Boris as usual

Noted in this Washington Post report on Boris Johnson tour of bits of the kingdom that aren't very united behind him:

Nichola Mallon, a leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, said she had a “very blunt meeting” with Johnson and observed that he did not have a full grasp of the “complexities” of Northern Ireland. 

She said she told Johnson that he “must avoid a hard Brexit at all costs.” 

Mallon said she reminded the prime minister that he had responsibilities under the Good Friday Agreement, which ended 30 years of sectarian violence, and that he “must live up to them.”

Mallon said, “We pressed him time and time again and just got stock responses.”

Quantum Darwinism discussed

Peter Woit (of the Not Even Wrong blog) says this: 

Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests 

is a good article, so it probably is.

Haven't the time to read it all right now, though. 

So she's an influencer?

A "reality star" has been criticised for promoting use of a diet product while pregnant.  What a surprise that such a heavily and garishly tattooed women might not be the most sensible person to pay attention to:

The slug gambit

A catering war in Victoria possibly involves slug sabotage:

A former health inspector at the City of Greater Dandenong says council managers seemed intent on shutting down a family catering business that was competing with another catering company part-owned by the council.

The owner of the shuttered business, I Cook Foods, even claims a council inspector planted a slug on its premises, which was then used as evidence the company had breached food safety regulations.....

The council has since charged I Cook Food's owner, Ian Cook, with 48 breaches of the Food Act, including one charge relating to the slug allegedly found in the kitchen the day before it was closed.

But Mr Cook claims the inspector — who did not use the normal body-worn camera during the inspection — planted the slug as evidence against the company.

The company's CCTV cameras were operating during the inspection, but did not capture the discovery of the slug, which was outside the camera's field of vision.

Heat death noted

It's summer and hot and humid in Japan.   This is a very unfortunate way to die, and I have to say, I did not realise that the Japanese did not really know how to avoid heatstroke in such high numbers:

A 28-year old man in a mascot costume who was training for a dance performance died of heatstroke Monday at Hirakata Park, a theme park in Osaka Prefecture. As of 5 p.m. the same day, the Tokyo Fire Department said 63 people had been hospitalized for heatstroke in the capital, with two people in their 70s and 80s in serious condition.

Last Saturday, a 91-year-old woman died of heatstroke in Saitama Prefecture after she was found lying in her garden at around noon. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, about 95,000 people were taken to hospitals for heatstroke during the May-September period last year, exceeding the previous high of 58,000 logged in 2013.

Not a fascist: just a proto-fascist. Great.

I refer to this article, at The Guardian:   Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes

Get it while it lasts

The new Chrome will apparently get around the way lots of paywalls currently work.  Yay, for a while, even though I don't like to overdo the freeloading.

(I don't like Chrome much as a Windows browser, though.  Long time Firefox user here, although some versions have developed memory hogging issues.   Chrome is fine on Android, although I recently just started trying Brave as an alternative, and it seems very fast and quite good.  Not entirely sure what it is wanting me to do sometimes, but I ignore that.)

Making your own fake meat

I ate the left over vegetarian chilli con carne last night - yeah, the flavour was good (most spiced dishes taste better as leftovers, don't they?), but thinking about the texture of the vege mince, it did remind me again that it had a bit of a stickiness to it, unfortunately reminding me of what you get if you chew paper. 

This whole texture of fake meat issue is very important to me, and watching Youtubes where they try to make vegan analogues of real meat, it's obviously a prime concern of others too.

Last night, I watched this one and was interested to see it used pea protein isolate, which I think is the main ingredient in the Beyond Burger.   Given that I don't hang out in health food stores, I didn't realise that this product was a powder readily available.  

So here's this guy, trying to make imitation chicken using it and one main other ingredient as a binder:



I think I have worked out why this topic appeals to me - it's a bit like watching a science experiment, and now that my kids are well past doing science experiments at home, I need a substitute.

Fake meat experimentation in my kitchen might be it.

The old invisible ink trick

Spotted this at Gulf News:

Dubai: A customer service employee was sentenced to 10 years in jail for stealing Dh1 million from a customer’s account, a Dubai Court of First Instance heard.

The Egyptian defendant, 42, who is still at large, conned the customer by using magic ink when the latter wrote his name on the cheque to deposit the money in his account. When the name disappeared because of the ink, the defendant put his name on the cheque, cashed the money and escaped.

That lasted a long time

MIT Technology review notes that Facebucks might never happen: 

The company has warned investors that the currency, which it wants to launch next year, may not ever get off the ground.

The news: In its quarterly report, Facebook reminded investors that the proposed currency, called Libra, is “based on new and unproven technology," adding that the legal environment surrounding digital currencies is “uncertain and evolving.” That could cause Libra to be delayed or even blocked, it said.

The backstory: Facebook revealed its ambitions for Libra a month and a half ago. Since then, it has faced skepticism and backlash from government bankers and politicians, who have criticized Facebook’s track record on privacy and warned that its plan to launch a private currency to billions of people could be risky.

Onward: During Facebook’s quarterly earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck an optimistic tone, affirming that the company will spend “however long it takes” to earn regulators’ approval before launching.

Living under the Moon

From Space.com: 

Living Underground on the Moon: How Lava Tubes Could Aid Lunar Colonization

Finding a lava tube that has lots of ice inside would be fantastic site for a base, I would think. 

And the doctor is always in

Psychoanalyse yourself:

A new study shows that conversation with oneself embodied as Dr. Sigmund Freud works better to improve people's mood, compared to just talking about your problems in a virtual conversation with pre-scripted comments. Researchers claimed that the method could be used by clinicians to help people dealing with minor personal problems.

The explanation as to why this should be is given at the link as follows:

People are often much better at giving useful advice to a friend in trouble than they are in dealing with their own problems. Although we typically have continuous internal dialogue, we are trapped inside our own way of thinking with our own history and point of view, and find it difficult to take an external perspective regarding our own problems. However, with friends, especially someone we know well, it is much easier to understand the bigger picture, and help them find a way through their problems.

A research team of the University of Barcelona (UB), IDIBAPS and Virtual BodyWorks, a spin-off of both institutions and ICREA, has used immersive virtual reality to observe the effects of talking to themselves as if they were another person, using virtual reality.

The technique is complicated, though:

For this technique to work out,researchers scanned the person to obtain an 'avatar' which is a 3D-likeness of the person. In virtual reality, when they look at themselves, at their body parts, or in a mirror, they will see a representation of themselves. When they move their real body, their virtual body will move in the same way and at the same time. Seated across the table is another virtual human, in the case of this experiment, a representation of Dr Sigmund Freud.

The participant can explain their personal problem to Dr Freud, and then switch to being embodied as Freud. Now, embodied as Freud, when they look down towards themselves, or in a mirror, they will see Freud's body rather than their own, and also this body will move in synchrony with their own movements. "They will see and hear their own likeness explaining the problem, and they see their virtual self as if this were another person. Now they themselves have become the 'friend' who is listening and trying to help," said Mel Slater.

 Working in psychology research sounds fun, no? 

A flicker of hope

From Axios:

Carbon emissions from China could peak as soon as 2021, which is nine years before the voluntary deadline in their Paris agreement pledge, a new peer-reviewed study finds.

Why it matters: China is by far the world's largest carbon emitter. The trajectory of its emissions affect whether the world has any chance of meeting the Paris temperature goals — or, more likely, how much they're overshot.

• It adds to separate analyses suggesting China could see a peak well before 2030 if things break right.

Meat substitute scepticism

Someone from the CSIRO casts a deeply sceptical eye over how much potential growth there really is in the "fake meat" industry that excites high market valuations for the companies making these new fake burgers.   He notes the growth in demand for meat as nations get richer as being a major factor offsetting any reductions in livestock that an increasing market for meat substitute products would involve.

You should read the comments too, where the author expands his scepticism about lab grown meat - a topic of which I have been sceptical from day one.

In these discussions about future food, it annoys that I have not been able to track down a person who I once heard on the ABC arguing that lab grown protein derived from microbial sources could readily and cheaply feed the world.   I don't think he was talking about fungus derived protein either - from which we get Quorn.   But who this was, and which exact source for the protein he was talking about, I have not worked out.  I think he had written a book on the topic of future food, but there are a lot of books on that topic around.

One other point:   because I looked at a couple of vegan recipe videos, I keep getting this topic coming up on my Youtube feed now.  It is very clear that the matter of vegans trying to make plant based food look and taste like the meat equivalent is very "hot" at the moment.  There are no end of videos about how to make tofu look and taste (allegedly!) like chicken, fish, or whatever.  And a guy who tried various ways to come up with something that resembles bacon - he ended up recommending strips of daikon, dried out a bit, soaked in his mix of soy and stuff, and fried.   I am not at all convinced it would taste anything like bacon.

So yeah, it seems to me that a lot of people are convinced that getting people to eat more vegetarian or vegan is a matter of making the food at least look like what they like in meat.   I am pretty sure that this must be annoying some more purist vegan types...

When Dick doesn't work

I've been watching The Man in the High Castle, the alternative history series on Prime based on Phillip K Dick's novel of the same name and which (I think) got pretty favourable reviews when it first started.

I've seen 4 (maybe 5?) episodes now, and while I initially enjoyed the novelty of the scenario, I am prepared to abandon it. 

Looking at an imagined Nazi New York and Japanese California (and the desolate bit of the country in the middle) is cool for a while, but the plotting has slowed down and I'm not finding much of a reason to keep following the story.

The main problem is that it's too much of a bleak monotone, and none of the main characters seem particularly charming, or interesting, really.   I did once start reading the novel and couldn't get into it, either:  maybe I was just distracted with other stuff at the time, since I have read and enjoyed quite a bit of Dick's other work, and the novel won many awards, so you would think I would like it.

But, sorry - not finding it engaging enough.

Might be a bit of a pattern here...

About that teenager who shot up the garlic festival in California:

Legan posted two photos on Instagram not long before the attack.

One photo depicted Smokey the Bear in front of a "fire danger" sign, with a caption that said to read the 19th century book "Might is Right," a work that claims race determines behavior and is popular among white nationalists and far-right extremist groups.

About one of the teenage fugitives from the Canadian killings:

For Schmegelsky a dark but depressingly familiar picture began to form—a young man with a tense home life who found solace in online activities and had connections to the far-right. The two have been connected a YouTube account featuring a Nazi insignia, online game accounts using the banner of the Azov battalion (a Ukrainian far-right militia) and had photographs of a Nazi armband and a Hitler Youth knife. Schmegelsky's father, while adamant his son was not a neo-Nazi, did admit to having to drag him out of an army surplus store eight months ago after his son got too excited over the Nazi memorabilia. VICE also viewed photos of Schmegelsky with a gun barrel in his mouth.

An article at Business Insider in January:


All of the extremist killings in the US in 2018 had links to right-wing extremism, according to new report 

And over at Quillette:    but look what happened to Andy Ngo, the poor guy got punched, and some Lefties said he had been provocative.  The Left is appallingly violent!

Update:  also, count me as pretty amused about the long, boring, pointless Quillette piece "Why isn’t Jordan Peterson on This List of the World’s Top Fifty Intellectuals".  Not even worth a link, that one.

The ridiculous Ninja show

So is this three seasons now that the Australian version of Ninja Warrior has had a final in which no one got through the final course in order to have a go at the final climb?  

I saw some of the first season; none of the second; and bits of the third including last night's final, in which Channel 9 had been putting out hints that someone finally completed the whole thing to "win".

Instead, we got contestants who all found the "swinging doors" impossible - not even able to move past the first one in a row of 4 or 5.   This seems to me, and surely many viewers, pretty ridiculous.  As someone on Twitter said, the show might have more credibility if they showed that the obstacle was actually do-able, as they (apparently) have people who test the different segments of the course.

But these swinging doors looked ridiculous - a smooth metal edge giving no grip to two hands, let alone the one hand that would have to remain while trying to grab on to the other.

Do the international versions have this issue as well? - going several seasons before anyone can even try the final?

Planet of the Rats

Japan is going to do some human stem cell in animal experiments that sound a little confusing:

A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people....

Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal’s organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The reason why some people worry about these experiments:

Some bioethicists are concerned about the possibility that human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition.

Oh.

Woman with stupid idea has daughter with dubious ideas

NPR reports on the woman who allegedly invented or popularised the very stupid idea of gender reveal parties now saying that she regrets it.  In part, due to have a very "woke" daughter:

"Plot twist! The baby from the original gender reveal party is a girl who wears suits," Karvunidis says. "She says 'she' and 'her' and all of that, but you know she really goes outside gender norms."

The post went viral. Karvunidis says her views on sex and gender have changed, especially when she's talking to her daughter.

"She's telling me 'Mom, there are many genders. Mom, there's many different sexualities and all different types,' and I take her lead on that," Karvunidis says.

She says she does have some regrets and understands these parties aren't beneficial to everyone.

The daughter is about 10 or 11, given that Karvunidis' gender reveal party for her was in 2008.

Singapore and fake news

I just read a good article about Singapore trying to deal with the problem of fake news via legislation and its usual "soft authoritarian" style whereby politicians can order the correction or removal of fake news.

I have great sympathy to the goal, if not the exact means of execution.