The gripping hand

A somewhat interesting article at Nautilus about how much we should (or shouldn't) read into studies showing that grip strength is weakening pretty rapidly in us modern humans.   (Well, Americans in particular.)

I liked this bit of history:

Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.”⁹ Many could do it for upward of a minute.  In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”

Going back further:

As the evolutionary biologist Mary Marzke argues, our hands today were literally shaped around millions of years of using and making tools (our cerebral hemispheres, notes John Napier, author of the classic study Hands, expanded as our tool making did). The human hand became an almost perfect gripping machine. That long opposable thumb, enabling what has been termed the “power grip” and the “precision grip,” looms most obvious. But consider also the Papillary ridges, those tougher, thicker parts of the skin, found on the human heel, but also on the human palm—a vestigial souvenir from our time as quadrupeds. Their placement, as Napier writes in Hands, “corresponds with the principal areas of gripping and weight bearing, where they serve very much the same function as the treads on an automobile tire.” Eccrine glands perfectly line the papillary ridge, Napier notes, providing a grip-enhancing “lubrication system.” This sort of “frictional adaptation” does not kick in until we are around 2, writes Frank Wilson in The Hand (before then, we just grip harder).

Gripping, then, is a deep part of our biology and evolution as a species. It’s also part of a long story in which we have been getting weaker for millions of years, largely because of a decline in physical activity. The human skeleton, for example, is “relatively gracile” (weak) compared to hominoids.¹² Those infants tested by Robinson, stout hangers-on though they may have been, can hardly compete with infant monkeys, who can hang on for upward of a half hour. Why? Because they need to. “Modern infants,” as one researcher notes, “as well as their fairly recent human antecedents, do not need to hang on with their hands and feet from the moment of birth.”¹³

I would have guessed that men not sexually partnering much in countries like Japan or China might have activity which compensates for gripping strength loss from automation, if you get my drift.   But perhaps I am wrong...

Zuck watches

From Gizmodo, I like the understated humour of the last line:

Indicating that the ways Facebook can continue to erode trust in its products are evidently limitless, Bloomberg reported Monday that the social media network has used specialized toolkits to monitor and shepherd the public’s opinion of the company and its top brass. This reportedly involved the use of two programs: one titled Stormchaser and another dubbed Night’s Watch, evidently a Game of Thrones reference.

Citing former employees and internal documents, Bloomberg reported that Stormchaser has been used by Facebook employees since 2016 to track viral content involving everything from “Delete Facebook” campaigns to claims that Zuckerberg is an alien (big if true).

Rainfall intensification noted

There's been a lot of flash flooding in Washington DC area:

Reagan National Airport, an official observing site, saw 2.79 inches of rain in just one hour, beating a 1945 record of 2.05 inches, The Washington Post reported.

That's climate change for you, after 1 degree globally.

Let's throw the dice and see what its like under 2 degrees, hey my stoopid reader JC?

Update:   for anyone who wants to argue about attribution to climate change, as I have recently said in comments, intensification of rainfall is being widely studied and the connection with climate change is clear - it was predicted to increase and it is increasing.  If a place breaks a previous rainfall intensity record by a very high margin, then I don't think there is much to argue about in terms of attribution.  Have a look at this, for example:

Extreme precipitation has been proposed to scale with the water vapor content in the atmosphere. The Clausius‐Clapeyron (CC) relation describes the rate of change of saturated water vapor pressure with temperature as approximately 7% °C⁻¹ and sets a scale for change in precipitation extremes in the absence of large changes to circulation patterns [Trenberth et al., 2003; Pall et al., 2007]. Analysis of observed annual maximum daily precipitation over land areas with sufficient data samples indicates an increase with global mean temperature of about 6%–8% °C⁻¹ [Westra et al., 2013]. However, observational relations between precipitation extremes and temperature (or dew point temperature) show that subdaily precipitation extremes may intensify more than is anticipated based upon currently available modeling and theory [e.g., Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010]. This seems to be a property of convective precipitation and may be explained by the latent heat released within storms invigorating vertical motion. This mechanism is thought to generate greater increases in hourly rainfall intensities [Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Berg et al., 2009; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010; Westra et al., 2014; Blenkinsop et al., 2015; Lepore et al., 2015], with a stronger response in convective systems than in stratiform systems [Berg et al., 2013]. This suggests that hourly extremes will probably intensify more with global warming than daily extremes [e.g., Utsumi et al., 2011; Westra et al., 2014].

Which is why I would ban music festivals, if I were benevolent dictator

Inspired by this report in the SMH:

Almost all patrons at music festivals take illicit substances, with MDMA the "drug of choice", an inquest into the deaths of six young people was told yesterday.

The coronial inquest heard that NSW Ministry of Health data indicated up to 90 cent of young festival patrons used drugs.

Look, concerts that are done and dusted within 3 hours of an evening, and finish by midnight - that is fine.

Music festivals that last for 24 or more hours, involving crushing masses of people, in the sun, with poor sanitation and leaving huge piles of rubbish:   should be stopped and people sent away to just hang around having fun in smaller groups, like in my day.

Drug flooded music festivals, gay parades that involve celebration of clear fetishes, and people who want all drugs liberalised are examples of the liberalism's tolerance of hedonism gone to excess.   

I don't want any argument from any libertarian reader - I bet Putin doesn't care for music festivals in Russia, and you've got the hots for Putin, so let's agree that he is right on something for once.

Samuelson on Putin

Robert J Samuelson's column in the Washington Post on Putin's "liberalism is dead" comments seems pretty fair to me.

First, he says post WW2 liberalism is strapped for cash, due to slowing economic growth, an ageing population and uncertainty as to how far budget deficits can stretch.   (He probably could have added things like the revival of Lafferism, the race to the bottom in terms of international competition to reduce tax takes, and gigantic companies that play the "hide the pea" shell game to avoid paying tax.)

Secondly, he writes this, which is worth quoting in full (with my emphasis):

We’ve long governed by hope: a better life. In its loftiest state, postwar liberalism was expected to have a cleansing effect on countries’ social climate, liberating people from prejudice and small-mindedness. The liberal appeal spanned the ideological spectrum. In the United States and Europe, centrist governments of the left and right ruled.

It is this promise of a morally elevated electorate that Putin panned. The trouble, professor Putin lectured to the Financial Times, is that many people have lost faith in the liberal idea. They have moved on. Now, Putin and his fellow travelers, including President Trump and others, propose that we govern by fear: a dread of outsiders.

No one should suppose that Putin’s nationalistic substitute for lapsed liberalism will make the world a kinder, gentler or more stable place. The liberal ideal presumed, perhaps naively, that people could be brought together by common interests and common values. The nationalistic alternative takes as its starting point the view that there will be winners and losers.

People feel threatened. Liberal high-mindedness has created a backlash by justifying policies and practices that are unpopular with large swaths of the population — open borders, unwanted immigration, globalization and multiculturalism. Liberal policies “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population,” Putin said.

 

People value their national identities. They generally fear policies and practices that would erode these identities. One question in a 2016 Pew study asked whether increases in the number of ethnic groups, races and nationalities made their countries “a worse place to live.” Large shares of Greeks (63 percent), Italians (53 percent) and Germans (31 percent) said “yes.”

We are straddled between two systems. The daunting task is to salvage the best of postwar liberalism while, at the same time, acknowledging the importance of national identities and sovereignty. It may be a mission impossible.

I tend to think that this is too pessimistic.   I reckon that the West has had a fright over two things - immigration surges from war torn and economically savaged regions, ironically sometimes contributed to by interventions from the West; and the unevenness in global economic growth (also, somewhat ironically, caused by the globalisation as promoted by Western economists as a good thing overall - which it is.)  

It's hard to "cure" continued conflict in the Middle East and within Islam, which has remarkably wide-reaching effects.   But I find it hard to believe that the swing to conservatism in parts of Islam will continue to have long term wins.   And the irony is that increased isolationism internationally of one type (economic) can worsen internal conflict and encourage the unwanted immigration.   It's all very tricky to balance, but I don't see that the retreat into all forms of isolationism can do anything other than hurt.

As for the economic problem - the cure for that is probably more "liberalism" in economics policy, not less - with inequality being addressed by better tax targetting, and (to be honest) reduced expectations of unending growth.   As many on the Right like to point out, most of the poor being poor in the West is not the same thing as it was 100 years ago.   That shouldn't be used as an excuse for not caring about inequality, but it is relevant to the questions of expectations of growth.   (Yes, I know, growth lifts all boats; but ageing and then declining populations change the picture somewhat.)

Desert capital

Another Youtube I saw on the weekend:  I had missed the news that Egypt was building a new capital city outside of Cairo.  I thought the country was economically in the dumps, but the government is spending a lot of money on this, and the army is apparently in charge of building this place.  Quite interesting:



An article at The Conversation talked about it last year:

Built on a site located 45 kilometres east of Greater Cairo, the city will feature a new presidential palace, a new parliament, a central bank and business district, an airport and a massive theme park, alongside housing for 6.5m people.

 

Parts of Australia pretty warm too

From the local Tamworth news:

So far, this winter in Tamworth has been unusually dry and warm.

This June fell well short of the month's long term average rain with just 16.4mm which was only slightly greater than one quarter of the month's mean, 57.7mm.

The city hasn't seen a drop of yet in July; a month which typically brings 45.6mm.

Top temperatures in the middle month of winter are tracking at record highs in 2019.

Thermometers are peaking at 20.7 degrees in July which is 4.5 degrees above the average.

June was a little warmer than usual as well, climbing 1.2 degrees above the standard set in the last 25 years.

Dry and warm winter could likely prolong Tamworth's water restrictions as Chaffey Dam's capacity continues to fall.

The dam, which is currently the chief supply for Tamworth's population, fell to 23 per cent recently.

That's a pretty significant top temperature above average, by the sounds.

All about Jason

Heh.  Not you, Jason.  But this Jason:

After 59 years of service, Jason, the famed science advisory group, was being fired, and it didn't know why. On 29 March, the exclusive and shadowy group of some 65 scientists received a letter from the Department of Defense (DOD) saying it had just over a month to pack up its files and wind down its affairs. "It was a total shock," said Ellen Williams, Jason's vice chair and a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "I had no idea what the heck was going on."

The letter terminated Jason's contract with DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDR&E) in Arlington, Virginia, which was Jason's contractual home—the conduit through which it was paid for all of its government work. So, in effect, the letter killed off all of Jason's work for defense and nondefense agencies alike.

I'm pretty sure I have never heard of this group before.  And the article is a bit odd, in that it calls it "famed" in the first sentence, but the headline calls it "a secretive group".  I suppose you can be both.  Anyway, its origins:

Can a group created during the Cold War's nuclear and missile races, when the U.S. government was keenly aware it needed scientific advice, survive today?...

Jason was created in 1960 by a group of physicists who had summers off and were familiar with government consulting. They also had prestige: Eleven early Jasons—including Charles Townes, Murray Gell-Mann, and Burton Richter—eventually won Nobel Prizes. Their main customer was DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which originally dubbed them Project Sunrise—a name that seemed presumptuous to them. So, inspired by Mildred Goldberger, wife of one of the founding members, they renamed themselves in honor of the mythical Jason, leader of the Argonauts.

The name change was a small but telling example of the group's independence. "I used to tell sponsors from the get-go," says Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas in Austin (UT Austin) and Jason's head from 2005 to 2011, "that we tell people things they might not want to know."...

 In Jason's early decades those problems were physics-related defense questions, like how to detect the infrared signals of an enemy's missile launch or decipher the seismic signals of an underground nuclear weapon test. In an early study for the Navy, Jason devised a communications system for nuclear submarines, first called Bassoon, that bounced low-frequency radio signals off the ionosphere and into the oceans. It operated from 1989 until 2004, when the Navy declared it an unnecessary Cold War system.

During the Vietnam War, Jason designed a forerunner to the electronic battlefield: an anti-infiltration barrier that linked hidden acoustic and seismic sensors on the ground to bombers and artillery. In the mid-1980s, the group invented a way for telescopes to detect and compensate for the jitters caused by atmospheric turbulence, by using a laser to create an artificial guide "star"—a glowing spot high in the atmosphere. The technology, intended for tracking satellites and missiles, remained classified until 1991, when lobbying by Jasons helped convince the Air Force to open it up to astronomers. In 1989, the group reviewed the Star Wars antimissile program called Brilliant Pebbles, judging it technologically unsound; the program was canceled in 1993. In 1995, Jason's study on what could be learned from small nuclear tests—not much—helped convince then–DOD Secretary William Perry to recommend that the United States sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (The Senate, however, refused to ratify it.)

With the end of the Vietnam and Cold wars, Jason members began to branch out from physics and engineering. In 1977, they did their first assessment of global climate models and later advised DOE on which atmospheric measurements were most critical for the models. Since the mid-1990s, Jason has studied biotechnologies, including techniques for detecting biological weapons.

When "the hair of the dog" might really save you..

A report from a Filipino news site talks about recent poisoning there from people drinking cheap gin, probably due to methanol content.  Actually, Googling the topic, I see that 6 people died in Penang recently from it (19 sickened in Malaysia in a recent period), and I think it's still suspected in the recent Dominican Republic tourist deaths.  So, it's a pretty topical subject.

Anyway, the Filipino story explains how this tasteless alcohol works:

Lim said naturally produced methanol is safe. It only becomes poisonous when it is ingested and converted into formic acid and formate in the body.

When mixed with ethanol, methanol doesn’t immediately metabolize. However, Lim explained that ethanol exits the body through exhalation, leaving methanol in the body to break down.

“You wait a bit of time for (methanol) to break down to formic. In our studies, it takes a minimum of 6 hours,” she said.

The formic acid will then seep into the bloodstream and spread throughout the body. “It is very acidic and it damages the eyes,” Lim said.

OK.  Here's the part that surprised me (my bold):

While initial symptoms are similar to regular alcohol intoxication, Lim said people should be alarmed when they are still experiencing a severe hangover after 12 hours.

“If after 12 hours you are still not feeling well . . . You are vomiting, you feel weak and your head hurts, you need to consult a doctor,” she said.

While it may sound counterintuitive, Lim said taking gin or other hard drinks will help a victim if it will take time to reach a hospital, because ethanol contained in those drinks will help slow the breakdown of methanol.

“Even if you’re not sure if the drink has been contaminated with methanol . . . It’s still going to be an antidote (because it has ethanol),” she said.

At the hospital, methanol poisoning patients are then given more ethanol, a bicarbonate to buffer the acidosis then folic acid to convert the toxic formate into carbon dioxide and water.

“But it’s dialysis that will really remove the methanol from your body,” Lim said.

There you go.  I might have saved a reader's life.  Either that or ended a marriage when some spouse thinks their partner is definitely a chronic alcoholic for drinking when really sick with a hangover...

Military cooking

This came up, for some reason, as a recommended video on Youtube this morning, and it was surprisingly interesting.   A New York pizza chef goes on board a (pretty modern looking) US Navy ship to help out in the galley.

Dang, seems I can't embed it.  Here's the link.  17 minutes but it's worth it.

Update:  I can embed from another computer.  Here you go:



Some observations:

*  How extraordinarily young most military personnel on the ship seem to be.  As I asked last week, what would US employment look like if the military was actually sized more in line with your average nation?

*  In the food storage hold, everything just seemed stacked as if it were a land based store.  Not at all sure what would happened to the stacks of crates if the ship was in heavy seas.

*  For a modern ship, the messes and the line up to them still looked kinda cramped.

Dental work in Singapore

I saw this on CNA, but here is a report from Straits Times about it.  It's pretty neat biotechnology:

Patients requiring dental implants often have to open their wallets wide, as well as their mouths.

But a new treatment process developed by the National Dental Centre Singapore (NDCS) could save them at least $2,000 - as well as a considerable amount of time and pain.

Researchers there have developed an enhanced bioresorbable 3D-printed dental plug which promotes bone growth in the jaw, reducing the chances of bone shrinkage after an extraction.

Currently, many patients requiring dental implants have to wait for three months for bone to grow in the tooth socket after extraction.

If too much bone is absorbed and broken down by the body, the patients may need a bone graft, either surgically harvested from their own chin, jaw, skull or hip, or from animal-derived bone - these are expensive and not acceptable to patients with religious restrictions.

With the enhanced 3D-printed plugs manufactured by dental plug manufacturer Osteopore, patients will go through a shorter and less painful treatment process as the plugs are placed immediately after extraction, eliminating the need for bone grafts.

The plug prevents the bone from being absorbed by the body, and facilitates bone growth so that a dental implant can be placed. It then degrades gradually over 12 months, allowing the patient's own bone to fill in over time.

I see that this technology was first reported on in 2016, and this latest report says they are just now recruiting for a large scale randomised trial starting next year.

This biotech stuff sure can take a long time in the testing....

What a difference an accused (and a decade) makes

I love the way that at Catallaxy threads, they are appalled that actor John Jarratt was even charged with a  rape which was said to have happened in 1976 - and are calling on the accuser to be sued or jailed - but when it was Bill Shorten accused of a rape that happened in 1986, they were appalled that he wasn't charged.  

Nothing like consistency, hey?  

For the benefit of a stupid reader

Based on recent comments he has made to my posts about floods, reader JC, who prefers "blog science" over actual science, is plainly still having difficulty grasping that the IPCC has always been saying that climate change means both increased droughts and floods due to a fired up water cycle.

How many times have I had to post on this topic, which ignorant people like Bolt and every single commenter at Catallaxy can never get into their thick heads?    "But Flannery said on TV ...etc" is all they can crap on about -  and I have covered his words, which were more the target of a shallow, wilful misreading than anything elese - years ago. 

Anyway, just to show that talking today about increased floods and droughts in the same breath has always been predicted, here is an extract from the IPCC AR4 report (the volume Climate Change: The Physical Basis) from 2007:

Mean Precipitation

For a future warmer climate, the current generation of
models indicates that precipitation generally increases in the
areas of regional tropical precipitation maxima (such as the
monsoon regimes) and over the tropical Pacific in particular,
with general decreases in the subtropics, and increases at high
latitudes as a consequence of a general intensification of the
global hydrological cycle. Globally averaged mean water
vapour, evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase.
 
Precipitation Extremes and Droughts
 
Intensity of precipitation events is projected to increase,
particularly in tropical and high latitude areas that experience
increases in mean precipitation. Even in areas where mean
precipitation decreases (most subtropical and mid-latitude
regions), precipitation intensity is projected to increase but
there would be longer periods between rainfall events. There
is a tendency for drying of the mid-continental areas during
summer, indicating a greater risk of droughts in those regions.
Precipitation extremes increase more than does the mean in
most tropical and mid- and high-latitude areas.

And:  

Climate models predict that human influences will cause an increase in
many types of extreme events, including extreme rainfall. There
is already evidence that, in recent decades, extreme rainfall has
increased in some regions, leading to an increase in flooding.

And:

10.3.6.1 Precipitation Extremes

A long-standing result from global coupled models noted in
the TAR is a projected increase in the chance of summer drying
in the mid-latitudes in a future warmer climate with associated
increased risk of drought. This is shown in Figure 10.12, and
has been documented in the more recent generation of models
(Burke et al., 2006; Meehl et al., 2006b; Rowell and Jones,
2006). For example, Wang (2005) analyse 15 recent AOGCMs
and show that in a future warmer climate, the models simulate
summer dryness in most parts of the northern subtropics and
mid-latitudes, but with a large range in the amplitude of summer
dryness across models. Droughts associated with this summer
drying could result in regional vegetation die-offs (Breshears et
al., 2005) and contribute to an increase in the percentage of land
area experiencing drought at any one time, for example, extreme
drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by
the end of the century in the A2 scenario (Burke et al., 2006).
Drier soil conditions can also contribute to more severe heat
waves as discussed in Section 10.3.6.2 (Brabson et al., 2005).
 
Associated with the risk of drying is a projected increase
in the chance of intense precipitation and flooding. Although
somewhat counter-intuitive, this is because precipitation is
projected to be concentrated into more intense events, with
longer periods of little precipitation in between. Therefore,
intense and heavy episodic rainfall events with high runoff
amounts are interspersed with longer relatively dry periods
with increased evapotranspiration, particularly in the subtropics
as discussed in Section 10.3.6.2 in relation to Figure 10.19 ...

However, increases in the frequency of dry days
do not necessarily mean a decrease in the frequency of extreme
high rainfall events depending on the threshold used to defi ne
such events (Barnett et al., 2006). Another aspect of these
changes has been related to the mean changes in precipitation,
with wet extremes becoming more severe in many areas where
mean precipitation increases, and dry extremes where the mean
precipitation decreases... 

 Climate models continue to confirm the earlier results that
in a future climate warmed by increasing greenhouse gases,
precipitation intensity (e.g., proportionately more precipitation
per precipitation event) is projected to increase over most
regions ... and the increase
in precipitation extremes is greater than changes in mean
precipitation.

A movie not to watch

There are many reviews floating around about Midsommar - the new horror film by Hereditary director Ari Aster.   Some are good - but some indicate not so much.  (Slate asks openly whether it's OK to laugh at the ending which is "brutal and unhinged", and promptly describe it.  I think the studio is probably really annoyed about that.)   

I thought Hereditary was just awful, and don't understand how it got any good reviews.

The trailer for Midsommar made it look way, way too obvious:  very much like The Wicker Man thematically.   The reviews are pretty much confirming the comparison.  (As it happens, I have never watched much of Wicker Man, but I do know the story and how it ends.) 

I am therefore feeling extremely confident that this is a movie I would hate. 

Quantum computer scepticism

Sabine Hossenfelder, the physicist who thinks a bigger, better particle collider (now that the LHC seems to have discovered just one big thing) would be a waste of money, explains that she has some scepticism about whether quantum computing will ever turn out to be useful, too.

And in the course of that explanation, she comes out sounding sceptical of fusion too. 

So, I'm pleased to have some heavy hitting physicist sharing my scepticism.

That's climate change for you

Axios notes:

AccuWeather is predicting as much as $12.5 billion in damages throughout the Midwest after months of flooding has ravaged the region, according the the Wall Street Journal.

Catch up quick: The first half of 2019 is on its way to becoming the wettest on record due to snowmelt and flooding, largely in the Midwest, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ensuing damage has been extremely costly to Midwestern infrastructure and industries, particularly with agriculture.

• Officials in Iowa are estimating the first round of flooding alone cost the state $2 billion in losses.
• Illinois' state transportation department estimates more than 1,000 miles of road will require cleaning.
• In Nebraska, only 10 of the 21 bridges that had to be closed have reopened, and repairs on the rest may not be finished until fall 2020.

Would be good to know if the economists who did the work on climate change think they adequately took into account the cost of repeated repairs for flood damage in future years.  (Strong hunch that they didn't.)

Rather like Trump, I imagine

Not sure if The Sun is at all a reliable source, but it claims this:

SECURITY chiefs kept top secrets from Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary over fears he couldn’t be trusted, The Sun has been told.

Intelligence bosses were “anxious” about sharing the most sensitive information with the frontrunner in the race for No10 during his two years in the Cabinet.

The nerves were sparked by at least two instances when Boris was accused of revealing classified information by mistake.

The order to cut him out came directly from PM Theresa May, The Sun has also been told.
“Pre-meetings” were held before key discussion forums such as the Government’s COBRA emergency committee that Boris attended for security chiefs to brief the PM on alone.

You would have to strongly suspect that intelligence delivery to Trump is also hedged - how on Earth could they trust the Tweeter in Chief completely??

The stories of Boris's incompetence and unreliability (and dis-likeability) are legion now.  

Movie financing in the news

The Hollywood producer Riza Aziz, stepson of the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, has been arrested on suspicion of money laundering.

Mr Aziz, who produced The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was detained in Malaysia and bailed.

US prosecutors have accused Mr Aziz's production company of misappropriating money from a multi-billion dollar state fund to finance the film.

Mr Aziz's stepfather and mother have both been charged with corruption.

Mr Aziz will appear in court on Friday to face charges, said Latheefa Koya, the head of Malaysia's anti-corruption agency.

Here's the link

More record rainfall in Japan

I pointed out back in 2017 that Japan is now, nearly every summer, coming up with new record rainfalls and bad floods (often, given their landscape, accompanied by landslides and a lot of infrastructure damage.)

It continues in 2019:

More than 1 million residents across the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan were ordered to evacuate Wednesday amid torrential rains and warnings of severe flooding and landslides.

According to the latest weather forecast, the massive downpour, which has already brought record levels of rain over the past 72 hours, is set to intensify over the next 12 hours.

This is real, damaging, climate change in action.

On 50 year anniversaries

It seems to me that the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the month long Pride events, are attracting much more media and pop culture attention than the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.   (Maybe that will change in coming days, but I have my doubts.)

It's a very surprising turn of events, I think, that shows how very hard the job of futurologist must be, especially when it comes to social views and sentiment.