Busy but some thoughts

The office workload is high at the moment:  it is always is at this time of year, and it always dispels any sense of a holiday mood.  Oh well.

Anyway, some various thoughts I normally would have posted separately about:

 *  By virtue of falling asleep and waking up with the TV still on, I found myself watching on SBS last Friday a documentary about Hank Williams, of all people.   Like most Australians, I guess, I knew the name, would probably recognise a couple of songs as being him, but had absolutely no idea about his life.  I would have guessed he lived into the 1960's, but he died aged 29 in 1953, seemingly of a combination of alcohol and medically administered morphine.

So yeah:  turns out he was like he was like the early country version of Amy Winehouse:  big talent, unhappy life, drugs and alcohol their ruination.  (Not that I know much about Amy Winehouse either, but I think that's the general gist.)   Fame is good for very, very few people.

* This Texas Supreme Court last ditch effort to try to stop Biden becoming President:  it's too cute by half, surely?   Given that the litigation is only against those States where Biden won, the political motivation is just too obvious - I mean, couldn't they find a Trump voting State where some technical argument might be possible about how that State had changed its voting procedures in the last year and join them in the action to try to gain some pretence of it not being purely about trying to install Trump?   

And if the Supreme Court gave it any credibility, surely it would be opening a Pandora's Box of potential future litigation. 

I see that a lot of people have noted that the 17 States joining in are basically the States of the old South, making it like a revenge attempt for losing the Civil War.   It's also been noted that its being run by the "States rights are important" party - sure, until they vote for the wrong President.

I am no expert on American constitutional law - but it seems wildly improbable that this will go anywhere.

* Assuming that this is all done and dusted soon - the biggest story of 2021 will be how seriously the Republican party splits.  Here's a bit of speculation:  the "best" thing that could happen for the party to recover would be for some QAnon, "the election was stolen" nutter to shoot or blow up up some Democrat (or even Republican who didn't endorse Trump's fake win claims) office - this would finally give the appalling "leadership" of the Party a reason to say "Enough is enough.  The election was lost legitimately and people have to stop believing it was all a conspiracy that's going to be cured by armed rebellion."

 

The very messy state of marriage in India

At the BBC, a quite long article on the mess that is inter-faith marriage in India.  Some points:

Every year, some 1,000 interfaith couples get in touch with a Delhi-based support group and seek help.

Hindu and Muslim couples usually approach Dhanak when their families deny them permission to marry. Aged between 20-30 years, the harried men and women want the group to talk to their families or help them seek legal assistance.

Among the couples who come to Dhanak, 52% are Hindu women planning to marry Muslim men; and 42% are Muslim women planning to marry Hindu men

"Both Hindu and Muslim families in India fiercely oppose interfaith marriages," Asif Iqbal, founder of Dhanak, told me.

"They will stoop to any level to stop them. Parents even smear the reputation of their daughters to dissuade her lover's family. The so-called 'love-jihad' is another weapon to discourage such relationships."

The bogey of "love-jihad", a term radical Hindu groups coined to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage, has returned to haunt India's interfaith relationships. 

Last week, police in northern Uttar Pradesh state held a Muslim man for allegedly trying to convert a Hindu woman to Islam - he was the first to be arrested under a new anti-conversion law that targets love-jihad. At least four other states ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are planning similar laws. Party spokespeople say such laws are required to stop "deception, fraud and misrepresentation".

"When a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, it is always portrayed as romance and love by Hindu organisations, while when the reverse happens it is depicted as coercion," says Charu Gupta, a historian at University of Delhi, who has researched the "myth of love jihad" ....

 

Monogamous, arranged, heterosexual and same-community marriages are idealised - more than 90% of all marriages in India are arranged. Interfaith marriages are rare. One study put them at just over 2%. Many believe the spectre of love jihad is resurrected from time to time by Hindu groups for political gains.

That such strident campaigns against interfaith unions have a long and chequered history in India is well-documented.

In the backdrop of rising religious tensions in the 1920s and 1930s, Hindu nationalist groups in parts of northern India launched a campaign against "kidnapping" of Hindu women by Muslim men and demanded the recovery of their Hindu wives.

There's a lot more at the website.

 

Bind my (veggie) burger, please

For the second time, I tried making "smoky" beetroot and bean based burger patties on the weekend.  (It's the use of smoked paprika that gives them that flavour.)  The recipe I followed this time is here.    

The taste is pretty nice, and it's interesting, because I am pretty sure it's a psychological association of the colour of red with meat which gives the brain the impression that a beet burger is going to be more substantial and filling than some other forms of vegan or vegetarian burger.  

But - as with a previous attempt, using a different but similar recipe, there is a problem with getting home made veggie burgers to stick together in a similar way to meat burgers.

This seems to be a well recognised problem - see this article Tricks for Making Veggie Burgers That Won't Fall Apart, for example.  The trouble is, none of those suggestions sound very convincing to me.

I am sure the problem comes from the hard to avoid fact that frying (or baking) the patty makes the semi cooked vegetables inside release steam/water, which loosens the whole thing.   I doubt egg works, as I have never found it helps much with salmon patties, which can also suffer structural integrity issues. 

It was suggested to me yesterday, in a discussion which went on for far too long in the dog park, that perhaps the answer would be xanthan gum, which I didn't realise you could use in baked products as a thickening agent.

I also wonder whether the common ingredient you see on a lot of the imitation meat products you see lately - pea protein (or pea protein isolate) - itself binds somewhat when cooked.   Now that I look around, one other veggie burger suggest wheat gluten - so maybe just adding flour or cornflower does help?   Not sure how it would affect the taste, though.  (As a side note, I also see coconut oil in a lot of fake meat products now.  I can imagine that could help in taste and mouth feel too, so maybe it's time I start just experimenting with my own additions to a veggie burger recipe.)

I suspect that reader Tim might have an idea about this.  Help me, please.

Update:  because Google knows what I want to know, I found that Youtube suggested a Canadian video which showed a chef making a vegan burger with all the usual suspects (beans, lentils, chickpeas,  mushrooms, spices) but also oats and - I think this may make the difference - tapioca starch.

That sounds plausible to me - it would avoid the possible floury taste of wheat flour or cornflower.

Someone who watched the video guessed at the quantities:

1 cup - Black Beans

1 cup - Chickpeas

1 cup - Lentils 1 cup 

Mushrooms (cooked) 1/2 cup

Rolled Oats 1/4 cup 

Beets (Shredded) 

1/4 cup - Nutritional Yeast

1 tsp - Tapioca Starch

1/4 tsp - Salt 1/4 tsp - Pepper 1/8 tsp - Chili Powder 1 tsp - Parsley 1 tsp - Rosemary  

 

I think there was more tapioca starch than that. 

Sounds worth a try...

As read on Twitter

Count me disappointed that no one seems to remember The Andromeda Strain

Well, that was a good news science story - the Japanese satellite returning to Earth (to Woomera, no less) with a chunk of asteroid rock and dust in it.  

The only thing that slightly disappoints me is that not enough people are referencing that this is pretty much how The Andromeda Strain started, and given what 2020 has thrown up at us already, who would put it past the year to try that on....

Dubious about lab grown chicken

The Guardian has a headline:

No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time 

but when you read the details, it sounds more like PR spin than anything else:

The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. Initial availability would be limited, the company said, and the bites would be sold in a restaurant in Singapore. The product would be significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper.

The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. The nutrients supplied to the growing cells were all from plants.

The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago.

What I would like to know is:

*  how many chicken cells per piece?

*  how much could they be contributing to the taste?  [Perhaps need a blind test between a bit of their chicken made with plant filler alone, compared to a piece with the chicken cells thrown in.]

*  sounds like they certainly can't be contributing to texture. 

* is using "plant medium" to grow cells really been proved as viable?

I remain deeply skeptical about the benefits (both for the individual consumer and on the bigger question of whether it will ever reduce the number of animals raised and eaten) of this whole idea.  

I would like science journalists to show more skepticism on the matter - they seem too ready to just repeat PR releases.

Amongst the reasons to avoid it

Case studies and autopsy results are confirming that, in some cases, COVID-19 can cause such severe lung damage that patients require a lung transplant to survive.  ....

"We provide explicit evidence that COVID-19 can cause permanent damage to the lung in some patients for whom lung transplantation is the only hope for survival," said study principal investigator Dr. Ankit Bharat. He's chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, in Chicago.

His team also discovered unique cells—called KRT17 epithelial cells—in the lung tissue of COVID-19 patients with irreversible damage. These cells have also been found in patients with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis, a deadly progressive lung disease.

The findings, the first of their kind on the issue, were published Nov. 30 in Science Translational Medicine. To date, eight COVID-19 patients have received double-lung transplants at Northwestern Medicine, the most performed at any health system in the world.

Pretty extraordinary (and not widely publicised, it seems.)

Not sure what this means for Umbrella Academy

So, mopey faced Ellen Page is now Elliot Page - and the BBC wastes no time in endorsing her transgender proclamation:

Elliot Page: Juno star announces he is transgender

As I have complained before, I already found her kind of annoyingly serious, and I would guess she very specifically wanted the second season of Umbrella Academy to give her character a lesbian awakening storyline.  (It was, in any event, pretty well handled; and the whole season was extremely enjoyable.) 

Apart from a suspicion that this will cause a further spike in unhappy teenage girls deciding their depression can be cured by deciding they are really men, my only other interest in the matter is what it means for the third season of Umbrella Academy.

Can the producers just replace her with a more likeable actress?   Please.

 

Yeah... Real suspicious

This man likes to give mini history lessons in many of his posts: 

Where's the rah rah Brexit support now?

By the way, there are tweets following that last one that say "only 8% lead for remain after all of this?"; and people responding with "wait until the effects actually start to be felt in the hip pocket, and in general inconvenience, next year." 

I have noticed, for a long time now actually, that there is a distinct lack of pro-Brexit content on the internet from the libertarian/conservative people who never said all that much about it, but were pro-Brexit because they could just feel it in their bones, or something, that "less rules the better". 

Look at Helen Dale, for example.  She promotes herself as some sort of reasonable, "classical liberal" Tory who supports Brexit yet seem to virtually never discuss it in detail in her Twitter feed.  Maybe she has written a column or two criticising the way it has been handled politically, but it seems low on her priority of interests, even though she lives there.

And calling Jason Soon:  where do you stand on this now?   You've had a pretty crook year as far as disillusionment with commentators who you formerly gave some credence to when they have gone completely stupidly pig headed on COVID 19.   (Hello, Adam "I never liked my gran anyway" Creighton - but I think there must be others.)   As far as I can recall, you indicated soft support for Brexit, like Dale, and thought Johnson would make a great PM.   Isn't it time to admit error, or do we have to wait to see economic and social costs over the next few years before you'll admit your support never had more than a mere intuitive basis?

Update:   also, not that I watch it, apart from the odd clip that turns up on Youtube, but I don't think even the clown wingnuts on Australia's Sky News at Night spend time trying to defend Brexit.   Lack of material to work with, I suspect.

Going To the Lake

I started watching the Russian Netflix series To the Lake, and I thought the first episode was really good.   Looks like a lot of money spent on it, with some flashy camera moves and fancy shots showing  directorial flair which I didn't really expect from a series from that part of the world.   

A few other observations:

*  angry Russian language sounds really angry.   I guess angry German does too.   Is there just something about the tone of certain languages which make them sound scarier than others when the speaker is upset?

* interesting to see wealthy characters in a Russian story, and the wealthiest played as dislikeable.  (Maybe there is a redemption arc coming up though?)  The show seems to pull no punches about corruption, crime and how quickly the place would fall apart if under disaster pressure a tad higher than that presented by COVID-19.   I doubt that Putin likes it.

* why is Googling bringing so few American reviews for it?  It has been released there, but I can't spot mainstream media outlets reviews at all.   That's odd, isn't it?

Historical pigs of London

This story came to my attention by being mentioned in a Youtube video.  I had not heard of it before.  Here is the Wiki version, from an entry about the medieval St Anthony's Hospital in London:

One source of income, traditional to certain religious foundations dedicated to Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt, was from donated free-range pigs: any pig considered by the supervisor of the London Livestock market unfit to be killed for food was reserved for the use of the Hospital as follows: a proctor of St. Anthony's placed a collar around its neck from which hung a bell. It was then released onto the City streets to scavenge, protected by the status afforded by its bell, from molestation by the population.^[2] it was a virtuous deed to feed these pigs, which quickly fattened and when ready for the table were reclaimed by the Hospital and sold or slaughtered for food.^[3] The privilege appears on occasion to have been abused, as in 1311 one of the Hospital's tenants Roger de Wynchester, was forced to promise the City authorities not to claim pigs found wandering about the City, nor to put bells on "any swine but those given in charity to the house".^[4]

Incredible bad faith

The news is already old - these losing pro-Trump cases really are being thrown out quickly now - but I just wanted to note the incredible bad faith of (some) Pennsylvania Republicans who voted for mail in ballots a year ago, conducted a primary using them, but when Trump loses in the final election, decide to challenge the constitutionality of the legislation they voted in!

This was all explained in a post by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air - which remains in my opinion the only conservative politics website worth anything.   

Here he is with an update when the PA Supreme Court threw it out. 

It just shows incredible bad faith that any Pennsylvania Republican should have tried this on. 

Balls

A post about something I found mildly amusing.   

We went to IKEA on Sunday and decided to have lunch there.   None of my family are fans of the IKEA meatball, but I saw they had a new vegetarian or vegan choice - Plant Balls.   What a name, hey?

Apparently, they always used to have "veggie balls", but this new one is part of the movement to make a plant product that resembles the meat product.   They are cheap so I had ten, with mash potato, peas, gravy and that jam that perhaps only exists due to  IKEA shops.  

I thought they weren't bad, but reminded me a little of poultry stuffing rather than meat.   (Perhaps that's unfair - I would not consider a meal of stuffing, but I would eat these again.)  The IKEA website explains:

The plant ball is proof that a less meaty future can be just as delicious, whether you’re a meat-lover or not. Made with pea protein, potatoes, onion, oats and apple, it has the taste and juicy bite of the IKEA meatball – minus the meat. Instead, the perfect meaty taste is achieved by adding umami flavours, like mushroom, tomato and roasted vegetables.

They don't have much trouble replicating the IKEA meatball in texture - one reason I don't care for them being the lack of texture, like they are made from the leftover residue of a mincing machine rather than the mince itself.  That said, they do sell an extraordinary amount:

“At IKEA, we sell 1 billion meatballs a year. Imagine if we can convert even some of those into plant balls. That’s a real tangible reduction in our climate footprint.”

But still - that name.   I don't think they put much effort into it.   I reckon they should have a competition to rename them.  

Am I right? [I am right]

Every single bit of alleged evidence of the Trump election being "rigged" comes down to someone with no direct and detailed knowledge of specific vote counting and tallying processes either seeing something*, or doing some maths, and saying "that looked real suspicious to me."  That's it.  That's where it ends.

I cannot believe how dumb and gullible so many on the Right are - as I have said many times, it's like they are not only willing dupes to any shonky, bad faith, self proclaimed expert (as they have been for a decade or so with climate change), but they have virtually self gaslight themselves into an alternative reality.

Update:  in the weird world of Australian Right wing-nuttery, curated by Sinclair Davidson because, it would seem, he likes people to be able to display themselves as ageing, gullible, conservative cranks and fools (often with unpleasant personalities to boot), we get examples like this:

 As so many are observing - Rupert spent a decade or two, for his profit, pandering to a conspiracy consuming, culture warring, gullible and ageing conservative audience that is now distraught that he is trying to edge them back to an even slightly more evidence based view of the world.   It would be sort of funny to watch, if it weren't a worry for democracy and the future of the US.

Update:   Trump and his cultists are adamant that the Biden vote (at more than 80 million) is just too incredible to believe.   Looking at this graph, putting it in historic perspective, there's nothing shocking about it at all.   

*  or, not seeing something, then inferring that fraud was being committed - like complaining they were kept 10 feet from a electorate office worker's table and thinking the reason was that they wanted to commit fraud. 

Getting creeped out now

OK, so because I watched the BTS song Dynamite, and perhaps because I actually like watching the Feel the Rhythm of Korea tourism ads (they really do make it look like a cool and nice place to visit), Youtube got me to watch the new BTS song Life Goes On last night.   They're a cultural phenomena, OK.  Do I have to keep justifying myself?

Man, the androgynous (and quasi Japanese "boys love" anime - made for girls, mind you) styling and vibe of the group is starting to creep me out.  It's giving me a sad and uncanny Michael Jackson "they don't know what they want to look like" feeling - and in fact the guy driving the car in close up in this clip specifically reminded me of Jackson for some reason.   I also thought at one point that it was going to have a boys in pyjamas having a pillow fight sequence - but it didn't quite go there.  One of them does something very peculiar to a bicycle seat, though.   I just thought the whole clip was sort of off.

As I have said before - it's not like deliberate androgyny in pop music is anything new (and for all I know, maybe one or more of them is gay) - but whoever is control of their image is making this band look like pale, plastic skinned robots with with artificially perfect hair.  It's just too much...

It's stuff like this that makes me doubt the whole "Trump will own the Republican party for years" thing

I keep saying - I reckon most prominent Republicans who defend Trump have only done so for purely opportunistic reasons.  They know he's a jerk who has no real friends (political or everyday) and that he dumps on anyone who crosses him in a heartbeat.   People like Raffensperger will not appreciate having to worry about a Trump cultist stalking him with a gun for doing his job.

So his idiot base may be loyal to him for a year or two after he's gone, but the "establishment" Republicans are going to dump on him as soon as he is out of the White House.

Again - I could be completely wrong.   But it just seems the most plausible take to me.

Revenge of the wasps (and in Brisbane, too!)

I would guess that aircraft are responsible for splatting at least a few thousand wasps a year, so is it any surprise that wasps are trying to take them down?

Interesting story at phys.org:

Over a period of 39 months, invasive keyhole wasps (Pachodynerus nasidens) at the Brisbane Airport were responsible for 93 instances of fully blocked replica pitot probes—vital instruments that measure airspeed—according to a study published November 25 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alan House of Eco Logical Australia and colleagues. As noted by the authors, the results underscore the importance of risk-mitigating strategies, such as covering pitot probes when aircraft arrive and setting up additional traps to intercept the wasps....

A total of 26 wasp-related issues were reported at the airport between November 2013 and April 2019, in conjunction with a series of serious safety incidents involving pitot probes. In its native range in South and Central America and the Caribbean, the wasp is known to construct nests using man-made cavities, such as window crevices, electrical sockets, and of course, keyholes.

Things I'm not reading about: a Republican split?

Maybe the columns about this are yet to come, but I am surprised at how few words are being written on the risk that Trump will cause a serious, quite long term, split in the Right between his dumb, conspiracy addled "base" who are leaving Fox News and going into the even more intensely partisan propaganda echo chambers of OAN and Parler, and those "establishment" Republican politicians and their supporters who have always known Trump is a useful idiot but have not been able to say so for 4 years.  

Because, it seems to me, the only way those on the "establishment" side can hope to win back the cultists is if they start spilling the beans on how hopeless they found Trump to deal with after his departure.   But given the nature of cultist logic, that runs the risk of intensifying their belief in the Deep State and the righteous cause of their glorious leader who always warned them that Washington was corrupt.  

Look, I could be completely wrong and somehow the fine line that the likes of Carlson and Fox News is trying to tread will work.   But it seems a real problem, way outweighing the intensity of the internecine arguments within the Democrats.  

The Fox way forward discussed

At the Washington Post, a detailed look at how Tucker Carlson hopes to manage accepting a Biden presidency without losing the wingnut base that would prefer to be shooting people on the street.  (If you use Twitter, you should really look at that @parlertake account to see how much violence is being hoped for amongst wingnuts.  I wonder if the FBI now has staff dedicated to examining that site/app.)

I liked this take down of the complete and utter crap Carlson claimed yesterday:

Carlson then gets to the third part of his post-election playbook.

“We shouldn't let our focus on voting machines distract us from all that happened earlier this month. The 2020 presidential election was not fair. No honest person would claim that it was fair,” Carlson insisted. “On many levels the system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another, and it was rigged in ways that were not hidden from view. We all saw it happen.”

How? Well, for one thing, Carlson says that the media allowed Biden to “refuse to explain what they would do if they were elected.”

This, as The Post’s Dave Weigel has pointed out, is ridiculous. Perhaps there wasn’t coverage of Biden’s agenda on Fox News, but it’s impossible to argue that he didn’t offer detailed proposals of what his presidency would entail. Those proposals often struggled to be heard over the volume of Trump’s chatter, but they existed.

The candidate who explicitly had no post-election proposals was Trump. There was no section on his website outlining any plans, just a delineation of his self-described accomplishments. The Republican Party broadly acknowledged that there was no use in developing a platform, reverting to a broad “whatever Trump wants” explanation.

The other part in this column I liked was the short and simple summary of the nonsense position of Republicans that investigating this election as being entirely legitimate and essential, while the "Russiagate" investigation was a fraud from the start:

To this day, Trump remains frustrated that his 2016 election was overshadowed by questions about Russia's efforts to interfere in the results and various investigations into people associated with his campaign. As he's pushed to hold off Biden's win, many of his allies have argued that muddying the waters after Election Day is fair play given the investigations Trump himself had to endure.

There are important differences, of course. One is that the investigations into Russian interference began well before the 2016 election concluded and focused on several individuals with demonstrated ties to Russia. Had Trump simply embraced the probe of interference broadly as a way to protect the vote, it wouldn’t have become the pall that it did. But, again, Trump was eager to present himself as a winner, and the idea that Russia might have influenced the outcome was therefore anathema.

The other distinction between the 2016 election probe and the one Carlson suggests is that in that case there was good reason to suspect malfeasance on the part of people associated with Trump’s campaign. One adviser traveled to Moscow in July 2016. Another was told that Russia had obtained emails that were apparently the ones eventually leaked by WikiLeaks. Another — Trump’s campaign chairman — had worked directly for pro-Russian interests and, it turns out, shared campaign data with an individual linked to Russian intelligence.

By contrast, there isn’t any evidence that anything untoward happened with electronic voting in 2020. There are plenty of allegations, certainly, though even Carlson had to admit last week that Trump’s campaign couldn’t present evidence to support those allegations. As with most elections, there were certainly errors and flaws that deserve to be probed to prevent them from happening again in the future. Perhaps those investigations will turn something up. But what Carlson proposes is obviously a fishing expedition, something that may bear political fruit but should be understood in that context.

Basically, whenever you read a person mock "Wussia, wussia, wussia" or the Mueller investigation, you know that they have dumbed themselves down with partisanship to the point they are not worth arguing with.