Dog science news

From Science:  Dogs may use Earth's magnetic field to take shortcuts

Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional—albeit hidden—sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth’s magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.

The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies “magnetoreception” and navigation in turtles. She notes that dogs’ navigational abilities have been studied much less compared with migratory animals such as birds. “It’s an insight into how [dogs] build up their picture of space,” adds Richard Holland, a biologist at Bangor University who studies bird navigation.

There were already hints that dogs—like many animals, and maybe even humans—can perceive Earth’s magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots. But stationary alignment isn’t the same thing as navigation.

What a twerp

Ethical use of work email accounts (meaning you don't use them for self serving political purposes) seems to be something beyond Timbo's grasp:

American holidays

One of the happy things I recently realised was the number of good quality international news networks that have all day live and free feeds on Youtube.   ABC News (America) always comes up, sometimes NBC (not sure if it always live, actually), Sky News from the UK (which presents as a relatively normal news network in what I have seen - has the Murdoch family decided that only American and Australian versions need to be "wingnut at night" outlets?); France 24; DW from Germany; Al Jazeera; and of course my beloved CNA from Singapore.   Our own ABC is on there as well, although it's just the News network which I can watch free to air.

That's all by way of introduction to noting that I was watching ABC News (America) this morning and was surprised to see a puff piece about holiday bargains to be had at the moment within America.  Cheap hotels!  Cheap airfares!  Why not go to Las Vegas!  (Yes, Las Vegas was specifically a destination mentioned.)

Sure,  Las Vegas in summer, where the only option is to stay indoors in air conditioned, COVID spreading wonder.   Here's a report from a few hours ago:

Foot traffic in Las Vegas casinos is starting to slow as the number of COVID-19 cases rise.

Roughly 350,000 visitors were estimated to be in Clark County casinos Saturday, the lowest Saturday count since casinos reopened on June 4, according to a Monday note from J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff. More than 400,000 were in casinos the Saturday the week prior, and roughly 550,000 on July 4.

The analyst attributed the drop to increased COVID-19 cases in Nevada. The Southern Nevada Health District reported 1,288 new coronavirus cases in the state on Sunday, 88 percent of which were in Clark County. It was the fifth day in a row officials reported more than 1,000 cases in the county.

And from another site:

Southern Nevada hospitals are filling with COVID-19 patients, and intensive care unit occupancy is rising fast.

In Clark County, it recently rose to 89 percent. And though not all of those patients are stricken with COVID-19, it's the highest level of ICU occupancy since the outbreak began. Statewide, the Nevada Hospital Association reported about 27 percent of all ICU patients are suffering from COVID-19,

I then flipped over to NBC News, which had a story about Christian summer camps having to be cancelled when COVID outbreaks start in them. A few days ago, Slate had an article about one camp with 82 cases!

In short - isn't it just a really bad idea to be taking a holiday nearly anywhere in the US at the moment?   Ratbag wingnuts refusing to wear masks;  heat and airconditioning; touching slot machines in a casino?  (I presume they are providing gloves for that, but people still touch their face.)

Yet here we have ABC News trying to get people to get out and grab a bargain holiday?

The network is owned by Disney, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that it may well turn out that there is corporate self interest going here, to encourage people to think that you can be safe enough travelling so as to visit Disney properties, not by encouraging visits to their theme parks directly, but by encouraging holiday travel generically.

Someone should question the company about this.

All the maturity of a 10 year old schoolyard bully

About a monkey

I've long had an interest in reading Journey to the West, the source material for Monkey and various movies of the story; but when I first went looking for it in a book store, I was surprised to learn it was a multi volume work (about 2,500 pages in all!) that I would surely fail to get into enough to finish. 

But, I have taken the easy way out, and started reading (on Scribd) an abridged version that comes in at a mere 479 pages:

I'm only 50 pages in, but so far, it's...interesting.

One thing I have noticed is how it's pretty limited in scene description of the fantastical, but perhaps it works because it leaves so much to the imagination?   For example, in a sequence which is reminding me a lot of Aquaman movie, our hero goes to get a suitable weapon from the Dragon King at the bottom of the Eastern Ocean, and we get passages like this:

[Sun Wukong is the name of the Monkey King, by the way.]   No description at all of what Aoguang himself looks like - or the "shrimp soldiers and crab generals".

I also wrote earlier this year about the peculiar Eastern belief about the great health benefits of men retaining semen.  Little did I realise that Monkey attained his immortality via this idea too:

 etc. Seems an odd point to make in a book that I thought was read out to children. 

Anyway, it's an easy read, and I am inclined to continue...





 

Less food, again

*  The slow advance of weight gain has advanced enough to go on another bout of dieting.  5:2 diet has worked before, but I always go off it completely and don't go onto any maintenance regime of one day a week fasting (as Michael Mosley found necessary.)   This time, rather than getting annoyed at the slowing rate of weight loss (the first 2 to 3 kilos seem to come off quickly, then it slows down somewhat), I haven't even weighed myself (and haven't done so for about 3 months, I reckon.)   I'm going to see how I go with the general feeling of tightness of pants and shirts and play it by ear.  I will weight myself eventually (and then probably be depressed over the weight I must have been at the start.)

*  In a bad start to the dieting enterprise, my wife last night made a fantastically good pork roast with baked vegetables and a mustard cream sauce.  The vegetables were potato, pumpkin, red capsicum, and onion - apparently, apart from some olive oil, she added dried thyme, fresh rosemary, and (maybe this made the difference) some balsamic vinegar, and gosh, it came out nice.   And although I recently made a cream mustard sauce which I thought nice, hers involved brandy as well as wine and some parsley, and it was of deeper flavour for it.

*  One thing I have liked in the past about the 5:2 diet is that, at least at the start, it has given me a feeling of mental sharpness on the fast days.   Unfortunately, the focus of this ability eventually turns into speculating on getting more variety into what I can eat to get my 600 calories, and an inordinate amount of time reading food labelling in the supermarket.   For this reason, I'm wondering if I am better off just going on a tighter fast, for the first few weeks at least - pretty much just liquids (although I will still take a small amount of milk in my tea or coffee) and see how I go.    Or maybe just have one or two of those 300 cal shake mixes?  We'll see...

Early hydrogen ballooning

Thinking about rubber led me to reading about sulphur and vulcanisation, which led to my stumbling across the fact that hydrogen balloons were around much earlier than I would have guessed.

And there is another, direct, rubber connection.  From Wikipedia:

Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers began filling^[10] the world's first hydrogen balloon on the 23rd of August 1783, in the Place des Victoires, Paris. The balloon was comparatively small, a 35-cubic-metre sphere of rubberised silk (about 13 feet in diameter),^[9] and only capable of lifting about 9 kg.^[11] It was filled with hydrogen that had been made by pouring nearly a quarter of a tonne of sulphuric acid onto half a tonne of scrap iron.^[11] The hydrogen gas was fed into the envelope via lead pipes; as it was not passed through cold water, the gas was hot when produced, and then contracted as it cooled in the balloon, causing great difficulty in filling the balloon completely. Daily progress bulletins were issued on the inflation, attracting a crowd that became so great that on the 26th the balloon was moved secretly by night to the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower), a distance of 4 kilometres.^[12] On August 27, 1783, the balloon was released; Benjamin Franklin was among the crowd of onlookers.^[11]
 
The balloon flew northwards for 45 minutes, pursued by chasers on horseback, and landed 21 kilometres away in the village of Gonesse, where the reportedly terrified local peasants attacked it with pitchforks^[11] and knives^[13], and destroyed it.

 Here's the drawing of the peasant attack (which, to be honest, has a touch of an urban myth sound about it, if you ask me):

Surprisingly, as the Wikipedia entry on the history of ballooning goes on to explain, the famous Montgolfier brothers and their first manned hot air balloon flight (in November 1783) was followed only about 10 days later by the first manned hydrogen balloon flight.  The balloon itself sounds pretty sophisticated for the times:

The balloon was held on ropes and led to its final launch place by four of the leading noblemen in France, the Marechal de Richelieu, Marshal de Biron, the Bailli de Suffren, and the Duke of Chaulnes.^[22] Jacques Charles was accompanied by Nicolas-Louis Robert as co-pilot of the 380-cubic-metre, hydrogen-filled balloon.^[9][11] The envelope was fitted with a hydrogen release valve, and was covered with a net from which the basket was suspended. Sand ballast was used to control altitude.^[9] They ascended to a height of about 1,800 feet (550 m)^[11] and landed at sunset in Nesles-la-Vallée after a flight of 2 hours and 5 minutes, covering 36 km.^[9][11][13] The chasers on horseback, who were led by the Duc de Chartres, held down the craft while both Charles and Robert alighted.^[13] Charles then decided to ascend again, but alone this time because the balloon had lost some of its hydrogen. This time he ascended rapidly to an altitude of about 3,000 metres^[23][13]), where he saw the sun again. He began suffering from aching pain in his ears so he 'valved' to release gas, and descended to land gently about 3 km away at Tour du Lay.^[13]

It was also an enormously large public spectacle:

It is reported that 400,000 spectators witnessed the launch, and that hundreds had paid one crown each to help finance the construction and receive access to a "special enclosure" for a "close-up view" of the take-off.^[13] Among the "special enclosure" crowd was Benjamin Franklin, the diplomatic representative of the United States of America.^[13] Also present was Joseph Montgolfier, whom Charles honoured by asking him to release the small, bright green, pilot balloon to assess the wind and weather conditions.^[13]

Now, in my previous post, I noted that a famous chemist Gay-Lussac did some ballooning.   Here's a brief summary:

On Aug. 24, 1804, Gay-Lussac and physicist Jean B. Biot went up in a hot-air balloon to check out the Russian idea. All iron was excluded, excepting a few tools hung on a string far below the open basket. The basket contained, besides the humans, a sheep, a rooster, pigeons, snakes, bees, and other insects. The scientists began making observations at about 8,600 feet and rose no higher than 13,100 feet despite jettisoning everything they could spare. They landed about 48 miles from Paris after 3.5 hours aloft. They found no variation in Earth’s magnetic field.

Gay-Lussac went up alone on Sept. 16, 1804. He reached 23,000 feet, Miller says, as calculated from barometric pressure. Gay-Lussac sampled the air at different altitudes and found no change in composition. His altitude record stood for half a century. 

I have questions:   at that height, he should have needed oxygen.  Also - was the second flight in a hydrogen balloon?

But before that, another amusing talk of peasant panic:

The items jettisoned on the foregoing flight included an old kitchen chair. The balloon was invisible in the clouds. The chair landed near a girl tending sheep, and she screamed. The local priest was consulted, but he could opine only that the chair had fallen from heaven or been thrown out by angels. The mystery went away a few days later when news of the balloon reached the village, which was about 20 miles from Paris.

OK, more on his very high flights from a different source:

Gay-Lussac got a larger balloon provided with every requisite, and made an ascent by himself on September 16 of the same year. On this occasion the balloon rose to a height of 7016 metres, an altitude greater than any which had been formerly reached, and surpassed only by a few later ascents. At this great elevation of nearly 23,000 feet, and with the thermometer at 9 1/2° C. below freezing, Gay-Lussac remained for a considerable time making observations on temperature, on the moisture of the air, on magnetism, and other points. He observed particularly that he had considerable difficulty in breathing, that his pulse was quickened, and that by the absence of moisture in the air his mouth and throat became so parched that it was painful to swallow even a piece of bread. 

 Annoyingly, I still don't know if that "larger balloon" was hot air, or hydrogen.

This brief site says the latter:

In 1804 Gay-Lussac made several other ascents of over 7,000 meters above sea level in hydrogen-filled balloons.

Well, the guy was certainly brave:  can you imagine being the first to float up to 23,000 feet, have difficulty breathing, and doing it again?

This warrants further reading....

Update:

Well, this is frustrating.  A Gettyimages print, made by who I don't know, is captioned with this:

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac's hot air balloon ascent, Paris, September 1804 (1900). On this flight, French chemist and physicist Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) reached a height of 7016m and confirmed many of the observations he and Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1864) made on their flight of 20 August 1804. 

But surely it's a hydrogen balloon:

Embed from Getty Images

Update 2: OK, thanks to a subscription to Scribd [have I recommended it before? I am finding it has a lot of interesting and some rather obscure titles, as long as you not looking for current bestsellers] I have found a rather delightful looking book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, which seems a pretty thorough but general audience history of early ballooning. It has solved the continual confusion I am finding in other sources as to whether Gay-Lussac was going up in a hot air or hydrogen balloon, or both.  Here are a couple of pages:

Now, to be clear, the book explains prior to this that Coutelle was a French commanding officer of the Corps d'Aerostiers, which took hydrogen filled (and manned) balloons into battle to use for military observation.   He was in Egypt with his balloons in 1798 fighting for Napolean, when Nelson turned up and spoilt the show.

Even allowing for the book possibly being wrong about the type of balloon used on the first ascent (because the earlier extracts above note that Gay-Lussac got a larger balloon for his solo ascent, yet Falling Upwards makes it sound like there was only ever one balloon,)  I would say that at least his second, solo and record breaking attempt must have been a hydrogen balloon from Coutelle.

Well, if anyone is still reading, I hope you appreciate how I have tried to clear that up.  Please send  money.

Poor furry animals

The BBC reports:

Almost 100,000 mink at a farm in north-eastern Spain are to be culled after many of them tested positive for coronavirus, health authorities say.

The outbreak in Aragon province was discovered after a farm employee's wife contracted the virus in May.

Her husband and six other farm workers have since tested positive for the disease.

The mink, bred for their prized fur, were isolated and monitored closely after the workers became infected.

But when tests on 13 July showed that 87% of the mink were infected, health authorities ordered for all 92,700 of the semi-aquatic animals to be culled.

Poetry is bad

It's a generalisation, I know, but based on the evidence of a poem read out on Radio National breakfast this morning (apparently, this is a regular thing after 8.30am on Fridays now?) all reading of poetry on any form of broadcasting needs to be banned forever.

If people like it, they can do it in semi clandestine fashion in the back rooms of some pub or other.  God knows it would take a lot of alcohol to make me enjoy it.

Update:  given my daughter has complained about doing poetry in English, and I have expressed my condolences as she apparently inherited my dislike of the art form, I am curious - what percent of the population does actually say they like (some) poetry?    I know as an art form it has some following, but how large is it?    I mean, honestly, if there was a Cultural Revolution style government that could ban its creation, publication and recitation, would there be like 90% of the population (95% amongst high school students) who would shrug their shoulders and say "seems a bit harsh, but affects me not one little bit, actually"?

I know there is a risk that if I go on about this it seems like I'm painting myself as an insensitive and intolerant bogan*, but the poem I heard this morning has sent me over the edge.


* also, as it happens, I know that 3 of my tiny pool of regular readers are, at the very least, poetry defenders and 2 write it!

Setting standards Nero would have been impressed with

Honest to God, we're going to have to wait another 2,000 years before we see a stupider, more offensively facile Presidency:

It's attracting a lot of comments.  Some are great:

Douthat on "cancel culture"

I think that the best column I have read on the (always verging on the tedious) topic of "cancel culture" is by Ross Douthat.  It's worth clearing your browser cache to read it.

I tend to get annoyed with both extremes on the topic - those on the Left who are disinclined to admit there are shouty, illiberal, snowflakey liberals who would like to see those who don't toe their (usually identity politics driven) takes "punished" in one form or another; and those on the Right who think this is completely new and novel and ignore conservative examples of seeking to punish liberals, as well as the fatuous self serving line that all offence taking is stupid and only exists because people choose to be offended.

It's pretty clear, I think, that Douthat is similarly somewhere in the middle on this.

A big, mushroom shaped, anniversary

Axios reminds us that today is the 75th anniversary of the explosion of the first atomic bomb (not Hiroshima, but the Trinity test).

First of all - as I've said before, the older you get, the more you properly sense the incredibly rapid pace of change of human knowledge and abilities; and when you compare the timing of historical events to your own age, it starts to feel not very long ago at all.  

Secondly, maybe I have read this before, but it hadn't stuck in my memory:  the bomb turned out to be about 4 times more powerful than they had expected -

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb was tested at Trinity Site, in a New Mexico desert valley called Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of the Dead.

• It was successful — far more successful than expected. Before the test, the scientists at the Manhattan Project had estimated the bomb — a 194-ton metal ball they referred to as "the Gadget" — would yield the explosive equivalent of between 700 and 5,000 tons of TNT. And that assumed it would work at all.

• In fact, after the blinding flash of light and that first awful mushroom cloud, observers discovered that Trinity's detonation force was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, at a time when the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal was equivalent to 10 tons of TNT.

A prediction

This book by Tim, published by Right wing vanity press outlet Connor Court, will be the most vapid book of political thought since Pauline Hanson's autobiography:

Update:  here's the description of the book from the publisher's website:

Tim Wilson argues that it is time for liberals to offer Australia a new social contract that places the interests of the individual at the core of the Government’s policy agenda. Central to achieving this will be reforms that depart from the neoliberal era of equity extraction, and instead concentrate on decentralising power and increasing homeownership, in order to address the needs of Australia’s changing demography.

 Yep. Getting the feeling this is hardly going to be ground breaking.

A rubbery question

As one thought leads to another, and I've been reading about rubber lately, I've been wondering this:   why did Goodyear, who invented vulcanisation (and hence the modern era of rubber), even think to put sulphur into rubber?  Why sulphur?  Seems an odd substance to try mixing with indian rubber in the vague hope something good may come of it.

Of course the mega resource of the internet would help.

Turns out the sulphur idea was actually that of another inventor, Nathaniel Hayward, and his account of his involvement in the path towards vulcanisation seems to be set out in a statement at this obscure website:

Sometimes previous to the year 1834 there was a company formed at Boxbury, Mass., to manufacture India Rubber goods. The members of this company were John Haskins, Edwin M. Chaffee, and Luke Baldwin. They had in some way learned the art of dissolving rubber gum, which they tried to keep a profound secret. They soon, however, sold out their interest to a larger company called the Roxbury India Rubber Company, who continued the business in the same place. This company made large preparations to manufacture India rubber goods, and the interest got up with regard to this article in and around the city of Boston was very great. India rubber cloth for carriage tops, overcoats, and other articles to protect such as were obliged to be out in stormy weather, and it was thought would soon come into general use and create a great demand for this fabric.

In the year 1834 Gen. Jackson, then President of the United States, visited New England, and while at Boston was presented with a suit of clothes of this new manufacture, in which dress, on a day somewhat wet, he appeared in public on horseback, for the purpose of reviewing the troops on the Boston Common. This occurrence helped to inflate the bubble, and in a short time the stock of this company rose from one hundred to five or six hundred dollars a share, and every one owning stock in this concern, it was thought, was about to make his fortune.

My curiosity, with that of many others, was highly excited, and I went to the factory and bought rubber cloth for a carriage top. When using the carriage thus covered, I noticed that when two surfaces of this cloth came together, in a warm day, they adhered, in consequence of the softening of the gum. This struck me as quite an objection to the use of the article, and led me to try experiments to obviate it. For this purpose, in the month of August, 1834, among other experiments, I mixed and melted together rubber gum, sulphur, and lampblack; but this mixture, at that time, did not result in anything valuable. I continued, however, as I had leisure, experimenting with this article from August, 1834 till April 1835, showing from time to time small samples of my results to sundry persons engaged in the rubber business, for the purpose of carrying on which many companies were being formed in and around the city of Boston, where I then lived. I was assured, by persons to whom I showed my samples, if I could hit upon any method of preventing rubber cloth from becoming soft and sticky when it was exposed to the sun or otherwise warmed, I might depend on being well rewarded. These assurances from men in whom I had confidence, encouraged me to continue my efforts. I therefore sold out my livery establishment in Boston, that I might be able to devote all my time and attention to the business of experimenting with India rubber.

Still doesn't explain why he thought of adding sulphur at that time!  However, the determination he showed to continue experimenting is pretty admirable:

After closing up my affairs, and paying my debts, I had remaining about five hundred dollars, and a horse and buggy. With this property 1 went out to Easton, my native town, and hired a mill building of Cyrus Lathrop, called the Quaker Leonard Place, at a rent of one hundred and fifty dollars a year. This mill was situated in a retired spot about half a mile from the main road, and not far from Oliver Ames' shovel factory. Here, remote from observation, I shut myself up and entered upon a course of experiments with rubber, and continued it for two months without any satisfactory result.

At the end of this time I was on the point of giving up the whole concern, in utter despair; but finally concluded, before doing this, to make one more trial. For this purpose I put all my chemicals, with which I had been working, into a still of the capacity of fourteen or fifteen gallons, with spirits of turpentine, and drew off about four gallons, into which I put four pounds of rubber gum to be dissolved, and with this solution, I made twelve yards (three-fourths wide) rubber cloth, which looked finely, and which stood the weather perfectly, without melting when exposed to the sun for months. The chemicals I put into the still were white vitriol, blue vitriol, sugar of lead, sulphur and several others, indeed, all I had. This result gave me much encouragement, and I took my rubber cloth and went to Boston, thinking that now I had found out how to make rubber goods that would stand the test. I showed my cloth to a company recently formed called the Eagle India Rubber Company, and they at once offered to give me employment. But I declined entering into their service till I had ascertained, by further trial, that I could make more cloth like the piece I had been exhibiting. I therefore bought a  new supply of chemicals and returned to Easton to repeat the experiment which had proved so successful. To my great disappointment, after numerous trials, variously repeated, and continued for nearly four months, I utterly failed to make anything like the sample I showed to the company in Boston. I then went to work to examine my chemicals separately, with the view of ascertaining their purity. I found impurities in many of them, especially spirits of turpentine and lampblack. The turpentine I found I could purify by thoroughly agitating it with water, and the lampblack by exposure to heat, and thus clearing it of all oily matters with which it is usually connected. The spirits of turpentine thus purified, I found would dissolve the rubber, and purified lampblack being added, and the solution applied to cloth, produced an article which would stand the weather. Upon the strength of this discovery, I engaged to work for this company, on a salary of $1,000 a year.

Finally, we get to him working out that it was the sulphur that was important:

Soon after they began work at Woburn, they expressed the wish that I would make some white aprons, thinking they would sell well. This I attempted to do by using a compound of white lead, magnesia and whiting, with equal parts of virgin or white rubber, dissolved in spirits of turpentine. The aprons looked pretty well, but when warmed would soften and stick, and not being white enough to suit irie, I exposed them to the fumes of sulphur to make them whiter, taking the hint from having seen straw bonnets bleached in this manner. By this treatment the rubber cloth became very white, and made elegant aprons. But in addition to superior whiteness, I noticed that these aprons did not soften and adhere after being exposed to the fumes of sulphur as they had done before such exposure. This gave me the first intimation of the power of sulphur to prevent rubber from becoming soft and adherent when warmed. After this I tried exposing pieces of cloth to the sun that had been fumigated with sulphur, and others of the same kind which had not been thus treated, and found the former' would stand firm while the latter would melt and become sticky.

From this time I tried a great variety of experiments with these articles, in numerous and various combinations, and I found that only when sulphur was one of the ingredients of the mixture, there was no melting or sticking of the rubber cloth. All the time I was working for the Eagle Company, and afterwards while working for myself, I, as I had leisure, was experimenting with sulphur and rubber—and the results, and the way and manner they were brought about I kept entirely to myself. One of these discoveries was that rubber cloth which had been prepared without the use of sulphur, if sprinkled over with sulphur in powder and exposed to the sun, and afterwards washed clean, that this process would fix the gum and prevent it from melting.

After I discovered that it was sulphur, and nothing else, among the articles with which I had been experimenting in combination with rubber, which prevented it from melting and becoming adhesive when warmed, it occurred to me, that this was what made the piece of cloth shown to. the Eagle Company free from the usual objections to this article as then made. But during the four months I was laboring in vain to make a perfect piece of rubber cloth, it never entered my mind that sulphur was of any account in this business, and I did not use it.

The story goes on to explain that Charles Goodyear started sniffing around this factory, and Hayward finally told him that it was sulphur that was the secret to his non sticking rubber products.

And then, apparently, Goodyear accidentally discovered that heating it worked wonders:

He developed a nitric acid treatment and in 1837 contracted for the manufacture by this process of mailbags for the U.S. government, but the rubber fabric proved useless at high temperatures.


For the next few years he worked with Nathaniel M. Hayward (1808–65), a former employee of a rubber factory in Roxbury, Mass., who had discovered that rubber treated with sulfur was not sticky. Goodyear bought Hayward’s process. In 1839 he accidentally dropped some India rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and so discovered vulcanization. 

This discovery, and patenting it, did not lead to an easy ride for Goodyear, though:

Goodyear went on to perfect the modern process of curing rubber-acid mixture with heat, now known as vulcanisation. He received a patent for his process on June 15, 1844. Good years, however, weren’t ahead.

Patent wars, pirates employing his patented process without authorisation, increasing debts (for instance, money borrowed for extravagant displays in London and Paris) and a host of other factors meant that Goodyear never enjoyed the success of the rubber industry. His process would go on to make millions for others, but when he died in 1860, he was still in debt.

Anyway, after all of that:  was sulphur first being added to rubber just a case of Hayward throwing anything into the problem and seeing what (wouldn't!) stick?   Seems so...

Update:  I was just reading a bit about the history of sulphur more generally, and have found the next historical thing I must look up:

The element itself was not isolated until 1809, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry, when French chemists Louis-Josef Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thénard created a pure sample. (Gay-Lussac was known for his research on gases, which involved him flying in hydrogen-filled balloons more than 22,900 feet (7,000 meters) above sea level, according to the Chemical Heritage Foundation.)

 Gay-Lussac sounds well worth reading about!

Most satisfying household chore

I'm been meaning to say this out loud for some time:  I reckon clothes washing and outdoor drying of same is the most satisfying household chore.

Many years ago, a flatmate made a confession that she said she knew she should keep to herself -  she actually enjoyed cleaning the bathroom.  The restoration of cleanliness and whiteness in sinks and toilets did it for her.

I understand the sentiment, but I think I find that job too chemical intensive and therefore artificial to be completely pleasing.  (Not only that, but if you live in an older house where the shower screen glass has become impossible to restore to perfect see through transparency - it's the micro erosion of the surface, apparently, not soap scum or scale - you don't get the feeling that you've restored the whole room to "as new" condition.)

But for some time now, I find myself always thinking about how unusually satisfying I find hanging out washing to dry, and how putting on a load of washing is so simple, especially compared to my childhood, when my mother had to wrestle washing through this type of machine:

The whole washing and drying process now combines something like the best of technological convenience (the front load washer that has come from some far away land - possibly Germany?) with the ancient practice going back to the invention of clothes of hanging them out to dry in the sun and/or breeze.   When you think about it, the clothes drying part is actually nuclear powered, but at a very safe distance.   :)

I posted many years ago about the weird American aversion to using outdoor clotheslines.   I see that the struggle for them to get sensible about this continues.  Here's a recently updated post at Treehugger:

The New York Times Green Inc. blog ran an insightful post on an increasingly love it or hate it practice earlier today: using outdoor clotheslines in lieu of or in addition to conventional energy guzzling drying machines.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never used an outdoor clothesline. In fact, aside from movies and television and a trip to Spain several years ago I rarely see clotheslines being used. I, like much of young urban North America, consider clotheslines to be domestic relics; household staples that have either been banished to the "countryside" or disappeared decades ago along with egg timers, rotary phones, and washing buckets.

According to Project Laundry List, an advocacy group that’s pushing to give all citizens the legal right to hang dry their dirty knickers while raising awareness about alternatives to nuclear power, state-backed initiatives to lift bans on the use of clotheslines are increasingly common.

Clothesline bans, usually enacted by homeowner and condo associations, operate under the guise that they these simple energy-savers are unsightly blemishes on urban and suburban landscapes. States including Florida, Colorado, Utah, and most recently, Maine, have right-to-dry laws intact while other states such as Maine and Hawaii have similar bills in the works.

Imagine never knowing the nice feeling of bringing in naturally dried clothes?  They don't know what they're missing out on.

 

No translation needed

Now going with "elder statesman" hair

So, Trump has given a widely panned campaign speech from the White House (apparently supposed to be about China, but more complaining about Biden.)

Lots of people have commented on his hair being transformed into grey:

I reckon we'll have a leak from the White House soon enough - some media adviser (or Ivanka) has told Trump "maybe it's the grey haired 'elder statesman' look that explains Biden's poll numbers.  Let's give it a try."

Singapore, democracy, and housing

Keeping on today's Asian theme, I noticed the Singaporean election result last week gave the PAP (should be PGP - Permanent Governing Party) a lower than usual 61.2% of the vote.  Now that sounds more like a democracy - although I see that it still meant it got 83 out of 93 seats.   And I see that it has had similar vote just above 60% a couple of times before.   Hmm.  Is this another stupid first past the post system?  Yes, yes it is.  (The link points to other aspects of the Singaporean system that work in favour of the PAP.) 

Anyway, as I have said before, if you watch CNA a lot, you can't help but be impressed by the apparent technocratic and social reasonableness of the current bunch of governing PAP politicians.   I'd be inclined to give up on a more representative form of democracy too if I felt it meant government in the hands of such competent sounding people.   Instead, we get stuck with Smarmo (with the occasional fart smell of Mini Trump), who unfortunately is getting better approval ratings than he deserves due to his at least appearing to be on a more-or-less reasonable track regarding COVID-19.  

Put me down as someone who is never likely to give him an overall tick of approval - Labor would not have handled COVID-19 substantially differently, and we might at least have something vaguely resembling Ministerial accountability under them. 

But - back to Singapore.  I was reading this history of their public housing success, and learnt a few things:

While the government’s action helped solve the housing crisis, it was the decision to begin offering subsidized flats for sale in 1964 that laid the foundation for Singapore’s real-estate success. Under its “Home Ownership for the People Scheme” around 2,000 two- and three-bedroom apartments were sold to lower-middle-income citizens in a new estate in the district of Queenstown for as little as S$4,900 each. Like most HDB sales, they were offered on a 99-year lease and buyers were forbidden from reselling the property for at least five years.

Once that period finished, owners of flats in prestigious complexes stood to make a sizeable profit. Even in those venerable blocks in Queenstown, an unmodernized two-bedroom unit can now sell for around S$220,000, with only 43 years left on the lease. In 2016, the total resale value of Singapore’s HDB apartments was estimated to be more than S$400 billion.

The blocks were built in neighborhood clusters – miniature new towns with playgrounds, food centers and local shops. The larger ones, like Queenstown, had a health clinic, a community center and a library. And like most things in Singapore’s meticulously planned economy, the management of the estates was integrated into policies that included everything from the design of the city’s mass transit system to racial integration.

In a policy that began in 1989, HDB blocks require minimum levels of occupancy of each of the main ethnic groups in the city — Chinese, Malay and Indian — to prevent the formation of “racial enclaves.” The government continues to implement what one senior minister once called the “most intrusive social policy in Singapore” to encourage social harmony.

I find that kind of social engineering very appealing - when it works, anyway.

The government makes sure the blocks are well maintained:

While many governments have focused public housing programs on the poorest members of society—often allowing the austere concrete blocks to deteriorate into urban slums—Singapore recognized that these homes represented the biggest stake its citizens had in the prosperity of the country. The HDB not only maintained its buildings and grounds carefully, but periodically upgraded estates with new elevators, walkways and facelifts.

And how is this for a bit of "that's not how government is supposed to work!" PAP policy:

The potential financial gain from the value of the flats became so important to the nation’s citizens that it was used as a political tool, with the ruling People’s Action Party in the 1980s announcing that it would prioritize maintenance of estates in constituencies that elected a PAP member. The party has never lost a general election.

I don't think I had heard this before - but residents now get built in bomb shelters too!:

As the illustrated floor plan above shows, many have a store room, which, in all apartments built since 1996, has become a bomb shelter with reinforced concrete walls and a massive steel door to protect the occupants in case the Republic is attacked.

Gee. 

Anyway,  I can't wait to go back to Disneyland with the Death Penalty, but there is the matter of a certain coronavirus stuffing up my plans.  

What a year we're having...

I think it was obvious from years of watching Mythbusters that he must have been a likeable guy in real life, and because of that (as well as his age, the suddenness, and - more selfishly - the uncomfortable feeling this gives that an aneurysm time bomb could be in anyone's head) makes this more upsetting than the average celebrity death:

Super huff

That's a very huffy look from Trump while taking questions today:

Incidentally, you can see where he got this bit of "whataboutism" from - Fox News had an article about it a few days ago:

However, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the Obama administration suddenly told states to shut down their testing, without providing much in the way of explanation. And, Biden's top advisor at the time has acknowledged that the Obama administration didn't do "anything right" to combat that pandemic, before walking back those comments.

The record seemingly complicates Biden's claims, in advertising and speeches, that he would have handled state-level coronavirus testing more effectively than the current White House.

As David Roberts said recently, the Republicans and conservatives have virtually no arguments that don't come down to "whataboutism".    It's a style of argument that appeals particularly strongly to a chronic narcissist.