Monday disease

41 cases of locally transmitted Zika confirmed in Aljunied Crescent cluster, 34 fully recovered, Health News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

I wonder if Singaporeans themselves are surprised, given its general super clean image, that the island state has reported scores of cases of locally transmitted zika disease.   It can't be great news for their tourism sector.

See the story above from the local paper, showing great clouds of insecticide being deployed.   I would bet there is a lot of that going on over the next few weeks.

A trilogy of diseases

Time for 3 stories of unpleasant diseases I noticed this week:

*  a terribly depressing situation with tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea.  Drug resistant TB there continues to spread, and a quarter of cases are in children who, if they survive (it kills one in 10, apparently) may well have life long disabilities in a country with next to no services for them.

*  The Guardian reports that doctors are starting to worry about treatment resistant fungal infections.  And the resistance may be coming from a surprising source:

More than a million people die of fungal infections every year, including about 7,000 in the UK, and deaths are likely to increase as resistance continues to rise.

Researchers say the widespread use of fungicides on crops is one of the main causes of the rise in fungal resistance, which mirrors the rise of resistance to antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections in humans.

As for medicines available: there aren't many:

“There are more than 20 different classes of antibacterial agents. By contrast, there are only four classes of anti-fungal agents. Our armoury for dealing with deadly fungi is much smaller than the one we have for dealing with bacteria.

“We cannot afford to lose the few drugs we have – particularly as very little funding is being made available for research into fungi and fungal infections.”

 The article also mentions the case of an apparently fungal lung infection that killed a bagpipe player.

*  And for this final round of unpleasant thoughts:  I guess I had heard before that people can get a gonorrhoea infection in their throat or mouth, but I'm not sure I had realised that it could be carried there, without symptom, for weeks or months, and be transmitted on via that common bedroom activity that's not intercourse.   A doctor thinks, based on some early tests, that gargling with ordinary commercial mouthwash might be helpful in preventing its spread, although I don't think he thinks it will kill off entirely.

Gee, I wonder how the Listerine company might cope with that information in advertisements. 

The French and toast

My wife made French toast for a Sunday morning treat today (and she makes it very well - using a French stick cut thickly, and the bread soaked in the milk and eggs overnight.)

We eat it with maple syrup, which led to the question - do the French eat French toast, 'cos the syrup makes it seem more like an American meal.

So off to Wikipedia it is, where the French toast entry is not as detailed as I feel it deserves, but it at least tells us the recipe pre-dates France quite considerably.  (Basically, it goes back to Roman days, and has been seen in many countries as a good way to make stale bread palatable.)

This entry on the history of the dish at "Today I Found Out" (a site which has a very appealing name for someone like me) is much more readable.  The site says this:

Indeed, the name for French toast in France itself is “pain perdu”, which literally means “lost bread” (it is also called this in Belgium, New Orleans, Acadiana, Newfoundland, and the Congo, among other places). It’s interesting to note, for the naysayers who like to cling to the belief that it came from France, that before the French called it pain perdu, they called it “pain a la Romaine” (Roman bread).

And this: 

In France itself, French toast is highly sweetened and is served as a dessert item, rather than served for breakfast, as in America and many other places.

So, now we know. 

The French and swimwear

I can't be bothered working out a position to take on the French attempting to enforce smaller swimwear on women, except to remind people that the country has a history of being very prescriptive about swimwear in a way that leads to foreign men, at least in  public pools, also being forced to wear less than they otherwise might in their own country.   And, as I noted not so long ago, up until about the 1960's, many boys and teenage guys in many parts of the US were forced by their State school system -or if they were learning at a YMCA - to take swimming lessons nude.  Go back further, and England had to ban men bathing nude - at the beach - in the 1860's, and this coincided with bans on mixed bathing, as well.

Yes, I know, both of the first two examples are about alleged hygiene concerns in pools, not the ocean.   But just wanted to note that the history of regulation of bathing suits has taken many peculiar turns, in many countries, one way or the other over the years...

Paging Dr Nick

One of the more amusing things to come out of the Trump/alt right conspiracy mongering about Hillary's health is a re-examination of the Trumpian sounding letter from Trump's doctor.

As I said in comments recently, the letter put me in mind of Dr Nick from the Simpsons (and I bet I'm not the first to think that), and as it turns out, the doctor does at least look a little unconventional.  (See story at the link.)   The funniest suggestion in the WAPO story is that a "positive" medical test often means something bad..was Trump's doctor trying to tell us something?   It's logic worthy of the alt right itself, but pretty funny. 

Sensitive Tim and gay marriage

Oh, so newly elected walking selfie Tim "Send in the water cannon" Wilson is now taking to re-tweeting rude tweets from lefties?   To show up the intolerant Left?  Seems a bit rich...

As to the whole same sex marriage plebiscite - what a mess this issue is.  While I think a plebiscite is actually not a bad idea for everyone for a major social and legal change, I would expect it to be conducted conveniently (and economically) with an election day vote.  But this seemed to have been beyond Turnbull's ken to get going in time for the last election.  Do we blame deals with his conservative Coalition base for that?  I'm not sure.

Now with the Greens going all "principled" again (they manage to delay a lot of useful things to their side of politics by doing this) it seems there won't be one for years.  Actually, I wonder if it's more likely now that we won't have one at all, and gay marriage will just come in via a new Labor government.  But I could be wrong.

It's one of those issues where everyone's annoying - gay activists by carrying on too much about how dire it will be for gay teens to hear rhetoric against it;  conservatives for going on about how it will be a cultural disaster that will see people locked up for refusing to marry same sex couples.  And Tim Wilson for criticising the Greens, when members of his own party are interested in delaying the inevitable, including undertaking not to be bound by the result anyway.  

And for the record, again:  I would favour civil unions over gay marriage.  If the plebiscite had been held at the last election, I would have likely have voted "no", but with the expectation that the "yes" vote would win, and without any great concern that it would end Western civilisation.  (Or perhaps, I would just have voted informal on this - that's probably the better line for someone like me to take, given my preferred option is not on the table.)   Give it another couple of years of listening to argument about it, though, I might be persuaded to vote "yes" for gay marriage, just so I can stop hearing about it....

A funny line about Coulter

The Great Ann Coulter Immigration Bamboozle

From The Federalist, of all places:

“I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper,” Coulter tweeted last August, calling Trump’s immigration plan “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” At the time, due to my longtime understanding that Coulter is 85 percent ratings-and-book-sales-related shtick and 15
percent the amalgamated ghosts of old cigarettes, I shrugged and rolled my eyes.

Robot babies

I see that an evaluation of one of those "here, look after this demanding, crying, robot baby and see what a pain baby care is, so you'll know not to get pregnant" programs with teenagers in WA actually ended up with more of the robot carers getting pregnant.

I'm a little puzzled by this.  Haven't these programs been tried in the US for many, many years?  They've featured in some sitcoms for a long time, I'm sure.  Were those programs properly evaluated?  Or does it depend on the location of the teenage population (with, for example, teenagers in remote towns with little to do finding that even caring for a robot or real baby is better than being bored?)

The Hillary health campaign

The Trump/Guiliani/nutty Right wing conspiracist reliance on ridiculously concocted "evidence" of Hillary Clinton being seriously frail just goes to show what intense gullibility has swallowed up significant sections of the Right in the US, as well as the dearth of genuine good policy they have on which to run.   Just as they would prefer to believe that climate change is a self serving fabrication of money hungry scientists and/or socialists of the UN, rather than believe the hundreds of professional science bodies and the evidence of record temperatures before their eyes, they show little in the way of common sense, let alone good policy judgement, and swallow the silliest suggestions whole.  I am still inclined to blame the internet for this - I just don't think conspiracies used to get the hold on as large a part of the Western public in the pre-internet decades as they do now.

And it seems to me that the Trump campaign is probably facing a backlash for this - with one poll now showing a 10 point lead for Clinton, and ridicule of the health conspiracy finally making news.   Or maybe it's the Trump flip flopping on his populist immigration policy.  Who knows. 

And why haven't those in the GOP who want their party to have a skerrick of credibility been calling out Trump on this health conspiracy issue?  Are they just figuring that the only way the party can rise again is to see it first burn to the ground when the nutty element takes control?

More comedy stylings from the escapee from 1950

Spotted at Catallaxy, from someone who has become the walking definition of hysteria about homosexuality and the matter of gay marriage:

The video, incidentally, shows the weakest "firestorm" of violence since, well, I dunno, readers can up with their own comparison for wannabe violent confrontations that weren't anything to write home about. 

Providing for the dead

China's ghost weddings and why they can be deadly - BBC News: Police in north-west China have charged a man with murdering two women with mental disabilities, alleging that he wanted to sell their corpses to be used in so-called "ghost weddings".

It has put a spotlight on the ancient shadowy ritual, still practised in certain parts of China, which aims to provide spouses for people who die unmarried.

Read the whole thing - it's fascinating.

Yet more on (very odd) Japanese management ideas

The ‘handsome weeping boys’ paid to wipe away your tears - BBC News

This will, no doubt, be the oddest story about Japan you will read today.

Putin and the Noosphere

What is the Mysterious “Nooscope”? Let’s Ask Putin’s New Chief of Staff | Mysterious Universe

Russia has long been the home of crank-ish spirituality; although, as it happens, I'm quite fond of the idea of the Noosphere myself.  The possibility of an orbiting nooscope, though?  Sounds like something out of Philip K Dick.

What it means for Putin to be elevating someone who seems to take these ideas very seriously is anyone's guess.

More about "Japanese Schindler"

Documentary sheds light on Japanese who helped Jews escape Holocaust | The Japan Times

I've mentioned him before on this blog, way back in 2008.

The problem of regional predictions

Global climate models do not easily downscale for regional predictions | EurekAlert! Science News

Zhang and Michael Mann, Distinguished professor of atmospheric
science and director, Earth System Science Center, were concerned that
the direct use of climate model output at local or even regional scales
could produce inaccurate information. They focused on two key climate
variables, temperature and precipitation.

They found that projections of temperature changes with global
climate models became increasingly uncertain at scales below roughly 600
horizontal miles, a distance equivalent to the combined widths of
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. While climate models might provide
useful information about the overall warming expected for, say, the
Midwest, predicting the difference between the warming of Indianapolis
and Pittsburgh might prove futile.

Regional changes in precipitation were even more challenging to
predict, with estimates becoming highly uncertain at scales below
roughly 1200 miles, equivalent to the combined width of all the states
from the Atlantic Ocean through New Jersey across Nebraska. The
difference between changing rainfall totals in Philadelphia and Omaha
due to global warming, for example, would be difficult to assess. The
researchers report the results of their study in the August issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The problem has been well known for some time, but I guess this is putting some more specific details into it.  Also, it makes it clear what nonsense it was for the head of the CSIRO to suggest we could afford to move on from climate modelling work.

Things you probably didn't know about airplane tires

Airplane Tires Don’t Explode on Landing Because They Are Pumped! | WIRED

The article ends by noting that it's really hard to make an airplane tire explode by overinflating, because they are designed to be so strong.  I presume they are better now than tires on Orions in the 1980's - as I am aware that an airman lost his legs due to an accidental overinflation explosion in Adelaide in that decade.

In other natural disaster news

Giant, deadly ice slide baffles researchers : Nature News & Comment: One of the world's largest documented ice avalanches is flummoxing researchers. But they suspect that glacier fluctuations caused by a changing climate may be to blame.

About 100 million cubic metres of ice and rocks gushed down a narrow valley in Rutog county in the west of the Tibet Autonomous Region on 17 July, killing nine herders and hundreds of sheep and yaks.

The debris covered nearly 10 square kilometres at a thickness of up to 30 metres, says Zong Jibiao, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITPR) in Beijing, who completed a field investigation of the site last week.  The only other known incident comparable in scale is the 2002 ice avalanche from the Kolka Glacier^{1, 2}
in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, says Andreas Kääb, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. That catastrophic event killed 140 people.

I hadn't even heard of these, until now...

Roman earthquakes

Can an Earthquake Bring About the Fall of Rome? - TIME

With news of the deadly Italian earthquake, not all that far from Rome, I was curious about whether Rome itself has ever suffered a lot of damage from a major quake.  The answer appears in that Time article from 2012.  Seems from historical precedent that the city is not all that likely to ever be reduced to rubble; but sure, it has had some earthquake damage, and could get a moderately large shake again.

Man, he's childish..

Just had a look at the Trump twitter feed:

Don't any of his advisers have the gumption to say to him - "Boss, I suggest you stop using these 'people are saying' and 'virtually everyone agrees' lines - they're seen as transparently self serving and a silly rhetorical device"?

Money for access

For people who like to accuse the mainstream media of liberal bias, aren't they are little surprised that the New York Times and the Washington Post both have had articles playing up the concern about the Clinton emails and the "access for money" issue they raise?

I find it hard getting too worked up about this:  money for access to politicians (via political donations and attendance at exorbitantly priced fundraisers) is so common now that it seems beyond winding back.  True, from little I have read, it seems that the Clinton arrangement incorporated an indirect - but only just - wealth enhancement to the Clintons personally (via Bill being paid by his own foundation?), and I can understand why people think this is a bit rich (ha!)   But as for how bad it is for good governance - isn't the problem that to get too horrified by it, you have to show that the payment did in fact lead to corrupt and bad decisions?  As far as I can tell, so far, no one has pointed to a clearly egregious example of such a decision as a result of donation to the Clinton Foundation, which lead to an email to Hilary, which led to a meeting, which led to a bad decision that would not otherwise have been made.  But I stand to be corrected.   It seems from the most recent articles that donors who contacted Hilary or her staff for help often didn't get much "value for money"; sometimes getting responses that were more "I dunno.  Good luck with that one.  Oh, and thanks for the donation, again."

Anyhow, here's the choice:  a candidate who has a long history of doing very well personally out of politics and political connections - sometimes in dubious fashion - but who appears basically sound on matters economic, understands foreign affairs (even if you don't agree with every decision she made - but let's face it, it's frequently a case of not being able to win no matter who you support when it comes to foreign policy, especially in the Middle East), and believes scientists when it comes to climate change - the global issue of the century with dire planet wide risks.

On the other hand - a narcissistic flip flopping ignoramus, with terrible judgement as to who to take policy advice from, who still thinks decades later that his being able to use hairspray with CFCs was more important than fixing the ozone hole.

It's just not a realistic comparison.

Update:  I think I can say that this BBC summary of the issues with the Foundation over the years supports my general take on the matter.

Update 2:  and here's the Slate take on the matter.  Pretty much along the same lines - the Foundation was sort of asking for trouble; or at the very least, doubts.  Perhaps the best line in this article is this:

You don’t need to believe the Clintons orchestrated some sort of pay-for-play scheme to know that there is something wrong with a dynamic where it is nearly impossible to prove whether they did or did not.   

 But this is still not the same as showing the Clintons were corrupt in any highly serious way.

And it's not as if people shouldn't have doubts about Trump's ability to remain a cleanskin.  If anything, his refusal to be upfront about his tax returns, and the connections with Russian money (that do indeed go to the matter of direct benefit to him and his businesses), as well as his generically self centred, immature attitude to everything, show him to be a fertile field for future corruption and secret dealings.

Update 3:  Here's the Michael Yglesias take on the matter at Vox, more defensive of Clinton than other media.  Key point:

Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.