Surely Google has to act on its rapid reputation decline, soon?

It seems that for a good few months now I am forever reading about how bad Google search has become, and how the company is freely fiddling with functionality (such as dropping "news" as a category in search is a recent experiment for some users, I hear).   All with apparently zero concern as to how users feel about the changes.

This latest story in the Washington Post, for example:

People searching Google for airline contact information when they have a problem occasionally find bogus customer service phone numbers listed at or near the top of Google.

If you call, crooks posing as airline reps try to persuade you to pay to rebook a flight or another task. Your money goes poof.

No one knows how often this scam happens. But this airline customer service misdirection is common knowledge in the travel industry and among people who know Google.

In researching this article, I found an apparent scam number highlighted by Google when I searched “JetBlue contact customer support.”

Google has the power to ensure that it shows the correct airline contact information, according to three experts in the inner workings of web searches. In their view, Google chooses not to fix the problem.

I don't really understand how Google can ignore the outcry.

 

On a musical note

I only recently noticed (via Youtube) Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox (it's been around for 10 years now), and while I'm not always in the mood to listen to modern songs transformed into an alternative, older style, some entries really hit the spot.   (It is also easy to imagine going to a concert by them as being a very enjoyable night out for which the word "sophisticated" would seem apt.)

I really like the minimalist approach to the edit free videos, too, and wonder about how many takes the average song needs.

Anyhow, I will post two that I was watching last night, and liked a lot.   The first makes a melodramatic song fun:

 

The second one features a gay American Chinese guy (Kenton Chen) who seems to have a diverse career in LA as an actor and singer in various groupings.  As many people say in the comments (it has 38,000 - all of them swooning over the performance, and the video has had 35 million views) his voice is just wonderful.  I said to my daughter it's very "clean" - by which I meant precise, I guess.  She said "so in tune" which I suppose is a more accurate way of putting it:

 

There are other videos of him (appearing much "gayer") including a funk style cover of Hey Jude which I thought was pretty good, actually. (I'm not the biggest fan of the original.) But in every song, his vocal performance is just so good I feel he ought to be more famous.

Hope this is true

Funniest comment following:

I'm not sure how I feel about this!

Hmmm:

Reddit strikes $60M deal allowing Google to train AI models on its posts

On a related matter, for some reason as I walking between my car and my office this morning, I had an idle thought about how fear of a smarter-than-any- human Artificial General Intelligence that will destroy humanity might have an analogue with the start of fear of God at the very beginning of theism?   If so, are we going to develop an idea of sacrifices to keep AGI on side?   What type of sacrifice might we now perceive a silicon AGI to desire?

[Really, this is a very "thoughts in the shower" line of thinking - but I was fully clothed at the time.]

Update:  It has since occurred to me that it would be funny if the AGI demands that Elon Musk be thrown in a volcano as an act of appeasement.  Can't say I would be too upset.

I can only imagine how irritating this would be...

A somewhat amusing account about what it was like for one audience member at a Taylor Swift concert in Sydney:

The sound of the 80,000-strong crowd were deafening as Swift finally took to the stage for our show. It was adulation bordering on hysteria: Phones held aloft (to capture stunning footage of … the phones held up in front of them), young fans crying, thunderous applause.

But, as Swift began her opening song, the moody ballad Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince, one voice in our area rose above the masses.

A fan in the row behind me, screaming every. single. lyric in a voice that could only be described as heavily indebted to the vocal stylings of Cannibal Corpse singer George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher.

And on it went, for the full three-and-a-half hour show. Our own personal death metal concert (Taylor’s Version). And before you come for me for yucking some poor fan’s yum, I implore you to watch the video at the top of this story. That was the sound we were dealing with for the whole show.

What was weirdest was that these demonic screams were the loudest not during the show’s bigger, singalong production numbers – undeniable bangers like Shake It Off or Ready for It that had every man woman and child singing the lyrics back at Taylor– but during the quiet, sparse piano ballads like My Tears Ricochet or the ironically named Tolerate It.

Nothing but the sound of Taylor, her piano, and a deranged gremlin.

For one brief, beautiful song, death metal banshee took a short break, perhaps to use the bathroom or have emergency vocal chord surgery.

It was then that I could enjoy the concert as it was intended: Cheering fans, singalongs, but also a clearly audible Taylor Swift.

Hearing Taylor Swift sing a Taylor Swift concert – imagine that!

And it seems the fans exhibiting this behaviour are well aware of just how irritating – if not concert-ruining – their screams are to those around them.

Rather than being filmed by other annoyed fans, these concert caterwaulers are posting their efforts on social media themselves, usually with captions joking that they sure feel sorry for anyone unlucky enough to be sat near them. Indeed – if only there was a solution to this seemingly unfixable problem!

 How did he manage to not tell her to shut up, at least after the first 30 minutes....

British decline, illustrated

I really was put off that Bald and Bankrupt guy on Youtube when he did a trip through Vietnam, and seemed to act quite obnoxiously to the locals.   (I figure that he is OK with interacting with locals when he knows some of the language - but when he knows none of it, he's a wisecracking "ugly" tourist.)   He has also always been too much on the "lads being lads" side of things, and I forget who did an explanation about his seedy side. 

However, he has lately taken to putting some videos about visits to some decrepit towns of Britain, and I'm there for that kind of content!   They really, really make the country look like a lost cause.  (Actually, there is another British vlogger who has been putting similar content, visiting "high streets" in many British towns, and decrepit residential areas, and showing how depressing they look.)   

Also, I sometimes watch videos where British migrants (or even tourists) talk about Australia and what it's like to live or visit here, and I have noticed that the great majority of the comments from British viewers are along the lines of "oh my God, it makes Britain look like a third world country".     

So, if you want to see some very awful parts of Britain (which, incidentally, seem extremely easy to find) have a look at this video:

 

To be fair, although I don't want to be, some people in comments after the video point out that you can find decrepit areas in many European cities (and someone said even in Vancouver!)     But there are aspects to the British decline that  are very self-inflicted, and I think that's what makes it "special" (in a bad way).   And also, make me feel how very lucky Australia is to never have developed quite the same level of urban decay, virtually anywhere (except for some smaller outback towns, I guess).

The promising blue pill

I remain a bit puzzled about why the first stories about this, which appeared at the end of 2021 (as a result of a different study), did not seem to result in a plethora of jokes on talk shows or elsewhere.   But here's a detailed article in the Washington Post about a new study with similar results:

Why Viagra has been linked with better brain health

One bit:

The findings are based on a massive study of nearly 270,000 middle-aged men in Britain. Researchers at University College London used electronic medical records to track the health of the men, who were all 40 or older and had been diagnosed with erectile dysfunction between 2000 and 2017. Each man’s health and prescriptions were tracked for at least a year, although the median follow-up time was 5.1 years.

During the study, 1,119 men in the cohort were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers noticed a distinctive pattern. The men who were prescribed Viagra or a similar drug had an 18 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, compared with men who weren’t given the medication.

The researchers also found an even larger difference in men who appeared to use Viagra more often. Among the highest users, based on total prescriptions, the risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s was 44 percent lower. (Men with erectile dysfunction are instructed to only take Viagra before sex, and no more than once a day.)

And yeah, there is a question of causation or correlation, but as the article notes, there is reason to suspect its more than mere correlation.

Update:  well, in more oddball viagra news I just noticed -

A priest in Spain has been arrested for allegedly running a Viagra trafficking operation from his home.

The unnamed clergyman was detained alongside another man on suspicion of selling the medication, as well as "other powerful aphrodisiac substances", according to El Pais.

He was arrested in Spain's western Extremadura region and has appeared in court charged with a criminal offence.

The priest's lawyer told local media the allegations were unfounded.

More "but he's old"

 

Here's a bit of context from the WAPO.

Trust Americans to come up with a new thing to overdose on

I hadn't even heard of the pain relief herb kratom before, but it's causing deaths in Americans:

A Washington Post review of federal and state statistics shows that medical examiners and coroners are increasingly blaming deaths on kratom — it was listed as contributing to or causing at least 4,100 deaths in 44 states and D.C. between 2020 and 2022. The vast majority of those cases involved other drugs in addition to kratom, which is made from the leaves of tropical trees. Still, the kratom-involved deaths account for a small fraction of the more than 300,000 U.S. overdose deaths recorded in those three years.

Dozens of wrongful death lawsuits involving kratom have been filed nationwide — including by Geers’s mother, who in February sued a Nevada retailer. The suits illustrate increased scrutiny of deaths involving products made from kratom, which is banned in six states but remains widely available online and in vape and convenience stores despite health warnings from federal authorities.

Here's a gift link to the Washington Post story.

A bad review noted

You don't often seem to see really bad reviews in The Guardian of theatre that comes from (what might be called) lefty source material, but this is quite a savage one of the musical Rent being staged in Melbourne.

I am not surprised that it sounds like I would really dislike it as a musical, as I was very underwhelmed by the same writer's Tick Tick...Boom which was made into a movie on Netflix.   Yeah, it's sad that he died young and before he could develop more, but still...

They seek it here, they seek it there...

From PhysOrg:

A study recently submitted to The Astronomical Journal continues to search for the elusive Planet Nine (also called Planet X), which is a hypothetical planet that potentially orbits in the outer reaches of the solar system and well beyond the orbit of the dwarf planet, Pluto.

The goal of this study, which is available on the pre-print server arXiv, was to narrow down the possible locations of Planet Nine and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the makeup of our solar system, along with its formation and evolutionary processes....

Dr. Brown tells Universe Today, "This would be the 5th largest planet of our solar system and the only one with a mass between Earth and Uranus. Such planets are common around other stars, and we would suddenly have a chance to study one in our own solar system."

Scientists began hypothesizing the existence of Planet Nine shortly after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, including an 1880 memoir authored by D. Kirkwood and later a 1946 paper authored by American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, who was responsible for discovering Pluto in 1930.

More recent studies include studies from 2016 and 2017 presenting evidence for the existence of Planet Nine, the former of which was co-authored by Dr. Brown.

This most recent study marks the most complete investigation of narrowing down the location of Planet Nine, which Dr. Brown has long-believed exists, telling Universe Today, "There are too many separate signs that Planet Nine is there. The solar system is very difficult to understand without Planet Nine."

He continues by telling Universe Today that "…Planet Nine explains many things about orbits of objects in the outer solar system that would be otherwise unexplainable and would each need some sort of separate explanation."

 

Some very random stuff

*   Hollywood's Edward Zwick (director/producer - and writer?) teased us with tweets about the movie making business for a couple of years, it seemed, while he was writing a book about it.  The book is now released and is getting good reviews.  He also has this interview at the NYT.   He seems a likeable guide to when Hollywood made better movies than it does now.  

You know, one thing that puzzles me a bit about Hollywood is that movies or shows that feature heavily story lines about how awful the acting/production business is - the most recent example that brought this to mind is the series Barry - always seem very convincing, yet the shows are made by Hollywood producers. Every decade we do have movies or TV shows which say "this business is awful and full of awful people", but it doesn't seem to change much regardless.   Isn't that a little odd?

*  I'm old enough to remember when shave gels first came on the market - I would guess the early 1980's? - and I have always liked them for the way they transform.   But I have been using shave soaps for quite a while - they are fun in their own way.  (And a tube of the cheapo Palmolive Lather Shave and a shaving brush is the best for travel shaving.)   

But a certain laziness meant that I have recently starting using gels again, and can now say for sure - Shick's Hydro Gel is better to use than Gillette's equivalent.  

*  Are modern sausages made much saltier than they used to be?  We don't eat a lot at our home, but that is often the impression I get - and I don't buy the cheapest, either.

Generally speaking, buying German style sausages is the best way to go - the brand at Aldi is especially good.  It's the only thing worth preserving about German cuisine, I reckon.

*  I take it as a sign that Elon is having a lot of trouble selling advertising on X/Twitter that my feed has been chock full of advertisements for "toe mushrooms" - nails with fungal infections - for a week or more now.   And it's not just me, I saw someone else say "why am I seeing 50 pics a day of gross toe nails?"

* There's a long, magazine style article from the Washington Post about the losses of Catholicism to Evangelical churches in Brazil - in particular, the isolated parts of the Amazon, where sometimes a priest would only turn up once a year.   All pretty interesting, although I didn't get to the end yet.

Tuck's incredibly shrinking credibility

Well, it was already in the negative range, but now it's in freefall:

 Update:  one of the Right-iest writers at Hot Air attacks Tucker hard.

Powerline calls him "stupid".

PJ Media says he is "wrong".

It's hard to find any right wing outlet that doesn't criticise this pathetic exercise...

Frankenrice

 Well, this is interesting:

Rice has been used as a scaffold to grow beef muscle and fat cells, resulting in an edible, “nutty” rice–beef combo that can be prepared in the same way as normal rice.

The study, published today in Matter¹, uses manufacturing methods similar to those for other cultured meat products, in which animal cells are grown on a scaffold in a laboratory, bathed in a growth medium. Using rice as the scaffold has the benefit of adding nutrition to the rice, with the beef–rice having a slightly higher fat and protein content than standard rice.

The team of South Korean researchers behind the project hopes that the beef–rice will find use as a supplement for food-insecure communities or to feed troops, and will reduce the environmental impact of rearing cattle for beef. “Finding alternative protein sources or making conventional livestock production more efficient is critical,” says Jon Oatley, an animal biotechnologist at Washington State University in Pullman. “It’s probably one of the most important things facing the future of the human race.”

I guess it gets over the "how do we make the texture like real meat" issue with growing a bunch of meat cells in a lab, but it still sounds like an expensive way to increase protein and fats.  And if the rice is sitting in liquid for a week, while cells grow on it, what sort of texture does it end up with?  Mush?  No, according to this, it's harder?   How does that work?

...the researchers found that coating the rice in fish gelatin and the widely used food additive microbial transglutaminase improved cell attachment and growth. After glazing uncooked rice grains with the gelatin–additive mix, the team seeded the grains with bovine muscle and fat cells. Then, the cells sat in the growth medium for around a week.

After the culturing period, Park washed and steamed the beef-infused rice as she would conventional rice. “It was definitely different from regular rice,” she says. “It was more nutty and harder.”

And I'm sceptical about the cost claim:

The team estimates that 1 kilogram of the rice as it’s made now would cost US$2.23, comparable with normal rice ($2.20/kg) and far less than beef ($14.88/kg). And the study estimates that hybrid rice will have a lower emissions footprint than farmed beef.

We will see if this goes anywhere, but I have my doubts!

Too smart to recognise the damage he's causing?

I happened to see that Jon Stewart's reappearance as a (once a week) host of the Daily Show was on YouTube last night, and he put in a disappointing performance.  I agree with most of the takes here:

Yes, he really lost me, and struck me as kinda stupid, when he mocked the answer Biden gave on Gaza at his press conference:  the very answer I praised the other day!  It was in fact another case of editting to hide the big picture - he showed Biden's caution at the start of the answer, while he was clearly thinking how to diplomatically express himself, and painted it as a sign of Biden feebleness.  

Really, that's pretty disgraceful, and Stewart deserves to be attacked for it.

I don't doubt he's smart, but seemingly not smart enough to see the harm he is doing in encouraging cynicism among voters who don't get their preference to see a younger candidate.