Short story: it's a long way off

Noah Smith had a friend who works in the lab grown meat field do a guest post about where it's at.

Despite Noah's optimistic intro:

I actually read it as endorsing my skepticism that it's not really viable, and may be a waste of research and investment. 

Wild uncertainty

That's a surprise coming from Kristol.

Twitter (when not spending time in glorious schadenfreude about Musk losing advertisers and trying to blame everyone except himself) is talking a lot about the Republican favouring polls "flooding the zone" in the last couple of weeks.  Early voting, however, has been high, and traditionally favours Democrats - although I have also noticed that some people are claiming that Republican early voting is high in a couple of places (I think Florida is one of them.)   But I don't know how they know they know how the early voters voted.   

This weekend, there are some (such as Kristol above) suggesting that the Democrats are going to do OK after all (although his tweet above doesn't actually say they will retain control of congress), and it is no doubt based on stuff like this:

 And this is one theory about Republican polling:

As is this:

Yes - that is one safe bet.  If Democrats do surprisingly well (compared to the way the MSM is currently skewing their reporting on the assumption that the Republicans will do well), there are going to be millions of stupid American wingnuts (and their Australian counterparts) claiming it is due to electoral fraud, but (again) with no actual evidence.

The reality is, however, that polling is extremely difficult in the US and surprises have happened before.  

Countryside viewed

Went out to Mulgowie farmers market again on Saturday, which might seem a long way to go to get really fresh corn, potatoes, beans (and locally grown garlic) but it's a nice drive.  

The dams are full everywhere around Laidley, and for some reason, there seems to be an enormous amount of corn planted at the moment (see above - well I think it's corn.  This is right besides the market, but we drove around to Forest Hill, and up to Lowood, and corn was everywhere.  If the market is soon flooded with cheap corn, you heard it here first.  Actually, it's already around $1 a cob, I think, so it's not even that expensive at the moment.  Why is so much being grown?)

It was also surprisingly cool for November.  The weather is still very wonky at the moment.  I kind of don't recall wanting to wear a jacket in November anywhere near Brisbane before.

Some Friday science trivia - I just bought an ancient condiment

I like using Himalayan rock salt in cooking and on my food - it's pink, and makes me think about how incredible it is that I'm using something mined out of a hill in Pakistan that is incredibly ancient.   

You think oil drilled from far underground is old?  Well it is, but here's the specifics:

The formation of oil takes a significant amount of time with oil beginning to form millions of years ago. 70% of oil deposits existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago). This is likely because the Mesozoic age was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the ocean.

Himilayan rock salt, on the other hand:

Himalayan salt is mined from the Salt Range mountains,^[1] the southern edge of a fold-and-thrust belt that underlies the Pothohar Plateau south of the Himalayas in Pakistan. Himalayan salt comes from a thick layer of Ediacaran to early Cambrian evaporites of the Salt Range Formation. This geological formation consists of crystalline halite intercalated with potash salts, overlain by gypsiferous marl and interlayered with beds of gypsum and dolomite with infrequent seams of oil shale that accumulated between 600 and 540 million years ago. 

I had to check, of course, but Ediacaran period starts at 635 million years ago and ends at the (oddly specific) time of 538.8 million years ago (according to Wiki).   For more context, at that time, there weren't even land plants in existence:

We have land plants to thank for the oxygen we breathe. And now we have a better idea of when they took to land in the first place. While the oldest known fossils of land plants are 420 million years old, researchers have now determined that pond scum first made landfall almost 100 million years earlier.

"[This] study has important global implications, because we know early plants cooled the climate and increased the oxygen level in the Earth's atmosphere," conditions that supported the expansion of terrestrial animal life, says Tim Lenton, an earth system scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work.

There were squishy things in the ocean, and that was about it.  (Backbones didn't turn up until about 500 million years ago.)

So yeah, the salt I'll be cooking with is older than most oil, and probably pre-dates even plants!

(Although, for some reason, some salt company sites refer to Himilayan salt as being "more than 250 million years old" and one says only 200 million years.  But I trust Wikipedia, and NPR, more than them and think the 600 million year figure is more correct.)

I intend to impress my family with this news over dinner this weekend.   (It's the sort of thing I loved telling kids when they were school age, but I  like to inflict science stuff on anyone of any age.)

Exactly

 

The party of "we just make stuff up"

 

Thanks for your contribution, Joe

Too late for the millions of Trumpy culture warriors who will go on believing this was real:

Joe Rogan has admitted he lied about a school letting “furry” children use litter boxes, walking back his claims from a month ago that have since been amplified by Republican Senate Don Bolduc. In an October podcast, Rogan told guest Tulsi Gabbard that his friend’s wife taught at a school that “had to install a litter box in the girl’s room because there’s a student that’s a furry.” Now, he’s saying “I don't think they actually did it,” attributing the whole situation to “one wacky mother” who the school ignored. Claims that furry students are using litter boxes have been debunked over and over, but the lie has persisted as a right-wing talking point. Bolduc accused a school of using litter boxes in a campaign town hall, saying “I wish I was making it up.” Lucky for the New Hampshire Republican, he was. “I fed into that,” Rogan said in his podcast, admitting he had no facts to back up his claim.

More lights seen by pilots that aren't quickly explained

I mentioned this guy recently, and really don't know how much credibility I should give him.  But in these videos, he appears reasonable, and he is just putting up pilot and ATC recordings that seem genuine, and somewhat puzzling: 

 

What puzzles me in particular is that if it is a military test of something, why do it in that location, and with a brightness that is going to be seen from far away and attract attention.

Paranoid idiot watch (Australian edition)

Monty used to think he could be debated back to some sort of Right wing moderate position.  I told monty he was wrong, and daily I feel vindicated.

Lost credibility

Yes, I have felt this way about this guy.  The pressure to keep high numbers (and good income from it) is very likely what has brought down his credibility:

 

Some skeptic wins on UFOs

I missed this recent report in NYT that starts:

Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in past years.

The sightings have puzzled the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations.

It goes on to note that the Mick West explanation of the "Go fast" and "gimbal" video seems to be accepted by the Pentagon, and that there is nothing to the "green pyramids" video too.  (I always said that the latter was rubbish - any UFO video that shows lights of any kind flashing in a typical aircraft or drone type sequence is likely to be an aircraft or drone.)

Anyway, still no explanation for the verbal report of the Nimitiz Tic Tak case - confirmed by three pilots.  What a shame there is no good video of what they saw...

Yes, release video

Even though there can be problems with prosecutors rushing out evidentiary material because of political pressure, I reckon it would be a ridiculous look if video showing that the wingnut narrative about the Paul Pelosi attack is a 100% conspiracy fantasy only comes out after the mid term elections.   (The Axios version of this story does not say that the video is recorded, but I think the Wapo story said it was.)

Philip Bump writes about this at the Washington Post, noting how the current calls to release the video are mainly coming from those who want to further conspiracy belief, because any delay is "suspicious".   (Mind you, Bump also seems to think that we can sure than any ambiguity in the video will be used to spin further conspiracy, which is probably true, but it would likely have to be a completely different conspiracy to the one that millions of dumb, conspiracy addled American brains currently believe.)  

A very "apropos of nothing" post

The Youtube algorithm recently led to me listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" for the first time in years.  (It was one of the videos where they use one of the AI art apps to illustrate lyric lines.)

Anyway, it occurred to me while listening that it is incredibly well produced.   (The amount of attention given to George Martin's role with the Beatles, as well as some other Youtube "making of" content I've watched, is no doubt why such a thought now occurs to me.  It would not have when I was younger.)

So I decided to look up who produced it, and it was a guy who isn't famous enough to have a Wiki entry - Ed Freeman.

Nevertheless, my hunch that this song likely had a huge amount of input from the producer seems to be correct.  Look here:

Producer Ed Freeman stated that the “American Pie” single is a combination of 24 different takes of McLean’s voice. This happened because the singer wasn’t the easiest person to work with, and as such, multiple takes were taken during the same session on May 26, 1971, with a live and unedited backing band track.

The producer also stated that even though McLean was a very talented singer, he was sometimes criticized for singing with the same vocal inflections, so he decided to be more improvisational. “In my head, I knew what it was supposed to sound like—I don’t now remember how I arrived at that, but when I kept asking him to sing it in a certain way, he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to play with it every time, inserting slides, melismas and other things that, to my mind, didn’t fit. So we ended up recording him 24 times on 16-track tape and took different parts from different takes until I got every word the way I wanted it, without all the play, and I don’t think Don appreciated that very much…In Don’s case, I think he was happy with the finished vocal, but he was not happy with somebody else having that much influence,” said Freeman.  ...

As for the challenges the length of the song brought to the producing team, Ed Freeman remembers that “it was a complete nightmare to fit an eight-and-a-half-minute track onto one seven-inch single.” The track had to be cut in half very carefully and added to both sides of the record. The final running times were 4:11 minutes for Part One and 4:31minutes for Part Two.

Don McLean is now 77, and looking haggard.  Not sure that he is very likeable in person.  But good song that still sounds great when you haven't heard it for years...

 

Quick takes on Twitter

*  Noah Smith on Twitter seems to be unusually cranky and coming out with some very dubious takes at the moment.   Holidaying doesn't seem to do him any good.

*  Elon Musk is being nearly universally derided by "blue tick" people at Twitter over his plan to charge them for the privilege.  Once again, we have the puzzle - just how smart is this guy?  It's pretty clear he has a modest amount of emotional intelligence and a fragile ego (the "pedo" insult for someone rejecting his impractical idea sealed that forever), but in terms of engineering and other problems, is he really just a hyped up latter day monorail salesman who got lucky?   That's pretty much the vibe he gives me.

*  Everyone on Twitter is also puzzling still about the lack of a convenient and appropriate replacement.  Surely it will arise soon, though.

Is she real?

I don't usually like to say anything that suggests I'm dehumanising a politician or celebrity, but that Kari Lake is so intensely smooth-skinned and over-groomed (and video filtered to look like she's beaming in from the soft glow world of 1980's cinematography) that I would not be at all surprised if turns out to be a robot from some Peter Thiel funded lab:

To me she absolutely reeks of manipulative insincerity and artifice to a skin crawling degree.   I rank her worse than the appallingly unself-aware dumbness of Marjorie Taylor Greene because she seems to have a degree of intellect that's capable of worse manipulation.

Rarely do I have such a strong feeling from a politician's manner and appearance, but she does it for me (in the worst possible way).