The war and wanton women

Sexually Active Women Were Quarantined During World War II - The Atlantic

Well, no, I hadn't heard about this before.  This bit in particular:

At first, health officials focused on sex workers who had been arrested
near military bases or factories. As the war progressed, however, the
focus widened from sex workers to “any women who were somehow viewed or
under suspicion as being delinquent,” Parascandola said. Some places
dispatched health workers to bars and dance halls to scout out women who
appeared too sexually forward; in other cases, officials would wait at
bus stops, questioning the women who came off the bus about their
reasons for traveling to the town.

Women who didn’t agree to submit to testing could still be quarantined
via court order if officials suspected her of having an STD—a caveat
that was interpreted liberally. “For example, they might arrest a woman
who they found hanging around the camps under vagrancy charges,” he
said, “and they might use some claim of suspicion for venereal disease
because this women was hanging around with all these men.”

Can't remember this aspect of the war being featured in a movie before...

The Cruz response

It was a bit slow coming, probably because people did not really like to been seen to be dissing the poorly performing Sierra Club guy who clearly wasn't expecting it, but here is Phil Plait's rebuttal (follow his many links) to the King of Fools Ted Cruz.

Cruz's performance has been greeted with acclaim by Right wing sites everywhere, from Andrew Bolt to Powerline.

As I have said recently, I think its time for gloves off as far as politicians, journalists (and scientists) who are properly informed on the matter of climate change - start calling out Cruz and his ilk as fools who are refusing to inform themselves on science.   By all means, they can still be pointed to the information to rebut their arguments, but call them fools for not reading or believing it.

It's really the arrogance mixed with ignorance that is getting to me - they genuinely believe that climate science, which has been becoming more certain and understood over the last couple of decades, is teetering on the edge of collapse, all because a mere handful of largely discredited scientists (4 or 5, tops) in the field lend support to the non-scientist advocates, politicians and conspiracy theorists such as Monckton, Watts, Steyn, Delingpole, Bolt, etc.  Guys, you're being fooled.   Your arrogance is entirely misplaced.   If you read more broadly, you might understand.  

Now having said that:  I will still make the observation that the last refuge of the denialists is the satellite temperature record, specifically honing in on the RSS one lately.   I am sure denialists do not know what the satellites are measuring, the history of the problems with this method and sometimes dramatic adjustments (see links I have previously provided), or that that one of the senior members of the RSS team wrote late last year:

A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). 

However, the oft repeated line has been that the satellite method may be more sensitive to ENSO and the 1998 El Nino than the surface temperature record, in which case one would expect that the current El Nino may see a similar spike to that in 1998.

Such a spike is not yet appearing in the satellite figures.   If it does, and is of a similar magnitude to the the 1998 one, then the denialists will likely have a serious problem as to how they maintain their lines.
  
If it doesn't appear, then the matter of the method of how the satellite temperature is measured and the records compiled, and the issue of its comparison with radiosonde readings, will be in for some more consideration.

It would simpler for everyone if there is a spike.

But - whether there is or isn't a spike will not matter much to those enduring a temperature rise, and rainfall changes, on the surface.    That's where we live - not in the middle of the troposphere.

All a bit incestuous

Here's Why Samsung's Profits Are Up Nearly 80%

Samsung Electronics says its operating profits for the third quarter will hit $6.29 billion, up 80% year-over-year and smashing Wall Street expectations.

That forecast from the South Korean tech conglomerate exceeded analysts’ expectations of about $5.89 billion. It marks a surprise for a company that as recently as the previous quarter saw operating profits fall 4% from the same period last year.

What’s driving the comeback? It’s all about Samsung’s semiconductors division, the backbone of its third quarter success. And that’s partially thanks to smartphone rival Apple, which uses chips manufactured by Samsung in its latest iPhone 6 lineup (Samsung’s own phones also use Samsung-made chips). Samsung’s chip business saw revenues grow by around 24% to about $28 billion last year.

Aren't Samsung and South Korea generally  great examples of crony capitalism?    (Here's The Economist in 2010 briefly on the topic.) Doesn't their success send some sort of challenge to small government advocates that their approach isn't the only one that can succeed?

When the constitution stuffs it up

Umpqua: Is Jeb Bush right about 'stuff happens'? - CNN.com

Somewhat interesting to read about the way the interaction between State and Federal powers in the US makes creating an effective background check system in the US so difficult.

But never forget - the fundamental resistance to increased effectiveness of any such system is driven by a "they're coming to get our guns!" paranoia encouraged by the NRA and like bodies.

Lettuce eat

This Robot-Run Indoor Farm Can Grow 10 Million Heads Of Lettuce A Year | Co.Exist | ideas impact

That seems an awful lot of lettuce...

Rainfall will change - just not sure where

As I noted in a recent post, some climate scientists are warning that the current Californian drought may well be small compared to some ones that may be coming under climate change - lasting up to 35 years, perhaps.

Now it seems to me that for a State with a high population and a very big agricultural sector (which has presently been getting by on diminishing groundwater), a 35 year drought would be a very big problem indeed.  How are economists and their models on the effects on GDP dealing with that scenario?

More generally, a paper just out in Nature Climate Change explains that changes to tropical rainfall are shown under all modelling of the future climate under AGW, but the problem is working out where. As the abstract explains:

Many tropical countries are exceptionally vulnerable to changes in rainfall patterns, with floods or droughts often severely affecting human life and health, food and water supplies, ecosystems and infrastructure¹. There is widespread disagreement among climate model projections of how and where rainfall will change over tropical land at the regional scales relevant to impacts^{2, 3, 4}, with different models predicting the position of current tropical wet and dry regions to shift in different ways^{5, 6}. Here we show that despite uncertainty in the location of future rainfall shifts, climate models consistently project that large rainfall changes will occur for a considerable proportion of tropical land over the twenty-first century. The area of semi-arid land affected by large changes under a higher emissions scenario is likely to be greater than during even the most extreme regional wet or dry periods of the twentieth century, such as the Sahel drought of the late 1960s to 1990s. Substantial changes are projected to occur by mid-century—earlier than previously expected^{2, 7}—and to intensify in line with global temperature rise. Therefore, current climate projections contain quantitative, decision-relevant information on future regional rainfall changes, particularly with regard to climate change mitigation policy.

Again, I wonder how economic forecasts over the coming decades can take this uncertainty into account.

He has a point...

How school debating has ruined Australian politics

The unexpected

New The X-Files makes a dazzling debut as Cannes hosts world premiere

Given the show had become boring and not worth watching in the last couple of seasons, I wasn't expecting the re-boot to be good.  I hope this review is right, though.

When funny actors age

Jerry Lewis is 89 and frail, but still making public appearances:

I don't think he has many more left in him, though, by the sounds of the report.

I'm not sure what Chevy Chase does in his spare time now, but he has not physically aged well, at all:

He's an inspiration for dieters, though.

Doris Day, on the other hand, looks pretty much how I think she should (she's 91):

Last time I saw Billy Crystal on TV, I thought that his head was starting to look strange.  But in this photo, I think the beard makes him look more normal:

He's 67, and just had a TV series cancelled.

David Letterman, 68, on the other hand, looks positively ancient when he grows a beard:

Kirstie Alley turned up on The Middle this last season (still a funny sitcom, shamefully overlooked by the Australian market) and she is a good looking 64 (as long as she keeps the weight off):

Mind you, she would surely have had the best medical assistance Hollywood could buy.
 
The best preserved comedian of the modern era, however, has to be Bette White, who at 93 is still working and appears to have stopped aging 30 years ago:

Is there a reason for this post?   Not that I can tell.  It's strangely pointless...

Worse to come

10 Weather Extremes In October's First Week | Weather Underground

Given that there is a strong chance the El Nino's full effects are really just getting into gear, there is strong reason to believe we're in for a period of severe weather of different types around the world.

Mind you, I see that some economists have come out arguing that El Nino events are actually pretty good economically - the benefits outweigh the downside, globally.  Yet some of the examples given in the article seem  to be along the same lines that can be used to argue that earthquakes and war can be "good" for an economy.

Personally, I'd prefer that the economy improve without the death, destruction and pestilence along the way - but I'm not an economist.

One has one's doubts it will succeed...

New Quantum Cats game launches to build better understanding of quantum concepts

Good to see good Spielberg reviews

Bridge of Spies Reviews - Metacritic

I had been intending to note here that I was completely underwhelmed by the trailer for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies - it was a terrible, plodding example of trailer salesmanship, if you ask me.

Yet we all know a great trailer can be made from a bad or average movie, so it is always possible that it can work in the other direction, too.

That seems to be the case here, and I am pleased to see that the movie is generally getting solid reviews.

A detailed look at the Islamic State propaganda machine

BBC News - Fishing and ultraviolence

Interesting to read how the IS propaganda machine actually spends a lot of time on positive PR spin about the its economic and social future.   "Look! - a man growing melons.  Look! - a camel herder!  Look! - a homosexual being thrown off a building and the crowd below stoning his body."

[Apparently, the medieval period has a lot of allure to a certain subset of the population.   It's a bit like those who enjoy medieval dress up fairs - hey, I've been to one or two - but with the violence real.]

Longer droughts for California?

California agriculture weathers drought — at a cost

A bit of a worrying future in store for California:

A team led by climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University in California has used historical data and climate models to show that global warming is increasing the odds of the state seeing warm, dry conditions similar to those that spawned the current drought (N. S. Diffenbaugh et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 3931–3936; 2015).

The droughts could even last for many decades.  By incorporating palaeoclimate data into climate models, Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and two co-authors are predicting droughts that could last as long as 35 years (B. I. Cook et al. Sci. Adv. 1, e1400082; 2015).

“We’re in a new climate, and it’s a climate in which the probability of severe drought conditions is elevated,” Diffenbaugh says. “That recognition is really critical.”

The Xenophon solution

Plan to shake up Senate voting | Business Spectator

I find Nick Xenophon's proposed changes to the Senate voting system to be very reasonable.

They will upset Senator Leyonhjelm, who openly advocates gaming the voting system by the creation of microparties simply to direct preferences, so that people have no idea who they may get.  As we have seen in all other Senate or House of Reps election results, Leyonhjelm's party has a vanishingly small voter base, and he wants it to have a chance in future by the same devious tactic.   This deserves to be crushed.

Tempura noted

Been a while since I made a "just cooked this for the first time" post, but the weekend saw my first attempt at tempura.

The recipes for this on websites vary a lot - quite a few involve self raising flour, or baking powder added to plain flour; others recommend cornflower mixed in with it, or even potato starch.  The matter of using an egg (or just yolk) is not even settled.   The only universal thing is that the water used must be ice cold, and you do not want an over-mixed, smooth batter - lumps are good.

In any event, I found that plain flour, mixed with an equal quantity of iced water containing a lightly beaten whole egg, worked well.   And one cup of flour and one of water makes quite a lot of batter.   (Actually, I think I added a bit more water - I don't like thick batter.   But it basically seems hard to go wrong (as long as the oil temperature is pretty high too.)

As for the dipping sauce - 1 cup of dashi (powdered stock type, of course); 1/4 cup each of mirin and soy sauce, plus a couple of teaspoons of sugar, all heated in a saucepan and cooled  a bit for serving, worked well.

The history of tempura as a Japanese mainstay is interesting.  As the Kikkoman company's website explains:

China, which has long influenced Japan, has traditions rich in culinary techniques based on the use of oil. In fact, written Chinese includes an array of characters used to distinguish different types of frying, such as quick-frying over high heat, searing at low heat, and so on.

Yet Japan was unaffected by this particular culinary aspect of China: early Japanese cooking was more strongly influenced by the injunction against eating meat that arrived with the introduction of Buddhism in the sixth century. This meat-eating taboo came to Japan by way of China, but Buddhism was not the state religion of China, nor was it closely associated with the ruling classes, as it was in Japan. Pig lard was used to prepare some dishes in China, but pork fat was unavailable in Japan, once the eating of pork was prohibited. Vegetable oils were obtainable here, but they were used mainly as fuel for illumination and their quantity was limited; thus the use of oil in cooking was slow to catch on.

Tempura most likely made its first appearance in Japan via Spanish and Portuguese missionaries and traders, who introduced deep-frying in oil during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Gradually, the type of cooking we now know as tempura became firmly established during the eighteenth century. As if to endorse this history, I have encountered a deep-fried squid dish in Portugal. And to my surprise, I enjoyed something called “fritters” —deep-fried seafood or vegetables—which had an uncanny resemblance to tempura in Malacca in Malaysia. Malacca is a bustling coastal port where the descendants of Portuguese colonists, who arrived during the early sixteenth century, pursue fishing and other trades while conducting their lives in the local vernacular, a dialect of Portuguese....

What was early tempura like? The oldest extant records, dating from the late seventeenth century, indicate that it consisted of balls made of a paste of thrush meat, shrimp and ground walnuts, which were deep-fried in oil, then covered with a sauce thickened with kuzu (a perennial of the bean family) starch. No batter coating seems to have been applied.

In the mid-eighteenth century there are records of deep-frying with a coating, apparently fish dusted with flour or root vegetables like burdock, lotus and taro dipped in a thin mixture of flour, soy sauce and water. Considerable innovations then followed, creating the tempura we know today: the production of vegetable oil increased and its price stabilized, making it possible to use generous amounts in cooking; soy sauce manufacture became an established industry, and this seasoning became more widely available; it was also during this time that bonito-flake stock was more commonly used.

During the Edo period, tempura-style cooking first became popular at movable outdoor stalls. In those days, Edo was built entirely of wooden structures, and so was extremely vulnerable to fire. Cooking outdoors rather than in houses was encouraged, and outdoor stalls serving foods like tempura were very popular. Like sushi, tempura flourished as a snack enjoyed by the common townspeople, and went on to become an essential element in the “flavor hierarchy” of Japanese cuisine.

Thus ends today's culinary notes...

Quaint and distinctive

I don't know why, but a lot of my pleasant dreams lately seem to be about the memorable scenery.  Is it because the internet is serving up spectacular images of locations from all over the world - like a daily dose of National Geographic, instead of just a once a month (or once a dental visit) experience as it used to be when we relied on printed images?

In any event, my Zite feed has referred me to a short article at Country Living about Giethoorn, a
quaint Dutch village in which the houses are thatched and the streets are actually canals.  It certainly looks dream-worthy:

Here's the town's tourism website.   I would like to visit.

Extraordinary game

You can take as true, when it comes from someone like me who only invests about 5 hours a year in watching sport, that everyone saying that the Rugby League grand final tonight was stupendously good viewing is correct.  It showed everything that, even to my generally disinterested mind, makes this code the best to watch:  a scoring rate that is "just right"; genuine tension that comes from clear movement of team lines back and forth in relation to the try line; less risk of idiosyncratic umpiring decisions changing a game; and the ability to always see the ball in play. 

Good article on gun free zones

Commentary: Gun-Free Zones Don't Attract Mass Shootings

Some American gun law thoughts

Given the latest American mass shooting (Oregon, 13 dead, 20 injured),  that appears very likely  to be another case of a person, probably with guns legally purchased by themselves or by a relative, who has gone nuts due to some perceived slight from fellow students, I was wondering whether one of the key differences between Australia and the US is not just the ridiculously easy access to firearms over there, but also the greater ease with which Australian authorities can remove firearms from people.

Well, I assume it is much easier in Australia.  Certainly, this is the situation if a person has a domestic violence protection order against them in Queensland:

A temporary protection order will suspend your weapons licence and a final protection order will revoke your weapons licence.
You are required to surrender all weapons licences and weapons possessed to a police officer as soon as practicable, but no later than one day after the court makes the order, or the order is served on you. If you fail to surrender licences or weapons in the time specified, you may commit an offence against the Weapons Act 1990 and will be liable to a penalty of up to 10 penalty units.
You cannot apply for a weapons licence for a period of 5 years from the date of the order if a protection order is made against you.

And certainly doctors who are concerned about whether a patient should have weapons can inform the police.   A booklet here describes the process and issues.

But in the US?   A paper from 2014 by some psychiatrists argues that national registries of the mentally ill aren't likely to help gun violence, but the power of authorities to order the removal of guns from those deemed "dangerous" might:

The debate regarding creation and maintenance of a national registry as a primary legal tool for keeping firearms out of the hands of people with mental disorders has obscured a potentially useful strategy for reducing firearm violence or suicide—temporary removal of a firearm from a person’s custody during periods of acutely elevated risk (32). Some states, e.g., California (33), permit removal of firearms from people during mental health emergencies and restrict access during the period of commitment. Specified clinicians in these states can work with appropriate personnel to facilitate removal of firearms from persons they believe are at significant risk of harm to themselves or others. Indiana and Connecticut (34) allow firearms to be removed from imminently dangerous individuals, whether or not they have mental disorders. Under the Connecticut statute, the state’s attorney or two police officers can file a complaint in court whereby temporary seizure of firearms of persons posing risk of imminent personal injury to self or others may be authorized for up to 14 days. After the initial firearm removal period, a court can extend the order for up to a year if it finds, after a hearing, that the danger persists. Under this statute, a history of confinement in a psychiatric hospital is only one factor that the judge may consider, in addition to several non-clinical factors, in evaluating the danger that the person presents.

I see that this comment from one site promoting "smart" gun laws in America indicates that the movement to make removal of guns easier has only just started:

Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVRO) empower families and law enforcement to petition a judge to remove guns from relatives who pose a risk to themselves or others. Shooters often exhibit dangerous warning signs, and GVRO laws help keep guns away from people with the intent to harm. California passed a landmark GVRO last year, in response to the shooting at the University of California, Santa Barbara. How many other mass shootings could have been prevented had the shooters’ families had legal recourse to keep them away from deadly weapons?

Of course, I expect the NRA will oppose such laws vigorously.  Yep, here's an NRA member complaining:

No one wants firearms in the hands of someone who’s not competent to own them. However, when someone crosses the danger to self or others threshold, they need immediate care, not a restraining order. Police and family members should focus on the individual, not their guns.
If the person is truly a danger to self or others, committing them to a psychiatric institution will safeguard them from their firearms.

Has anyone taken to these nuts the matter of how incredibly illiberal their idea is, not to mention the ridiculous increase in the number of psych ward beds you would need?   And of course, NRA membership would be almost a given for Tea Party Republicans, exactly the last people who would want the government spending the money that would be needed to make their "anything but the guns!" line in any way effective.

I'm glad I don't live there.