A tasty medicine?

Strawberries!  They are now so cheap for so much of the year that I'm starting to worry how farmers can possibly be making money out of it without exploiting poor backpackers.

But a compound in them may be good for Alzheimers:

Salk scientists have found further evidence that a natural compound in strawberries reduces cognitive deficits and inflammation associated with aging in mice. The work, which appeared in the Journals of Gerontology Series A in June 2017, builds on the team's previous research into the antioxidant fisetin, finding it could help treat age-related mental decline and conditions like Alzheimer's or stroke.

The Salk team fed the 3-month-old prematurely aging mice a daily dose of fisetin with their food for 7 months. Another group of the prematurely aging mice was fed the same food without fisetin. During the study period, mice took various activity and memory tests. The team also examined levels of specific proteins in the mice related to brain function, responses to stress and inflammation.

"At 10 months, the differences between these two groups were striking," says Maher. Mice not treated with fisetin had difficulties with all the cognitive tests as well as elevated markers of stress and inflammation. Brain cells called astrocytes and microglia, which are normally anti-inflammatory, were now driving rampant inflammation. Mice treated with fisetin, on the other hand, were not noticeably different in behavior, cognitive ability or inflammatory markers at 10 months than a group of untreated 3-month-old mice with the same condition. Additionally, the team found no evidence of acute toxicity in the fisetin-treated mice, even at high doses of the compound.

Speaking of Alzheimers, last night's Four Corners was a sad case study of a few examples of people living with it in Australia.  It is a terrible disease, especially with the early onset variety.

The White House shambolic intrigue

Allahpundit at Hot Air goes through all the curious questions the latest Russian connection stories carry:  such as why some in the White House are going to the media to dob in Trump Jnr regarding his meeting with a Russian lawyer who was claiming to have dirt on Hilary.

In short - what more evidence of an absolutely shambolic state of affairs within the administration can people want?

But some will just shrug their shoulders, as if this isn't anything of concern.

Update:  Vox notes that Trump Jnr may have broken the law, and pretty much provided the evidence against himself.    Maybe helps explain explain why Jared or others would be going to the media to say "hey, it was all his idea"?

Vaccination in history

I didn't know about the controversy over smallpox vaccination in its earliest days in England.   Mind you, it sounds like the anti compulsory vaxxers had something to worry about, given the technique:

In 19th century Britain, the only vaccine widely available to the public was against smallpox. Vaccination involved making a series of deep cuts to the arm of the child into which the doctor would insert matter from the wound of a previously vaccinated child.
These open wounds left many children vulnerable to infections, blood poisoning and gangrene. Parents and anti-vaccination campaigners alike described the gruesome scenes that often accompanied the procedure, like this example from the Royal Cornwall Gazette from December 1886:

Some of these poor infants have been borne of pillows for weeks, decaying alive before death ended their sufferings.

That it's all a fake news fantasy is the fantasy

Hey Jason, I see that you're retweeting apologetics for Donald Trump again.   This is a worry.

It's a very stupid post, containing one element of truth (that at one time Trump could've been thought to be a wannabe Democrat, not Republican, candidate) but overwhelmingly, it's a very stupid argument made.  This part, in particular, saying that until relatively recently:

 No one would have doubted for a second that he was an American patriot, the least likely stooge for Russia or the USSR. I say all this to remind people that the image of Trump promulgated by the media and his other political enemies since he decided to run for President is entirely a creation of the last year or two.

If you consider yourself a smart person, a rational person, an evidence-driven person, you should reconsider whether 30+ years of reporting on Trump is more likely to be accurate (during this time he was a public figure, major celebrity, and tabloid fodder: subject to intense scrutiny), or 1-2 years of heavily motivated fake news.

Hsu even says "There were no accusations of racism", which is rather remarkable claim for a man who actually faced court for having racist policies in the business he ran for his Dad in the 1970's.

I'm not entirely sure of the intention of Hsu's argument here - surely he can't be suggesting that Trump didn't have much negative publicity over the years - he had plenty of that with his business and marriage failures.   Success as a reality TV host hardly wiped that away: some viewers may well have been watching to laugh at Trump's swaggering act, not admire it.

Or is it just that Hsu is taking offence at the idea that Trump could be a Russian stooge, and saying that this argument has only just arisen because of "fake news".  Well, might not the unprecedented (in modern times) refusal of a Presidential candidate to do a proper financial disclosure, and having a son making statements about how much funding his Dad got from Russia raise any question?   As well as Trump's frequently stated admiration for a Russian leader widely believed to have direct involvement in authorising political murders?   And people on his campaign (including, we know now, his son) having meetings with Russians offering dirt on Hilary.  Not to mention the actual intelligence agencies believing that the hacking was authorised from the top.

This is all meant to be "fake news"?   Yeah, sure.

As for the supposed outrageousness of the idea of Trump as Russian stooge - I strongly suspect that few people actually think Trump is an intentional Putin stooge, in the sense of actually planning to deliberately do Putin's direct bidding at the cost of America.  But since when has being a stooge required such intent?   Being dumb and able to be manipulated because you're an ill educated, vain  and psychologically needy man who has shown few business or relationship scruples and who seemingly only ran for the Presidency because it would be good for business, win or lose - perfect stooge material.

That anyone has to point that to someone like Hsu is pretty ridiculous.

Can't both be right

Well, isn't that funny.   Back in May, I questioned Jason Soon's verdict that French President Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with.  

Today, Andrew Bolt is criticising Malcolm Turnbull for calling Macron a "centrist", whereas Bolt knows he's an "old socialist".  (Culture warrior-ing prevents Bolt from seeing otherwise - because Macron is completely on board with climate change.)

Still, Macron truly seems to a be a case of people seeing what they want to see.

I'll stick with my cautious verdict in comments to my May post - he's a relatively mild economic liberal, especially coming off a quite Left base in economics in France, but his overall suite of policy ideas picks from both the Left and Right.  He therefore counts pretty much as a centrist, for lack of a better term, although perhaps one who chooses an unusually wide range of policy ideas.

The culture war means never having to say you were wrong

Tim Blair mocks the recent Lateline episode in which various young scientist types spoke about their fears for the future, including whether they should have children, and where they think they may need to retire to as temperatures rise.  (Tasmania is popular, but the degree to which rainfall pattern changes may affect it seems rather uncertain - which isn't great for a place so reliant on hydro-electric.)

I saw this on Lateline and knew it would get mocking from Right wing culture warriors who have dumbed themselves down sufficiently such that they have not a clue who to listen to on climate change.  Delingpole, with his arts degree, or whatever he has, is apparently a more reliable guide than thousands of scientists who have contributed to climate change research.

That said, I don't think it's a wise thing to talk about not having children for the sake of climate change.  Let's face it, the kids of scientists are quite likely to be smart and rich enough to arrange things for themselves (such as moving to a more temperate climate) so as not to be a direct victim of climate change, much more so than a kid from some poor country in Africa or the Indian subcontinent.   And really, we want smart people to have kids and (hopefully) bring them up to be able to contribute to solutions to the problems climate change may bring.

But as with all culture warriors, Blair's attack (which is all about how Islamic terrorism is a direct and immediate threat and why are stoopid scientists not panicking about that instead of climate change) makes two fundamental mistakes:

a.  it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time - yes, I know, a hard concept for any culture warrior obsessed with the Islamic and migrant threat to get a grasp on.  (Am I being unfair to Blair here?  I'm not sure he carries on about African immigration or even Islamic immigration as much as Bolt does - they seem to have divided things between them so that Blair will deal with cranky feminism, Waleed Aly and Jonathan Green - man, does he obsess about Jonathan;  Bolt deals with immigration and aborigines; and they both obsess about the ABC generally.)

b.  he lives in a fantasy world where heat seems to never matter.  Take this:

Very well, then. If we’re calculating risk based on the number of dead bodies, let’s consider the toll so far due to climate change.
It’s literally zero.

A big call, given that heatwaves kill off quite a few Indians each year, not to mention floods.   A milder climate in a cool to cold country may well be better for the population's health, but in a country that's already warm to hot for most of the year? 

Of course, what he's relying on is an inability to precisely say which extreme weather event can be ascribed to climate change, given that some extreme weather events would happen even without it.

But that is such a shallow way of considering it, unless you're a culture warrior, which essentially means never having to make yourself better informed on a topic you just know is wrong.

Dumbed down

Trump's speech in Poland did not get rave reviews from anyone other than his fellow culture warriors, who have developed a paranoia about the end of the West at the hands of Islamic extremism.

It was, patently, not a good speech and (at least in transcript) was delivered poorly, with several Trumpian moments where he made it all about him, again.  As for its key paragraph, Peter Beinart covers it well:

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

 Exactly.  Hence it was only members of his own, dumbed down, "tribe" who thought this was a monumental speech.

That Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt could think this was a great speech just shows what inept and completely unreliable commentators they've become.  I actually find it hard to credit how they could even get so stupid.   I honestly did not previously think culture warrior-ing to be so capable of blinding and dumbing down people's judgement. 

As for Trump's performance at the G20, I have to give credit to Chris Uhlmann, who I don't trust generally for being too soft on the Coalition and unreliable on climate change.  His assessment of Trump, though, rang very true, for the most part.  (I only disagree when he said that there were "interesting" observations in the Poland speech about defending the values of the West.)  But this part, yes:

...it is the unscripted Mr Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West's institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press.

He was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some other leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him.

Mr Trump is a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity. To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters. And there is no value placed on the meaning of words. So what is said one day can be discarded the next.

So, what did we learn this week?

We learned Mr Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the US as a global leader. He managed to diminish his nation and to confuse and alienate his allies.

He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century.

Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we'll miss it when it is gone.
And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear.

Marvel watched

Off we went to see Spider-Man: Homecoming this afternoon.

Yes, it's very good.  I have one quibble:  the climatic fight sequence was not as thrilling as the two other main set pieces in the film.  It was a tad silly, truth be told, even by Marvel's dubious physics standards.

Apart from that:  yes, it has plenty of laughs (key to my enjoyment of any superhero film), a very likeable actor as the lead,  a Ramones song featured prominently that make us older folk feel good about music from our youth, and a great plot twist which I don't think anyone in the audience saw coming.  Even the Stan Lee appearance was better than the one in Guardians 2, I thought.

The movie will make a lot of money, and I don't mind.

Sounding very sensible

John Quiggin's article in The Guardian this week sounded very sensible to me, in a "big picture" kind of way.

Look, it's the understudy

I've always thought that Grace Collier was a lightweight, look-at-me-I-used-to-be-vaguely-Left contrarian with nothing interesting to say,  but with her silly, silly piece in the Spectator, I see she's gone into auditioning for the role of  "Hyperbolic and Somewhat Unhinged Culture Warrior" currently being played by Mark Latham.  It's true, you never know when he may next blow a fuse.

The funniest thing about the piece is one of the comments following:

This is all makes so much sense to one person

False flag in Connecticut

Trumpkins here always suspicious of the Left sometimes doing "false flag" vandalism on Mosques, etc, so they should be interested to read of this:

A supporter of President Trump in Connecticut says he wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on elementary school equipment hoping to frame Democrats because he believes they are "disrespectful to our government." 

Stephen Marks, 32, wrote “Kill Trump,” “Left is the best,” "Bernie Sanders 2020" and “Death to Trump” on playground equipment at Hartford's Morley Elementary School last month, according to the Hartford Courant.

Hand avoidance

Pretty hilarious, the look on Trump's face as the Polish First Lady wisely avoids the chance of a handshake with him:

via GIPHY

Update:  I've read since that she shakes Trump's hand after Melania's.  Maybe that made President Manbaby feel better...

About Yassmin

I haven't really paid that much attention to her - just as I find it easy not to read opinion pieces by rude feminists like Clementine Ford, who wingnuts similarly obsess over.  But I did think the reaction to Yassim's ANZAC Day tweet was completely over the top and out of proportion.  However, that Guardian column she wrote about cultural appropriation was extremely self indulgent, and it may well be that her Muslim apologetics re feminism  are semi to fully ludicrous to many ears.

But it's surely the case that it should be possible for someone like her to be both attention seeking, hold annoying opinions, and wrong in much of what she writes, yet still not warrant the vicious obsession of aggro wingnuts in attacking her.  I might be wrong, but I strongly suspect that she probably has received scary death threat type of messages.   And don't say that Andrew Bolt has received them too as if that makes it right.    Neither of them deserve that. 

Boys fighting

A somewhat amusing account here of a famous altercation between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman.   Eastman didn't care for Hemingway's romantic fondness of bullfighting:

In a passage that would come to haunt Max later, he likened writing that derived pleasure from such senseless bloodshed—writing like Hemingway’s, in other words—to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.” To Papa Hemingway’s supporters this was blasphemy. “I don’t know when I have written anything that I have heard more about from various sources than that article,” sighed Max. Not bothering to read Max’s review carefully, Hemingway’s defenders engaged in the kind of public posturing and muscle flexing that ironically confirmed Max’s concerns. 

Which led 3 years later to this:

On August 17, 1937, Max was visiting his editor Maxwell Perkins’ office, discussing a new edition of Enjoyment of Poetry, when Hemingway sauntered in. He was not in a particularly generous mood: his marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer was on the rocks, and he was about to return to Spain, where the civil war he had been covering had reinforced his contempt for literary refinement. Opening his shirt, he encouraged Max to assess the authenticity of his chest hair, while he mocked Max’s chest, which was, remarked Perkins, as “bare as a bald man’s head.” Then everything went haywire. Seeing the well-fed, white-clad, good-looking Max, tanned from tennis and hours spent napping on the beach, Hemingway erupted. The way Max remembered it, Hemingway was crude and  aggressive. “What did you say I was sexually impotent for?” he snarled. Conveniently, a copy of Art and the Life of Action was sitting on Perkins’ desk. Max attempted to point out a passage—a positive one, we might imagine—that he thought would clarify that he had never wanted to trash Hemingway. But Hemingway, muttering and swearing, zeroed in on a different passage, and a particularly good one it was, too: “Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.” This was Max at his best, the use of the plural “evidences” giving the line a rhythmic lilt: “évi / dénces of / réd-blooded/ máscu / línity.” An altercation ensued, during which Max, as both parties agreed, got “socked” on the nose with his own book. Everything was happening very fast after that. Max charged at Hemingway. Books and other stuff from Perkins’ desk went flying to the ground. Convinced that the much younger Hemingway was going to kill his friend, Perkins rushed in to help. By the time he had reached the two men they were both on the floor. Max was on top, although Perkins felt this was by accident only. But Max would later tell everyone who cared to listen that he had been the winner. Recognizing the disadvantage imposed on him by age and lack of physical fitness (“I would have kissed the carpet in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway”), he claimed he had used a wrestling move to throw Hemingway on his back over Max Perkins’ desk. Hemingway assured the Times no such thing had taken place, that Max instead had taken his slap “like a woman.” He went on to challenge Max to meet him in a locked room and read to him his review in there, with “all legal rights waived”—the Hemingway equivalent to challenging his adversary to a duel. There is one detail, however, that does make Max’s account credible: he did know how to wrestle.

Very early practice

The title says it all:   Fetal Onanism: A Surprising Scientific Debate.

Ok, well here's the opening paragraph, too:

The medical journal Prenatal Diagnosis recently played host to a vigorous debate over whether a male fetus was spotted engaging in masturbation on ultrasound. 

The whole debate (no "mass debate" puns, please) was about the proper interpretation of anatomy on ultrasound images. 

On your skin - a continuing story

Gee, they are still working out what sorts of things are living on our skin.   Not just bacteria, but archaea:

The researchers conducted both genetic and chemical analyses of samples collected from human volunteers ranging in age from 1 to 75. They found that archaea (pronounced ar-KEY-uh) were most abundant in subjects younger than 12 and older than 60. Their study has been published in Scientific Reports (a Nature journal) in an article titled, "Human age and skin physiology shape diversity and abundance of Archaea on skin."

"The skin microbiome is usually dominated by bacteria," said Hoi-Ying Holman, director of the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology (BSISB) Program and a senior author on the paper. "Most of the scientific attention has been on bacteria, because it's easier to detect. Based on the literature, six years ago we didn't even know that archaea existed on human skin. Now we've found they're part of the core microbiome and are an important player on human skin."

These are usually tough bugs:

It was not until the 1970s that scientists realized how different archaea were from bacteria, and they became a separate branch on the tree of life -- the three branches being Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (which includes all plants and animals). Archaea are commonly found in extreme environments, such as hot springs and Antarctic ice. Nowadays it is known that archaea exist in sediments and in Earth's subsurface as well, but they have only recently been found in the human gut and linked with the human microbiome....

This study stemmed from a planetary protection project for NASA and the European Space Agency. "We were checking spacecraft and their clean rooms for the presence of archaea, as they are suspected to be possible critical contaminants during space exploration -- certain methane-producing archaea, the so-called methanogens, could possibly survive on Mars," Moissl-Eichinger said. "We did not find many signatures from methanogens, but we found loads of Thaumarchaeota, a very different type of archaea that survives with oxygen."

At first it was thought the Thaumarchaeota were from the outside, but after finding them in hospitals and other clean rooms, the researchers suspected they were from human skin. So they conducted a pilot study of 13 volunteers and found they all had these archaea on their skin.

As a follow-up, which is the current study, they tested 51 volunteers and decided to get a large range in ages to test the age-dependency of the archaeal signatures. Samples were taken from the chest area. The variations in archaeal abundance among the age groups were statistically significant and unexpected. "It was surprising," Holman said. "There's a five- to eightfold difference between middle-aged people and the elderly -- that's a lot."

Plastic rice - the urban myth

Well, maybe "urban" is not quite the right word, since the BBC explains that the myth that rice sellers are adding plastic fake rice in with their real rice seems to be most popular in some poor African countries now, after starting in China.

The internet is terrific, except when it's not.

One other thing about the baby Gard case...

All of those Right wingers complaining that it's outrageous that a court should be supplanting the parents decision about what's right for their child - where's your outrage when courts intervene to override Jehovah's Witness parents' refusal to allow blood transfusions?   In cases such as this.

As I argued in my previous post, sometimes parents can't be relied on to make reasonable decisions, and it's appropriate the courts intervene.  

And don't think that Catholic thought on this is uniform.  The rather conservative columnist priest Fr Lucie-Smith in the Catholic Herald wrote back in April:

On initial reading of the case, it seems that the court has condemned Charlie to death. But the decision in fact may be the right one to make. It is absolutely true, of course, that we should do our best to preserve life, but not at any cost. There comes a time in all cases where doctors can, and indeed must, tell patients that there is nothing further that medical science can do for them. For there may well come a time when further medical intervention is either useless or counter-productive, and nature must be allowed to take its course.

However, while it may well be the case that families are ready to accept the sad decision that palliative care only is to be offered from now on in the case of a beloved grandparent in her 90s, it is quite understandable that the parents of a very young child may not be willing to accept a similar medical judgment. That presumably explains why this case has ended up in court. Charlie’s doctors and Charlie’s parents found themselves in profound disagreement, of the sort that could only be resolved in the High Court.

Analysing the Republican voter

David Brooks at the New York Times has a go at analysing why it seems that Republican voters seem happy to vote against their own economic interests. 

He takes the "they have a residual sense of independence and dislike of government that came from the American frontier communities" line, which puts a somewhat noble sheen on the matter.  Who can dislike a person who declines a government handout on the grounds that they would rather make their own way in life and fully control their own destiny?

The trouble is, as a very large number of people in comments are saying, lots of Republican voters actually want to hold onto their government benefits (in the form of Medicare, veteran's entitlements, etc) as strongly as they want the right to have an armoury in the basement.   Hence, Trump support comes from his promising everything to his base - less government and more government at the same time.   Also, there's no doubt that Trump played up to resentment of others - countries that have done well with globalisation, migrants (both legal and illegal, when you think about it), blacks and feminists. 

I think Brooks was too generous - he should have been more critical of the urge of Republicans to vote for their emotional interests, especially when they have been conditioned and informed by the grossly misleading echo chamber of the Right wing media - which has to take an enormous amount of blame for the sad state of American politics.    (He could have then spread the same criticism around to argue that for those on the Left for whom identity politics is everything might also sometimes be voting for their emotional interests.   The thing is, though, someone for whom - say - gay marriage is the most important issue is at least not as likely to jeopardise generations of descendants to planet wide problems by denying science on climate change.)  

Movies

July might turn out to have a couple of good movies.   Despite my Nolan skepticism, I still think the trailer for Dunkirk makes it look very realistic and worth seeing (let's see if he can stuff up the dialogue enough to make it a failure); and this new Spiderman has such good reviews, most indicating that it's pretty funny, that I think I need to see it.

Incidentally, I have never seen Memento, by Nolan, and for some reason it is not available on Google Play.  I wonder why. 

More evidence for the sad (angry) sacks

I noted recently that Catallaxy is mentally unhealthy for its commenters, because its misleadingly reassuring echo chamber effect isolates them from reality, increasing their anger at why the media/rest of the world just don't get it.   More evidence:

Turnbull is preferred as Liberal leader to Tony Abbott by 68-32, with Coalition voters favouring Turnbull 73-27. However, One Nation voters prefer Abbott by a massive 77-23. It appears that as Turnbull has become more centrist over the last two months, the hard right has moved towards One Nation.

In ReachTEL’s forced choice better PM question, Turnbull leads by 54-46, a two point gain for Turnbull since the May Channel 7 ReachTEL. Same sex marriage is supported by 62-26, with 59% in favour of a plebiscite to decide the issue, while 41% prefer a parliamentary vote. 64% thought penalty rates should be higher on Sunday than Saturday.

Hey, a new phone

So, I did go and buy myself the Moto G5 Plus.   $350 from Good Guys, on special. 

May I carry on about the amazing abilities of smartphones, again, and how everyone should be in awe every day they use one?

Given this phone apparently has a gyro and accelerometer sensors, I have been telling my kids that if only I could plug it into a rocket, I suspect it could navigate me to the Moon and back.  (I also have a fantasy that it will be stolen by an alien trying to repair its defective flying saucer.) 

Anyway, all looking good so far, but setting up stuff on it reminds me again about what a problem it is keeping track of multiple account passwords these days.   I've not found the best solution for this.  Sure, it's convenient setting everything up to remember passwords, but when you need to type them in again somewhere else a year later...

I do like the way Yahoo mail can be set to log in on a computer by answering a message on your phone confirming that you are trying to log in.  I now occasionally get notification this way of attempted log ins from funny parts of the world (I think it has happened 3 times in the past 6 months.)   That's sort of a worry on the one hand, but on the other, it feels good to know you've defeated an attempt from somewhere.

Advice to a reader

So, JC, you're all taken with your nicotine being delivered through an e-cigarette now, instead of your regular tobacco hit.  (I know, you didn't smoke much.)  Anyway, thought you might be interested in parts of this article from 2016, at Live Science:

But regardless of how the nicotine is delivered — whether through e-cigs or conventional cigarettes — it still has effects on the body. The drug is a cardiovascular stimulant, and can potentially worsen heart disease in people who already have severe heart conditions. However, it's not known whether nicotine alone can cause heart disease in people who don't have heart problems, said Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco researcher and professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health.

But there's some evidence that e-cigarettes can have a substantial effect on blood vessels, and may increase people's heart attack risk in that way, Glantz said....

Studies evaluating whether e-cigarettes are less harmful than cigarettes have been inconclusive, according to a review of studies published in the journal Tobacco Control in May 2014.

Moreover, the long-term health effects in people who get nicotine in a vaporized form over time are not known, Siegel said. It's also unclear whether propylene glycol, a known irritant to the respiratory tract, could result in lung problems after decades of vaping, he said.

And because e-cigarettes have been on the market for only about 10 years, there have been no long-term studies of people who have used them for 30 to 40 years. Therefore, the full extent of e-cigs' effects on heart and lung health, as well as their cancer-causing potential, over time is not known, Glantz told Live Science.

 And since that article, you might care to read this one:

Electronic cigarettes may increase the risk of heart disease, researchers at UCLA report.
The team found that two risk factors for heart disease were elevated in 16 e-cigarette users compared with 18 nonsmokers.

And this one:  

Our findings indicate that Electronic cigarette use, when adjusted for other risk factors, is associated with a 42 % increased odds of myocardial infarction. This increase in odds is consistent regardless of traditional cigarette smoking history. More studies are needed to further assess this risk.

You can thank me later...

Poor decisions - parents and courts

I've said many times here that I am not in favour of euthanasia laws, but I do get very irritated by reflexive conservative Christian attitudes to prolonging life by artificial means in cases where the doctors want to withdraw life support, and parents or relatives disagree.

Why do conservatives always assume that the parents know what is best?

The irony in the current Baby Gard case (which Trump has opportunistically weighed in on - groan), is that the US neurologist who has offered to try an experimental treatment is explicitly saying that it would be a "treatment, not a cure", and at most may achieve this:

He said the therapy, which would be tried for six months, would provide a "small chance" of a meaningful improvement in Charlie's brain function.

"[Charlie] may be able to interact. To smile. To look at objects," he said.

Charlie at the moment is (apparently) completely reliant on ventilation and a feeding tube, and is not conscious.   Given that I'm sure both ventilation and feeding tubes are distressing if you are awake, at least he is not suffering.   (True, a young, awake baby would not understand what is happening, but the physical sensation of having feeding tube and ventilation is presumably detectable by a conscious baby, and is surely not pleasant.)

It would seem that, at best, the neurologist is suggesting that he might be improved enough to gain consciousness, but if that happens while he is still reliant on a feeding tube and ventilator, that is where the true suffering would begin!

Don't the parents recognise that risk?

The mother (and her supporters) have been quoted as saying that even if this treatment doesn't work, it's worth the experiment because that is how effective treatments might be found.   I can see the "in principle" reasoning for that - but no acknowledgement that a partially successful treatment sounds likely to increase this baby's suffering before his ultimate death. And,  it very much seems that there is no real medical opinion that there will ever be a cure for mitochondrial disease, given the problem is at the cellular level.   

Look,  these cases are tragic and he is a really beautiful baby, but the fact remains that highly emotional parents, and conservative Christians who believe in miracles, may well not be capable of making the best decisions in cases like this.   There is a strong case to be made that it is the English doctors and the judges backing them who are the ones being more compassionate here.

Therapy animals

There is quite a bit of common sense on display in this article about the therapy animal fad in America.   The idea has definitely gotten a bit out of hand: 

A therapy-animal trend grips the United States. The San Francisco airport now deploys a pig to calm frazzled travelers. Universities nationwide bring dogs (and a donkey) onto campus to soothe students during finals. Llamas comfort hospital patients, pooches provide succor at disaster sites and horses are used to treat sex addiction.

And that duck on a plane? It might be an emotional-support animal prescribed by a mental health professional.

As some in the article say, it's hardly surprising to find that a lot of troubled people find some comfort with being around animals - but bumping it up into a form of therapy can get more than a little silly (as with the duck story.)   I was interested to read this:

Using animals in mental health settings is nothing new. In the 17th century, a Quaker-run retreat in England encouraged mentally ill patients to interact with animals on its grounds. Sigmund Freud often included one of his dogs in psychoanalysis sessions. Yet the subject did not become a research target until the American child psychologist Boris Levinson began writing in the 1960s about the positive effect his dog Jingles had on patients.

I was also wryly amused by the therapy bear cub gone wrong story:

But there are good reasons for rigorous research on animals and mental health. ... Crossman pointed to a 2014 incident at Washington University in St. Louis as an example of animal therapy gone wrong. A bear cub brought to campus during finals week nipped some students, causing a rabies scare that almost ended with the animal being euthanized. More generally, Serpell said, the popular idea that pets make you happier “is not a harmless distortion. … If the public believes that getting an animal is going to be good for them, many times an unsuitable person will get an unsuitable animal, and it doesn’t work out well for either.”

Guns in America and the Trump effect

It seems to me that it now has to be a case of victims being within special categories in American mass shootings before the world media pays that much attention to them.   Hence, while a nightclub shooting where 28 are injured, or a hospital rampage by a mad doctor, both get noticed, media attention moves on pretty fast.   I'm suspecting that it is partly the Trump effect - the media is so amazed at the mental 13 year old who became President**that it crowds out attention to all but the most spectacular examples of death by gun.

I also have been meaning to post about the new study that indicates that right to carry laws in the US do not make States safer.  Quite the opposite.

It's one of the great ironies that rabid guns rights advocates are also likely to be climate change denialists who believe (even if they don't put it this way) that correlation does not mean causation when it comes to increasing CO2 and rising global temperatures, yet they won't apply the same rule to decreasing crime rates and looser gun laws, where it actually deserves to be applied*.    This recent study address that particular issue.

I liked the concluding remarks in The Atlantic interview with one of the study's authors (linked above):

Ewing: Is the general takeaway that gun owners in these states are more likely to commit crimes because they are allowed to be armed all the time?

Donohue: The one thing that the paper puts most of its focus on is estimating what the net impact is. There could be some beneficial use of these guns, but overall the harm outweighs the benefit. And the harm comes in many different forms.

For example, the Philando Castile case in St. Paul, Minnesota. [After he was stopped by police,] he immediately told the officer that he was a right-to-carry holder and had a gun, which you’re advised to do. And then the officer shot at him seven times. It scares the hell out of people when they think someone has a gun. Obviously, that right-to-carry holder wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he ended up getting killed anyway.

When more people are carrying guns, things can get more heated. There are times in which the gun could be involved in a way that thwarts a crime, but for the same reason that the officer shot Castile, guns tend to escalate the situation.

The NRA offers a very simplistic view to the public in the way in which the world works, which is: There are all these bad guys out there, but now we’re going to give you a gun, and that means you’re going to be able to be the good guy who saves your life and the lives of other people.

But [with more] people carrying around guns—they’re going to be losing them, they’re going to be stolen, there are going to be more criminals with guns, and the criminals are more likely to carry guns because they know there are guns out there. For a whole array of reasons, more concealed-gun-carrying outside the home pushes up violent crime.

*  And in climate change it has been applied, in the sense that scientists have excluded other explanations. 

**  I think it's a bit silly of CNN to be saying the tweet encourages violence against reporters - but it does show the juvenile mind of Trump.

Boxing observed

I've never paid (much) attention to boxing, but having a bout on in my city which attracted a stadium audience of fifty odd thousand, a large international viewership, and a week long build up in the media, I did notice it today.  A few observations:

a.  It was, I take it, a close win; but the sport does seem to have a credibility problem if some well known figures within it are going to carry on as much about a close decision not going the way they thought it should as they did today.

b.  I won't go into the matter of concussion and blood and whether it's a sport that really should be endorsed as entertainment.   (As it happens, I don't really have a strong view.)   But I was annoyed to see on TV in the post match wrap up that our Lord Mayor (who was thrilled with the national and international publicity his city received for hosting it) had a couple of young, bare female torsos standing prominently behind him at his press conference table.  Really, isn't the quasi-gladiatorial nature of the enterprise appealing enough to the average male viewer without throwing in titillating female (un)dress too?  I thought the promoters could do a fair bit towards making it seem a sport more connected to modern mores if they avoided adding superfluous heterosexual  messaging into the mix. 

c.  One thing I don't get about boxing at this level is how those who want to be close to the action will get all dressed up for it, as if it's as sophisticated as going to a ritzy European opera house.   (Bear in mind, I have never been to an opera - I'm just trying to think of a form of entertainment most associated with dressing up for a night out.)  Sure, it may well just be a factor of the wealth required to get an expensive seat, but if you're going to a show that appeals at a visceral level, why sit at it in a suit and look on impassively, as most seem to do.   I have always wondered about this, as it strikes me as very incongruous - I have this feeling that, by rights, it should be more like how viewing Shakespeare in his day at the Globe was depicted in Shakespeare in Love - pretty rough and ready regardless of how much money you have. 

Kon-tiki revisited

I never read the book, but I'm sure it was lying around the house when I was a child, so I at least knew about it; but it does seem that the 20th century fame of the Kon-Tiki expedition has faded a lot from popular memory.  (I'm extrapolating from the fact that my teenage son didn't know about it - but I think I'm right.)

However, one serendipitous off shoot of reading reviews of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie was that I learned that the same Norwegian directors had made a pretty well regarded movie of the expedition, simply called Kon-Tiki.  And, as luck would have it, it is available on SBS on Demand, and has been for some time.

We watched it last night, and it is a genuinely well made and engaging movie.  I was not expecting it to be in English, and I was particularly impressed with the visual realism of nearly all of it - particularly with the sharks and other sea creatures lurking around much of the time. 

I see from reading the Wikipedia entry that the movie does take considerable liberties with the true, on water, events - I guess that was probably inevitable, and I would recommend not reading Wiki until after viewing the movie, so as to not spoil a key scene.  

In a way, this doesn't really worry me, as the real voyage and the theory behind it (that Polynesians had come from Peru) was never thought to be probable in the first place, and that still pretty much stands to this day despite the raft's journey.  (Although it looks like look there was a genetic mixing of South Americans with Polynesians at least in Easter Island, but when and how that happened is still unclear.)  On my "should I be annoyed with the historical inaccuracies or not" scale, I'm happy to put this one into the "no, as it encouraged me to double check on the real facts" category.

Anyway, well worth watching.

Morning Trump

This Trump, Morning Joe warfare is quite the thing, isn't it?

The Washington Post story has thousands of comments following it, mostly despairing about Trump's behaviour, of course.  Some were amusing:

Another WAPO article lists the criticism of Trump from cable tv commentators.   Worth reading. 

A Brisbane winter

It's supposed to be getting cold in the southern States today, and cooler up here as well.

I have to say that, so far, this Brisbane "winter" has been very mild.   And I don't think it's just in my mind - there seem to be things fruiting/flowering in the garden out of season.  The dwarf mulberry, in particular, which is not doing very well in a pot and needs to be moved, has been fruiting in the last month.   The lavender has also been flowering a lot, although to be honest, I don't recall if lavender normally does well at this time of year.

The Right has never been stupider

I simply cannot believe the stupidity to which the American (Trump supporting) Right (and its Australian counterparts) have descended.

Now, whenever a news organisation retracts one story (or part of one story) out of literally thousands regarding Russian interference in the US election, this is supposed to be a complete vindication of the childish, self serving, quasi authoritarian Trumpian line of "fake news", even after Trump switches tactic from claiming for months that there was nothing to the Russian hacking claims at all, to blaming Obama for not taking action on it.  (And, of course, despite an active special counsel  investigation under way.)   

Is there a lot more lead in the water in America than they realise?  (That's no excuse for Australian sycophants, though.)   I'm starting to look for some explanation, because it just seems all so abnormal.

Quantum and causation

Some more "quantum is weird" reading from Nature.com here:

How quantum trickery can scramble cause and effect

One voice in a head is enough, isn't it?

In a lengthy Atlantic article about research comparing psychics who claim to hear voices of the dead, and schizophrenics who also hear voices, there is one paragraph about an idea ("tulpas") which is new to me:

In her work, Luhrmann has come across groups of people who—unlike Jessica—hear voices only as a result of practice. She gives the example of tulpamancers: people who create tulpas, which are believed to be other beings or personalities that co-exist along inside a person’s mind along with their own. “Somebody in that community estimated to me that one-fifth of the community had frequent voice hearing experiences with their tulpas, that their tulpas talked in a way that was auditory or quasi auditory,” Luhrmann said, a practice that she was told takes two hours a day to develop.“That’s connected to work. Psychosis is not connected to effort. It happens to people.”

Odd.

Neurosurgeons behaving badly - very badly

It's a pretty gobsmacking story to read of two neurosurgeons using party drugs like they're going out of style.   And, the tribunal said, there was evidence of plenty of nurses using them recreationally too.

I wonder if patients should take one of these with them to hospital, and ask their surgeon to provide a sample.  (I didn't even know anyone could buy those, 'til now.) 

You had me at "you shouldn't exercise"...

Actually, the article is about why you shouldn't think exercise will help a lot with weight loss (despite it being good for plenty of other reasons.)

(I'm not an obese butterball, honestly.  I just find going out to deliberately exercise intellectually boring.)

In which I say two conservative-ish things

1.   While I think that Federal Labor is looking the better party for dealing with all sorts of things at the moment, I regret that Shorten is saying that Labor will make Sunday penalty rates go back up again if elected.

My common sense judgement is that penalty rates got too high, and deserve the present decrease, which is relatively modest in any case. 

I wish Labor could accept the same.

2.  There is an article at NPR in which someone argues that "cultural appropriation is indefensible"  for writers and artists generally.     It is completely and utterly unconvincing.   Take this, for example:

I teach classes and seminars alongside author and editor Nisi Shawl on Writing the Other, and the foundation of our work is that authors should create characters from many different races, cultures, class backgrounds, physical abilities, and genders, even if — especially if — these don't match their own. We are not alone in this. You won't find many people advising authors to only create characters similar to themselves. You will find many who say: Don't write characters from minority or marginalized identities if you are not going to put in the hard work to do it well and avoid cultural appropriation and other harmful outcomes. These are different messages. But writers often see or hear the latter and imagine that it means the former.

So what is cultural appropriation?  She explains:

Cultural appropriation can feel hard to get a handle on, because boiling it down to a two-sentence dictionary definition does no one any favors. Writer Maisha Z. Johnson offers an excellent starting point by describing it not only as the act of an individual, but an individual working within a "power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group."

Uhuh.   

This has lead to accusations of gatekeeping by Malik and others: Who has the right to decide what is appropriation and what isn't? What does true cultural exchange look like? There's no one easy answer to either question.

But there are some helpful guidelines: The Australian Council for the Arts developed a set of protocols for working with Indigenous artists that lays out how to approach Aboriginal culture as a respectful guest, who to contact for guidance and permission, and how to proceed with your art if that permission is not granted. Some of these protocols are specific to Australia, but the key to all of them is finding ways for creativity to flourish while also reducing harm.

Well, seems to me that the accusations of gatekeeping are entirely justified by the explanation in the second paragraph. 

I'm sorry, this is all ill defined bulldust, if you ask me.   Sure, I can understand people being annoyed by  lazy or insultingly inaccurate depictions of culture by an artist outside of it.    That can just be called "bad art".   But to try to dress it up in high minded, vaguely defined, heavy on offence taking,  resentful of the potential for someone outside to make money, demands for only doing art one way, is just painful and silly.

I can hear the sound of furious typing coming from the Sydney Institute and Catallaxy...

To be honest, I haven't been following the ins and outs of the investigation of George Pell for child sex abuse offences in any close detail.  I had the impression that the evidence was very old and not very convincing, but as I say, that was just an impression.  

So I am a bit surprised to see that the Victorian Police have charged him.

This will, I expect, infuriate the Catholics and other sundry conservatives of Catallaxy, as well as Andrew Bolt and Gerard Henderson, who have been convinced for many a year that Pell is a lovely, lovely man the subject of a witch hunt.  And, to be honest, there is a witch hunt air about the reaction to Pell from many on the Left.

I suspect the truth in Pell's behaviour lies somewhere between the two extremes:  whether any of it results in a criminal conviction, I would be surprised;  but I also suspect people might have been right to worry a little bit about his behaviour at one time.

The whole thing is unfortunate in many respects.   But for now, watch the steam rise from the predictable defenders.  

Thanks, Noam

Seeing I think 1984 is a vastly overrated book, and I'm still annoyed that I had to write an English class review of it in which I felt compelled by the teacher to praise it,  I'm always interested if I spot anyone expressing a similar view.  Apparently, I have Noam Chomsky on my side:

In the interview at the top of the post (with clumsy subtitles), Noam Chomsky makes some similar observations, and declares We the superior book to both Brave New World and 1984 (which he pronounces “obvious and wooden”).

Yay Noam.

Lukewarmers: making the perfect the enemy of the good

There's a very good explanation here by Dana Nuccitelli about the recent paper by Santer and others which identified the problem with some (modest) overestimates of atmospheric warming in modelling.   (It's to do with errors in forcings estimates, not the models themselves.   Climate change denialists instead will claim the models are all wrong and cannot be relied on to make any policy decisions.)

The thing is, the latter is the whole lukewarmer argument, isn't it?   Because the models might not be precisely on point for a certain period, you can never rely on them to make policy decisions.   It's a classic case of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Incidentally, there was a Science Show recently that gave voice to certain key climate change "skeptics" (you can read the transcript here),  but the one key impression you got listening to it was the age of the voices of the skeptics.   

Tasmanian thoughts

I've posted before about the reasonable house prices in certain parts of Brisbane, and out of curiosity, I've been looking at Tasmania for bargains as well.  

Now, it may have high unemployment and (probably) more than its fair share of ice addicts, but as long as you don't want to live at Sandy Bay in Hobart, the buying is still remarkably good.  Especially if you go to Launceston, where I'll concentrate today.  Look:

Four bedroom, two bathrooms in a pleasing expanded older house, close to the centre of town for 400 and something thousand?

What about this handsome enough looking renovated old place:

Still too expensive?:

Sure, it looks boxy, but it's pretty damn tasteful inside:

This is pretty ridiculous.

I wonder what the fishing is like in the Tamar River?   I'm feeling like a reverse Ratso from Midnight Cowboy, where he says "The two basic items necessary to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk. Did you know that? That's a fact. In Florida, they got a terrific amount of coconut trees there."

For me, it's more like "The two basic items for life are a cheap but cosy  house, and salmon.  They've got a terrific amount of both in Tasmania."

A culinary observation

I just noticed this at The Guardian:

First, that's a very odd combination of food, if you ask me.


More importantly:   I think brownies are just about the most over rated food thing ever devised.   I mean, I like chocolate (at least, dark chocolate), but a brownie is the biggest waste of chocolate I know of.

That's all...

Diet news

I've been on a 5-2 diet maybe three times now, over a couple of years, because I do indeed put the weight back on if I stop completely.   (I really must follow Michael's advice and go on a permanent 1-6 diet if I want to keep it off.  Or get serious about exercise.) 

So I'm on it again, and I have to say, maybe I like yo-yo dieting.   I mean, as I've said before, the fasting days on the diet (600 cal allowed) really make the small amount of food you do eat taste pretty fantastically good.   (And, as I scrap up every last morsel of salad or cracker crumb, I am also always reminded of the scene in Empire of the Sun where our young hero carefully gathers all of the weevils from his rice and eats them happily.)   There is a sort of feeling of mental focus that can come with the fast days, too.

True, after a few months the novelty wears off, and the reducing speed of the weight loss encourages me to stop at "close enough".   But the early weeks of being on the diet - they feel pretty good.

In other diet news, I see that Eddie McGuire and Malcolm Turnbull have apparently both tried a severe fasting diet over 3 weeks and lost something like 15 kg.  Yeah, I agree with the experts - that's not a good idea.   It might take me a year to lose that much on 5-2, but I can enjoy life on the way.   (By the way, I should lose about 7 kg this time - I really did let myself rebound too far this time.)

She should take the train

From the BBC:

A superstitious elderly passenger delayed a flight in Shanghai after throwing coins at the engine for good luck, a Chinese airline has confirmed.

The 80-year-old woman threw her change at the China Southern Airlines flight as she crossed the tarmac to board.

She told police she launched the coins as she "prayed for safety" on Tuesday.

Of the nine coins launched, only one hit its intended target - but this was enough to force the evacuation of 150 passengers for several hours.

Police were called to Shanghai Pudong International Airport after a passenger noticed the woman's bizarre behaviour, apparently aimed at ensuring a safe flight, and alerted authorities.

Oh dear...

Once again, Helen Dale is attracting attention, and not in a good way: An Award Winning Novelist Is Lifting Viral Tweets.

(She apparently doesn't like Twitter*, so instead of retweets, she just lifts them and puts them on her Facebook page, with no acknowledgement of the source.   But I guess if they are viral, people would often be recognizing the main part as being from elsewhere - and it's not as if people would think she drew a professional cartoon or graphic.    The problem is more the words or caption in a lifted Tweet:  they make it look awfully like her either desiring, or not caring, that some people will think they were her creation too.)

* I was quoting her from the article, though I now see that she is pretty regularly using Twitter - so it seems a very odd explanation.

Update:  I had forgotten, until I re-read her Wikipedia entry, that she had been sacked from writing for the Courier Mail for not acknowledging someone else's jokes she used in a column.    And I'm pretty sure she left Catallaxy after putting up a viral giant pig photo, claiming it was genuine and from people she knew, and then people called her out about that.   It is strange behaviour, and the book tour for her next novel is likely to present more oddities, I expect...

Increasing acceptance

With legalisation of same sex marriage in Australia in the news again, it's interesting to see NPR reports on a new Pew survey result showing that, in the US, public approval of legalising it is still on the rise:

And even Republicans have weakened in opposition:

I guess it's a factor of former opponents not seeing the world change much around them after it's legalised.   There's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen similarly in Australia.

That said, a defensible conservative position remains to have civil unions for those who want the equivalent rights as heterosexual marriage,  but which leave millennial long understandings of the meaning of "marriage" alone.

Sea level rise and climate change

Seems there's a significant new paper on the increasing rate of sea level rise at Nature Climate Change.  I'm waiting for some better explanation of its significance, though.

It is, of course, important to remember how "lumpy" sea level rise will be across the globe.

Hail and climate change

It usually crosses my mind at least once every summer, particularly if hail is falling outside, what effect a warming atmosphere might have on its frequency and size.

Well, some scientists have looked at this for the United States, where it is expected to make a difference:

Anthropogenic climate change is anticipated to increase severe thunderstorm potential in North America, but the resulting changes in associated convective hazards are not well known. Here, using a novel modelling approach, we investigate the spatiotemporal changes in hail frequency and size between the present (1971–2000) and future (2041–2070). Although fewer hail days are expected over most areas in the future, an increase in the mean hail size is projected, with fewer small hail events and a shift toward a more frequent occurrence of larger hail. This leads to an anticipated increase in hail damage potential over most southern regions in spring, retreating to the higher latitudes (that is, north of 50° N) and the Rocky Mountains in the summer. In contrast, a dramatic decrease in hail frequency and damage potential is predicted over eastern and southeastern regions in spring and summer due to a significant increase in melting that mitigates gains in hail size from increased buoyancy.

Reminds me a bit of the complexity of rainfall changes under climate change - with rainfall intensification, but increased drying on hotter days, you might end up with roughly the same amount of rainfall over (say) a year, but more damage caused by the intensity when it does fall.

A Liberal split?

Is it too much to hope for that the Liberals could rid itself of the climate change denying Right in a major party split that was actually initiated over Pyne's not particularly shocking comments that he favours gay marriage coming in soon?   I doubt it will happen - there are too many of them who would need to leave, I think.   But I can't see the conservative forces getting the upper hand in the party room for a leadership spill either - surely they could not contemplate an Rudd-like Abbott rerun, and Dutton has not the slightest hint of any charm that a leader needs.   Who else is there that conservatives could be happy with?

Mind you, it's sort of fun watching the culture warrior Right gnashing their teeth over the centrists in the Liberals having the upper hand.

Wow apology

I've been a bit remiss, because it's been a few weeks since I read this article in Discover magazine on 8 June pretty much debunking the claimed identification of the Wow radio signal as coming from comets.  (Which I had posted about on 6 June.)

Turns out I had very good reason to be skeptical that comets would make a radio signal  of sufficient strength to be mistaken for the Wow signal (or, indeed, that they make radio signals at all.)

So, it's back to the drawing board, I reckon.

Frum on the Republicans

I think David Frum's lengthy article on what has happened with the Republicans sounds pretty convincing.   Worth a read. [Oh wait - it's an old article, just it is popular at the moment in the sidebar at the Atlantic.  I might even have recommended it before!]

Upset at Obama's response to what didn't happen?

It seems to me that there is less outrage in the liberal media than I would have expected with Trump tweeting blame at Obama for not taking more action against the Russians for election interference that Trump has always insisted was "fake news".

Perhaps it's just because no one's surprised anymore by any ridiculous turnaround by this ridiculous President, and how his support base - at the moment - don't care how ridiculous he is.  (Will Steve Kates, the most ridiculous politically commentating economist in Australia, and that's saying something, comment on the turnaround?  I would love to see how he spins it.) 

It's going to take some spectacularly awful stuff to shake his base awake, it would seem.   (Or maybe, just enough incrementally awful stuff - but it's still too soon after the election to see that happen yet.)

Photos from Science

These just caught my eye:

I didn't realise that giraffe skulls looked so much like a dino skull.  Don't you think?

But real dinos were really big: 

 

And numbats are remarkably attractive:

Failure unforeseen (and an excuse to talk about Tom Cruise)

We get Graham Norton's UK chat show about 3 or 4 weeks after it screens there, and it's often very funny.  (It is just about the most relaxed celebrity chat show ever made, I reckon - is it because of the alcohol served?)

Anyway, last night's episode featured Tom Cruise promoting The Mummy (along with his female co-star whose name I don't recall), and Zac Efron, appearing to promote Baywatch.

Both movies were - shortly after that show was taped - pretty much panned by most critics and are already considered box office failures.  (Although, I see that The Mummy has made $300 million internationally in a few weeks of release, so at a claimed production cost of $120 million, it's not a complete disaster - even allowing for the rule of thumb that a movie has to make about 3 times its production costs before it becomes profitable.  Baywatch is doing considerably worse.  But for a complete, it won't even make its production cost disaster, look at Guy Ritchies' King Arthur movie.  Why does anyone employ him?)

However, on last night's appearance on Norton, both Cruise and Efron seemed very genuinely positive about their respective movies.   Either they are really good at faking it; really unable to see defects in their own movies; or the movies are better than what most critics and audiences seem to think.  (I seriously doubt that with respect to Baywatch, where even Zafron was talking about its high quotient of  penis jokes.)

Anyway, somehow while browsing the net after the show, I stumbled across a Simon Pegg twitter account, and he was talking about being in Queenstown, New Zealand, shooting for Mission Impossible 6.  Indeed, it has been in the New Zealand media.  I wonder if NZ is standing in for some other country? 

 

More reason for disliking Monsanto

You may know my position:  I think the Monsanto tactic of genetic modification of food crops to tolerate weed killing chemicals is a bad idea.  (I think the reason is kind of obvious, but see the links at this previous post, and this one too.)

Here's another story of where this agricultural technique is going wrong:

Arkansas's pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.

"It's fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product," says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.

The tension — which even led to a farmer's murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.

Farmers, especially in the South, have been desperate for new weapons against a devastating weed called pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. And some farmers even jumped the gun and started spraying dicamba on their crops before they were legally allowed to do so. (Dicamba has long been used in other ways, such as for clearing vegetation from fields before planting.)

The problem is, dicamba is a menace to other crops nearby. It drifts easily in the wind, and traditional soybeans are incredibly sensitive to it. "Nobody was quite prepared, despite extensive training, for just how sensitive beans were to dicamba," says Bob Scott, a specialist on weeds with the University of Arkansas's agricultural extension service.

Nuts have been with us, always

I am on the email list for Literary Review, but they mostly now just contain links to old reviews from their archive.  This one, though, by the late John Mortimer in 1997, talking about a sensational defamation trial in England in 1918, is very amusing.  Not sure that I have heard of the Pemberton Billing trial before.  Some extracts:

Reference was made throughout the proceedings to a mysterious German ‘Black Book’, which was said to contain the names of 47,000 prominent British homosexuals, lesbians and secret agents working for the enemy. The names included, it was said, Asquith, Margot Asquith, Lord Haldane and many others of the great and good. When a Mrs Villiers-Stuart (later imprisoned for bigamy) shouted, from the witness box, that the judge’s name was in the book, the proceedings reached a level of insanity beyond anything achieved by Mr Justice Cocklecarrot....

....Decadence, however that pejorative word is defined, is by no means synonymous with homosexuality.

Noel Pemberton Billing MP, of course, was sure that it was. He had been an actor, a barrister, the inventor of a ‘self-calculating pencil’ and a ‘flying boat’ which failed to take off. He had founded the Vigilante Society with an Admiral’s son called Henry Hamilton Beamish who believed that Britain was ruined by ‘Jewalisation’ and that the Jews were responsible for a quarter of the casualties in the war. The Vigilantes published a paper called the Imperialist, which announced ‘the existence in the “Cabinet Noir” of a certain German prince, a book which contains reports from the agents ‘who have infested this country for over twenty years’, agents spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute’.

Billing was anxious to spread his beliefs, not only to Parliament and the Press, but in the Courts of Law. His opportunity came when a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a play banned from the public by the Lord Chamberlain, was proposed. The Vigilante carried a paragraph mysteriously worded ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ and went on: ‘To be a member of Maud Allan’s performances of Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta of 9, Duke Street, Adelphi, WC. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of members, I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000 [in the Black Book].’ Maud Allan charged Billing with criminal libel and he decided to defend himself at the Old Bailey.

Mr Justice Darling, a small, dandified figure, much given to flippant little jokes at which the Court was expected to laugh heartily, was caricatured by Max Beerbohm wearing a black cap with bells on it. He allowed the loud-voiced Billing, who stood with his monocle fixed in his eye and his arms crossed, to dominate the proceedings. Hours were spent discussing the contents of the Black Book which probably only existed in the fertile imaginations of Billing, his mistress Mrs Villiers-Stuart, and some other dubious witnesses....

The tone of the trial was further lowered by the evidence of the loathsome Lord Alfred Douglas, who attacked Wilde in general and Salome in particular. He also said that prime ministers, judges and ‘greasy advocates’ all conspired to ‘support perverts’. The judge and lawyers seemed too innocent for any such task. They had great difficulty in understanding the word ‘clitoris’ and the QC for the dancer-actress Maud Allan, apparently hearing the word ‘orgasm’ for the first time, asked if it meant some sort of unnatural vice.

I am reminded somewhat of one Graeme Bird, too.  

Update:  Something else has occurred to me:   our current nutty Right wing conspiracists are decidedly lacking in numerical specificity, compared to their predecessors.  Joe McCarthy's list of subversives was either 57 or 205, but it was a very specific either way.  These days, we just have to wonder how many are in Washington's Deep State: wingnuts don't cite a number, as far as I know.  Disappointing.

Yes, ban it

Interesting article at The Conversation asks the question whether pro-anorexia web sites should be banned or criminalised.

Not sure 100% sure whether criminalisation is the best response to removing them off the net, which should be the first priority, but can't say that I would have a moment's concern about an attempt to criminalise them. 

The article doesn't agree, and runs the odd argument that many women (well, it is much more common with women) end up at these sites because they already have an eating disorder and are looking for support.   But, of course, it's exactly the wrong sort of "support" that these people will get from a "pro" site.

Free speech ninnies can get lost, as far as I'm concerned:  Western society is not going to collapse because of legal interference with some websites (or their owners) who are clearly encouraging self harm of otherwise healthy people which is likely to end in death.