White voter problem

 It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.

Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.

If you unite both sides, you're doing it wrong

Unfortunately, not a good point being made by normally sensible David. 

He seems to have stopped ageing about 35 years ago

He's 82:

 Had some "work" I would guess.  Still looks remarkably good for his age.

This was ridiculous

I don't think this got the amount of ridicule it deserved:

 

 I mean, of course stories about AI development are interesting, but this was a silly stunt.   

In a groundbreaking hearing, a robot “gave evidence” to a House of Lords committee on Tuesday – where it read typos from its pre-written script, struggled to hear questions, and needed to be rebooted halfway through the session.

“Ai-Da”, described by its creator, Aiden Meller, as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist”, appeared in front of the Lords communications and digital committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the creative industries in the UK.

The chair of the committee, Tina Stowell, emphasised at the outset that it was “a serious inquiry”, before explaining to Meller that “the robot is providing evidence but it is not a witness in its own right, and it does not occupy the same status as a human. You as its creator are ultimately responsible for its statements”.

A relatively close black hole

This was in Science last month:

Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.

Update:  Oh, just a minute.  In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.

A meme made me laugh

It was in response to this:

 This:

Weird science

From Nature, a story about which I am unsure how to react:

Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong¹.

In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snout² and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. (Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms mastered Pong many years ago³ and have moved on to more-sophisticated computer games such as StarCraft II⁴.)

The gamer cells respond not to visual cues on a screen but to electrical signals from the electrodes in the dish. These electrodes both stimulate the cells and record changes in neuronal activity. Researchers then converted the stimulation signals and the cellular responses into a visual depiction of the game. The results are reported today in Neuron.

Intelligence in a dish

The work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence, says lead author Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “In current textbooks, neurons are thought of predominantly in terms of their implication for human or animal biology,” he says. “They’re not thought about as an information processor, but a neuron is this amazing system that can process information in real time with very low power consumption.”

I'm betting the cells in a dish would also be easily persuaded to vote for Trump.   

 

Catholic disgrace, continued

Why would this upset him?:

What, his clear discomfit with Putin actually losing the war isn't enough to mark him as a disgrace?    

Update:  he admires Right wing trolls:

Old time commenter JC likes to mouth off in public, and chose db's "new catallaxy" as the forum in which to continue.   But if he had any real moral character, he would tell db (who he increasingly disagrees with) that his views are disgusting:

 

Stand up, JC, you coward...
 

Update 2:

 Dover beach also linked to the Revolver news story, with the title:

Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones Is a War Against Us All

Conspiracy believing paranoid conservatives just hate to see any conspiracy promoting and defaming  moron being punished, economically or legally.   

Dover beach and Currency Lad just illustrate daily how detached from reality and morality conservative Catholics have become.   True disgraces to their religion. 

Update 3:   Well, I guess that makes all OK, then:

He's quite the moron...

Ross sees a problem (but has no solutions)

I don't think there is too much to disagree with in Ross Douthat's column about the unresolved conflict within the Catholic Church that kicked in post Vatican II.

Except - I would say that I get the feeling his inclination is to blame Vatican II, whereas I think the current internal conflict is an inevitable result of the effect of the science revolutions starting from Darwin  making there way slowly through society.   (Vatican II was barely 100 years after The Origin of the Species, after all.)

A coherent president

Further to my wish that American journalists should stop ignoring the Right wingnut meme that Biden is a babbling, dementia riddled puppet - yes this interview was pre-recorded, but Biden comes across as smart and reasonable:  

 

In comments following, there are still some wingnuts claiming "he probably has an earpiece and is repeating words fed to him". They have become detached from reality. This needs to be pointed out by the mainstream press, often.  

Doesn't fit the Trumpy narrative

Yeah, I've read something like this quite a few times recently:

 If MAGA leaders are truly concerned about violent crime, they might look inward. Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime.

This isn’t the fault of Republican leaders, of course, any more than Democratic leaders are to blame for crime in blue states. The South, for reasons sociologists debate, has been more violent than the rest of the country for centuries. But those who are truly worried about violent crime should consider decamping to blue America. Living in a Republican state is much more likely to get you killed.

Sometimes I wonder if dedication to hyperbole causes permanent brain damage

 

Quite a few people make the following point in response: 

Update:  oh look, gullible Adam is impressed too:

Yet, as calmer people are pointing out (my God, this comes from one of the new Catallaxy blogs):

And yeah, the link is to a Nature story from Feb 21 pointing out that:

As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

As some comments note in the thread after Adam's tweet:

Noah tries to counter

Right wingnuts are 100% committed to a belief that Black Lives Matter led to several cities being laid to waste, and that Democrats endorsed the destruction.  As with the "Obama was a disastrous President" narrative, it's difficult to not see underlying racism in the fanciful exaggeration they have convinced themselves is obviously true.  Anyway, I agree with Noah, as I do on many things:

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

What a nightmare for the parents

Noted in The Guardian:

A nurse murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 others by poisoning them on a hospital neonatal unit where she was a “constant malevolent presence”, a court has heard.

Lucy Letby, 32, fatally injected newborns with insulin, air or milk during night shifts when she knew their parents would not be present, a jury was told.

One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The nurse tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.

The court was told that Letby, who was trained to care for the most seriously ill babies, developed an “unusual interest” in the parents of some of her 17 alleged victims and in some cases tracked them on Facebook.

Sounds like something you would read in fiction, but I don't want to see Netflix making money off it either.