Danger and humour

They still Might be Giants

Gosh:  it's been years since they appeared in one of their music videos (unfortunately - it's nice to see them acting peculiarly on video again!)   But here they are, with an immediately likeable song:

It's hard to explain how significant this band is to people who have never heard of them - I mean, clearly, they are well known amongst the creative types in Hollywood, given the number of things they have been asked to do in TV and the elsewhere. But it is so pleasantly intriguing: it's almost like the John's and their fan base both like them being a modest success forever, rather than hitting an early peak and flaming out.  In fact, they pretty much explained this is a correct take on them in a recent interview with PBS: 

Cannibal chickens (and more) considered

In an article about whether free range chickens are as cheery as we might imagine them to be, there's this:

Feather pecking is when chickens peck and pull out other hens' feathers.

This can lead to cannibalism, where chickens eat the wounded flesh of the injured hen.

These three factors kill a lot of free-range hens. One Australian study found cannibalism was a major cause of death in free-range hens, second-only to being eaten by predators.

Dr Hartcher, who researched feather pecking for her PhD, says death by cannibalism is an "awful way to go".

"We understand more about it than we did a few decades ago but we still don't fully understand how to control the problem," she says.

I would have guessed that keeping too many chickens in too small a space may be a reason behind it, and  I see from another website that is one trigger, but there are many others:

These stressors include crowding, bright light intensity, high room temperature, poor ventilation, high humidity, low salt, trace nutrient deficiency, insufficient feeding or drinking space, nervous and excitable birds (hereditary), external parasites, access to sick or injured birds, stress from moving, boredom and idleness, housing birds of different appearance together and birds prolapsing during egg-laying.

 How do you cure "boredom and idleness" in a chicken, I wonder.   I would have thought letting them scratch around free range on grass would go a long way to curing that, but maybe it's more the lack of good quality chicken cinema and poetry readings?   

They're an odd animal. 

Update:  OK, let's just have a whole gross out afternoon, by reading this list of 10 cute animals you didn't know were cannibalistic.   I did know of hamsters, and had heard of pigs too.  But rabbits and red squirrels?   It's a particularly cute bunny they have chosen to picture, too.   Most of the examples are of babies being the victim of mothers, though, and I guess we tend to feel that crazy hormonal stuff maybe gives those individual Mums some sort of excuse.  Males (or females) who go killing other mother's offspring, though - harder to like them!   

As for primates and cannibalism - chimps seem to be the nastiest of all. 

I'm almost starting to wonder why we don't have cases of modern humans feeling evolutionarily compelled to do something similar.  

Calling out lies

I am finding it refreshing, this new found confidence in Labor, and much of the media, to call Scott Morrison a liar:

 

The armed Right wing in the USA

I find the argument in this article pretty convincing:

Prepare for the Shock Troops

What happens when gun culture merges with a nationalist personality cult?

A key extract from the end:

There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”

After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.

The lights are still flashing red.

 

 

Scientists taking it personally

In Science magazine, there's an article about disagreement amongst physicists about whether one particular experiment really did show interactions with dark matter.   The problem is, it hasn't been replicated elsewhere, and it seems that the "no it didn't" group think they may have worked out what the first group did wrong.

You can read all about that at the article, but I wanted to note the very personal way the leader of the "yes it did" camp takes criticism:

Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”

Interesting, but looks kinda crazy

Obviously, a fair bit of money has been put into this already, but the precision with which it has to work is surely a worry.  (I mean, you can imagine the internal damage if the timing of the release if off by the tiniest, tiniest, bit.)

On reasons for voting for Trump

I thought this thread contained much truth:

 

True American patriot

 

Some lunar oxygen calculations

An article at The Conversation explains how there's a lot of oxygen on the moon - unfortunately, all in the soil and needing a lot of heat to extract.  But still, the maths are interesting:

If we ignore oxygen tied up in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material — and just consider regolith which is easily accessible on the surface — we can come up with some estimates.

Each cubic metre of lunar regolith contains 1.4 tonnes of minerals on average, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630kg oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just over).

Only 800g of oxygen a day?  I would have guessed it was more than that, probably influenced by things like the thought of the weight of a full scuba tank!  Of course, there are going to be other gases involved too.  The ISS has a 79% nitrogen atmosphere. 

Anyway, more rough estimates from the article:

Now let’s assume the average depth of regolith on the Moon is about ten metres, and that we can extract all of the oxygen from this. That means the top ten metres of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years.

This would also depend on how effectively we managed to extract and use the oxygen. Regardless, this figure is pretty amazing!

Indeed.

 

   

Precipitation issues in China

First:  quite a lot of snow:

 

 Another video of buildings not coping with it:

  

 

 And an article in The Guardian about recent heavy rains:

 ‘It’s alarming’: intense rainfall and extreme weather become the norm in northern China

For the next time you're in a dangerous crowd

From NPR:

8 tips to follow if you're trapped in a crushing crowd

 

A European problem

I didn't know this:

The European Union brags that its climate ambitions are more aggressive than anywhere else in the world. There’s just one problem: If the world behaved like Europe, it would be burning an awful lot of wood.

Europe gets 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass fuels, a process that uses wood scraps, organic waste and other crops to generate heat and electricity in specially designed power plants. U.N. rules allow the European Union to write off the emissions as carbon-neutral, so long as sustainable guidelines are met, even though burning the fuel can release more warming gases into the atmosphere than coal.

The European Union’s reliance on wood-burning energy to meet its climate goals — which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent by 2030 — is a measure of the difficulty of making the transition to clean energy even on a continent where politicians have shown political will and enjoy significant public support for their green agenda. For now, much of Europe’s emissions reductions are being achieved by burning biomass instead of coal — and then not counting the resulting greenhouse gases, which critics say they should.

 ....

Excluding emissions from biomass can make a big difference. According to their official numbers, the European Union and Britain together reduced energy-related emissions by 26 percent between 1990 and 2019. Adding emissions from biomass makes the reduction 15 percent over the same period, according to an analysis last month from Chatham House, a British policy think tank. Britain — which left the European Union in 2020 — is a major consumer of biomass pellets, so the post-Brexit E.U. figures for biomass are likely to be somewhat smaller.

About dangerous crowds

Here's a good article at the ABC about the history and science of crowd surges, like the deadly one at the Travis Scott concert.

I think it clear that the most disconcerting thing about this one was the fans who were trying to get the concert stopped when it was clear a disaster was unfolding.

Trans reality

I didn't intend to, but I ended up watching about half an hour of the show on ABC "Girl Like You" last night.   It was a documentary, made over many years, watching a young trans guy and his girlfriend dealing with his transition.

I didn't get his full background, and I have to say, as documentary it was very heavy handed.- lots and lots of music made to flag the emotions on display.   And as with all "fly on the wall" documentary, I do wonder what influence the presence of the documentary makers have.  

I also wondered why it was being pretty heavily promoted, but only being show in a pretty late time slot.   

I suspect the answer is that because the story wasn't as positive about the whole trans experience as might be expected from the very queer friendly ABC.   The story seems to be that his girlfriend thought their relationship could survive him transitioning, and it turned out it couldn't.  She broke it off, abruptly, but it was clear that she had felt the whole experience of supporting her former boyfriend very draining.  

As for the transition - it looked like he had not had the operation, just a lot of chemical treatment.  And they made the point that one of the drugs taken to achieve comes with lots of potential mental health side effects - which isn't ideal for a group already prone to depression, etc.

As often happens, I again wondered about the body dysmorphia aspect of trans, which seems such a large part of it.   We can all agree that body dysmorphia that leads to anexoria is bad and an issue that needs a mental cure;  but when it comes to dysmorphia that is based on gender bits, it's considered wildly improper to approach it in the same way.    I looked up links on cognitive behaviour therapy and trans, for example, and as far as I can tell, the only idea about using it is to help trans be happy trans - not to question whether their thoughts about how wrong their body is may be misguided.  Yet isn't it used that way to encourage people with healthy bodies to stop thinking there is something wrong with it that will only be cured by being dangerously thin?

I suppose people will say that trans ideation is not only about body dysmorphia - or isn't always.   But gee, it's a messy area full of unstated assumptions and ideas that seem to be rarely thought about by those sympathetic to their situation.

I guess it was somewhat refreshing to see a doco that didn't portray the whole issue as if all trans situations would have a happy ending if only everyone would "validate" the person going through it.  (He seemed to have lots of support, including from his Mum when he moved back in after the girlfriend left.) 

A Carter comparison

My main recollection of how I felt about the Carter presidency at the time is that I thought his popularity suffered because his administration gave the impression of the nation suffering a kind of paralysis in the face of several problems not really within anyone's control.   And was there ever a worse Presidential PR look than the one of him running himself into collapse (and being attacked by a rabbit!)

I keep getting the feeling now that the Biden drop in popularity has similar features - OK, so the Congressional paralysis is something he perhaps could have done something about faster, but the other things which Americans are saying concern them  (supply chain, the possible return of modest inflation, COVID, border rushes) seem to me to be much harder to pin on Joe.  

But that doesn't seem to matter much - Americans like a sense of "moving forward", I reckon, even if the direction is dubious and going to be later regretted.  (Like rushing into Middle Eastern wars under Bush.)

You perhaps get similar sentiment in other countries, but the hatred of not moving forward seems something felt particularly keenly in the American public, I suspect.  

Some kids brains are really wired differently

  

I find it impossible to imagine standing that close to the edge, let alone jumping across the gap, from a standing start too!

Sounds like an excellent point

 I didn't know that about polio - so I assume most people wouldn't.

I also see on Twitter that the come back to this by COVID anti-vaxxers is "but the COVID vaccine is not a normal vaccine!  It's new and untried and you have to keep getting boosters..etc etc".

I've said it before, and say it again:   a significant chunk of the Right has spent 20 to 30 years telling each other that there's a massive conspiracy in the scientific community (in the form of climate change.)

Having become so acclimatised to believing one massive conspiracy, they find it easy to swallow another conspiracy that is also actually against their children's interest to believe.

 

Good luck, New York

That invisible movie

I watched the 2020 movie The Invisible Man on Netflix on the weekend, and it's very good.

I kept thinking it's a mash up of #MeToo, Marvel-esque "hi tech in the wrong hands", and ghost story (invisible presence in the house).  But it worked for me.  Most of all, it's the suspense that works well - lots of good directorial decisions as to swapping between point of view and other neat ideas.

It also has a terrific plot surprise that I did not see coming at all.   (Ha, I just realised that sounds like a pun on the title, but it wasn't intended as such.)

Now, without ruining my general praise for the movie - I think the ending was bold, and a bit confronting, and perhaps not set up as being as well justified as it could have been.   But I still like that the director (who also wrote the movie) and studio went with it.   It's the sort of ending it's possible to have decent discussion about afterward.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it.