Astronomer likes to speculate

Abraham Loeb was the key guy suggesting that the recent asteroid Oumuamua was possibly an alien probe, and he like to think science fiction-y thoughts generally, it seems from this Scientific American piece he wrote:

Meeting a piece of advanced technological equipment developed by an extraterrestrial intelligence might resemble an imaginary encounter of ancient cave people with a modern cell phone. At first, they would interpret it as a shiny rock, not recognizing it as a communication device. The same thing might have happened in reaction to the first detection of an interstellar visitor to the solar system, ‘Oumuamua, which showed six peculiar properties but was nevertheless interpreted as a rock by mainstream astronomers.

Because it would likely be relatively small, most advanced equipment could only be recognized in the darkness of space when it comes close enough to our nearest lamppost, the sun. We can search for technological “keys” under this lamppost, but most of them will stay unnoticed if they pass far away. More fundamentally, one may wonder whether we are able to recognize technologies that were not already developed by us. After all, these technologies might feature subtle purposes—like the cell phone communication signals that a cave person would miss.

He then talks a bit about directed panspermia - the idea that Earth was seeded for life deliberately by alien probes.

Have I ever said this out loud before? - I have long imagined a science fiction comedy starting with a scene in which a UFO lands on a barren Earth for an alien toilet break, and that's how life gets started here.

The big double standard continues

This is topical - Trump talked about stopping HIV transmission in his State of the Union speech (something Conservatives commentary has made no mention of, as far as I have seen - no doubt because it hardly accords with their priorities).   Amusingly, I heard someone say that this idea appealed to Trump because he had so much feared catching it himself from his random sexual encounters in the AIDS heyday.   Sounds a very likely explanation.

Anyway, clearly a crucial tactic for this will be to increase use of PrEP, which allows users to greatly reduce any chance of catching it even with unsafe sex.

But, as I have written before, people do question the tactic if it's going to vastly increase the risk of other STDs spreading through the community.   This should be a particular concern when drug resistant strains of things like gonorrhoea are starting to really be a worry. This is the topic of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, discussed here.

Generally speaking, it argues that doctors should not worry about the "risk compensation" rise of unsafe sex amongst those on PrEP.   But look at the reason given:

"PrEP does not protect against non-HIV sexually transmitted infections, but concerns about risk compensation do not justify withholding PrEP," said lead author Julia Marcus, Assistant Professor of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School. "According to the World Health Organization, sexual health is not only the absence of disease, but a holistic state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality. By enabling condomless sex with less fear of HIV transmission, PrEP has the potential to facilitate the intimacy and pleasure that can enhance sexual well-being for many people."

As the authors note, however, previous studies have suggested that clinicians may discount the importance of the psychological aspects of sexual health.

Look, the aspect of this that seems to be a case of self induced blindness when it comes  to considering gay folk is this:    no one is at risk of catching HIV if they are in a monogamous relationship with a HIV negative person.    But now the argument is that it's crucial to gay men's psychological sexual health to be able to have casual sex with men without a condom.

It is surely a clear case of a double standard here:    a straight man who picks up a woman at a club and has unprotected sex with her that night that results in pregnancy or an STD is going to be thought of at least as someone who made a mistake and let his libido override his common sense.

A straight man who for years goes out regularly and keeps sleeping with women he's just met without a condom is going to be thought of as really pretty dumb, and no one is going to be surprised if he catches a STD or ends up an unexpectedly father.

Surely doctors or friends knowing that's how he's living such a lifestyle are going to say "look, we know condoms don't feel great, but they are pretty reliable and it's not as if you are going to be using them the rest of your life.   If you get a proper girlfriend who you trust as monogamous, and you are too, and that she's using reliable contraception, then you can pretty safely drop the condoms."

How much freaking concern is a friend or doctor of such a straight young man going to have that telling him to use a condom is going to hurt his psychological sexual health?   I think we all know the answer - none whatsoever.

But with gay men, apparently they cannot be psychologically happy if they can't have condomless sex at any stage of their life in any circumstances.

I cannot get over the feeling that PrEP's widespread use is a form of too much indulgence of hedonism, and for just one sector of the community. 

Saletan on the State of the Union

Seems to me that the State of the Union addresses from any US President are weird bits of self serving, insincere theatre, and it's a bit hard to understand why more commentators don't just say that instead of poring over every detail.

I suppose that with a person as dumb, changeable and narcissistic as Trump, the speech might be worth paying attention to if it gives any indication of which way the wind blows with him:  but the problem is, everyone knows any view he holds is disposable and not based on any consistent or principled belief.

It's also gobsmacking that anyone, let alone an Australian, can view Trump as giving a good speech of any kind.   His voice, his mannerisms, his mugging very reminiscent of a Mussolini at times, all override content anyway.

But in any case, here's Saletan, one of the best critics on Trump's dangerous nature, discussing the authoritarian aspects of the speech:

The Alarming Message in Trump’s State of the Union

 The president’s speech wasn’t dull. It was dangerous.

About the North magnetic pole

About time I noted the news about the wandering north magnetic pole:  I see that Vox has a good summary:

The locations of magnetic north and south have always been moving targets. Because of that, NOAA and its partners in the UK release an updated magnetic model of the Earth every five years. That way, navigation systems that use magnetic compasses, like those used by airplanes, can be more accurate and correct for the difference between the magnetic poles and the geographic ones.

The next update wasn’t supposed to happen until the end of 2019. But magnetic north has been moving at a rate of 31 miles a year since the last update in 2015 — faster than usual. 

“The pole moved maybe about 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] between 1900 and 1990, and it’s also moved about 1,000 kilometers between the late 1990s and today, so it’s really sped up,” geomagnetic modeler William Brown explained to The Verge.

Baby food

Last week, I discussed an article from The Conversation regarding the advances in meat preservation (refrigeration and canning) in the Victorian era that led to much greater meat consumption in England (and, presumably, elsewhere).

The author noted that there was a bit of push back against imported meat, however, which included this rumour:

In my archival research, I’ve even discovered concerns that boiled human babies were entering the food chain.

By coincidence, I've noticed two other reference to baby eating recently in Netflix shows I've been watching:  Fargo (season 3, which is very eccentric), in which a Russian bad guy talks about parents eating babies during the famines; and The Alienist, with a serial murderer writes a ranting letter about filthy foreigners eating babies.(Or was it kids generally?  I could be wrong there..)

This is a topic of which I know little.  Googling it comes with various bits of information of some interest:

*  some sites note it as a form of the old Jewish blood libel.  It's sort of funny how the rumour was easily transferred from Jews to Christians as the villains.  From a 1976 article:

How come with Christians it became specifically babies?  And then, with Christians, the accusations became of Jews using the blood of children, not babies.   All peculiar, how it changed over time.

*  As for Russians and famine - there are plenty of horrible photos on line, but it would seem anyone (children in particular?) was at risk of being eaten, not specifically babies.

*  More recently, it's the Chinese in particular who have been in the firing line, in significant part because of a stupid performance artist who had photos taken of him eating a fetus, leading Snopes to run an article "Fact Check:  Are human fetuses 'Taiwan's hottest dish'?"  (Most people doubt it was a real fetus in the pics.)

Apparently, this story did a big sweep through tabloids back in 2001, leading to Taiwanese officials complaining to a Malaysian publication:

Government officials have filed a complaint with a Malaysian weekly tabloid that published an unsubstantiated story that an unnamed local restaurant had served human fetuses and the bodies of babies to its customers.

The publication has promised to publish a correction in its next issue.

But there are many other stories on the 'net - usually from tabloid-ish or otherwise unreliable sources - claiming that Chinese doctors eat aborted fetuses for good health (or sexual virility!) 

I have complained before that one big thing that really needs to change about Chinese culture is its stupid belief that eating certain animals gives particular vitality or health benefits.   If people there would spend less time interested in consuming rare and endangered animals for illusory benefits, maybe they would also stop being targetting for rumours of fetus eating, too.

Anyway, this is an unpleasant topic.  Moving on...

Regulatory failure noted

Am I the only person flabbergasted that a high rise apartment building in Melbourne can start to burn up because of cigarette flung off a balcony?

MFB Fire investigators spent most of the day at the apartment building and concluded that the most probable cause was a discarded cigarette that ignited combustible materials stored on the balcony.

The only mild encouragement from that is that at least it doesn't mean that the cladding itself was directly ignited by the cigarette butt.   Some small comfort, though.   The building was apparently audited for safety for its cladding after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Seriously, what were architects, builders and regulators thinking when putting any "combustible in the right circumstances" material on a high rise building?     Has this practice stopped completely yet?   

Good grief

Pretty much from the "only in America" category, I see a Vox headline:

Why Bible-inspired diets and fitness plans are catching on

Ezekiel bread, the Daniel fast, and Holy Yoga all take their cues from Scripture.

 People who want to get fit, lose weight, and eat more healthfully often turn to trainers and dietitians for advice. But today, they might also to turn to a Bible-inspired or faith-based wellness program. Take actor Chris Pratt. He announced last month in an Instagram story that he was on day three of the Daniel fast.

“It’s 21 days of prayer and fasting,” he explained.

The program takes its name from the Old Testament prophet Daniel. While it’s called a fast, it does not require complete abstinence from food. Instead, “some foods are eaten while others are restricted,” according to the Daniel fast website. Those who go on the fast hope to not only get their weight and diet under control but also draw closer to God.

Look, Pratt is a likeable enough screen presence, but his strange mix of apparent seriousness about religion and willingness to talk a lot of sex jokes (as well as getting divorced with a young son at home) is a bit odd, if you ask me.  And peculiarly American too.

Time travel murder needed

I see that the matter of whether it's ethical (or just a good idea) to go back in time and kill baby Hitler was on the internet recently (see the Vox explainer here); but I have a better idea - someone needs to consider going back in time to kill Dorothy Mackellar.   

If you are not Australian, you may need to be informed:  she was an Australian poet who wrote a piece beloved of primary schools of my era which nearly every Australian (at least over the age of 50) has had to learn. 

The problem:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.   

means that climate change deniers, like those that flood (ha, a bit of a topical pun) Catallaxy, think that the one line in there eans that they never have to admit that record breaking rains and associated floods in Australia are being worsened by climate change. 

OK, maybe she doesn't need to be killed.   Just someone get their hands on that pretty turgid piece of writing and tear it up.   

Tim being a naughty boy

Tim Wilson has been attracting much attention for his ridiculously blatant partisan hijacking of the economics committee.

One wonders - could Victoria polling for Liberals be so bad that even his seat is in danger?  It would explain the hint of desperation that his actions here indicate.

In tech news best kept away from paranoid schizophrenics...

Lasers have been used to send targeted, quiet messages to someone from several meters away, in a way that no one nearby would be able to hear.

How it works: To send the messages, researchers from MIT relied upon the photoacoustic effect, in which water vapor in the air absorbs light and forms sound waves. The researchers used a laser beam to transmit a sound at 60 decibels (roughly the volume of background music or conversation in a restaurant) to a target person who was standing 2.5 meters away. 

A second technique modulated the power of the laser beam to encode a message, which produced a quieter but clearer result. The team used it to beam music, recorded speech, and various tones, all at conversational volume. “This can work even in relatively dry conditions because there is almost always a little water in the air, especially around people,” team leader Charles M. Wynn said in a press release. Details of the research were published in Optics Letters. 

Next steps: In theory, the technique could be used to direct a message to a single person at range, without any receiving equipment. The team plans to get the technique to work outdoors, at longer ranges. It isn’t too much of a stretch to see it being used for military or spying purposes, and of course there’s always the ever-present specter of super-targeted advertising.

The Link.

The 1TB phone will soon be here

Samsung announces it has a new 1TB chip for use in mobiles and tablets.   It is, quite frankly, incredible what is being fit on a chip this size:

On its new drive, despite having the same 13 x 11.5mm dimensions as smaller flash drives, Samsung says its new 1TB module boasts sequential read speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps, twice that of a typical SATA-based laptop SSD. Additionally, random read speeds are allegedly 38 per cent faster than on an equivalent 512GB flash drive, with random writes speeds as much as 500 times higher than a high-performance microSD card.

"Fatherhood" is rarer in nature than I realised

From an AEON essay, by an anthropologist who got into studying fatherhood:

In the first instance, as someone who began her graduate career as a primatologist, I knew that fathers who stick around, rather than hot-footing it as soon as copulation is complete, are vanishingly rare in the primate world, limited to a few South American monkey species and completely absent from the apes, with the exception of ourselves. Indeed, we are among the only 5 per cent of mammals who have investing fathers. I knew that, given the parsimonious nature of evolution, human fatherhood – with its complex anatomical, neural, physiological and behavioural changes – would not have emerged unless the investment that fathers make in their children is vital for the survival of our species.

The whole essay is interesting.  Go read.

Nothing like a good chart, part 2

Nothing like a good chart

Sounds interesting

NPR talks about a film looking at the stories of (some) Jews who chose to "hide in plain sight" from the Nazis in WW2:

Hanni Weissenberg, now Hanni Lévy, survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Today, the petite and lively 94-year-old lives in Paris. Earlier this month, she returned to Berlin, her home during the war years, to attend the screening of a film about her and other Jews who survived while hiding under the noses of the Nazis.

The Invisibles, a German documentary-drama based on the accounts of four survivors, opened Friday in the U.S....

Schieb says about 1,900 Jews survived the war while hiding in and around Berlin.

Comedy and animals

Gee, I'm finding I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from watching Rosehaven on the ABC now.

It's just the best comedy writing and acting in an Australian series since, I dunno, Frontline maybe?   Everyone seems so comfortable in their roles, and you have to imagine they take pleasure in making it.   Who writes it?  I must look it up.

Anyway, last night's return episode featured a pig which they decided to "rescue" from what they presumed was a fatal return to the local butcher.   And oddly, there is a story in The Guardian today about real farmers who have had even larger scale sudden conversions:

A farmer was recently on the road to the abattoir when he changed direction and drove his trailer full of lambs 200 miles to an animal sanctuary instead. Sivalingam Vasanthakumar, 60, from Devon, now plans to grow vegetables.

Vasanthakumar is not the only farmer to perform this kind of reversal. In 2017, Jay Wilde, of Bradley Nook farm in Derbyshire, took his cattle to a sanctuary and decided to become a vegan farmer (the film telling this story, 73 Cows, has been nominated for a Bafta). In the US, the Illinois-based charity Free From Harm has gathered tales of many farmers who have had epiphanies and switched to veganism.

 Why veganism though?   Isn't vegetarianism enough?

Heh

In "vegetarianism is looking a little better" news...

The Illinois State University,  of all places, has developed a high protein rice cultivar:

Utomo and his team developed a high-protein line of rice cultivar, 'Frontière,' which was released in 2017. The rice was developed through a traditional breeding process. It's the first long grain high-protein rice developed for use anywhere in the world, he says. On average, it has a protein content of 10.6%, a 53% increase from its original protein content. It also needs less heat, time, and usually less water to cook. This high-protein cultivar is currently marketed as "Cahokia" rice. It is grown commercially in Illinois.

The article is about how they are not trying to improve yield.

So, how much protein is in food by weight percent, anyway? 

According to this short-ish list from the British Nutrition Foundation, most meats are around 30%;  fish in the low 20's, and beans and other higher protein vegetables around 10% or under.  I'll just copy the whole list:

Meat	Chicken breast (grilled without skin) Beef steak (lean grilled) Lamb chop (lean grilled) Pork chop (lean grilled)	32.0 31.0 29.2 31.6
Fish	Tuna (canned in brine) Mackerel (grilled) Salmon (grilled) Cod (grilled)	23.5 20.8 24.2 20.8
Seafood	Prawns Mussels Crabsticks	22.6 16.7 10.0
Eggs	Chicken eggs	12.5
Dairy	Whole milk Semi-skimmed milk Skimmed milk Cheddar cheese Half-fat cheddar Cottage cheese Whole milk yogurt Low fat yogurt (plain)	3.3 3.4 3.4 25.4 32.7 12.6 5.7 4.8

Plant protein
Pulses	Red lentils Chickpeas	7.6 8.4
Beans	Kidney beans Baked beans Tofu (soya bean steamed)	6.9 5.2 8.1
Grains	Wheat flour (brown) Bread (brown) Bread (white) Rice (easy cook boiled) Oatmeal Pasta (fresh cooked)	12.6 7.9 7.9 2.6 11.2 6.6
Nuts	Almonds Walnuts Hazelnuts	21.1 14.7 14.1

So this new rice is now up above chickpeas and kidney beans.  And tofu.   Look at almonds though!  Eat a friand and it's getting close to eating a piece of mackerel, protein by weight wise.

And peanuts!  Seems that they are 25% protein by weight.  

Learn something new every day.

The alt.right will love this theory...

The title to an article in The Atlantic:

A Bold New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves

A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males.

A few key paragraphs from it:

In fact, Wrangham’s notion of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling, the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of communal harmony.

Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to protect the group from one of its own: They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.

The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and killed him. My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a similar taming function.)

Modern humans due to the luck of plate tectonics?

Well it's a theory, and if true, not sure what it means about the prospects of highly intelligent life of our kind on other planets.   From a review in Nature of a book "How the Earth Made Us":

In this age of worldwide climatic deterioration, many authors have documented what we are doing to our planet. Lewis Dartnell turns the tables in his book Origins. He asks how Earth has affected us, through our long evolution to big brains, small jaws and scrawny bodies that somehow cooperate with each other enough to make us the planet’s dominant eukaryotic species. All this began, Dartnell argues, with the tectonic processes that created the East African Rift — the area that today runs from Somalia and Ethiopia down to the coast of Mozambique. The uplift of mountains here caused a rain shadow that dried and warmed East Africa, turned jungle into a park-like savannah, and enticed early hominins to leave the trees and become game hunters, runners, thinkers, cooks and, eventually, empire builders.