Vaping mystery

I would have thought that the pro-vaping lobby would have some misgivings about their position until doctors work out what is causing serious lung disease amongst vapers in the USA.

But I have noticed no sign of that in Australia.   I see that Terry Barnes, former Liberal health adviser, is still running a pro-vaping line in the interests of reducing smoking rates. 

I know he can claim some academic support - but I think it very likely that within a few years, it will be seen to have been misplaced. 

I am surprised that people cannot apply some common sense to this issue, and judge that it is unlikely to be a healthy thing to coat your lungs regularly with the liquid needed to deliver nicotine.  Less unhealthy than smoking?  Presumably so, but the key thing should be how much it helps smokers quit - and the research on that is still early.   Even if it helps more smokers quit, it would need to be a substantially higher number than other nicotine replacement methods in order to justify the health risks associated with vaping.  As to how much higher - that is just a judgement call, and for me, it is one the vaping industry is unlikely to pass, especially taking into account how many young users it attracts. It is not as if the industry wants only ex-smokers as users, after all.

Heinlein believed

...in an afterlife, so it would seem from a 1968 letter that Michael Prescott has posted.

I am not sure I am all that surprised - I would say he always showed interest in other dimensions (a bit like in the Flatland scenario), and alternative universes, and perhaps his afterlife interests were connected with that.   (In other words, a belief that if we understood science better we could work out where "Heaven" is.)

Portland is still there

Today I had read this very anti Ngo article at Jacobin: Portland's Andy Ngo is the Most Dangerous Grifter in America, then had a look at his twitter feed during the anticipated confrontation between out of town Right wing provocateurs and local Antifa, many of whom are unsavoury looking characters in their own way.

And yeah, I have to say, it is clear Ngo isn't a real journalist.  He was tweeting short clips (taken by others - I assume he did not turn up this time, which is no doubt a good idea in his own self interest), without context, and giving the uniformly worst possible interpretation against Antifa in all cases.  He's as much as a journalist as, say, John Pilger was when doing his completely one-sided takes.  In other words, just a biased commentator with a camera. 

Anyway, it seems there wasn't as much drama at Portland as people feared, even though there were arrests.  I did see on Twitter that one of the Right wing organisers of their intervention said it was a success because it got Trump's attention on Twitter.

Yeah, right.  A real sincere exercise in free speech.

Portland is still there, and Andy Ngo is still doing his part to encourage wingnuts into thinking the US is going to collapse because of Liberals, rather than because it has a narcissistic, dumb, wannabe authoritarian President with an enabling Party behind him.

Update:  the Daily Kos version of events during the day.  Because you would have no idea what was happening if you relied on Andy Ngo.

Fluffy donut

Am sitting beside this at the moment:

She had a bath this morning...

Milk under attack

On a busy Brisbane street this morning, the anti dairy folk are out:

This is a busy street, just outside the Ekka.   Which, I now realise, is almost certainly why they are here.  

I haven't been into the Ekka this year, or last year.  I wonder if the vegans have much of a presence yet?  Given the increase in vegan products I've been noticing in supermarkets (Coles brand smoke flavoured tofu, for example), there must be some vegan promotion in there.   

Now I'm imagining late night fights there between big-hatted cow cockies and tofu stall holders.

I must go next year and find out...

Limited truth in advertising

Just saw this flyer:

Checking Wikipedia, I find that this now comprises just one original member..the drummer.   Rather like Ringo going on tour and calling himself The Beatles, no?

Saturday photo

Colmslie Beach Reserve, Brisbane:

Finger workout

This one's for reader Tim, who is interested in all things German, I think:

German finger wrestling pulls a crowd in Bavaria

Competitors, who are matched in weight and age, sit opposite each other and pull on a small leather loop using just one finger.  The winner is the one who pulls his opponent across the table. As in other forms of wrestling, those taking part must put in lots of training. Squeezing tennis balls and lifting heavy weights with just one finger are both part of the routine. To emerge triumphant, technique and physical strength are important, as is a high pain threshold.

Fingerhakeln is traditional in Bavaria and in Austria. Its origins are unclear but it is believed to have started as a way of settling arguments.

I thought at first, if only Hitler had been prepared to settle disputes with a good fingerhakeln session.  But then I thought of poor old Roosevelt being flung across the table, and America going all Man in the High Castle.

Churchill, on the other hand, might have kept Britain safe that way.

The articles has lots of photos of men in traditional get up, pulling fingers.

Does it make cream too?

More on that company that wants to get fake milk made using milk protein from GM yeast:

After working at MassBiologics less than a year, Pandya quit in 2014 to found Perfect Day with another vegan biologist, Perumal Gandhi, also now 27. Their Berkeley, California, company has developed a technology to insert a DNA sequence into microflora like yeast that produces casein and whey proteins that are identical to those found in cow’s milk. Rather than create its own line of grocery store items, Perfect Day, which has raised $40 million from investors, is selling its proteins to large food manufacturers to turn into mayonnaise, protein bars, baby formula and cookies.

I don't really understand - do those proteins make cream?  Because milk only tastes good because of the cream.  (If you're going to drink skim milk, you may as well go with unsweetened almond milk.)   And the article does not involve any actual taste test of a milk product made this whey way.  (Ha ha).  

Anyway, I am curious as to whether this can be a success.   Isn't raising yeast in gigantic bio-reactors pretty efficient,  and economical?      

Good grief

WSJ reports:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer’s imagination, according to people familiar with the discussions, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea.

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it was a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination that will never come to fruition. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

Maybe Peter Thiel told him it was a good idea?   He's nutty enough to think it might make a good future Libertarian Land.  I have no idea why Trump himself would come up with the thought...

Yay for science thwarting vegans

Have I mentioned before that I'm pretty dismayed how veganism has seemingly completely trumped vegetarianism in the alt. normal diet marketplace of ideas?    I mean, really:  the idea of giving up cheese, or eggs, is a huge ask for many people, me included.   And besides, I would be pretty sure that it is much, much easier to get a load of essential vitamins from your food if you include dairy, eggs, and the occasional not-very-sentient source of protein.   (Say, prawns and oysters - I am never going to worry too much about upsetting their farmed friends by taking them out of the sea.)  

But I can see why vegans argue about not wanting to support the egg industry, which involves killing huge numbers of day old rooster chicks.   (Why they wouldn't eat ones from their own backyard, though - that seems way too purist to me.)

So I am happy to read about the big effort to find a way to deal with the problem, by not even allowing the rooster eggs to hatch:

Modern laying hens have been bred to produce huge numbers of eggs, but their brothers are useless. They don't put on weight fast enough to be raised for meat. So hatchery workers—specialized "sexers"—sort day-old chicks by hand, squeezing open their anal vents for a sign of their sex. Females are sold to farms. Males—roughly 7 billion per year worldwide, according to industry estimates—are fed into a shredder or gassed.

Sorting males from females before chicks hatch at 21 days wouldn't just avoid the massacre. Hatcheries would no longer need to employ sexers, they wouldn't waste space and energy incubating male eggs, and they could sell those eggs as a raw material for animal feed producers, the cosmetics industry, or vaccine manufacturers. The United Egg Producers, a U.S. cooperative, says it wants to be cull-free by 2020, and the German government has said it will outlaw the practice. "Everyone wants the same thing, and the right piece of technology could solve this right now," says Timothy Kurt, scientific program director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) in Washington, D.C.

Look at how hi-tech one method of achieving this is:

One contender is the technology behind the respeggt eggs, which sorts them based on sex hormones. Funding from governments and industry has prompted an abundance of other ideas—from laser spectroscopy to MRI scans to genetic engineering. And next month, FFAR will announce seed funding for six finalists—selected from 21 entries from 10 countries—for an Egg-Tech Prize competing for up to $6 million for a workable method.

Almuth Einspanier, a veterinary endocrinologist at Leipzig University in Germany, and her colleagues laid the groundwork for the respeggt brand. They found that by day 9 of development, female embryos produce a hormone called estrone sulfate that can be detected reliably in fluid that builds up in the egg—"essentially the embryo's pee," Einspanier says. The German grocery chain Rewe and HatchTech, a Dutch hatchery equipment supplier, founded Seleggt, a spin-off based in Cologne, Germany, to market the technique. The company built a robot that fires a laser to open a hole in the shell much smaller than a pinhead. It sucks out a minuscule drop of the fluid and adds it to a solution that turns blue in the presence of the female hormone. Female eggs go to the incubator and male eggs are sent off to be frozen and processed into powder for animal feed.

Next thing we need work on - how to make milk other than from an udder.  What happened to this artificial cow's milk that is made from GM yeast?   Deserves another post, probably.

To be added to the international "everything in Australia wants to kill you" files

An elderly couple have been badly injured trying to break up a fight between their dog and a goanna in north Queensland.

The 72-year-old man underwent surgery after being bitten by the goanna while his wife was treated for her injuries at the Proserpine Hospital.

The couple's dog was killed during the attack.

I have to admit, that is an unusual and somewhat disturbing story, even for Australia.

No surprise

Of course, climate change deniers are thrilled;  but honestly, I don't think anyone sensible should ever have held high hopes that this was a useful energy idea:

World’s first solar road fails to meet expectations 

Roads need constant maintenance and get covered in dirt - they are about the last place I would expect it to make sense to lay thousands of solar cells.

Overcompensating

The reporting about the attractive young woman killed in Sydney by a nut a couple of days seemed odd to me from the start.    I mean, no one thinks a sex worker deserves death, but most people (surely including the parents of such a good looking and apparently smart young woman) would feel it is shame, at least to some degree, that she did that to make money.   Certainly I do - I'm one of the few people who strenuously objected to Pretty Women being a de facto glamorisation of prostitution at the time it came out. 

But the reporting on this woman seemed to be overcompensating from the start to promote her as a fantastic person, loved by all, who travelled the world and just happened to make a living via prostitution (sorry, sex work.)   And the print reporting has been full of warnings from some sex worker advocate telling people that she deserved to be able to work safely and without fear (duh) and people shouldn't look down on her because of how she made a legitimate living, etc etc.

It all seemed very much a case of the media trying to pre-empt anything less than fulsome praise for the women in every respect of her life - as if mere sympathy was not going to be enough.

As I say, I found it distinctly odd.  

What??