Natural signs from God

Hey, this is an interesting short item at The Conversation about how medieval smart Christians  understood that lunar and solar eclipses were natural, although they could read into them a sign from God.  

Good stuff. 

China and paper tigers

I find myself sympathetic to this take on China by David Frum:  the West is over-estimating its strength, and in a way that may be harmful to our own interests.  (He is basically repeating the argument made by another guy, but it sounds pretty convincing to me.  And I watch CGTN propaganda!)

Silly people

I would have thought climbers would have been more sensible about this:

A coronavirus outbreak on Mount Everest has infected at least 100 climbers and support staff, a mountaineering guide said, giving the first comprehensive estimate amid official Nepalese denials that the disease has spread to the world’s highest peak.

Lukas Furtenbach of Austria, who last week halted his Everest expedition due to virus fears, said on Saturday one of his foreign guides and six Nepali Sherpa guides had tested positive.

And as for "ultra marathons" as a sport - it seems to me these attract disastrous consequences for participants far too often.  Ordinary marathons are a dubious enough exercise in pointless exertion, if you ask me.  Making them more extreme is just silly.

 

 

Frozen rodents and James Lovelock

Well, this Tom Scott video, which features a short interview with the (still sharp) James Lovelock (age 101) was very interesting:

 

Did I know before this that rock-solid frozen rodents were capable of revival?  I think I had read about this, many years ago, although I don't think I knew Lovelock had been involved.  (If you asked me, I would have assumed it was research done in the United States).   It does certainly explain why science fiction from the 1960's on thought that this was a prospect for humans too.

As for James Lovelock - as I have noted before, we can safely ignore his opinions on climate change now, but he is still a remarkable and pretty charming man.

Military people and UFOs with unusual motion

If you have watched the 60 Minutes interview I linked to a few posts ago, or one of the other interviews David Fravor has given elsewhere, you will recall that both he and the other pilot who saw the object were puzzled by its erratic motion when it low above the ocean.

This reminded me of other, classic, UFO sightings where the object moved in a very odd fashion.  Do many people know about the way some have been described as having a 'falling leaf" motion as they descend?   Here's a classic account, for a book by David Clarke:

 Very odd.  Daylight sightings leave less room for misinterpretation of lights.

Still have a hunch that large scale flow batteries are going to be a significant thing in future

Here's the abstract from a Science paper out yesterday:

Aqueous redox flow batteries could provide viable grid-scale electrochemical energy storage for renewable energy because of their high-power performance, scalability, and safe operation (1, 2). Redox-active organic molecules serve as the energy storage materials (2, 3), but only very few organic molecules, such as viologen (4, 5) and anthraquinone molecules (6), have demonstrated promising energy storage performance (2). Efforts continue to develop other families of organic molecules for flow battery applications that would have dense charge capacities and be chemically robust. On page 836 of this issue, Feng et al. (7) report a class of ingeniously designed 9-fluorenone (FL) molecules as high-performance, potentially low-cost organic anode electrolytes (anolytes) in aqueous organic redox flow batteries (see the figure, top). These FL anolytes not only display exceptional energy storage performance but also exhibit an unprecedented two-electron storage mechanism.

A joke that was waiting to be made

 

There's some kind of deep irony going here...

...when its Right wing places like the Wall Street Journal and Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy decrying the effect of Left wing "woke" ideology on education standards, while it's the very same outlets which are full of readers who think they got a proper education before modern teachers ruined everything, but are also anti-Covid vaxxers and climate change deniers (or "do nothing" proponents.)   

Which is not to say that there isn't a valid argument to be made over the way education seems particularly prone to certain fads and fashions and ideologically motivated arguments.   But, seriously, look in your own backyard first, critics.

 

Some local pushback on the Big Lie

Allahpundit's post about the Republican election officials who have had enough of the "audit" in Arizona is a good read.

No, it's not really a bus, either...

Lots and lots of people on Twitter have said this in response to a tweet which seemed a little too excited about a Chinese thing:

But honestly, and at risk of being labelled a Tankie, I don't think it's right to call it an articulated bus.

The technology was discussed in an article at The Conversation a few years ago:

Trackless trams are neither a tram nor a bus, though they have rubber wheels and run on streets. The high-speed rail innovations have transformed a bus into something with all the best features of light rail and none of its worst features.

It replaces the noise and emissions of buses with electric traction from batteries recharged at stations in 30 seconds or at the end of the line in 10 minutes. That could just be an electric bus, but the ART is much more than that. It has all the speed (70kph), capacity and ride quality of light rail with its autonomous optical guidance system, train-like bogies with double axles and special hydraulics and tyres. 

It can slide into the station with millimetre accuracy and enable smooth disability access. It passed the ride quality test when I saw kids running up and down while it was going at 70kph – you never see this on a bus due to the sway.  

The autonomous features mean it is programmed, optically guided with GPS and LIDAR technologies, into moving very precisely along an invisible track. If an accident happens in the right of way a “driver” can override the steering and go around. It can also be driven to a normal bus depot for overnight storage and deep battery recharge.

As the article notes, Sydney might have been a lot better off with this system running down George Street (although I didn't realise how extensive the light rail in Sydney was until my last visit.)
 

Libertarian derp plus technobabble..heh

That unpleasant disease

This seems rather surprising:

Doctors are reporting a twenty-fold increase in people presenting with syphilis-related eye infections, as Melbourne grapples with a surge in cases of the sexually transmitted infection.

In the early 2000s the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital was recording approximately two cases per year of ocular syphilis.

A team of doctors at the hospital in East Melbourne then researched the condition from 2006 to 2019.

In 2018, 17 cases of ocular syphilis were recorded with infections increasing to 21 in 2019, seven of whom were women.

I would assume that this indicates that there are more women (and men) than before who are unaware of having caught it (because I would have thought this is not one of the likely first signs of infection.)  Then again, the CDC says:

Like neurosyphilis, ocular syphilis can occur at any stage of infection. Ocular syphilis can involve almost any eye structure, but posterior uveitis and panuveitis are the most common. Symptoms include vision changes, decreased visual acuity, and permanent blindness.

News stories of increasing rates of the disease usually talk about it in the context of gay men (or "men who have sex with men"), especially in light of reduced condom use due to reduced fear of HIV (and that PrEP medication gaining popularity.)   But this report seems to make a point of emphasising the number of women who are catching it.   A fair enough warning, I guess...

Eyewitness accounts can be the most compelling

I have said it before, but I will repeat - there may well be good explanations for the US Navy "UFO" videos, because it is hard to understand properly what you are looking at, and the aircraft and camera movement effects can be deceiving.   I'm also pretty sure that new radar systems can give bogus targets, so if there is any talk of new sophisticated radar systems seeing new stuff, I don't assume it is real.

Also, maybe it's just his physical appearance, but this dude does not sound or look like the sharpest person to be making intelligence assessments on UFO incidents:

He in fact gives me the impression of being an attention seeker.  

However, that Navy pilot David Fravor's account of his 2004 visual sighting of a "tic tac" object above the water, which then zoomed up towards him as he moved down towards it, has always sounded to me to be pretty convincing evidence of something completely novel and inexplicable as known technology.

But - I did wonder if he might just turn out to be a self promoting fantacist.   I mean, he seems smart and sincere and sensible, but you never know.

Well, that idea seems to be dealt with adequately by last weekend's 60 Minutes episode which for the first time showed us a second (female) pilot who was on the same sortie (in a second F 18) and backs up everything Fravor says on the many interviews he has been on.  She also appears smart and credible.  

   

It is very hard to see how their sighting could be a case of mistaken identity:  the most obvious "tic tac" shaped thing in the skies would have to be a balloon, but they both seem to say that it moved in complelely un-balloon like fashion, including departing the scene at incredible, almost instantaneous, speed. 

It's pretty fascinating that they also say that the whole ship knew within an hour or so that they had seen something that was commonly called a UFO, and everyone thought it was just a big joke.   Pretty amazing that it took so long for the story about it to actually come out.  

You know the other multi witness, high weirdness, case that this reminds me of - the O'Hare airport sighting of 2006.   The object sounds as if it was about the same size, and zoomed off at the same incredible speed.   I have never (to my recollection) seen interviews with the witnesses to that case, though.

 

Reason to live in high income country

New Scientist reported recently:

Piping an oxygen-rich liquid through the anus could be a life-saver. A new treatment for failing lungs that involves such a process has been successfully tested in pigs....

The researchers anaesthetised four pigs and put them on a ventilator that gave them a lower breathing rate than normal, so their blood oxygen levels fell. When they gave two of the pigs enemas of the oxygenated fluid, replaced once an hour, their blood oxygen levels rose significantly after each infusion. The same effect happened when the fluid was delivered by a tube surgically inserted into the rectums of the other two pigs.

If there is a similar-sized effect in people, it would be enough to provide a medical benefit, says Takebe. He thinks the approach could be especially useful in low-income countries that have fewer intensive care facilities. “Ventilators are super-expensive and need a number of medical staff to manage,” he says. “This is just a simple enema.”

One problem is that gut function may be impaired in people sick enough to need intensive care, which can cause diarrhoea, says Stephen Brett at Imperial College London. “It’s too early to say if this has got any legs,” he says.

Yes, interesting point about the enema aspect.  I wouldn't know for sure, but I didn't think it took all that much liquid insertion via enema for the intestines to want to shoot it out again.   How's that supposed to be stopped?

A worrying age related sign

I wore a black lambswool cardigan to work today.  And a white singlet under my shirt.  I was comfortable.

In my defence, the cardigan was from Uniqlo, which tries to make them cool: 

Yes, that's just what I look like in  my cardie.  (Actually, more like this dweeb from another page on their website:

I'm the one on the right.  Ha ha.)

 

Climate contrarianism raises its stupid head again

Of course, the Wall Street Journal would give high publicity to a new book by a guy who has been well identified as a climate change contrarian - a "do nothing" advocate, it's too expensive - and people like "Stagflation!" and "leave the tobacco companies alone!" expert Sinclair Davidson are impressed and his blog is covering the book like it's finally vindication.  

Ken Rice has a useful post showing how Koonin's arguments have been looked at and dismissed for a number of years.  Just because he has a new book repeating his past bad arguments doesn't change that.

UFOs, politics, and changes in world views

UFOs are in the news, particularly the Right wing news, again:

 

Ezra Klein did an interesting column last week in the NYT about what it might mean if there is about to be a disclosure of proof of alien intelligences operating on Earth.  I think this view is probably right:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

Leave the bears alone

I watched the 2020 Japanese movie Ainu Morir on Netflix on the weekend, and I recommend it at least as an educational exercise, despite some misgivings.

It's set in what I take to be a real Hokkaido village* where the old native folk from that part of Japan make a living from tourism.  The credits at the end would seem to indicate that a lot of people were playing themselves.

I have never read much about the Ainu - as far as I know, they are largely ignored by Japanese society.  The film might well be an attempt to remedy that.  As such, it is a pretty sympathetic treatment of them and their (barely holding on) culture.

The film's key plot is about their bear sacrifice ritual, which made it particularly relevant to me, given  my musing recently about the ubiquity of sacrifice in old human societies.   However, I am not sure it satisfactorily walks the fine line between respect for cultures facing modernity and the unwarranted romanticism of their tribal beliefs.  

To explain more, you would have had to have seen it.   Anyone who has, feel free to comment below.

 

*  Yes, here it is.   

Update:    Apart from the lengthy Wikipedia entry on the Ainu, there is this Smithsonian Magazine article which is a good read.

On worshipping bears generally, there's a short history here of different groups that have done it.  

I kept wondering while watching whether there might be an ancestral connection between Ainu people and native Americans, especially those in Alaska.  But no, genetic investigations indicate that's not the case.  They were just both really into bears. 

Well, actually, it would seem that according to that article, any native peoples living in bear country thought bears were worth worshipping.  Not to mention eating, but in a very ritual fashion: 

Erk.

Flaky Tony and the numbers

So, Tony Blair is in the news having a panic attack about "wokeness" killing the Left.  

While I don't doubt they are some culture war issues on which the Left looks a bit nuts, gullible, and sometimes illiberal, I wish Blair and this type of commentary would bear in mind that total Left wing vote is not as bad as that for Labour (or Labor) alone.

Look at the 2019 vote:

I assume you can call the Liberal Democrats centre Left?  Labour, them and the Greens make up 46.5%.  True, if you add Brexit Party to the Cons, their vote is up to 45.6%.  But my point still stands.

Blair might spend his time better arguing for preferential voting than sounding like Mark Latham lite.

 

Update:   see this article in Quartz looking at the terrible results that they get from their first past the post system.  It obviously stinks.   And I didn't realise that they had attempted to introduce a preferential system of sorts in 2011.   Then PM Cameron opposed it - another way in which he helped damage the country, I see.

My point about Blair is stronger than I realised - he would be better campaigning for another go at electoral reform, perhaps using a simpler preferential system

That's a lot of rabbits

It would seem, according to this article, that a lot of American backyards could raise a lot of protein for the household: 

People eat a lot of protein in the U.S. and the average person needs 51 grams of protein every day, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI). That comes to 18,615 grams each year or, for an average household of 2.6 people, 48,399 grams per year. Americans love burgers, but few people have room to raise a steer next to the garage -- and most city ordinances quake at the mere thought of a rogue cowpie. But small animals are more efficient protein producers and are often allowed within city limits. The average backyard provides plenty of space, typically 800 to 1,000 square meters or about 8,600 to 10,700 square feet. ...

They found that using only backyard resources to raise chickens or rabbits offset protein consumption up to 50%. To reach full protein demand with animals and eggs required buying grain and raising 52 chickens or 107 rabbits. That's more than most city ordinances allow, of course, and raising a critter is not as simple as plopping down a planter box. While pasture-raised rabbits mow the lawn for you, Pearce says the "real winner is soy." Consuming plant protein directly instead of feeding it to animals first is far more efficient. The plant-based protein can provide 80% to 160% of household demand and when prepared as edamame, soy is like a "high-protein popcorn." The team's economic analyses show that savings are possible -- more so when food prices rise -- but savings depend on how people value food quality and personal effort.  

I find it hard to believe an average backyard can produce enough soy to meet a family's protein needs, but that seems to be what they are saying. And as much as I like edamame as a snack, there are only so many ways you can imagine cooking it in meals.