Adam whips himself into a frenzy

Update:   And in an article we can be safely assume Adam would not read, or at least, let influence him, Science magazine notes the vexed issue of lingering effects of infection:

“Everybody talks about a binary situation, you either get it mild and recover quickly, or you get really sick and wind up in the ICU,” says Akrami, who falls into neither category. Thousands echo her story in online COVID-19 support groups. Outpatient clinics for survivors are springing up, and some are already overburdened. Akrami has been waiting more than 4 weeks to be seen at one of them, despite a referral from her general practitioner.

The list of lingering maladies from COVID-19 is longer and more varied than most doctors could have imagined. Ongoing problems include fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain.

The likelihood of a patient developing persistent symptoms is hard to pin down because different studies track different outcomes and follow survivors for different lengths of time. One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. Data from the COVID Symptom Study, which uses an app into which millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden have tapped their symptoms, suggest 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. But with the crisis just months old, no one knows how far into the future symptoms will endure, and whether COVID-19 will prompt the onset of chronic diseases....

For Götz Martin Richter, a radiologist at the Klinikum Stuttgart in Germany, what’s especially striking is that just as the illness’ acute symptoms vary unpredictably, so, too, do those that linger. Richter thinks of two patients he has treated: a middle-aged man who experienced mild pneumonia from COVID-19, and an elderly woman already suffering from chronic leukemia and arterial disease, who almost died from the virus and had to be resuscitated. Three months later, the man with the mild case “falls asleep all day long and cannot work,” Richter says. The woman has minimal lung damage and feels fine.

 In one respect, the article reports something that's not as bad as it could be:  it seems that COVID 19 causes less lung lesions than SARS did.  Seems like the range of other effects outweigh that, though.

Trump on how to make enemies with every American high school student

Banning Tik Tok seems a pretty ludicrous idea to me;  so naturally it's appealling to the Orange One.  Nevermind:

Extraordinary heat

While the world frets (rightly) about COVID-19, terrible temperature records are being set:

Record high temperatures have been plaguing the Middle East, the mercury soaring to extreme levels during a blistering and unforgiving heat wave. Baghdad surged to its highest temperature ever recorded Tuesday.

Tuesday’s preliminary high of 125.2 degrees (51.8 Celsius) in Iraq’s capital city shatters its previous record of 123.8 degrees set on July 30, 2015, for any day of the year.

On Wednesday, Baghdad followed up with a temperature of 124 degrees, its second-highest temperature on record. On Monday, it had reached 123 degrees.

The crippling heat forced many residents indoors, and street sellers had to seek whatever shade they could find. With the state electricity grid failing, many households were relying on generators to power fridges, fans or air-conditioning units, the machines adding a guttural hum to the city’s already-noisy streets.

Yes: the failure of a power supply in heat like that is surely an invitation to death.

Surprising tech news

On re-watching Goodfellas

Last weekend, I re-watched Goodfellas on Netflix for the first time since I saw it in the cinema, waaay back in 1990.

To be honest, not much had stuck with me about it over the years.  I remembered thinking Ray Lolita was good in it, and for some reason I could recall the bit near the end when he felt the authorities finally closing in on him as he kept looking up and suspecting a helicopter was following his car.   While nominally handsome, I always felt there was something about Lolita's face or gaze which made him look like he was not being sincere, and that you were dealing with a personality mask rather than a genuinely open person.   Not sure why he always gave me that feeling, but it works a treat for a character like the one in this movie.   (I get the same vibe about Eddie McGuire, as I have mentioned before.  I need a supercomputer to analyse the faces of men I feel are inherently untrustable to tell me what it is that is causing this reaction.)

On re-watching it, I realised I had forgotten how much humour and nostalgic music was in it, given that it was about mob gangsters.   My son said it might be accused of glamorising the criminal life somewhat, which is something I am often sensitive about in watching this genre.  But when they start eating their own, I think it's hard to say that's the effect of the movie overall.  (I still argue that glamorisation of the criminal underworld is a huge problem with Tarantino, however, despite his movies' body count.)  

Speaking of violence, it shows how far normalised movie and television depictions of violence have become.  Now whole effects studios seem to be engaged in adding blood sprays from bullet shots to the head in every show under the sun on Netflix;  whereas just one graphic blood spray in 1990 was enough to get an R rating at the cinema.   I long for the days when depictions of violence had more impact because it was genuinely considered shocking to show the graphic effect of violence for entertainment purposes. 

Anyway, I certainly could understand the praise for the direction, and overall, I would say I had forgotten how good it was. 

Libertarians say the stupidest things

According to Sinclair Davidson, cultural and political polarisation are the result of Leftists telling exactly the sort of extremely sexist, often racist, gay appalled, extremely rude, science rejecting, think-they-are-experts-on-everything commenters at his very own blog that they are being extremely sexist, often racist, rude, homophobic, etc.

He has this to say about a Jack the Insider column this week:

I actually laughed out loud when I read:

There is no sense of community, no looking after others.

Like, no shit Sherlock.

No sense of community? What? Not in the most left-wing state of Australia under the most left-wing government in Australia? After decades of lefties telling us that we’re all racists, and bigots, and there are haves and have-nots, and insiders and outsiders, and rich and poor, there is no such thing as a uniquely Australian culture, and definitely no such thing as western civilisation, and whatever other bullshit story they are capable of pulling out of their backsides,  what do you really expect?

Jack – I left my sense of community at the Tax Office.

I don't even know what the last line means.  It seems too stupid to take it at face value.  (He also fits in at the end of the post a "all taxation is theft" jibe.)   So does he really think that higher taxing, European style social democrat countries have less social cohesion than the tax minimising, gun toting, "we don't let government tell us to wear masks", conspiracy-rattled USA is displaying at the moment?

[Once again, I will also note that he seems to take COVID 19 as a serious health risk - how can he deny that the commenters at his blog - not to mention his nutty mate with fully paid up membership in Cult Trump (Steve Kates) - have always and continue to be in full denial of its seriousness?   How serious can he be that it's the Left being mean to them has made them reject expert evidence and prefer conspiracy theories and any demon seed theorising doctor's opinion on how easy it is to defeat the pandemic?] 

The explanation is this - libertarians and small government, minimal tax ideological types are in denial that the more their ideological views are enacted into policy it leads to greater entrenched inequality and worse social cohesion, and hence they have to try to deflect blame to someone else for the apparently deteriorating state of the community.   So they chose to demonise the Left as the source of all evil, because, you know, communists and Hitler (a cryptic Lefty, of course) killed people and still want to kill people and crush out all that is Goodness and Light in society.  (Hence they tend to also attract the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" support of religiously inclined social conservatives who hate the Left for its social progressiveness and see evil behind it, such as happens at Catallaxy.) 
  
It's not exactly sophistry - it's too transparent for that - it's just culture war, ideological driven attempt at deflection. 

Why California?

Can't say that I have seen a good explanation of why California, which I understood to be pretty aggressive in its shut down for COVID precautions from the start, and not one of the States considered to be politically inclined to rush to re-open, is doing so badly with COVID at the moment.

The New York Times had a go at explaining it about a week ago, I see.   Some extracts:

California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record on Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.

And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America have collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself....

It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back-and-forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House...

Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message, while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days...

In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.

The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.

In Los Angeles — which has seen the most cases in California, and where hospitals are filling up — parts of the city feel under siege and in other areas, there is little palpable sense of the severity of the situation. Unlike in New York City during the height of the outbreak, most Angelenos have not had to absorb the piercing wail of ambulance sirens at all hours, a sound that came to define the pandemic there.

Unusual hobby noted

Well, I like to have a craft beer at West End in Brisbane every now and then, but it is a pretty bohemian suburb, and if I had to pick an area in Brisbane where this activity was most likely to happen, it would either be there (or the sleazier Fortitude Valley, I guess):

Police went to the West End flat of electrician Ryan Andrew King, 27, in inner city Brisbane while investigating a bizarre mutilation last weekend.

Police and paramedics were called to a city backpacker hostel last Saturday night where they allegedly found a 26-year-old Sydney man with his genitals partly removed.

It is alleged the man had arranged to be partially castrated by Mr King in one of the rooms, after meeting online.

Mr King, who works as an electrician at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and has volunteered in the SES, is not believed to be medically qualified but allegedly taught himself castration from online research.

It is alleged he may have used a Cryopen, a device for removing lesions such as warts and benign skin spots with nitrous oxide under high pressure.

After finding the allegedly mutilated man at the hostel, police searched Mr King’s West End apartment and allegedly found a human penis and set of testicles in his freezer.

Here's an abstract from a 2004 study in Archives of Sexual Behaviour (sounds a fun journal) about this weird fetish/interest: 

We used a survey posted on the Internet to explore the motivation of men who are interested in being castrated. Out of 134 respondents, 23 (17%) reported already having been castrated. The 104 (78%) individuals who said they had not been castrated were asked why they wanted to be castrated and why they had not actualized that desire. They were given multiple-choice answers to select from. The major reason (selected by 40% of respondents) for desiring castration was to achieve a “eunuch calm” and freedom from sexual urges; however, a large proportion (∼30%) of respondents found fantasies about being castrated sexually exciting and a similar percentage desired castration for the “cosmetic” appearance it achieved (which we interpret to mean scrotal removal along with an orchiectomy). This high interest in castration as either a sexual stimulus (a fetish) or a cosmetic enhancement was unexpected and contrasted with the more classically stated motivation for voluntary castration in the psychiatric literature, i.e., libido control and transsexualism. Internet discussion groups that serve these men may encourage them to act out their castration fantasies. Alternately, Internet discussions may give them a displacement outlet for their fantasies and decrease the risk of castration by nonmedically qualified “street-cutters” or by self-mutilation. Forty percent of our respondents claimed that they would have an orchiectomy, if it were cheap, safe, and simple. A quarter wanted to try chemical castration first, but 40% were embarrassed to talk to their doctors about their interest in castration. Information now available on the Internet provides these men with increasingly easy access to street-cutters and directions on how to perform surgical castrations, putting them at risk of permanent injury and disability. Physicians need to be aware of these risks.

The French and their drugs

Huh.  I didn't think that France under Macron would be keen to crack down on marijuana, but there you go.  More reason for me to like the country:

Spot fines of 200 euros ($233) have been tested in several French cities in recent weeks and will now be applied nationwide, Castex said, ruling out a decriminalisation of cannabis.

A French law dating back to 1970 allows for illicit drug use to be punished with up to a year in prison and fined with up to 3,750 euros, but few users actually do jail time.

French people are Europe's leading consumers of cannabis and hold the number three spot for cocaine use.

The new measure would simplify police procedures by "inflicting punishment without delay", Castex said during a visit to the southern port city of Nice, and would be an efficient tool against sale points run by drug dealers "which are eating away at neighbourhoods".

If paid within two weeks the fine will be reduced to 150 euros, but will rise to 450 euros unless settled within 45 days.

The move honours an election campaign pledge by President Emmanuel Macron, who said spot fines should be used to deter petty crimes that often end up unpunished in overloaded courts.

Will submarines ever be designed to not feel claustrophobic?

I fell asleep last night half way through this recent video, but I should go back and finish it:



I have to say, it's a tad disappointing to see how cramped even a modern nuclear attack submarine seems to be.    Just watching the confined and cluttered spaces (and apparent low ceiling height) of most of the spaces started giving me claustrophobia vibes.   (Oddly, I don't get that when watching images from the ISS or spaceships.   Maybe its the thought of the crushing pressure outside a sub that helps contribute to it?)

Ban trout pout entry

Thank God I have a teenage daughter who agrees that "lip enhancement" is just the stupidest, most unnatural looking thing ever, and agrees with me that in 30 years people will be looking at photos of this fashion and saying "what were they thinking?" 

Hence, I would bet that it's this aspect of these two quasi Typhoid Marys which is immediately noticed in the media attention they are receiving:

 
As I said to my daughter:  of course you can't trust the common sense of 19 year old women with "trout pout" (I had to Google a derogatory slang term for lip enhancement - I thought it might be "duck lips" but that seems to be more a pose than a permanent feature), and it would simplify Queensland border protection to just ban any woman with that feature trying to enter. 

Anyway, the question will now be debated as to how fair it is for the media to get on board with a good social media pile on.   In a way, I suppose it isn't.  On the other hand, this is just what young people should expect if they want to promote their image on social media, and do really stupid and dishonest and dangerous stuff.

Crank

Probably most of my readers have already read about the crank doctor/Chistian minister and her pro Trump PR stunt about HCQ for COVID.   But I thought one of her theories sounded pretty unique:

Some of her other claims include blaming medical conditions on witches and demons - a common enough belief among some evangelical Christians - though she says they have sex with people in a dream world.

"They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm… then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves," she said during a sermon in 2013.

She's from Nigeria: is it rude to say it sounds like an African bit of demon folklore?

Also amusing to read about the sort of pro-HCQ company you keep, isn't it Graeme?

This be true

Pass the lithium

Yes, I have posted on the topic before, but another study seems to indicate the link between higher natural lithium intake (via the water supply) and lower suicide rates:

Professor Allan Young, Chair of Mood Disorders at King's College London, said: "This synthesis and analysis of all available evidence confirms previous findings of some individual studies and shows a significant relationship between higher lithium levels in drinking water and lower suicide rates in the community. The levels of lithium in drinking water are far lower than those recommended when lithium is used as medicine although the duration of exposure may be far longer, potentially starting at conception. These findings are also consistent with the finding in clinical trials that lithium reduces suicide and related behaviours in people with a mood disorder."

Professor Memon added: "Next steps might include testing this hypothesis by randomised community trials of lithium supplementation of the water supply, particularly in communities (or settings) with demonstrated high prevalence of mental health conditions, violent criminal behaviour, chronic substance abuse and risk of suicide. This may provide further evidence to support the hypothesis that lithium could be used at the community level to reduce or combat the risk of these conditions."

Hmm.  Somehow, I can't imagine those who freak out about fluoride in the water supply are going to take well the suggestion of adding lithium for its psycho-active benefits.

Update:  from a short article elsewhere, a brief history of lithium as an additive:

Until 1950, popular soft drink 7-Up² contained lithium citrate and even beer³ was brewed with lithium-heavy water and promoted for its mood-enhancing abilities.

However, both the real and perceived health benefits of lithium were overshadowed when lithium was prescribed to patients with heart disease as a replacement for salt.⁴ The resulting overdoses and deaths led to the US banning lithium as an additive in 1950.

It seems there is nothing to stop people buying a lithium supplement in Australia, but I would be pretty cautious about it. 

First, would be good to know what the lithium level in the local water supply is, but Googling doesn't turn any pointers towards that information.  I mean, I did find this:

but no entry for lithium.  :(  That puts me in a bad mood, and in more need of lithium.

Big in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR: Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak was sentenced to 12 years in jail and fined RM210 million (US$49.38 million) on Tuesday (Jul 28), following a guilty verdict in his first corruption trial involving millions of ringgit linked to state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

The charges include abuse of power, money laundering and criminal breach of trust.

High Court judge Mohamad Nazlan Mohamad Ghazali said when reading the judgment: “I find that the prosecution has successfully proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I therefore find the accused guilty and convict the accused on all seven charges."

From CNA.

Fish problem

Someone like Lomborg or his new best buddy Schellenberger might respond to this story with "so what, we now farm heaps of fish", but I suspect this is a much bigger problem because of the role such fish apparently play in fertilising the great forests surrounding the rivers.  (Something most of us probably only ever realised via David Attenborough pointing it out in one of this relatively recent series):

Populations of migratory river fish around the world have plunged by a “catastrophic” 76% since 1970, an analysis has found.

The fall was even greater in Europe at 93%, and for some groups of fish, with sturgeon and eel populations both down by more than 90%.

Species such as salmon, trout and giant catfish are vital not just to the rivers and lakes in which they breed or feed but to entire ecosystems. By swimming upstream, they transport nutrients from the oceans and provide food for many land animals, including bears, wolves and birds of prey.

The migratory fish are also critical for the food security and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, while recreational fishing is worth billions of dollars a year. The causes of the decline are the hundreds of thousands of dams around the world, overfishing, the climate crisis and water pollution.

 

A clear case for that "Why not both?" meme

Spotted at Twitter:

Jeez, Jason - there's no need to chose between either Carlson or glibertarians in the credibility stakes.  Both are terrible.

On Carlson in particular - he has been sending out contradictory messaging on COVID and masks, just as Hannity has, and both would clearly be responsible for a large percentage of the Fox ageing audience not taking COVID precautions seriously. 

Of course, he is also escalating, for political purposes, the sense of a national security crisis and encouraging Trump to use his heavy handed response which polling would indicate even most Americans think is hurting the situation rather than helping.   (See this article in Washington Post today.)  

I think there is room to criticise a lack of effective Democrat leadership on trying to get protesters to de-escalate too (Biden should be taking a higher profile on this), but any President should be taking a de-escalation approach.   (Yeah, I know, Trump is constitutionally incapable of being a figure of unifying appeal - but it's still a scandal that a "news" network works to goad him into being even more divisive than he needs to be.)

Capitalism in transition to...something?

What's the movie meme with the woman shouting "What's happening?!" ?  Oh yeah - one of my all time favourite Spielberg related movies - Poltergeist.   Disappointing that I had to Google that to double check.

Seems to me that those in the field of economics ought to be doing more of that, because I've been increasingly suspecting over the last few years that there is a crisis of confidence going on with respect to the understanding of some of the very basic concepts in the whole field. 

I don't know that John Quiggin would agree, but I take support for my gut feeling from his recent post:  The End of Interest.  Some extracts:

Amid all the strange, alarming and exciting things that have happened lately, the fact that real long-term (30-year) interest rates have fallen below zero has been largely overlooked. Yet this is the end of capitalism, at least as it has traditionally been understood. Interest is the pure form of return to capital, excluding any return to monopoly power, corporate control, managerial skills or compensation for risk.

If there is no real return to capital, then then there is no capitalism. In case it isn’t obvious, I’ll make the point in subsequent posts that there is no reason to expect the system that replaces capitalism (I’ll call it plutocracy for the moment) to be an improvement.....

In thinking about the future of the economic system, interest rates on 30-year bonds are much more significant than the ‘cash’ rates set by central banks, such as the Federal Funds rate, which have been at or near zero ever since the GFC, or the short-term market rates they influence. These rates aren’t critical in evaluating long-term investments.

The central idea of capitalism is, as the name implies, that of capital. Capital is accumulated through saving, then invested in machines, buildings and other capital assets to be used by workers in producing goods and services. Part of the value of those goods and services is paid out as wages, and the rest is returned to capital, as interest on loans and bonds or as profits for shareholders. Some of the return to capital is saved and reinvested, allowing growth to continue indefinitely. Workers, on this account, can become capitalists too, by saving and investing some of their wages. At a minimum, they should be able to save enough, while working, to finance a decent standard of living in retirement.

I await his further posts with interest.

Still surprising to be reminded of this...

More information on this topic:

The national exit polls have broken out their survey results by racial group since 1976, and since that year, the Republican nominee for president has received, on average, 54.8 percent of the white vote, while the Democratic nominee has garnered an average of 40.6 percent. In 1980, 1992, and 1996, third-party candidacies affected the distribution of the white vote. The highest percentage secured by a Republican was the 66 percent won by Ronald Reagan in his landslide re-election in 1984; the lowest Democratic number was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in that same election. Jimmy Carter received the largest percentage of white votes for a Democrat with 48 percent in 1976; George H.W. Bush received the lowest at 41 percent in 1992 when Ross Perot ran, splitting the white vote and dropping Bush from the 60 percent white share he received in 1988.

Singapore builds a COVID ward

There was a lot of scepticism about the quality of the Chinese COVID hospital built from scratch in ridiculously short time, but if you want to see a country doing something similar with a high quality outcome, watch this video about Singapore building a COVID ward in a hospital car park:



Once again, I will swoon over the technocratic success story of Singapore, and Homer will complain I am supporting a disgusting authoritarian regime.  

Big in Turkey

When I turned the TV on yesterday morning, SBS was showing its re-broadcast of foreign news services, and the one from Turkey was just beginning.  After about 20 minutes of (I think) a 30 minute evening news show, I switched over, because it was still talking about Hagia Sophia going back to being a mosque.

It was, it would seem, a popular move amongst most Turks.  Some polling would indicate that's right.

Yet some polling earlier in the year indicated that private religious beliefs were not as devout as they were a decade ago.  The suggestion is that it might be a bit of youth rebellion against their conservative government trying to get people to be more religious.

Going more conservative in Islam in particular has probably never turned out well for a country's economic development, has it?   I see now, Googling the topic of Islam and economic development generally, there's been some pretty negative analysis around for a long time. Here's an abstract:

This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997, when this literature was last surveyed. Among the findings are the following: Ramadan fasting by pregnant women harms prenatal development; Islamic charities mainly benefit the middle class; Islam affects educational outcomes less through Islamic schooling than through structural factors that handicap learning as a whole; Islamic finance hardly affects Muslim financial behavior; and low generalized trust depresses Muslim trade. The last feature reflects the Muslim world's delay in transitioning from personal to impersonal exchange. The delay resulted from the persistent simplicity of the private enterprises formed under Islamic law. Weak property rights reinforced the private sector's stagnation by driving capital out of commerce and into rigid waqfs. Waqfs limited economic development through their inflexibility and democratization by restraining the development of civil society. Parts of the Muslim world conquered by Arab armies are especially undemocratic, which suggests that early Islamic institutions, including slave-based armies, were particularly critical to the persistence of authoritarian patterns of governance. States have contributed themselves to the persistence of authoritarianism by treating Islam as an instrument of governance. As the world started to industrialize, non-Muslim subjects of Muslim-governed states pulled ahead of their Muslim neighbors by exercising the choice of law they enjoyed under Islamic law in favor of a Western legal system. 

To be honest, I would have thought that the Ramadan fast would not apply to pregnant women, and the issue of it hurting pre-natal development is something I hadn't heard of before.*   The full paper for that abstract is available here.  It's very long, so I skipped to the end summary, and yeah, things look bad for the connection between Islam and economic development.  (Unless, I guess, you're a tiny country sitting on top of a giant pool of oil.)


* Or maybe I have, but forgotten.  When I Google the topic, there are lots of articles about it as a controversial topic.  Apparently, pregnant women are told that they do not have to fast if they are concerned bout the health of their fetus, but many chose to do so anyway.   One study from Iraq seem to say that more of the better educated chose not to fast.  I find it hard to imagine how pregnant mothers in the countries with severe heat during it can think that not drinking during the day is OK for the baby.    

Snowflake cavemen

In research that strikes me as kind of amusing, though particularly useless, it turns out there is good reason to suspect that Neanderthals had a low pain threshold:

As several Neandertal genomes of high quality are now available researchers can identify genetic changes that were present in many or all Neandertals, investigate their physiological effects and look into their consequences when they occur in people today. Looking into one gene that carries such changes, Hugo Zeberg, Svante Pääbo and colleagues found that some people, especially from central and south America but also in Europe, have inherited a Neandertal variant of a gene that encodes an ion channel that initiates the sensation of pain.

By using data from a huge population study in the UK, the authors show that people in the UK who carry the Neandertal variant of the ion channel experience more pain. "The biggest factor for how much pain people report is their age. But carrying the Neandertal variant of the ion channel makes you experience more pain similar to if you were eight years older," says lead author Hugo Zeberg, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Karolinska Institutet. "The Neandertal variant of the ion channel carries three amino acid differences to the common, 'modern' variant,'" explains Zeberg. "While single amino acid substitutions do not affect the function of the ion channel, the full Neandertal variant carrying three amino acid substitutions leads to heightened pain sensitivity in present-day people."

There's a little bit more in the article here.

All rather unfortunate if you had a higher than modern chance of being gnawed on by a sabretooth.

As noted by lots of other people...

....Andrew Bolt is approaching Donald Trump levels of lack of self awareness:

Add caption

No, no they are not...

Article at The Guardian:

Rediscovering the male soap opera: 'The highs and lows of wrestling rivalry are intoxicating' 

It seems to be about a gay (or queer, to use his term) bloke saying that the camp drama of TV wrestling really appealed to him as a queer kid.   I guess I can get that - and still be completely puzzled as to why adult straight men or women would want anything to do with this lurid form of cosplay.

Things going "bang" in Iran

An interesting article at ABC News on the question of why Iran seems to be having so many infrastructure explosions.

It notes that Israel could well be behind some of it, aiming to prevent Biden re-negotiating the nuclear deal if he wins in November. 

Not sure Taleb is his friend

Well, that's odd.

James Allan, the conservative law lecturer at UQ who I have previously pointed out makes statements unsupported by, you know, facts, has a typical Australian right wing conservative blowhard's take on COVID-19:  its danger has been vastly overestimated and the lockdown approach has been a terrible error.

But in the Spectator column in which he is opining this, he starts with citing Nassim Taleb's "skin in the game" idea as being crucial to understanding why governments have got it wrong. 

Which seems odd for this reason: I think Taleb is far too idiosyncratic to spend much time paying attention to, but as far as I know, from my brief looks at his Twitter account since the pandemic started, he has never been a sceptic of the danger of COVID 19 and lately has spent time arguing that governments requiring face mask wearing would be a good policy they should have been pushing earlier.  

In other words, Allan seems to be using one idea of Taleb's to make an argument, but ignoring Taleb's actual opinion on COVID and risk.  Which seems a foolish (that is, typical Australian version of a conservative) thing to do. 

Perhaps Jason can confirm this is correct, as I assume you still follow Taleb much more closely than I do....

The man for whom the 1950's has never ended

I've said many times before he is a reincarnation of a middle aged Catholic man from the 1950's, but the extent to which Catholic conservative CL seems to think other people all share his viewpoint still amazes me sometimes:
 

And I say this even on the basis that, sure, I'm socially conservative enough to say that I think its better for parents to be married rather than in de facto relationships.   But it's ridiculous to suggest that unmarried mothers are in no position to set workplace relationship standards because they are unmarried.

I should also mention - he is profoundly ignorant (and arrogant) on anything to do with science:

Donald Trump was right along. And all the “experts” were wrong. Absolutely, totally, unambiguously…wrong. If the figure really is closer to 500,000 (or higher), COVID-19 is not a whole lot worse than the sniffles. This is the biggest episode of mass hysteria in modern history and if you’re still denying that, you’re a crank.

But Sinclair Davidson likes to run a blog for for the dangerous promotion of bad science takes that endangers people both now and into the future.


 

A completely normal observation

Way, way stranger than fiction.

That new climate sensitivity estimate

The report in Science seems pretty good in its explanation of what the new paper considered.

Short story:

Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment, conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C

At least the Saudis are being sensible about this

Gee. Saudis are being more sensible than Adam Creighton. France 24 reports:

This year's hajj, which has been scaled back dramatically to include only around 1,000 Muslim pilgrims as Saudi Arabia battles a coronavirus surge, will begin on July 29, authorities said Monday.

Some 2.5 million people from all over the world usually participate in the ritual that takes place over several days, centred on the holy city of Mecca.

This year's hajj will be held under strict hygiene protocols, with access limited to pilgrims under 65 years old and without any chronic illnesses.

Here's a photo with the article:

 It's probably 35 degrees or something while they are doing this, but when you can see the floor like that, it looks rather like a skating rink.

I also find it odd how it seems people don't aren't acting with particular reverence while doing stuff around the Kaaba.   I know cleaners gotta clean, but zipping around on those industrial cleaning thinks look more like they're cleaning the tiles at a giant shopping centre than somewhere something sacred sits.   I don't know - maybe the cleaners doing the rounds inside St Peter's look the same?  Heh - yeah, I guess right: 

In some rare, good social media news

Twitter has announced sweeping measures aimed at cracking down on the QAnon conspiracy theory, including banning thousands of accounts.

The social media giant said it would also stop recommending content linked to QAnon and block URLs associated with it from being shared on the platform.

That's from the BBC.

I thought I read somewhere that Twitter wannabe competitor Parler was also taking action against it?  Can't find that now, though.  In any event, Parler has not taken off, and won't.  This, from Forbes, is rather amusing:

It’s all had the feeling of a fad and, as the Daily Beast noted earlier this week, there are signs it has begun to burn out. Sensor Tower data provided to Bloomberg also show new downloads slowing significantly in recent weeks. The reason comes down to a somewhat obvious point: People seeking a platform for their political views gravitate towards the places with the largest audiences.

Conservatives have struggled to break free from Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths before. Milo Yiannopoulos, who actually was banned from Twitter and Facebook Inc., complained last fall to his 19,000 Telegram followers that they weren’t worth his time. “It’s nice to have a little private chat with my gold star homies but I can’t make a career out of a handful of people like that,” he said, according to screenshots posted by Vice last September. Yiannopoulos went on to say that Gab, another social network the right once hoped would supplant Twitter, was full of teenage racists, and complained that "no one" uses Parler. “Unless something monumental happens, we are just going to be driven off the internet forever,” he wrote.

And they are getting caught up in the limits of free speech fights anyway: 

Parler is quickly discovering the limits of free expression. On June 30, Matze used Parler to explain its house rules, apparently frustrated with some of Parler’s new users testing the limits of its free-expression motto by posting pornographic images and obscenities.

Parler is facing the same evolution bigger social media companies have confronted for years — balancing free expression with creating safe and inviting online communities. Twitter early on referred to itself as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg maintained through the company’s early years that it is not a publisher, but a neutral platform. Facebook is still a place for free expression, Zuckerberg said in a speech last year, but he acknowledged some speech that is harmful and infringes on others’ rights shouldn’t be allowed.

The mysterious radio stations are still with us

I would have linked before to articles about the "numbers stations" (which I am pretty sure I had heard directly a few times when I used to twiddle around with a nice shortwave radio I had as a younger man.  I still have a short wave radio, as it happens, but haven't scanned the airwaves for many a year.)

This article, at BBC Future, is a very interesting look at a Russian station that doesn't even transmit numbers, and its purpose is unknown.

The article indicates that it being a "dead hand" signal is probably the most likely explanation:

“There’s absolutely no information in the signal,” says David Stupples, an expert in signals intelligence from City University, London.

What’s going on?

The frequency is thought to belong to the Russian military, though they’ve never actually admitted this. It first began broadcasting at the close of the Cold War, when communism was in decline. Today it’s transmitted from two locations – the St Petersburg site and a location near Moscow. Bizarrely, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than shutting down, the station’s activity sharply increased.

There’s no shortage of theories to explain what the Buzzer might be for – ranging from keeping in touch with submarines to communing with aliens. One such idea is that it’s acting as a “Dead Hand” signal; in the event Russia is hit by a nuclear attack, the drone will stop and automatically trigger a retaliation. No questions asked, just total nuclear obliteration on both sides.

It does talk about the history of coded signals, and we get this part which I don't think I have heard of before:

During World War Two, the British realised that they could, in fact, decipher the messages – but they’d have to get their hands on the one-time pad that was used to encrypt them. “We discovered that the Russians used the out-of-date sheets of one-time pads as substitute toilet paper in Russian army hospitals in East Germany,” says Glees. Needless to say, British intelligence officers soon found themselves rifling through the contents of Soviet latrines.

 Such glamorous work, being in intelligence!

Exactly

Of course, a large chunk of Trump supporters are so, so stupid as to claim that even a private business  requiring they wear a face mask is fascism, while the above is fine because it's aimed at Democrat voters and enabled by their cult leader.

Australian wingnut watch

I see that the idea of having to wear a facemask when going out is going down a treat amongst several of the wingnuts of Catallaxy:

Funnily enough, Sinclair Davidson himself seems to take the risk seriously. From another post, in which he does his own hysteric act over imagined anti-Semitism (in the Herald Sun, of all places):

More seriously – hope lockdown is treating you well. Despite what they say here, this is more than a flu and you should stay in iso.

There's a deep irony here:   he's at greater risk of catching it himself because of the very same nutjob hysterics who are attracted to his anti-science blog. 

A peculiar syndrome

I mentioned the odd Indian/Chinese idea about the magical, health giving power of men not letting their semen ever leave their bodies again in a recent post, and have now found out something else that sometimes happens as a result of this belief.

First, a magazine article about some Western dudes who have cottoned onto the idea as a way of trying to make a buck:   The Cult of Semen Retention.   It's pretty amusing, the overblown claims.

But Googling the topic also brings up this topic:  Dhat Syndrome.  As explained in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry:

Dhat syndrome (“semen loss”-related psychological distress) is a culture-bound syndrome seen in the natives of Indian subcontinent, but it is prevalent in other cultures also. Its diagnosis and management issues need to be taught to postgraduates in their teaching program. This syndrome involves vague and multiple somatic and psychological complaints such as fatigue, listlessness, loss of appetite, lack of physical strength, poor concentration, forgetfulness and other vague somatic troubles. These symptoms are usually associated with an anxious and dysphoric mood state. These patients may also present with or without psychosexual dysfunction. The management of Dhat syndrome needs serious attention.

And more details.  First, this is why (some) Indians think semen is so important for health:

Since then, myth prevalent among people of the Indian subcontinent is that “it takes 40 days for 40 drops of food to be converted to one drop of blood, 40 drops of blood to make one drop of bone marrow and 40 drops of bone marrow form one drop of semen.”

You would have thought human biology being a subject in schools would help, but I don't know.

The author then goes on to draw a wider net, alleging that anti-masturbation crusades in Western countries in the past reflects the same sort of attitude.   It partly does, but still, this Dhat Syndrome is something else:

The patients who presented with symptoms of Dhat syndrome were mostly young, recently married, belonging to average or low socioeconomic status (perhaps a student, laborer or farmer by occupation), from rural area and from family with conservative attitudes towards sex.[12,16,17]

Patients having Dhat syndrome can be further divided into three categories.[18]

1. Dhat alone - Patients attributed their symptoms to semen loss; presenting symptoms - hypochondriacal, depressive or anxiety symptoms
2. Dhat with comorbid depression and anxiety - Dhat was seen as an accompanying symptom
3. Dhat with sexual dysfunction

The duration of presentation of these patients from the onset varies from less than three months up to one year,[5,16] even up to 20 years.[10] These patients reported that they lose their semen in sleep, with urine, masturbation, hetero/homosexual sex.[10,16,17,19]

In other words, it seems that their belief in the health enhancing importance of semen is so strong that even having a young man having sex within marriage can freak out that it's harming him.  As I say, pretty peculiar.

The syndrome even has a Wikipedia entry.  But here is another, better backgrounder about it (from the Indian Journal of Dermatology, for some reason): 

Ayurvedic literature describing semen as a vital constituent of the human body dates back to 1500 BC. The disorders of ‘Dhatus’ have been elucidated in the Charak Samhita, which describes a disorder called ‘Shukrameha’ in which there is a passage of semen in the urine. Similar conditions have been described under various names from China (Shen K'uei), Sri Lanka (Prameha) and other parts of South East Asia (Jiryan). Malhotra and Wig called ‘Dhat’ ‘a sexual neurosis of the Orient’.[4] In China, anxiety following semen loss (Shen-K'uie) has been associated with epidemics of Koro, which is another culture bound syndrome in which the individual holds the belief that his penis is shrinking into his body and disappearing. Tissot's paper in 18th century stating that even an adequate diet could waste away through seminal emission gained popularity amongst the emerging middle class and led Western Europe to an era of masturbating insanity.

The International Classification of diseases ICD-10 classifies Dhat syndrome as both a neurotic disorder (code F48.8) and a culture specific disorder (Annexe 2) caused by ‘undue concern about the debilitating effects of the passage of semen.’ It is a commonly recognized clinical entity in India and South East Asia and is also widespread in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Dhat Syndrome is characterized primarily with complaints of loss of semen through urine, nocturnal emission or masturbation, accompanied by vague symptoms of weakness, fatigue, palpitation and sleeplessness. The condition has no organic etiology. It may sometimes be associated with sexual dysfunction (impotence and premature ejaculation) and psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety neurosis or phobia).[5]

So, there you go.   I feel like drawing up a map sometimes of "bad cultural ideas that are harmful and need to go away", with China being labelled for Traditional Chinese Medicine as my first target.  But the semen worrying seems to me to be more likely Indian in origin. 

Update:  I was curious to read what a Ayurvdic practitioner might say about the condition, and found this site which seems to take a semi sensible line that a lot of anxiety about it is unfounded, but also includes this very specific opinion:

Charaka Samhita postulates that semen is all-pervasive within the body like "oil in the sesamic seed" and suggests one ejaculation per week in summer and 168 total yearly ejaculations as the optimal sexual frequency for males.

But, but...once a week in (say) a 3 month summer would only be about 12 times.   They have a fair bit of catching up to do to hit that weirdly specific "optimal sexual frequency" over the rest of the year.

Noted from Nature

It would be no magic elixir, but all ideas are probably worth investigating at this stage:

Large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be achieved through enhanced rock weathering. It now seems that this approach is as promising as other strategies, in terms of cost and CO₂-removal potential.

Also, as the headline indicates, don't get your hopes up about an effective COVID vaccine coming anytime soon:

Coronavirus vaccines leap through safety trials — but which will work is anybody’s guess

A podcast I might watch

A weather question

Is it just me, or does this Brisbane winter seem to others to be colder at night and in the mornings than your average recent winter?  The days are still nice enough, for the most part (although even then, I have a sense that we have had slightly more cloudy, no sunshine days - like today.)  I just seem to have been feeling colder in the house this winter generally speaking.

Of course, in the Northern Hemisphere, things are in the opposite direction:

For the past month, Siberia has captured the world’s attention thanks to a climate change-fueled heat wave that caused temperatures in an Arctic town to crack 100 degrees in June and whipped up an outbreak of fires across normally frigid tundra. But an equally alarming situation is unfolding just north of Siberia’s shores: sea ice is crashing in a region that scientists consider to be the ice factory of the Arctic.

A new ice extent record in September is not certain, but the long term consequences of a lot of open sea north of Siberia is still likely to be significant:

Whether 2020 brings a new record for sea ice destruction or not, what’s happening this year will be significant. Most new sea ice formation in the Arctic occurs along the eastern half of Siberia’s north coast, where ice grows in the autumn and winter before being swept out to sea. Because there’s so much open water absorbing sunlight in the region right now, Serreze says it’s “very likely” that autumn ice formation will be delayed, which could have ripple effects going into next year.

Ultimately, more years like this could hasten Arctic sea ice’s long term, climate change driven meltdown, which matters far more than individual records.

“Everyone wants to focus on the minimum, but any amount of time the ice is at a record low is affecting arctic climate,” Labe said. “To me, that’s very significant.”

Here's the graph:

 

The finest conservatives

Unless things have changed recently, "areff" is Roger Franklin, long time Quadrant online editor:

It's not that he told her he was Dave Mason; it's just that he didn't correct her and (apparently) signed the name "Dave Mason", which I guess is supposed to make it not something that's dishonest and creepy (not to mention, I suspect, now a sexual offence in some countries), but a jape to laugh about decades later:

Conservatives speaking openly at Catallaxy are just the worst possible advertisement for Conservativism that I know.

Update:  it has occurred to me that he doesn't say when she asked for the autograph.  If it was after "sleeping with" her, he possibly might not have been dishonest prior to it.   I find it a bit hard to believe, however, that if she was interested in him because she assumed he was a well known musician, that she would have not been asking questions about band life before going to bed, and that this would not have alerted him to her error.

Andrew Bolt unmasked

So Bolt joins the Right wing whiner mob about wearing facemasks.

In "good" company with chef nutball Pete Evans, and Alan Jones:

You know the score:  climate change denialists have been in science (and common sense) denial for decades now - why expect them to exercise common sense (and a responsible attitude towards other people - including their kids and grandkids) over a viral illness?  

Bolt has been fact checked pretty effectively by The Feed on SBS. 

I just find the arrogance of promoting facemask scepticism very disturbing.   Making a living from bloviating is no doubt a large part of the problem, as well as playing Right wing culture war politics.

But doesn't just plain common sense suggest that using a mask is a helpful thing to do when community transmission is becoming a great concern in a city?   I mean, bloody hell, you even had Hannity taking that line.

And for the millionth time I note:  the problems of the Left in terms of "cancel culture" and identity politics may be irritating and cause some individual cases of injustice, but it's nothing like the actual life threatening danger on every scale (local community and planet wide; immediate and long term beyond our lifetimes) that the poisonous culture war Right is bringing.


 

Dog science news

From Science:  Dogs may use Earth's magnetic field to take shortcuts

Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional—albeit hidden—sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth’s magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.

The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies “magnetoreception” and navigation in turtles. She notes that dogs’ navigational abilities have been studied much less compared with migratory animals such as birds. “It’s an insight into how [dogs] build up their picture of space,” adds Richard Holland, a biologist at Bangor University who studies bird navigation.

There were already hints that dogs—like many animals, and maybe even humans—can perceive Earth’s magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots. But stationary alignment isn’t the same thing as navigation.

What a twerp

Ethical use of work email accounts (meaning you don't use them for self serving political purposes) seems to be something beyond Timbo's grasp:

American holidays

One of the happy things I recently realised was the number of good quality international news networks that have all day live and free feeds on Youtube.   ABC News (America) always comes up, sometimes NBC (not sure if it always live, actually), Sky News from the UK (which presents as a relatively normal news network in what I have seen - has the Murdoch family decided that only American and Australian versions need to be "wingnut at night" outlets?); France 24; DW from Germany; Al Jazeera; and of course my beloved CNA from Singapore.   Our own ABC is on there as well, although it's just the News network which I can watch free to air.

That's all by way of introduction to noting that I was watching ABC News (America) this morning and was surprised to see a puff piece about holiday bargains to be had at the moment within America.  Cheap hotels!  Cheap airfares!  Why not go to Las Vegas!  (Yes, Las Vegas was specifically a destination mentioned.)

Sure,  Las Vegas in summer, where the only option is to stay indoors in air conditioned, COVID spreading wonder.   Here's a report from a few hours ago:

Foot traffic in Las Vegas casinos is starting to slow as the number of COVID-19 cases rise.

Roughly 350,000 visitors were estimated to be in Clark County casinos Saturday, the lowest Saturday count since casinos reopened on June 4, according to a Monday note from J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff. More than 400,000 were in casinos the Saturday the week prior, and roughly 550,000 on July 4.

The analyst attributed the drop to increased COVID-19 cases in Nevada. The Southern Nevada Health District reported 1,288 new coronavirus cases in the state on Sunday, 88 percent of which were in Clark County. It was the fifth day in a row officials reported more than 1,000 cases in the county.

And from another site:

Southern Nevada hospitals are filling with COVID-19 patients, and intensive care unit occupancy is rising fast.

In Clark County, it recently rose to 89 percent. And though not all of those patients are stricken with COVID-19, it's the highest level of ICU occupancy since the outbreak began. Statewide, the Nevada Hospital Association reported about 27 percent of all ICU patients are suffering from COVID-19,

I then flipped over to NBC News, which had a story about Christian summer camps having to be cancelled when COVID outbreaks start in them. A few days ago, Slate had an article about one camp with 82 cases!

In short - isn't it just a really bad idea to be taking a holiday nearly anywhere in the US at the moment?   Ratbag wingnuts refusing to wear masks;  heat and airconditioning; touching slot machines in a casino?  (I presume they are providing gloves for that, but people still touch their face.)

Yet here we have ABC News trying to get people to get out and grab a bargain holiday?

The network is owned by Disney, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that it may well turn out that there is corporate self interest going here, to encourage people to think that you can be safe enough travelling so as to visit Disney properties, not by encouraging visits to their theme parks directly, but by encouraging holiday travel generically.

Someone should question the company about this.

All the maturity of a 10 year old schoolyard bully

About a monkey

I've long had an interest in reading Journey to the West, the source material for Monkey and various movies of the story; but when I first went looking for it in a book store, I was surprised to learn it was a multi volume work (about 2,500 pages in all!) that I would surely fail to get into enough to finish. 

But, I have taken the easy way out, and started reading (on Scribd) an abridged version that comes in at a mere 479 pages:

I'm only 50 pages in, but so far, it's...interesting.

One thing I have noticed is how it's pretty limited in scene description of the fantastical, but perhaps it works because it leaves so much to the imagination?   For example, in a sequence which is reminding me a lot of Aquaman movie, our hero goes to get a suitable weapon from the Dragon King at the bottom of the Eastern Ocean, and we get passages like this:

[Sun Wukong is the name of the Monkey King, by the way.]   No description at all of what Aoguang himself looks like - or the "shrimp soldiers and crab generals".

I also wrote earlier this year about the peculiar Eastern belief about the great health benefits of men retaining semen.  Little did I realise that Monkey attained his immortality via this idea too:

 etc. Seems an odd point to make in a book that I thought was read out to children. 

Anyway, it's an easy read, and I am inclined to continue...





 

Less food, again

*  The slow advance of weight gain has advanced enough to go on another bout of dieting.  5:2 diet has worked before, but I always go off it completely and don't go onto any maintenance regime of one day a week fasting (as Michael Mosley found necessary.)   This time, rather than getting annoyed at the slowing rate of weight loss (the first 2 to 3 kilos seem to come off quickly, then it slows down somewhat), I haven't even weighed myself (and haven't done so for about 3 months, I reckon.)   I'm going to see how I go with the general feeling of tightness of pants and shirts and play it by ear.  I will weight myself eventually (and then probably be depressed over the weight I must have been at the start.)

*  In a bad start to the dieting enterprise, my wife last night made a fantastically good pork roast with baked vegetables and a mustard cream sauce.  The vegetables were potato, pumpkin, red capsicum, and onion - apparently, apart from some olive oil, she added dried thyme, fresh rosemary, and (maybe this made the difference) some balsamic vinegar, and gosh, it came out nice.   And although I recently made a cream mustard sauce which I thought nice, hers involved brandy as well as wine and some parsley, and it was of deeper flavour for it.

*  One thing I have liked in the past about the 5:2 diet is that, at least at the start, it has given me a feeling of mental sharpness on the fast days.   Unfortunately, the focus of this ability eventually turns into speculating on getting more variety into what I can eat to get my 600 calories, and an inordinate amount of time reading food labelling in the supermarket.   For this reason, I'm wondering if I am better off just going on a tighter fast, for the first few weeks at least - pretty much just liquids (although I will still take a small amount of milk in my tea or coffee) and see how I go.    Or maybe just have one or two of those 300 cal shake mixes?  We'll see...