A completely normal observation

Way, way stranger than fiction.

That new climate sensitivity estimate

The report in Science seems pretty good in its explanation of what the new paper considered.

Short story:

Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment, conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C

At least the Saudis are being sensible about this

Gee. Saudis are being more sensible than Adam Creighton. France 24 reports:

This year's hajj, which has been scaled back dramatically to include only around 1,000 Muslim pilgrims as Saudi Arabia battles a coronavirus surge, will begin on July 29, authorities said Monday.

Some 2.5 million people from all over the world usually participate in the ritual that takes place over several days, centred on the holy city of Mecca.

This year's hajj will be held under strict hygiene protocols, with access limited to pilgrims under 65 years old and without any chronic illnesses.

Here's a photo with the article:

 It's probably 35 degrees or something while they are doing this, but when you can see the floor like that, it looks rather like a skating rink.

I also find it odd how it seems people don't aren't acting with particular reverence while doing stuff around the Kaaba.   I know cleaners gotta clean, but zipping around on those industrial cleaning thinks look more like they're cleaning the tiles at a giant shopping centre than somewhere something sacred sits.   I don't know - maybe the cleaners doing the rounds inside St Peter's look the same?  Heh - yeah, I guess right: 

In some rare, good social media news

Twitter has announced sweeping measures aimed at cracking down on the QAnon conspiracy theory, including banning thousands of accounts.

The social media giant said it would also stop recommending content linked to QAnon and block URLs associated with it from being shared on the platform.

That's from the BBC.

I thought I read somewhere that Twitter wannabe competitor Parler was also taking action against it?  Can't find that now, though.  In any event, Parler has not taken off, and won't.  This, from Forbes, is rather amusing:

It’s all had the feeling of a fad and, as the Daily Beast noted earlier this week, there are signs it has begun to burn out. Sensor Tower data provided to Bloomberg also show new downloads slowing significantly in recent weeks. The reason comes down to a somewhat obvious point: People seeking a platform for their political views gravitate towards the places with the largest audiences.

Conservatives have struggled to break free from Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths before. Milo Yiannopoulos, who actually was banned from Twitter and Facebook Inc., complained last fall to his 19,000 Telegram followers that they weren’t worth his time. “It’s nice to have a little private chat with my gold star homies but I can’t make a career out of a handful of people like that,” he said, according to screenshots posted by Vice last September. Yiannopoulos went on to say that Gab, another social network the right once hoped would supplant Twitter, was full of teenage racists, and complained that "no one" uses Parler. “Unless something monumental happens, we are just going to be driven off the internet forever,” he wrote.

And they are getting caught up in the limits of free speech fights anyway: 

Parler is quickly discovering the limits of free expression. On June 30, Matze used Parler to explain its house rules, apparently frustrated with some of Parler’s new users testing the limits of its free-expression motto by posting pornographic images and obscenities.

Parler is facing the same evolution bigger social media companies have confronted for years — balancing free expression with creating safe and inviting online communities. Twitter early on referred to itself as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg maintained through the company’s early years that it is not a publisher, but a neutral platform. Facebook is still a place for free expression, Zuckerberg said in a speech last year, but he acknowledged some speech that is harmful and infringes on others’ rights shouldn’t be allowed.

The mysterious radio stations are still with us

I would have linked before to articles about the "numbers stations" (which I am pretty sure I had heard directly a few times when I used to twiddle around with a nice shortwave radio I had as a younger man.  I still have a short wave radio, as it happens, but haven't scanned the airwaves for many a year.)

This article, at BBC Future, is a very interesting look at a Russian station that doesn't even transmit numbers, and its purpose is unknown.

The article indicates that it being a "dead hand" signal is probably the most likely explanation:

“There’s absolutely no information in the signal,” says David Stupples, an expert in signals intelligence from City University, London.

What’s going on?

The frequency is thought to belong to the Russian military, though they’ve never actually admitted this. It first began broadcasting at the close of the Cold War, when communism was in decline. Today it’s transmitted from two locations – the St Petersburg site and a location near Moscow. Bizarrely, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than shutting down, the station’s activity sharply increased.

There’s no shortage of theories to explain what the Buzzer might be for – ranging from keeping in touch with submarines to communing with aliens. One such idea is that it’s acting as a “Dead Hand” signal; in the event Russia is hit by a nuclear attack, the drone will stop and automatically trigger a retaliation. No questions asked, just total nuclear obliteration on both sides.

It does talk about the history of coded signals, and we get this part which I don't think I have heard of before:

During World War Two, the British realised that they could, in fact, decipher the messages – but they’d have to get their hands on the one-time pad that was used to encrypt them. “We discovered that the Russians used the out-of-date sheets of one-time pads as substitute toilet paper in Russian army hospitals in East Germany,” says Glees. Needless to say, British intelligence officers soon found themselves rifling through the contents of Soviet latrines.

 Such glamorous work, being in intelligence!

Exactly

Of course, a large chunk of Trump supporters are so, so stupid as to claim that even a private business  requiring they wear a face mask is fascism, while the above is fine because it's aimed at Democrat voters and enabled by their cult leader.

Australian wingnut watch

I see that the idea of having to wear a facemask when going out is going down a treat amongst several of the wingnuts of Catallaxy:

Funnily enough, Sinclair Davidson himself seems to take the risk seriously. From another post, in which he does his own hysteric act over imagined anti-Semitism (in the Herald Sun, of all places):

More seriously – hope lockdown is treating you well. Despite what they say here, this is more than a flu and you should stay in iso.

There's a deep irony here:   he's at greater risk of catching it himself because of the very same nutjob hysterics who are attracted to his anti-science blog. 

A peculiar syndrome

I mentioned the odd Indian/Chinese idea about the magical, health giving power of men not letting their semen ever leave their bodies again in a recent post, and have now found out something else that sometimes happens as a result of this belief.

First, a magazine article about some Western dudes who have cottoned onto the idea as a way of trying to make a buck:   The Cult of Semen Retention.   It's pretty amusing, the overblown claims.

But Googling the topic also brings up this topic:  Dhat Syndrome.  As explained in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry:

Dhat syndrome (“semen loss”-related psychological distress) is a culture-bound syndrome seen in the natives of Indian subcontinent, but it is prevalent in other cultures also. Its diagnosis and management issues need to be taught to postgraduates in their teaching program. This syndrome involves vague and multiple somatic and psychological complaints such as fatigue, listlessness, loss of appetite, lack of physical strength, poor concentration, forgetfulness and other vague somatic troubles. These symptoms are usually associated with an anxious and dysphoric mood state. These patients may also present with or without psychosexual dysfunction. The management of Dhat syndrome needs serious attention.

And more details.  First, this is why (some) Indians think semen is so important for health:

Since then, myth prevalent among people of the Indian subcontinent is that “it takes 40 days for 40 drops of food to be converted to one drop of blood, 40 drops of blood to make one drop of bone marrow and 40 drops of bone marrow form one drop of semen.”

You would have thought human biology being a subject in schools would help, but I don't know.

The author then goes on to draw a wider net, alleging that anti-masturbation crusades in Western countries in the past reflects the same sort of attitude.   It partly does, but still, this Dhat Syndrome is something else:

The patients who presented with symptoms of Dhat syndrome were mostly young, recently married, belonging to average or low socioeconomic status (perhaps a student, laborer or farmer by occupation), from rural area and from family with conservative attitudes towards sex.[12,16,17]

Patients having Dhat syndrome can be further divided into three categories.[18]

1. Dhat alone - Patients attributed their symptoms to semen loss; presenting symptoms - hypochondriacal, depressive or anxiety symptoms
2. Dhat with comorbid depression and anxiety - Dhat was seen as an accompanying symptom
3. Dhat with sexual dysfunction

The duration of presentation of these patients from the onset varies from less than three months up to one year,[5,16] even up to 20 years.[10] These patients reported that they lose their semen in sleep, with urine, masturbation, hetero/homosexual sex.[10,16,17,19]

In other words, it seems that their belief in the health enhancing importance of semen is so strong that even having a young man having sex within marriage can freak out that it's harming him.  As I say, pretty peculiar.

The syndrome even has a Wikipedia entry.  But here is another, better backgrounder about it (from the Indian Journal of Dermatology, for some reason): 

Ayurvedic literature describing semen as a vital constituent of the human body dates back to 1500 BC. The disorders of ‘Dhatus’ have been elucidated in the Charak Samhita, which describes a disorder called ‘Shukrameha’ in which there is a passage of semen in the urine. Similar conditions have been described under various names from China (Shen K'uei), Sri Lanka (Prameha) and other parts of South East Asia (Jiryan). Malhotra and Wig called ‘Dhat’ ‘a sexual neurosis of the Orient’.[4] In China, anxiety following semen loss (Shen-K'uie) has been associated with epidemics of Koro, which is another culture bound syndrome in which the individual holds the belief that his penis is shrinking into his body and disappearing. Tissot's paper in 18th century stating that even an adequate diet could waste away through seminal emission gained popularity amongst the emerging middle class and led Western Europe to an era of masturbating insanity.

The International Classification of diseases ICD-10 classifies Dhat syndrome as both a neurotic disorder (code F48.8) and a culture specific disorder (Annexe 2) caused by ‘undue concern about the debilitating effects of the passage of semen.’ It is a commonly recognized clinical entity in India and South East Asia and is also widespread in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Dhat Syndrome is characterized primarily with complaints of loss of semen through urine, nocturnal emission or masturbation, accompanied by vague symptoms of weakness, fatigue, palpitation and sleeplessness. The condition has no organic etiology. It may sometimes be associated with sexual dysfunction (impotence and premature ejaculation) and psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety neurosis or phobia).[5]

So, there you go.   I feel like drawing up a map sometimes of "bad cultural ideas that are harmful and need to go away", with China being labelled for Traditional Chinese Medicine as my first target.  But the semen worrying seems to me to be more likely Indian in origin. 

Update:  I was curious to read what a Ayurvdic practitioner might say about the condition, and found this site which seems to take a semi sensible line that a lot of anxiety about it is unfounded, but also includes this very specific opinion:

Charaka Samhita postulates that semen is all-pervasive within the body like "oil in the sesamic seed" and suggests one ejaculation per week in summer and 168 total yearly ejaculations as the optimal sexual frequency for males.

But, but...once a week in (say) a 3 month summer would only be about 12 times.   They have a fair bit of catching up to do to hit that weirdly specific "optimal sexual frequency" over the rest of the year.

Noted from Nature

It would be no magic elixir, but all ideas are probably worth investigating at this stage:

Large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be achieved through enhanced rock weathering. It now seems that this approach is as promising as other strategies, in terms of cost and CO₂-removal potential.

Also, as the headline indicates, don't get your hopes up about an effective COVID vaccine coming anytime soon:

Coronavirus vaccines leap through safety trials — but which will work is anybody’s guess

A podcast I might watch

A weather question

Is it just me, or does this Brisbane winter seem to others to be colder at night and in the mornings than your average recent winter?  The days are still nice enough, for the most part (although even then, I have a sense that we have had slightly more cloudy, no sunshine days - like today.)  I just seem to have been feeling colder in the house this winter generally speaking.

Of course, in the Northern Hemisphere, things are in the opposite direction:

For the past month, Siberia has captured the world’s attention thanks to a climate change-fueled heat wave that caused temperatures in an Arctic town to crack 100 degrees in June and whipped up an outbreak of fires across normally frigid tundra. But an equally alarming situation is unfolding just north of Siberia’s shores: sea ice is crashing in a region that scientists consider to be the ice factory of the Arctic.

A new ice extent record in September is not certain, but the long term consequences of a lot of open sea north of Siberia is still likely to be significant:

Whether 2020 brings a new record for sea ice destruction or not, what’s happening this year will be significant. Most new sea ice formation in the Arctic occurs along the eastern half of Siberia’s north coast, where ice grows in the autumn and winter before being swept out to sea. Because there’s so much open water absorbing sunlight in the region right now, Serreze says it’s “very likely” that autumn ice formation will be delayed, which could have ripple effects going into next year.

Ultimately, more years like this could hasten Arctic sea ice’s long term, climate change driven meltdown, which matters far more than individual records.

“Everyone wants to focus on the minimum, but any amount of time the ice is at a record low is affecting arctic climate,” Labe said. “To me, that’s very significant.”

Here's the graph:

 

The finest conservatives

Unless things have changed recently, "areff" is Roger Franklin, long time Quadrant online editor:

It's not that he told her he was Dave Mason; it's just that he didn't correct her and (apparently) signed the name "Dave Mason", which I guess is supposed to make it not something that's dishonest and creepy (not to mention, I suspect, now a sexual offence in some countries), but a jape to laugh about decades later:

Conservatives speaking openly at Catallaxy are just the worst possible advertisement for Conservativism that I know.

Update:  it has occurred to me that he doesn't say when she asked for the autograph.  If it was after "sleeping with" her, he possibly might not have been dishonest prior to it.   I find it a bit hard to believe, however, that if she was interested in him because she assumed he was a well known musician, that she would have not been asking questions about band life before going to bed, and that this would not have alerted him to her error.

Andrew Bolt unmasked

So Bolt joins the Right wing whiner mob about wearing facemasks.

In "good" company with chef nutball Pete Evans, and Alan Jones:

You know the score:  climate change denialists have been in science (and common sense) denial for decades now - why expect them to exercise common sense (and a responsible attitude towards other people - including their kids and grandkids) over a viral illness?  

Bolt has been fact checked pretty effectively by The Feed on SBS. 

I just find the arrogance of promoting facemask scepticism very disturbing.   Making a living from bloviating is no doubt a large part of the problem, as well as playing Right wing culture war politics.

But doesn't just plain common sense suggest that using a mask is a helpful thing to do when community transmission is becoming a great concern in a city?   I mean, bloody hell, you even had Hannity taking that line.

And for the millionth time I note:  the problems of the Left in terms of "cancel culture" and identity politics may be irritating and cause some individual cases of injustice, but it's nothing like the actual life threatening danger on every scale (local community and planet wide; immediate and long term beyond our lifetimes) that the poisonous culture war Right is bringing.


 

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.