   It's a pity, in a way, that the book/movie did this; from what I have read (a long time ago, now) cases of possession with much more subtle aspects could be much more persuasive of the supernatural.

An unshared enthusiasm

No disrespect intended for the value of the life of George Michael as a fellow human, but I do have an odd urge to express my unfashionable opinion that most of his musical output was either gratingly bland (Last Christmas - a "straight to Muzak" song if ever there was one - I actively dislike) or annoying (have people forgotten "I want your sex"? I know I had, until I just read his obituary.)   And, while I'm speaking inappropriately of the deceased (again, I'm not dissing him as a person - I know very little about him - just expressing an opinion of his work that I know few agree with), I may as well spread the disrespect and admit that, amongst other signs, I always thought that Princess Diana's fondness for Wham! to be a pretty good indication that Prince Charles really had made a mistake in marrying her....
His voice was OK, I suppose, but I just found the material it was used for was usually not to my taste.  But then again, in music, my taste is very limited...

Continuing the Christmas theme

There's a good read to be found at The Japan Times on the "first" Japanese Christmas. 

Those missionaries really made converts work for their salvation:

The Christmas of 1552 could hardly have been more different from the Christmases we know today. Familiar Yuletide iconography — Christmas trees, reindeers, mistletoe and the like — was not yet established anywhere in the world (and, naturally, there was not a whiff of the commercialism that marks modern-day Christmas festivities.) The setting for this Christmas was the abandoned Daido-ji Buddhist temple, converted into the Jesuits’ house of worship and living quarters. It would be among the first of Japan’s nanban-dera, or southern barbarian temples, the name given to the makeshift Christian churches housed in Buddhist buildings, with shoji and engawa (a type of terrace) and, often the sole exterior visual difference, a cross erected upon the kawara roof tiles.

On Christmas Eve, Japanese believers were invited to spend the night in the Jesuit living quarters, cramming the venue as they embarked upon an all-nighter of hymns, sermons, scripture readings and Masses. For today’s readers, at least, de Alcacova’s account comes across as a rather gruelling experience, although there’s no reason to doubt the missionary’s numerous references to the “great joy” of the Japanese converts. From dusk until dawn, the new converts were treated to sermons and readings about “Deus” — the Portuguese word for God. The entire celebration contained no fewer than six Masses.

Father Juan Fernandez, an important Jesuit who wrote the West’s first lexicon of Japanese, opened the midnight scripture sessions. When his voice grew weary, he was relieved by “a Japanese youth with knowledge of our language,” de Alcacova writes. At the crack of dawn, Cosme de Torres — leader of the Jesuit mission after Xavier’s departure for India — led a new Mass, while another priest read passages from the gospels and the Epistles. After this night of Christian immersion, the faithful were allowed to go home, likely exchanging greetings of “Natala” — the Portuguese word for Christmas, meaning “birth.”

 There is much more of interest in this lengthy article, which you can read here.

Re-working the classics

For my 2016 Christmas graphic, I thought I would run some classics through Prismsa.
I wonder what da Vinci would have thought of this.   Here's the original, with the most Italian looking Christ child ever:

And here's part of it, turned a bit Japanesque via Prisma:

You know what I find interesting: I reckon this filter makes the Christ child look very much like a photo that's been filtered, not a painting.

I tried others through Prisma too, but I liked this the best.

As for your more classic Nativity scenes, how's this one for bright colours and an amazing amount of peculiar detail to analyse:

 

I find it very odd. Merry Christmas, anyway!

Update:  I've added a bit...

I expect such behaviour to be banned under ...ugh..President Trump

US Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, and a bunch of her staff, show themselves to understand what can please the Japanese, by dancing to a popular song, and including a mascot too:

An example of Trump not knowing who to listen to

Wow.  A really clear explanation by Matthew Yglesias as to why the simplistic ideas about trade by Trump approved advisers Ross & Navarro are just wrong. 

A good example of how Trump has no judgement as to who has credibility on virtually any subject.

Tiny food before the big food season

A Japanese thing I didn't know about:

YouTube is replete with Japanese tiny-food videos. Their creators shrink recipes to Lilliputian dimensions: pancakes the size of nickels, burgers compact enough to flip with chopsticks. The meals may be extremely diminutive, but they’re edible. Most of the ingredients are hulking compared with the finished products, but whenever possible, the chefs choose smaller stand-ins: Pearl onions or shallots sub for their bigger counterparts, and quail eggs replace chicken eggs.
Some of the YouTube channels devoted to tiny food post only periodically, while others roll out new installments a few times a week. Miniature Space, to take one example, has more than 1 million subscribers; its most popular video—a strawberry shortcake made from a single berry—has been viewed more than 8.5 million times. The videos are addictive; there’s something at once mesmerizing and weirdly funny about a gigantic hand trying to chisel a tiny sliver of meat, or smooth whisker-thin coats of icing on a multitiered “cake” cut from a single slice of bread.

All we want for Christmas - charcoal underpants

BBC - Future - How to tackle the most embarrassing problem on planes
I think I missed this article from two Decembers ago, about the problem of expanding intestinal gases on planes. (I'm glad to read it's not just my imagination - I had wondered for some time if the reduced cabin air pressure was really enough to cause this.  Apparently it is.) I also didn't know that you can buy charcoal filled underpants:

Even so, Rosenberg’s personal feeling is that more could be done – particularly since no smoking policies have made other odours more easily discernible. It may be possible to place charcoal within the seats themselves, he suggests – though previous studies have suggested that is not particularly effective, perhaps because most trousers and skirts create a “tunnel effect” that direct the fumes away from the cushion. Instead, he thinks that airlines would do better to use blankets with charcoal woven into the fabric. For people who are especially worried about their own flatulence, he points out that you can now buy underwear designed along similar principles; the American Journal of Gastroenterology reports that charcoal-lined underwear absorbs nearly 100% of the odour, compared to removable (and reusable) pads placed within trousers, which only absorb about 70%.

Somehow, I had previously missed reading about this brand of charcoal filtering underwear, and their rather upmarket looking website   You can thank me later...

No wonder defence industries like him...

The shambolic embarrassment of a President elect announcing potential policy as half-arsed thoughts on Twitter continues, I see:

 President-elect Donald Trump has said the US should enlarge its nuclear arsenal, an apparent reversal of a decades-long reduction of the nation's atomic weaponry that came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated calls for his country's arsenal to be reinforced.

And while the stoopid who voted for him thought it was great that careless reporting indicated Boeing was willing to shave about $1 billion off the cost of a new Air Force One (seriously, do reporters really think Boeing just admitted that it had bolstered the cost by 25% just because it could get away with it?), they might want to consider that all defence companies do have a great incentive to be seen to be flattering his massive ego, because they know he is a cash cow just waiting to be milked:

Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are already competing to build a next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the US Air Force, a project expected to cost at least $85 billion.
That is just one part of a modernisation plan that will contribute to what defence analysts call a gathering "bow wave" of spending in the coming decade on major weapons that future presidents will face.
Defence companies stand to benefit from a resurgence in military spending promised by Mr Trump and already under way in Western Europe and Asia as global tensions rise.

Vanilla coffee

On a whim, I recently put a few (well, maybe 5 or 6) drops of vanilla extract in my morning instant coffee.  (Moccona, if you're interested.)

It works well.  Not a strong taste, but sort of smooths out the flavour somewhat, I think.  Or perhaps I need to do a blind taste test to make sure I'm not imagining things.

Carry on.

Something vaguely optimistic

From The Guardian:

The Indian government has forecast that it will exceed the renewable energy targets set in Paris last year by nearly half and three years ahead of schedule.
A draft 10-year energy blueprint published this week predicts India will be generating 57% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2027. The Paris climate accord target was 40% by 2030.
The forecast reflects an increase in private sector investment in Indian renewable energy projects over the past year, according to analysts.
The draft national electricity plan also indicated that no new coal-fired power stations were likely to be required to meet Indian energy needs until at least 2027, raising further doubts over the viability of Indian mining investments overseas, such as the energy company Adani’s Carmichael mine in Queensland, the largest coalmine planned to be built in Australia.

Some astonishing figures

Why are rural areas seeing a rise in drug-dependent newborns? - CSMonitor.com

Gee, this isn't the cheeriest series of posts so close to Christmas. But Trump is on the way to the White House and the sense of doom is palpable.

Anyhow, here's one surprising sign of societal problems in rural America:

Roughly 1 out of every 130 babies in rural America are born dependent on drugs, according to a study published Monday.

The report, published in JAMA Pediatrics, shows a dramatic increase in neonatal abstinence syndrome – when a newborn baby is dependent on drugs and goes through withdrawal after birth – in rural areas between 2004 and 2013. In just a decade, the number of rural newborns suffering from chemical dependency skyrocketed from 1.2 per every 1,000 hospital births to 7.5 per 1,000.

While previous research has suggested an increase in neonatal abstinence syndrome in certain areas, the findings published Monday are the first to show just how widespread of a problem newborn drug dependency is across rural America, fueled by an increase in opioid use among women of all social classes and insufficient resources in far-flung areas to treat drug addiction.

Not a good sign...

Ice-melting temperatures forecast for Arctic midwinter | Environment | The Guardian

Earlier this year, when Arctic ice extent was low before summer, it looked possible that the summer melt would set a new record, and I thought that would be a good thing as the final nail in the coffin of AGW deniers, on top of record global temperatures convincingly beating the 1998 record, even on the dubious satellite records.  Well, it wasn't quite to be (a new record low ice extent, I mean), even though the summer melt was still very low.

But the recent patterns of global ice extent, and these odd winter temperatures, perhaps indicate we really don't have long to wait for the next record low.

Nick Cohen walking back from his Left hate?

I haven't followed his opinions all that regularly over the years, but I think it fair to say that, with this column, Nick Cohen's putting his attacks on the Left a bit more into perspective now, given the rise of the far Right in Europe and the US.   He really doesn't trust Russia, either.  Here's part of what he says about the murder this week in Turkey:

The propagandists of dictatorship are the most blatant exploiters of other people’s deaths. They use murder to brainwash their subjects at home and their fellow travellers abroad. Under the Tsars, Bolshevism and now Putin’s mixture of gangster capitalism and orthodox nationalism, hatred of the West has always been a defining feature of Russian ideology. When a Turkish police officer killed a Russian diplomat in Ankara this week – yelling ‘Don’t forget Aleppo!’ moments after the murder – Russia’s politicians and lickspittle ‘journalists’ instantly blacked out his real motives so they could fit him into their anti-Western story.

Even by the abysmal standards of Russian propaganda, the response to the assassination was breathtaking. It was either the result of Western protests about the Russian destruction of Aleppo or the direct result of a plot by ‘Nato secret services’. Despite helping Donald Trump to victory, and despite having the support of every far right party in Europe and Jeremy Corbyn’s contemptible British Labour party, Russia still has to regard the West as an enemy with supernatural powers. The propaganda is too deep-rooted and too useful to change. The naïve who think that Putin can be placated should watch it. Russia is telling us that not only that it cannot be appeased, it does not want to be appeased either. I doubt even a Trump presidency will stem the paranoid hatred.

Fear of blood

Menstruation really, really struck some old societies as something to be feared, didn't it?  And I see that in some corners of the globe, it still causes some terrible treatment of women and girls:

A 15-year-old girl died in a menstrual hut in western Nepal sometime between the night of Saturday, Dec. 17, and the morning of Sunday, Dec. 18. According to Nepal's Republica newspaper, Roshani Tiruwa, from Nepal's Achham district, went to the shed after eating dinner around 6 p.m. She lit a fire in the tiny mud hut before going to sleep. Tiruwa's father found her body the next morning. District police suspect the ninth-grader died from a lack of oxygen....

Since 2007, at least eight other deaths related to menstrual seclusion have been reported in Achham, a district with a population of 250,000. Carbon monoxide poisoning from lighting fires to heat the sheds was a common cause of death. Wild animal attacks was another.

The practice of menstrual seclusion is widespread in western Nepal. Taboos surrounding menstruation, rooted in Hindu mythology, have led to a range of restrictions on menstruating girls and women: from forbidding entrance to kitchens or temples to the practice of sleeping outside the house, called chaupadi. Many people believe that a menstruating girl who breaks the rules risks angering the gods and inviting misfortune on her family.

Chaupadi was outlawed by Nepal's Supreme Court in 2005 but proves difficult to eradicate. A 2011 U.N. report estimated 95 percent of women in the Achham district follow the practice. The government has invested in awareness campaigns and village by village has been declaring "chaupadi-free" zones. But that hasn't stopped the practice: Tiruwa's village was declared "chaupadi-free" in September 2015, according to Republica.

Tangled wins

Continuing my grudge against Frozen, this comedy song highlight from Tangled is about 20 times wittier than anything in the former movie.  You can read the lyrics on this version:

Not just me

I was watching Rick Stein's latest pleasant cooking/travel show last night, and he ended up in Greece, where he noted that a lot of people are "rather rude" about Greek cuisine.

Count me in on that.  Of all the European cuisines, I have always said that Greek is the least interesting, and I invariably find Greek restaurants are dull and way, way too similar.   Mind you, a good moussaka can be pretty nice, even though last night's example must be pretty damn heavy with olive oil.  But overall, I like to give Greek food a miss.

And in another example of confirmation that I am not alone, after all, I see that quite a few readers of The Guardian are criticising Frozen, a movie which I agree is completely underwhelming, with a popularity based on one song.  

Oh, and Jonathan Greene on Twitter has been sharing a three year old ribald attack on Love Actually, with which I also agree.  I really find that movie the pits, and would force people who love it into re-education camps if I were a not-so-benevolent dictator.  

Thanks, Hollywood cowards

Tom Arnold has a career to worry about?  Who knew?

I would say it is a near certainty that there is material of the kind Arnold describes floating around somewhere in Hollywood, but fear of legal action from Trump kept it in the closet.

What a bunch of cowards.

Clever mice

It turns out mice have a clever ability which has only just been discovered - the ability to sense oxygen levels through their nose: 

The genome of mice harbors more than 1000 odorant receptor genes, which enable them to smell myriad odors in their surroundings. Researchers ... have discovered that mice can also sense the oxygen level of the inhaled air using neurons in their nose. For this newly discovered sensory property, mice rely on two genes termed Gucy1b2 and Trpc2, but apparently not on odorant receptor genes.

The research team discovered that a specific type of chemosensory neuron in the mouse olfactory mucosa responds to oxygen decreases in the environment. Chemosensory cells typically detect an increase in the concentration of a substance. In mammals, a lack of oxygen was thought to be detected primarily by the carotid body, a sensory organ situated at the carotid arteries in the neck. Activation of the carotid body results in activation of the respiratory center in the brain. As mice live in burrows, it appears that during evolution an additional mechanism has developed in order to protect the individuals and their offspring from a shortage of oxygen....

Moreover, the scientists found that mice can learn very quickly where locations with low oxygen levels are, and then avoid these areas. By contrast, mice with inactivated Gucy1b2 or Trpc2 genes cannot distinguish between normal and modestly decreased oxygen levels in the external environment, and do not show avoidance behavior of these areas with a low oxygen level. These genes thus enable mice early on to select locations with an optimal oxygen level.

Blockchain doubts

I like to think I'm reasonably technology literate, but I have to admit, I can't for the life of me get what the IT pundits' excitement about Blockchain technology is all about.  I don't get what is meant to be transformational about it.  (Well, I think that this is what a bunch of people are claiming.)   That linked article is not the only thing I have read about it, but none of it convinces me that it is particularly exciting, or different, to the way things are done now.

I was always skeptical of 3D printing as being anything other than a niche method of manufacturing, and I think the early claims about it as the way of the future already look silly and overblown.   Bitcoin I always thought wildly oversold, too, and a bit of a silly idea that would mainly appeal to criminals and tax evaders.  I see that it was declared a failure early this year, although I am sure others will beg to differ.

I strongly suspect that Blockchain is something similar - an idea that has an odd ability to excite technophiles in a way that is out of proportion to the actual technology.

But, of course, I could be wrong.