I see that the matter of whether it's ethical (or just a good idea) to go back in time and kill baby Hitler was on the internet recently (see the Vox explainer here); but I have a better idea - someone needs to consider going back in time to kill Dorothy Mackellar.
If you are not Australian, you may need to be informed: she was an Australian poet who wrote a piece beloved of primary schools of my era which nearly every Australian (at least over the age of 50) has had to learn.
The problem:
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.
means that climate change deniers, like those that flood (ha, a bit of a topical pun) Catallaxy, think that the one line in there eans that they never have to admit that record breaking rains and associated floods in Australia are being worsened by climate change.
OK, maybe she doesn't need to be killed. Just someone get their hands on that pretty turgid piece of writing and tear it up.
One wonders - could Victoria polling for Liberals be so bad that even his seat is in danger? It would explain the hint of desperation that his actions here indicate.
Lasers have been used to send targeted, quiet messages to someone from several meters away, in a way that no one nearby would be able to hear.
How it works: To send the messages, researchers from MIT relied upon the photoacoustic effect, in which water vapor in the air absorbs light and forms sound waves. The researchers used a laser beam to transmit a sound at 60 decibels (roughly the volume of background music or conversation in a restaurant) to a target person who was standing 2.5 meters away.
A second technique modulated the power of the laser beam to encode a message, which produced a quieter but clearer result. The team used it to beam music, recorded speech, and various tones, all at conversational volume. “This can work even in relatively dry conditions because there is almost always a little water in the air, especially around people,” team leader Charles M. Wynn said in a press release. Details of the research were published in Optics Letters.
Next steps: In theory, the technique could be used to direct a message to a single person at range, without any receiving equipment. The team plans to get the technique to work outdoors, at longer ranges. It isn’t too much of a stretch to see it being used for military or spying purposes, and of course there’s always the ever-present specter of super-targeted advertising.
On its new drive, despite having the same 13 x 11.5mm dimensions as
smaller flash drives, Samsung says its new 1TB module boasts sequential
read speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps, twice that of a typical SATA-based
laptop SSD. Additionally, random read speeds are allegedly 38 per cent
faster than on an equivalent 512GB flash drive, with random writes
speeds as much as 500 times higher than a high-performance microSD card.
In the first instance, as someone who began her graduate career as a
primatologist, I knew that fathers who stick around, rather than
hot-footing it as soon as copulation is complete, are vanishingly rare
in the primate world, limited to a few South American monkey species and
completely absent from the apes, with the exception of ourselves.
Indeed, we are among the only 5 per cent
of mammals who have investing fathers. I knew that, given the
parsimonious nature of evolution, human fatherhood – with its complex
anatomical, neural, physiological and behavioural changes – would not
have emerged unless the investment that fathers make in their children
is vital for the survival of our species.
NPR talks about a film looking at the stories of (some) Jews who chose to "hide in plain sight" from the Nazis in WW2:
Hanni Weissenberg, now Hanni Lévy, survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Today,
the petite and lively 94-year-old lives in Paris. Earlier this month,
she returned to Berlin, her home during the war years, to attend the
screening of a film about her and other Jews who survived while hiding
under the noses of the Nazis.
The Invisibles, a German documentary-drama based on the accounts of four survivors, opened Friday in the U.S....
Schieb says about 1,900 Jews survived the war while hiding in and around Berlin.
Gee, I'm finding I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from watching Rosehaven on the ABC now.
It's just the best comedy writing and acting in an Australian series since, I dunno, Frontline maybe? Everyone seems so comfortable in their roles, and you have to imagine they take pleasure in making it. Who writes it? I must look it up.
Anyway, last night's return episode featured a pig which they decided to "rescue" from what they presumed was a fatal return to the local butcher. And oddly, there is a story in The Guardian today about real farmers who have had even larger scale sudden conversions:
Vasanthakumar is not the only farmer to perform this kind of
reversal. In 2017, Jay Wilde, of Bradley Nook farm in Derbyshire, took
his cattle to a sanctuary and decided to become a vegan farmer (the film
telling this story, 73 Cows, has been nominated for a Bafta). In the US, the Illinois-based charity Free From Harm has gathered tales of many farmers who have had epiphanies and switched to veganism.
Utomo and his team developed a high-protein line of rice cultivar,
'Frontière,' which was released in 2017. The rice was developed through a
traditional breeding process. It's the first long grain high-protein
rice developed for use anywhere in the world, he says. On average, it
has a protein content of 10.6%, a 53% increase from its original protein
content. It also needs less heat, time, and usually less water to cook.
This high-protein cultivar is currently marketed as "Cahokia" rice. It
is grown commercially in Illinois.
The article is about how they are not trying to improve yield.
So, how much protein is in food by weight percent, anyway?
According to this short-ish list from the British Nutrition Foundation, most meats are around 30%; fish in the low 20's, and beans and other higher protein vegetables around 10% or under. I'll just copy the whole list:
Meat
Chicken breast (grilled without skin) Beef steak (lean grilled) Lamb chop (lean grilled) Pork chop (lean grilled)
32.0 31.0 29.2 31.6
Fish
Tuna (canned in brine) Mackerel (grilled) Salmon (grilled) Cod (grilled)
So this new rice is now up above chickpeas and kidney beans. And tofu. Look at almonds though! Eat a friand and it's getting close to eating a piece of mackerel, protein by weight wise.
A Bold New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves
A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males.
A few key paragraphs from it:
In fact, Wrangham’s notion
of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient
lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s
named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th
century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but
that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing
if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling,
the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of
communal harmony.
Central to his argument is the idea that
cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central
role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists
eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors
killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly
all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking
out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the
patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The
twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to
protect the group from one of its own: They serve as a form of capital
punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists
witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their
midst.
The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human
hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes
collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the
Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies
of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a
certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and
killed him. My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust
possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice.
Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my
experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women
in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women
and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the
generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower
reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital
punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a
similar taming function.)
Well it's a theory, and if true, not sure what it means about the prospects of highly intelligent life of our kind on other planets. From a review in Nature of a book "How the Earth Made Us":
In this age of worldwide climatic deterioration, many authors have
documented what we are doing to our planet. Lewis Dartnell turns the
tables in his book Origins. He asks how Earth has affected us,
through our long evolution to big brains, small jaws and scrawny bodies
that somehow cooperate with each other enough to make us the planet’s
dominant eukaryotic species. All this began, Dartnell argues, with the
tectonic processes that created the East African Rift — the area that
today runs from Somalia and Ethiopia down to the coast of Mozambique.
The uplift of mountains here caused a rain shadow that dried and warmed
East Africa, turned jungle into a park-like savannah, and enticed early
hominins to leave the trees and become game hunters, runners, thinkers,
cooks and, eventually, empire builders.
That Simon Reeve is a likeable, informative host of travel/social commentary documentaries, isn't he? I have been watching his 2018 BBC series about journeying around the coast of the Mediterranean (on the ABC), and it was very good.
Last night's episode, in large part about the huge, plastic greenhouse market gardens in one part of Spain was particularly surprising. First, they look ridiculously ugly and obviously environmentally unsound. Second, it would seem most of the labour is dirt poor African migrants who live in ridiculous rented hovels near the gardens, working in (literally) sweathouse conditions which sometimes kills them. Thirdly, apparently all the UK big chain stores are happy to source their vegetables from there, and don't give a hoot about the conditions of workers.
It seems surprising that this is the first time I have heard of this as an issue.
The episode is one iView, and it looks like elsewhere on line.
I also learned from it that one, ridiculously popular Spanish beach resort area is ugly as, compared to the Gold Coast of Australia. (And I prefer the Sunshine Coast anyway, which looks like heaven compared to that Spanish resort area.)
I hadn't been into the Brisbane CBD for a while, so I didn't realise until I was near there yesterday that Lime electric scooters had started appearing. I first noticed them (or was it another app based sharing service, I forget?) actually being used in Singapore during my recent holiday.
I think they look pretty cool, really, although I can understand how they could be a nuisance in the hands of idiots too. I presume you have to use them with a helmet here, as I noticed helmets attached to them in Brisbane.
Their safety has been a hot issue. Mother Jones had an article noting a study about the injuries incurred in using them in Los Angeles, and its tweet about it copped a lot of criticism for seemingly ignoring the injuries caused by cars. As to the number of injuries, here's a key part:
Digging through records from two Los Angeles-area emergency rooms, the
researchers found 249 patients with injuries serious enough to warrant a
trip to the ER.In comparison, they found 195 bicyclists with injuries and 181 pedestrians with similar injuries during the same period.
But that alone is potentially misleading: surely the rate of injuries is more significant? There are (I would guess) a lot more bicycle riders in LA than scooter riders, and doing a lot more distance too.
I also see that even in liberal California, there is a move away from legislating helmet use for bicycles and now scooters:
Only 10 of the people brought to the ER were wearing head protection.
During three observation sessions, the study’s authors documented that
94 percent of the riders they saw didn’t use a helmet, and 26 percent
rode on the sidewalk. Bird and Lime encourage
their users to wear helmets, offering to ship free ones upon request.
But it’s unclear how many riders follow safety guidelines, like wearing
protective gear and staying off the sidewalk to avoid pedestrians.
As of January 1, adult scooter riders are no longer required to wear a helmet in California. Bird lobbied for the legislation, arguing that it would create parity with cyclists, who may ride helmet-free. The company’s chief legal officer told the Sacramento Bee that the goal was to help people “more easily embrace sustainable shared mobility options.” Lerer, who filed a class-action suit
against Bird and Lime for negligence, calls removing the helmet
requirement a “huge mistake.” She notes the suddenness and severity of
the injuries she began seeing as soon as the scooters were introduced.
“So many of the people I’ve spoken to have serious brain injuries,” she
says.
Surely the US must provide a lot of evidence for researchers about the effects of legislating for things like helmet use? Because it seems that their obsession with liberty means lots of places keep repealing things which other countries (or at least Australia) think are well worth keeping on public health grounds. Only a week or so ago, I saw a Reddit post about the motor cyclist death rate increase in Florida when it repealed compulsory helmet use in 2000. (No surprise - the death rate went up substantially.) It appears that other American states softened helmet laws in the same period. From a 2004 study:
Between 1997 and 2001, nationwide motorcycle rider fatalities increased by 50% while motorcycle registrations increased by 31%.1,2
The rise in death rates may be related to the concurrent weakening of
motorcycle helmet laws in Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and
Florida. In comparing rates the year before (1996) and the year after
(1998) the helmet law change, Preusser et al.3
found a 21% increase in motorcyclist deaths in Arkansas and a 30%
increase in Texas. This analysis tries to determine the effect of
weakening Florida’s motorcycle helmet law.
Remember a post I wrote recently about the way the comparative American death toll from traffic accidents had started going up over the last few decades, and the reason given was that other countries followed evidence-based policies shown to have reduced fatalities? Seems they may have the same problem when it comes to helmets.
Anyway, this post was partly inspired by watching this pretty interesting video about how Tel Aviv has embraced electric scooters, partly because they don't have public transport on the Sabbath (it seems Shabbat is the preferred word now?) I thought it pretty interesting:
