The nutty American way of democracy, again

Is it just Australia, or do lots of other countries look at the American system of allowing individual states and parties to completely and maliciously stuff up fairness and national uniformity in voting in their Federal elections and think "this is absolutely nuts"?

I mean, we now have a President who votes by mail, encourages the elderly residents of one state that he needs to win that it's OK for them to vote by mail, while also admitting that he will not support funding the Postal service because he doesn't want them to be able to cope with mail in voting.  And the fat faced corrupt Attorney General was saying the other week that it was "obvious" that mail in voting would allow for fraud.

This is tinpot dictatorship in a nominal democracy territory.   

The anti-establishment Left may be causing local trouble on the streets of (some) American cities, but the American establishment Right is far more determined to do the most harm to democracy as a whole.   

Seen better days

The famous Arecibo radio telescope has had a spot of bother:

Science writes:

The iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was damaged early on 10 August when a snapped steel cable smashed into one of its antennas and tore a 30-meter gash in its 307-meter-wide dish. Observations have been halted for at least 2 weeks while investigations are carried out

Build your own dangerous laser

Are the laws about getting your hands on dangerously powerful lasers looser in America than here?  Or does being a "backyard scientist" means you can order them from China and not attract attention?
Anyway, this is interesting and entertaining:

Florida man

Just wow:

 You would think the litigiousness of America would stop really stupid workplace decisions like this, but apparently not.

The thin line between rot and fermentation

 There's a somewhat hair-raising article on CNA with the title:

Adventures in DIY fermentation: From onion-chilli paste to grasshopper garum

 and it ends on this note which keeps me away from home experiments: 

This fermenting business needs an intrepid spirit and a sense of humour. As the Noma team put it: “There is a thin line between rot and fermentation.”

Consider this recipe for example:

“In the typical southern Tunisian home,” she wrote, “the cook will slice around seventy pounds of fresh onions, toss them with salt and turmeric, pack them in earthen jugs, and leave them for three months to become soft and wet.”

Wolfert’s version of hrous was simplified and shortened for convenience. But the long Tunisian path proved irresistible to me. When I finally popped open the lid on the onion jar, stashed in a cupboard, the ripe pong was admittedly something best kept away from anyone you might be hoping to feed. But the finished paste was sensational.

But the most horrifying idea is this:

There is nothing more highly prized at Noma than the grasshopper garum. This long, sophisticated, chocolatey potion is so versatile and so good they had to stop it popping up in too many of their dishes.

Noma suggests using live grasshoppers as well as wax worm larvae, little cream-coloured wrigglers that definitely look better as moths. Sourcing initially looked simple but, in the required quantities, it turned out to be a Google-defying mission (one example from my search history: “Are pet shop grasshoppers safe for human consumption?”).

I didn’t relish seeing the little critters jumping around in my food processor either. My squeamish compromise was cricket flour, a high-protein powder, which I am told makes a mean chocolate brownie and is catching on fast among insect eaters. 

I won’t go into the details of my encounter with 300 grams of wax worms, but let me just say that, when working in bulk, the sawdust is hard to separate from the larvae.

 So, the basic point is - if fermented foods are going to smell bad anyway, how does one tell if it's a "don't eat this, it'll make you sick" sort of bad smell, instead of "it's fine, it's meant to smell like that" kind of bad odour.

 Reader Tim, who seems unduly interested in fermentation, but I assume has not gone so far as putting live grasshoppers in his blender,  may care to explain...

A short opinion

That choice of Kamala Harris for Biden's VP seems pretty good to me.   Helps deal with the Republican law and order panic campaign; she seems smart, basically likeable, and ticks the "should appeal to people of colour and immigrants" box as well.     

Still a hockey stick

First, this tweet:

 

I read some tweets by Stephen McIntyre criticising this study due to some alleged massive mistake on (I think) Antarctic proxy temperatures.    However, when I go back to his twitter feed now, it seems he has become massively obsessed with proving a scandalous and earth shattering injustice was caused to Trump and his team regarding the Russia interference investigation.  Honestly, he has 60 tweet threads on the topic, and comes back to it again and again.  He seems, in short, a complete Right wing nut now. I can't even find the climate related tweets I read only (I think) last week, they are so swamped with political, conspiracy like, guff.

And, I should point out, as with his previous criticisms of Mann and the hockey stick, the key point should be "what difference does it make?  Do your own reconstruction the way you think it should be done and let us know what it looks like."  But as far as I know, he never does. 

 

COVID efficiency

Yesterday, an important co-worker in the office wanted her GP to give her antibiotics for what was almost certainly a sinus infection that had started with an earache and moved into post-nasal drip affecting her throat.  She rang him for a telephone consultation.  He insisted on her getting a COVID 19 test, and self isolating at home until the result was in.  He emailed the form to her at work.

She went and had the test at about 11 am yesterday.  This morning she got the result emailed to her - negative, as expected.   She is back at work at 9 this morning.

The GP had said the tests were only taking about 24 hours in Brisbane now, although at the pathology place they said 2 to 3 days, but they would mark this one "urgent".  Came back in way less than 24 hours.

Pretty impressive.

Anyway, I am still in a ridiculously busy patch at work.

Also - the continual flurry of pathetic and unhelpful commentary on COVID 19 from the Right is pretty depressing. Who would have thought the harm to democracy and good government that would come from political commentary being monetarised in the way it has been (and primarily from the Right).  

A noodley day

Today, I eat 600 calories.

Yesterday, though, I made some very nice blueberry pancakes for breakfast (with ice cream and maple syrup); a big plate of char kway teow for lunch from a cafe at Sunnybank, where lots of Asian eating abounds; and my wife made Hiroshima style okonomiyaki for dinner (which has noodles in a layered fry up which is, I have decided, nicer than the more flour batter based Tokyo style.   It is a fiddly thing to cook, though.)

Back to char kway teow:  it was a disappointment when in Singapore (and Malaysia) 19 months ago that this dish did not seem as ubiquitous as I hoped it would be.   Mind you, we only spent time in Malacca in Malaysia, so maybe it is slightly regional in popularity?   Anyway, I have always liked it a lot as a fried noodle dish, and it is not always easy to find a cafe in Brisbane that does it justice.  Yesterday's was pretty good.

Dr Sleep confirms it...

...I really, really don't care for Stephen King.

The sequel to The Shining has turned up on Netflix, and I can see why it was a box office flop.

I have read that the book of The Shining had much more of what I think could be called magical realism, and it was Kubrick who turned it into a more ambiguous and realistic psychological study, well capable of different interpretations.  And King didn't like it. 

So I presume this sequel follows his book closely, as the magical realism abounds.   No ambiguity here - the ghosts from The Overlook have followed Danny all of his life, and ancient quasi gypsies tour the world looking for kiddies with psychic power to suck it, or their souls, out of them.  Danny finds himself in contact with one such potential victim and decides to help her.

I think it's an idea that could work, and for much of the first hour (which is about as long as the first act takes to unfold - it's a very leisurely told story) it kept reminding me of Ray Bradbury - in particular Something Wicked This Way Comes, which happens to be my favourite novel of his.   While the movie never bored me, it was more a case that I kept expecting it to develop into something with genuine suspense, dread or scares:  but they simply never come. 

I think it became clear that was from a writer devoid of good ideas when many of the supernatural villains were taken out in a very typically American way [I say so as not to be accused of too much as spoiler].   This is probably about 3/4 of the way in, and the movie from there just kept getting less and less convincing.

I also had a problem with the lead villain actress - it's hard to put my finger on it, but there was just something sort of smug about her performance and physicality that carried no menace at all.

So yeah, not a great movie, and I blame Stephen King totally for a bad story.

  

A tragic case

So Trump pronounced it "Thighland", and ridiculous Dinesh leaves millions jaw-dropped by tweeting about it:

Amongst many funny comments following:

Update:  this was the complete Die-nesh (that's how you pronounce it, no?) discussion:

More amusing tweets follow:

It's a control freak's paradise

I mean, who doesn't want to micro manage their own city state?:

I hope they have done something about lycra wearing cyclists.  Or perhaps it's completely unnecessary, given the climate?

Update:  one problem that Singapore seems surprisingly incapable of adequately fixing is the amount of dengue fever - which is running at some sort of recent record high at the moment:

SINGAPORE -- Singapore has been hit by an outbreak of dengue fever on pace to shatter records, adding to the burden on its health care infrastructure already taxed by growing coronavirus cases.

The country reported more than 20,000 dengue cases this year as of late July -- close to the full-year high of 22,170 in 2013. Infections are rising at the fastest-ever weekly pace.

The disease is widespread in Southeast Asia, and there is no effective vaccine or treatment. Some of the initial symptoms, including fever and body aches are similar to those of COVID-19, making them difficult to distinguish. And both diseases often cause no noticeable symptoms in patients, yet can be fatal in severe cases.

I have seen on CNA and elsewhere that the country is trying out the bio control line of releasing treated mosquitoes which breed with females who then have infertile eggs (which has been trialled in North Queensland too, I think), but it seems it's still under assessment and improvement, and it's hard to breed enough mosquitoes to make it effective.

 

Big loss

Disney is bleeding money:

For months it’s been clear that Disney, the country’s most prominent entertainment company, was facing a financial disaster unlike any in its history.

On Tuesday, it became evident just how deep the carnage has gone.

The company revealed that as a result of the coronavirus pandemic it took in just $11.8 billion in revenue and $1 billion in operating income in the three-month period that ended in June, the height of lockdowns in the country. The numbers are a significant drop from the same period a year ago, when it generated $20.25 billion in revenue and $4 billion in operating income, among the worst slides of the modern era.

In more "what's Graeme thinking?" news

Long time readers will hardly be surprised to know that Graeme is complaining from inside the  moderated comments cage I built just for him that I haven't posted about the Beirut explosion disaster, because (of course!) it was actually an atomic strike by some nefarious Jews.   He's calling it "the Jewish nuclear attack on Lebanese Christians".

I think we can safely assume that if he stubs his toe on the furniture in the dark on the way to the toilet at night, he immediately starts wondering about the surname of  the last tradesman in the apartment because he was probably a Jew who moved the drawers just enough to cause the accident and is now gloating about it at the Synagogue.

[Waves to Graeme inside the moderated comments cage.  You nut.]

Update:  I'm sure that, according to Graeme, this will be e-vil psy-ops:

I may, or may not, let you know what he says while shaking the cage.

The odd Churchill family

Another link from Arts & Letters - this time to quite a long review of a biography of the woman who became the Churchills' war time cook.  The bits I liked:

Among Landemare’s regular clients in the mid-1930s were Winston and Clementine Churchill. Churchill was not at the time a minister, but he understood the political power of food. ‘He treated the dining room as a stage, and dinner as a performance.’ Happier as host than as a guest, he and Clementine gave dinners twice a week and frequent lunches. As lunch remained a less formal occasion the balance of the sexes didn’t matter. Winston and Clementine each held their own parties and she particularly enjoyed her ‘hen luncheons’.

 Although the Churchills always lived beyond their means, by the end of the 1930s Landemare’s prices had exceeded the Churchills’ reach. The outbreak of war, however, altered domestic economics once again. The demand for grand dinners declined and Landemare decided a permanent post would be desirable. The Churchills took on ‘Mrs Mar’ in February 1940, less than a month after rationing started. Clementine was ‘enchanted ... I knew she would make the best out of rations, and that everyone in the household would be happy.’ In May, Churchill became prime minister and Landemare moved into 10 Downing Street the following month. Here, at last, she becomes visible in history as a person described by others: ‘a round body’, according to one of the Churchill secretaries, ‘who could tell one in detail the intricacies of marriage and divorce among the aristocracy’. A woman who was ‘open and generous-spirited’ and ‘very calm indeed, whenever there was a mini-crisis’. She was quite often to be found sitting in the kitchen ‘half an hour or so before a big dinner ... with everything under control, reading the Sporting Life’. In October 1940 this sangfroid nearly cost her her life. Churchill ran into the kitchen during an air raid and told her to get into the shelter, but Landemare, who was making a delicate pudding, refused: ‘If I’d’ve turned it out it’d’ve been no more – it was so light you see.’ Churchill insisted, and moments later the 25-foot plate-glass window at the back of the kitchen exploded into shards. ‘Ooh the rubble, terrible,’ she recalled.‘He saved my life, I’m sure.’

Throughout the war she cooked at Downing Street, Chequers and occasionally in the tiny kitchen under the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill was an enthusiast for chain eating, which was his interpretation of the medical advice he had been given before the war. He liked soup last thing at night and insisted, even at Yalta, on operating on ‘tummy time’. He was not a glutton but, as Gray puts it, ‘he was used to good food and plenty of it.’....

The Churchills were famously terrible employers. Many a cook and kitchen maid had left in tears and one had reputedly gone mad. Mrs Mar, however, did more than stay the course. She became a trusted ally and a friend to Mary, the Churchills’ daughter. She took a practical view of Winston’s peculiarities. If, as sometimes occurred, he ‘absent-mindedly wandered around stark naked’, she told him off and he would apologise. His roast beef ‘always had to be underdone’, but since he was often late for meals this could be difficult to achieve. Landemare’s method was to ‘watch till I knew he was in, then he’d have to have his bath and then I knew to put the meat in’.

The odd Mozart family

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a short article from the US edition of the Spectator talks about the peculiar things we know about Mozart and his family from his letters.

First - execution as exciting public entertainment for the kiddies:

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

And dinner table conversation with the whole family must have been, um, fun:

That’s probably the most notorious aspect of Mozart’s letters: the filth. Quite how gamey they get varies with the translation. The classic English version — some 616 letters covering the period 1762 to 1791 — comes in three fat volumes, translated by Emily Anderson in 1938 in the best possible taste. More recent paperback selections by Robert Spaethling and Stewart Spencer are less reserved: ‘I’ll shit on your nose so it runs down your chin,’ writes the 21-year-old Wolfgang to his cousin Maria in Augsburg, and if you’ve seen Amadeus, you’ll know that there’s plenty more where that came from. (Mrs Thatcher famously disapproved of the scatology.) One advantage of Anderson’s edition (and Spencer’s 2006 translation) is that it includes letters from the rest of the Mozart family, and it’s clear that they were all at it — mother, father, daughter and son, all cheerfully potty-mouthing away. ‘Stick your tongue up your crack,’ Nannerl urges her brother.

Living in a tube on the Moon or Mars

Some interesting talk here of the size of lava tubes on the Moon and Mars, and their likely safety for a base:

The international journal Earth-Science Reviews published a paper offering an overview of lava tubes (pyroducts) on Earth, eventually providing an estimate of the (greater) size of their lunar and Martian counterparts....

"We measured the size and gathered the morphology of lunar and Martian collapse chains (collapsed lava tubes), using digital terrain models (DTMs), which we obtained through satellite stereoscopic images and laser altimetry taken by interplanetary probes," reminds Riccardo Pozzobon. "We then compared these data to topographic studies about similar collapse chains on the Earth's surface and to laser scans of the inside of lava tubes in Lanzarote and the Galapagos. These data allowed to establish a restriction to the relationship between collapse chains and subsurface cavities that are still intact."

Researchers found that Martian and lunar tubes are respectively 100 and 1,000 times wider than those on Earth, which typically have a diameter of 10 to 30 meters. Lower gravity and its effect on volcanism explain these outstanding dimensions (with total volumes exceeding 1 billion of cubic meters on the Moon).

Riccardo Pozzobon adds: "Tubes as wide as these can be longer than 40 kilometers, making the Moon an extraordinary target for subsurface exploration and potential settlement in the wide protected and stable environments of lava tubes. The latter are so big they can contain Padua's entire city center."

"What is most important is that, despite the impressive dimension of the lunar tubes, they remain well within the roof stability threshold because of a lower gravitational attraction," explains Matteo Massironi, who is professor of Structural and Planetary Geology at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Padua. "This means that the majority of lava tubes underneath the maria smooth plains are intact. The collapse chains we observed might have been caused by asteroids piercing the tube walls. This is what the collapse chains in Marius Hills seem to suggest. From the latter, we can get access to these huge underground cavities."

Francesco Sauro concludes: "Lava tubes could provide stable shields from cosmic and solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts which are often happening on the surfaces of planetary bodies. Moreover, they have great potential for providing an environment in which temperatures do not vary from day- to night-time.

Back to the Axios interview

Despite my reservations about Swan, it should go without saying that Trump's interview with him was a terrible performance highlighting all of his gargantuan inadequacies not just as a President, but as a person.

The worst look for his character was surely the response to the invitation to say something good about John Lewis, in which he made it clear that he views personal relationships in a purely transactional way. 

We already knew this, really:   all a mad dictator has to do is praise Trump to his face, and Trump will transactionally sing the praises of said dictator forever more.   But don't turn up to his inauguration, and no way will Trump say anything good about you.

How can his cult members find such a deeply cynical, "what's in it for me" attitude appealing?  

Sudden success comedian

Yeah, I saw the viral video of "Uncle Roger" watching the fried rice video and was amused.

I see that this character by Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng has a new video out, and I have to say, while it starts slow, his interactions with (real or fake, I'm not 100% sure) customers often made me laugh out loud.

I think Nigel, who seems to have been around for a while (with what appears to have been moderate success - he has toured as a support act in Britain, for example) may have a major hit on his hands with this character:

Still suspicious

This is not going to be a popular take on the matter, but nevertheless....

I watched all of the Jonathan Swan interview with Trump on Youtube last night, and I can understand the praise for an interviewer actually doing follow up questions, and looking openly sceptical and aghast at some of Trump's comments.

But you know, it still made me uncomfortable, or at least suspicious, as I kept thinking "why isn't Trump losing his cool with Swan?   Has Swan pre-endeared himself to Trump somehow such that Trump will tolerate anything he says, or any face he pulls?"

I saw on Twitter afterwards someone asking more-or-less that same question, and one person claimed that Swan is buddies with Jarod Kushner.   But I see that he did an interview with Jarod last year that lots of people think did not go well for the son-in-law.   So how true could this be?

When Swan started at Axios, I noted quite a few tweets which made me suspicious of his politics - I actually thought he should be sacked, as he was looking to me to be much like a Chris Uhlmann character - positioning himself as a moderate or objective middle man, but in fact conceding too much to the Right to really fit that picture.

I still have my suspicions about him.