Prion diseases discussed

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged : The Salt : NPR

I didn't realise that the PNG highland matter of cannibalism of the dead used to be so, um, thorough:

As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects."

Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who
did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.

"So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body — taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary
ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.

But women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. "Snacks," says Lindenbaum. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain
age and went off to live with the men. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."

Foreign Correspondent on China's kids

What a sad episode of Foreign Correspondent last night, looking at the issue of Chinese kids, particularly in rural areas, left in the care of grandparents (or other relatives) while their parents move away for years at a time to work in city areas.   And, of course, this does not always work out.

By the way, is it just me, or does it seem to others too that rancorous arguments within Chinese families sound like some of the nastiest you'll ever hear?  It seems that if kid's don't live up to expectations, they'll be really demeaned for it.

Testing Prisma 4 - another filter

(I really think this is awesomely good. As my son noted, it's the way it makes the lines on the more distant buildings a bit crooked that makes it look hand made.)

Prisma testing - the original photo

Testing Prisma 3 (this actually is Tokyo, run through the Tokyo filter...)

Testing Prisma 2

Testing Prisma

Well, this hardly seems fair...

Is sex in later years good for your health?: Having sex frequently - and enjoying it - puts older men at higher risk for heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems. For older women, however, good sex may actually lower the risk of hypertension.

That's according to the first large-scale study of how sex affects heart health in later life. The federally funded research, led by a Michigan State University scholar, is slated to be published online Sept. 6 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

"These findings challenge the widely held assumption that sex brings uniform health benefits to everyone," said Hui Liu, MSU associate professor of sociology.

Liu and colleagues analyzed survey data from 2,204 people in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. Participants were aged 57-85 when the first wave of data was collected in 2005-06; another round of data was collected five years later. Cardiovascular risk was measured as hypertension, rapid heart rate, elevated C-reactive protein and general cardiovascular events: heart attack, heart failure and stroke.

Older men who had sex once a week or more were much more likely to experience cardiovascular events five years later than men who were sexually inactive, the study found. This risk was not found among older women.

"Strikingly, we find that having sex once a week or more puts older men at a risk for experiencing cardiovascular events that is almost two times greater than older men who are sexually inactive," said Liu. "Moreover, older men who found sex with their partner extremely pleasurable or satisfying had higher risk of cardiovascular events than men who did not feel so."

How to deal with a jerk

Obama cancels meeting with ‘colorful’ Philippine president - The Washington Post

Fear of not dying

Apeirophobia: The Fear of Eternity - The Atlantic

What a great article here, about people who get all anxious and sweaty at the idea of living forever in heaven.

Just goes to show, there's no pleasing everyone.

The article does go on to explain, however, that it is related to the fear of infinity, or at least vastness, as explained in this paragraph:

There shouldn’t be too many atheists who fear of eternity, since they
reject the idea of an afterlife, Wiener says. But that doesn’t mean
that those who aren’t religious are immune to existential anxiety.
Infinity, after all, doesn’t pertain only to time; it can also apply to
space. “I feel that we are all insignificant compared to the universe,”
wrote Jamie Adkins, a nurse and longtime friend of mine, in response to
my Facebook post. “When I start to think beyond our solar system, it is
as if my thoughts automatically stop to protect myself from having some
form of a panic attack. The knowledge of black holes will give me
nightmares for days. The thought of the distance between galaxies is
unbearable.”

She likened the experience to Horton Hears a Who. “We are on this tiny flower and can be blown away any second.”

Yeah, I did have a brush with that, once, when I was around 7 or 8.  As I recall, a brother who had gone to the Council library when I couldn't borrowed a book for me, and it was one about space or astronomy, but was primarily about galaxies and the vastness of the universe.  There were lots of pictures of galaxies.   It actually upset me, because it conjured an image of such cold, lifeless, vastness in my mind.  My brother was puzzled, saying he thought I liked books about space (and I did - this was the era of Apollo and I followed it very closely in the papers and on the news.  I also read kid's science fiction, of which there was a lot - all of it optimistic - in that decade.)  But what I liked was the idea of life in the universe, making it home.  And I still do.

But as for heaven:  well, I think right from early childhood I've accepted the view that it's a basically unknowable thing: to be experiencing something like life but without the cycles, limitations and uncertainties with which we know it on Earth.  Reunion with loved ones (at least initially) has become a widely accepted part of the commonly believed experience of it, and who (or at least, the majority of people who have loving relationships during their life) can object to that idea?   As for what goes on for the rest of eternity:  who knows;  does  the ego continue indefinitely, rather than being subsumed into a greater thing sooner or later (or even temporarily.)   I don't mind the idea that you can spend a hell of a lot of time observing (or influencing) life on Earth, or in other parts of the Universe. It can all be fun to imagine, but it's unknowable. 

As I said recently, this is a positive feature of Christianity, not a bug.  Keeping it vague and unclear is actually a good thing, if you don't want people doing all sorts of evil things on Earth with the justification that it'll all be sorted out in the afterlife.  

Transgender skepticism that's not religiously motivated

I stumbled across this transgender skeptical blog (which mainly concentrates on the issue as it relates to pre-adulthood) some months ago, and forgot to mention it here

Transgender issues are not something I care to devote that much thought to, and the whole problem with complaining about transgender activism is that it's embarrassing to be identified with religiously motivated  conservatives and the way they chose to talk about the issue.   (As I have posted before, the whole issue of transgender use of toilets is one which I think is massively overblown in importance by American conservatives.)

But, I don't have much doubt that transgender activism has reached an amazing peak of influence, and in particular, the issue of how to deal with children who feel they are the "wrong" gender is a particularly vexed one.  Hormonal treatment to delay puberty for a mental conviction that might be strong at the moment, but for how much longer?   How do you know that the influence of hormonal changes will itself not lead to eventual change of mind about gender?  You only have to read Rupert Everett's (pretty amazing) disclosure that for a long time as a child he wanted to be a girl (and then became a very promiscuous gay man - although he did sleep with the occasional woman too) to be alerted to the fact that some people change their gender identifying views.   (A counter view, arguing that the quite large number of children who act out as the other gender who do not transition is not really an argument against "genuine" childhood transexualism can be found here.)

Anyhow, the 4thWaveNow blog was apparently started by a woman with this experience:

4thWaveNow was started by the mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a “trans man” after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs.  (The daughter has since desisted from identifying as transgender.) After much research and fruitless searching for an alternative online viewpoint, this mom began writing about her deepening skepticism of the ever-accelerating medical and media fascination with the phenomenon of “transgender children.”....

I created this site because mine is a viewpoint that is seldom publicly heard: that of a left-leaning parent who is critical of the dominant paradigm regarding transgender politics and treatment. My primary concern is children, teens, and people in their early 20s, particularly girls who are contemplating medical transition. While I may disagree with their views, I do understand that consenting adults have the right to do what they choose with their own bodies and minds.

 I haven't read many of the posts on the blog, but as far as I can tell, the skeptics who comment there frequently do identify as left leaning, and do not usually sound at all like being religiously motivated.

There is, though, I must say, some stridency in some material that (unfortunately) smacks of the language of conservative critics.

Interestingly, I see that they do talk about concern that there is presently a significant element of "social contagion" in the experience of teenagers who have never before seemed to have gender identity issues, but who suddenly announce they do. I really suspect that this is likely true, and a subject worthy of some detailed research.  But as the blog often complains - transgender activists (often men who transitioned late in life, oddly enough) are usually vehemently opposed to research that seems could question transgender desire as something fixed since birth, effectively.

Anyway, it's interesting to see skepticism on this issue that isn't embarrassing to be associated with.

Art apps

Prisma And Artisto: These Apps' Creations Sure Look Like Masterworks, But Is It Art? : All Tech Considered : NPR

I don't spend much time trying apps with photo filters, and the "art" filters usually give less than impressive results.  But this Prisma app looks a bit more promising.

Update:   see my posts above for my tests of it on a couple of my recent photos from Japan.   It really does very impressive "art" conversions....

Paleolibertarianism, racism and Trump

Where did Donald Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians. - The Washington Post

Interesting material in this article that's sure to get some libertarian noses out of joint.

Waterfront on the move

Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun - The New York Times

This is a pretty good article talking about the already increasing coastal flooding in America.

I am very curious as to whether economists with their "future costs of climate change" work can really have any firm basis on calculating the obviously high potential cost of works to hold back the sea.  We're not talking little old Holland here, with its puny length of coast line.

Crime in America

A few crime stories caught my eye on the weekend:

*  Anchorage, Alaska, with a population of about 300,000, has had 25 homicides this year, with 9 of them unsolved.  The unsolved ones seem to mostly be in parks and trails around the city.  

The article says that 25 was the total number of murders they had there in 2015, although going back to 1995, they had 29 in a year. 

Doesn't that seem high for a city of 300,000?    Looking at a story about Australia murder rates, yes it is:

According to the latest AIC figures, the homicide rate for the NT was 5.5 per 100,000 people. This is five times the national rate and almost four times the second highest state, Western Australia, which had a homicide rate of 1.4 per 100,000.

News.com.au examined 10 years of data from the institute’s National Homicide Monitoring Program and found the NT consistently had a higher rate for murder and manslaughter than anywhere else in Australia. In 2001-02, the NT’s rate was almost six times higher than the national average, 11.5 compared to 1.9. By 2011-12 it had improved significantly to 5.5, but was still higher than the rest of the country.

According to Matthew Willis, research officer from the AIC, the number of actual murders and manslaughters in the Northern Territory is far lower than bigger states such as NSW or Victoria, which both have larger populations. But when those numbers are calculated per (100,000) head of population, the statistics are staggering. Even when compared to smaller states such as Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, the NT is high. All those states sit around the 1 to 1.4 rate.

 So, even compared to recent figures in the Northern Territory, the Anchorage rate is high.   I wonder if they have alcohol problems, too?

 *  The Washington Post ran a lengthy article looking at the only known black lynching that took place on a military base in World War 2.   Never solved, it appears clear that people closed ranks, and it once again paints a picture of a black man killed for being too assertive (or perhaps, too friendly to white women.)   A depressing story, but worth remember the legacy that current black America carries in living memory.  

*  Vox's long article about the issue of whether "black culture" is responsible for violent crime in America is very good - and really, it covers more than just that theory - it looks at the whole matter of the uncertainty as to why violent crime has actually dropped dramatically over the last few decades. 

Good to hear

JTB, Panasonic, Yamato to test new ‘hands-free travel’ service for visitors to Japan ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I mentioned in my posts about Japan a couple of months ago how the country has a fantastic luggage courier service.  Good to see they are trying making it more accessible to the non Japanese speaking tourist.

More on DNA and data storage

I don't recall posting much about this before, but reading about DNA and its great potential for data storage does make you wonder if there is anyone trying to decode human DNA just to make sure that an alien Creator class has not left us a message.   Perhaps a contact address for warranty claims?

Here are three relevant articles:

If You Were a Secret Message, Where in the Human Genome Would You Hide? (I see this was published on 1 April 2015, but I don't think its a joke - although I haven't read it carefully.)

An Alien Code May Be Hidden Inside Our DNA!

Quest For The Hidden Alien Message Embedded In Human DNA Continues (OK, it's a flaky looking website, but this article seems OK.)

End this now

Calls for restrictions on Medicare access to IVF subsidies for older women: A decade after the IVF industry defeated the federal government's attempt to restrict Medicare access to older women, the president of its peak body has says there is little taxpayer value in subsidising the treatment after a woman turns 45.

Statistics on fertility treatment outcomes released on Friday show that 73,598 women started IVF cycles in 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available, and one in five of them (19.8 per cent) delivered a live baby.

This represented a 10 per cent improvement in the live birth rate
over five years, which has been attributed to better freezing
technology.

But the success rate dwindled to 6 per cent for women aged 40 to 44, and less than 1 per cent for women aged over 45.

If our current Coalition government cannot push this saving measure through now, they're good for nothing.

Sometimes it pays not to be an early adopter

Samsung Electronics is expected to announce a global recall of the large-screen smartphone Galaxy Note 7 because of faulty batteries that catch fire, South Korea's largest news agency reports, citing an unidentified company official.
The world's largest smartphone maker will announce the results of an investigation and a plan to deal with the issue as soon as this weekend, according to news agency Yonhap.

Link here.

As with Apple and its bend-y phone, I'm not sure it is ever a good idea to be in the first rush to get a new model phone.

Telling it like it is

Billionaire GOP Donor Wants Trump's Head Checked | Mother Jones: "As a Republican who has contributed millions of dollars to the party's causes, I ask: Why has our party not sought a psychological evaluation of its nominee?" Fernandez writes in an op-ed published in the Miami Herald on Thursday.

Under the headline "I'm a Republican and I'm With Hillary Clinton," Fernandez attacks Trump as responsible for "a neverending spiral of vulgarity, intellectual dishonesty, invective, abuse, misogyny, racism, intolerance, bullying, ignorance and downright cruelty." Fernandez says he takes particular issue with the way Trump has implied that if he loses, it will be because Clinton cheated.

"This is insanity and dictatorial machinations at best," Fernandez writes.