Short story: it's a long way off

Noah Smith had a friend who works in the lab grown meat field do a guest post about where it's at.

Despite Noah's optimistic intro:

I actually read it as endorsing my skepticism that it's not really viable, and may be a waste of research and investment. 

Wild uncertainty

That's a surprise coming from Kristol.

Twitter (when not spending time in glorious schadenfreude about Musk losing advertisers and trying to blame everyone except himself) is talking a lot about the Republican favouring polls "flooding the zone" in the last couple of weeks.  Early voting, however, has been high, and traditionally favours Democrats - although I have also noticed that some people are claiming that Republican early voting is high in a couple of places (I think Florida is one of them.)   But I don't know how they know they know how the early voters voted.   

This weekend, there are some (such as Kristol above) suggesting that the Democrats are going to do OK after all (although his tweet above doesn't actually say they will retain control of congress), and it is no doubt based on stuff like this:

 And this is one theory about Republican polling:

As is this:

Yes - that is one safe bet.  If Democrats do surprisingly well (compared to the way the MSM is currently skewing their reporting on the assumption that the Republicans will do well), there are going to be millions of stupid American wingnuts (and their Australian counterparts) claiming it is due to electoral fraud, but (again) with no actual evidence.

The reality is, however, that polling is extremely difficult in the US and surprises have happened before.  

Countryside viewed

Went out to Mulgowie farmers market again on Saturday, which might seem a long way to go to get really fresh corn, potatoes, beans (and locally grown garlic) but it's a nice drive.  

The dams are full everywhere around Laidley, and for some reason, there seems to be an enormous amount of corn planted at the moment (see above - well I think it's corn.  This is right besides the market, but we drove around to Forest Hill, and up to Lowood, and corn was everywhere.  If the market is soon flooded with cheap corn, you heard it here first.  Actually, it's already around $1 a cob, I think, so it's not even that expensive at the moment.  Why is so much being grown?)

It was also surprisingly cool for November.  The weather is still very wonky at the moment.  I kind of don't recall wanting to wear a jacket in November anywhere near Brisbane before.

Some Friday science trivia - I just bought an ancient condiment

I like using Himalayan rock salt in cooking and on my food - it's pink, and makes me think about how incredible it is that I'm using something mined out of a hill in Pakistan that is incredibly ancient.   

You think oil drilled from far underground is old?  Well it is, but here's the specifics:

The formation of oil takes a significant amount of time with oil beginning to form millions of years ago. 70% of oil deposits existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago). This is likely because the Mesozoic age was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the ocean.

Himilayan rock salt, on the other hand:

Himalayan salt is mined from the Salt Range mountains,^[1] the southern edge of a fold-and-thrust belt that underlies the Pothohar Plateau south of the Himalayas in Pakistan. Himalayan salt comes from a thick layer of Ediacaran to early Cambrian evaporites of the Salt Range Formation. This geological formation consists of crystalline halite intercalated with potash salts, overlain by gypsiferous marl and interlayered with beds of gypsum and dolomite with infrequent seams of oil shale that accumulated between 600 and 540 million years ago. 

I had to check, of course, but Ediacaran period starts at 635 million years ago and ends at the (oddly specific) time of 538.8 million years ago (according to Wiki).   For more context, at that time, there weren't even land plants in existence:

We have land plants to thank for the oxygen we breathe. And now we have a better idea of when they took to land in the first place. While the oldest known fossils of land plants are 420 million years old, researchers have now determined that pond scum first made landfall almost 100 million years earlier.

"[This] study has important global implications, because we know early plants cooled the climate and increased the oxygen level in the Earth's atmosphere," conditions that supported the expansion of terrestrial animal life, says Tim Lenton, an earth system scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work.

There were squishy things in the ocean, and that was about it.  (Backbones didn't turn up until about 500 million years ago.)

So yeah, the salt I'll be cooking with is older than most oil, and probably pre-dates even plants!

(Although, for some reason, some salt company sites refer to Himilayan salt as being "more than 250 million years old" and one says only 200 million years.  But I trust Wikipedia, and NPR, more than them and think the 600 million year figure is more correct.)

I intend to impress my family with this news over dinner this weekend.   (It's the sort of thing I loved telling kids when they were school age, but I  like to inflict science stuff on anyone of any age.)

Exactly

 

The party of "we just make stuff up"

 

Thanks for your contribution, Joe

Too late for the millions of Trumpy culture warriors who will go on believing this was real:

Joe Rogan has admitted he lied about a school letting “furry” children use litter boxes, walking back his claims from a month ago that have since been amplified by Republican Senate Don Bolduc. In an October podcast, Rogan told guest Tulsi Gabbard that his friend’s wife taught at a school that “had to install a litter box in the girl’s room because there’s a student that’s a furry.” Now, he’s saying “I don't think they actually did it,” attributing the whole situation to “one wacky mother” who the school ignored. Claims that furry students are using litter boxes have been debunked over and over, but the lie has persisted as a right-wing talking point. Bolduc accused a school of using litter boxes in a campaign town hall, saying “I wish I was making it up.” Lucky for the New Hampshire Republican, he was. “I fed into that,” Rogan said in his podcast, admitting he had no facts to back up his claim.

More lights seen by pilots that aren't quickly explained

I mentioned this guy recently, and really don't know how much credibility I should give him.  But in these videos, he appears reasonable, and he is just putting up pilot and ATC recordings that seem genuine, and somewhat puzzling: 

 

What puzzles me in particular is that if it is a military test of something, why do it in that location, and with a brightness that is going to be seen from far away and attract attention.

Paranoid idiot watch (Australian edition)

Monty used to think he could be debated back to some sort of Right wing moderate position.  I told monty he was wrong, and daily I feel vindicated.

Lost credibility

Yes, I have felt this way about this guy.  The pressure to keep high numbers (and good income from it) is very likely what has brought down his credibility:

 

Some skeptic wins on UFOs

I missed this recent report in NYT that starts:

Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in past years.

The sightings have puzzled the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations.

It goes on to note that the Mick West explanation of the "Go fast" and "gimbal" video seems to be accepted by the Pentagon, and that there is nothing to the "green pyramids" video too.  (I always said that the latter was rubbish - any UFO video that shows lights of any kind flashing in a typical aircraft or drone type sequence is likely to be an aircraft or drone.)

Anyway, still no explanation for the verbal report of the Nimitiz Tic Tak case - confirmed by three pilots.  What a shame there is no good video of what they saw...

Yes, release video

Even though there can be problems with prosecutors rushing out evidentiary material because of political pressure, I reckon it would be a ridiculous look if video showing that the wingnut narrative about the Paul Pelosi attack is a 100% conspiracy fantasy only comes out after the mid term elections.   (The Axios version of this story does not say that the video is recorded, but I think the Wapo story said it was.)

Philip Bump writes about this at the Washington Post, noting how the current calls to release the video are mainly coming from those who want to further conspiracy belief, because any delay is "suspicious".   (Mind you, Bump also seems to think that we can sure than any ambiguity in the video will be used to spin further conspiracy, which is probably true, but it would likely have to be a completely different conspiracy to the one that millions of dumb, conspiracy addled American brains currently believe.)  

A very "apropos of nothing" post

The Youtube algorithm recently led to me listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" for the first time in years.  (It was one of the videos where they use one of the AI art apps to illustrate lyric lines.)

Anyway, it occurred to me while listening that it is incredibly well produced.   (The amount of attention given to George Martin's role with the Beatles, as well as some other Youtube "making of" content I've watched, is no doubt why such a thought now occurs to me.  It would not have when I was younger.)

So I decided to look up who produced it, and it was a guy who isn't famous enough to have a Wiki entry - Ed Freeman.

Nevertheless, my hunch that this song likely had a huge amount of input from the producer seems to be correct.  Look here:

Producer Ed Freeman stated that the “American Pie” single is a combination of 24 different takes of McLean’s voice. This happened because the singer wasn’t the easiest person to work with, and as such, multiple takes were taken during the same session on May 26, 1971, with a live and unedited backing band track.

The producer also stated that even though McLean was a very talented singer, he was sometimes criticized for singing with the same vocal inflections, so he decided to be more improvisational. “In my head, I knew what it was supposed to sound like—I don’t now remember how I arrived at that, but when I kept asking him to sing it in a certain way, he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to play with it every time, inserting slides, melismas and other things that, to my mind, didn’t fit. So we ended up recording him 24 times on 16-track tape and took different parts from different takes until I got every word the way I wanted it, without all the play, and I don’t think Don appreciated that very much…In Don’s case, I think he was happy with the finished vocal, but he was not happy with somebody else having that much influence,” said Freeman.  ...

As for the challenges the length of the song brought to the producing team, Ed Freeman remembers that “it was a complete nightmare to fit an eight-and-a-half-minute track onto one seven-inch single.” The track had to be cut in half very carefully and added to both sides of the record. The final running times were 4:11 minutes for Part One and 4:31minutes for Part Two.

Don McLean is now 77, and looking haggard.  Not sure that he is very likeable in person.  But good song that still sounds great when you haven't heard it for years...

 

Quick takes on Twitter

*  Noah Smith on Twitter seems to be unusually cranky and coming out with some very dubious takes at the moment.   Holidaying doesn't seem to do him any good.

*  Elon Musk is being nearly universally derided by "blue tick" people at Twitter over his plan to charge them for the privilege.  Once again, we have the puzzle - just how smart is this guy?  It's pretty clear he has a modest amount of emotional intelligence and a fragile ego (the "pedo" insult for someone rejecting his impractical idea sealed that forever), but in terms of engineering and other problems, is he really just a hyped up latter day monorail salesman who got lucky?   That's pretty much the vibe he gives me.

*  Everyone on Twitter is also puzzling still about the lack of a convenient and appropriate replacement.  Surely it will arise soon, though.

Is she real?

I don't usually like to say anything that suggests I'm dehumanising a politician or celebrity, but that Kari Lake is so intensely smooth-skinned and over-groomed (and video filtered to look like she's beaming in from the soft glow world of 1980's cinematography) that I would not be at all surprised if turns out to be a robot from some Peter Thiel funded lab:

To me she absolutely reeks of manipulative insincerity and artifice to a skin crawling degree.   I rank her worse than the appallingly unself-aware dumbness of Marjorie Taylor Greene because she seems to have a degree of intellect that's capable of worse manipulation.

Rarely do I have such a strong feeling from a politician's manner and appearance, but she does it for me (in the worst possible way).  

Ghosts in the media

I'm posting this just a little late for Halloween, but the New York Times ran in their lifestyle section last week an article How to Live with a Ghost - about what happens when people think their residence is haunted.  It talks about people who have learnt to live with it, whether Americans have to legally disclose that a house is believed to be haunted when selling, and how many people do believe in ghosts.

I recently wrote how dismissive I am of the paranormal investigation cable TV shows, and I have to say that I find a well written, plausible sounding, first hand strange incident is much more convincing than anything I have seen on a TV show with investigators with their "ghostbusting" style equipment.  ("Spirit boxes" are just the most ridiculous idea for claiming communication evidence - it's like the perfect way to encourage imagined messages.)  

But take this story, which starts the NYT article, as it is easy to imagine as quite disturbing if it happened to me:

On a routine afternoon, Shane Booth, a photography professor living in Benson, N.C., was folding laundry in his bedroom, when he was startled by a loud, crashing noise. He stepped out to find a shattered front window and his dog sitting outside it. He was confused, how could his dog have jumped through the window with enough force to break it?

After cleaning up the glass, Mr. Booth came back to his room, where all of the clothes he had just folded were scattered and strewn about, he said. “That’s when I thought, this is actually really scary now,” said Mr. Booth, 45.

A few things it would be good to know, though:   has Mr Booth always enjoyed good mental health, and does he also have a mad cat as well as a dog?   Was he folding clothes into a basket, and did he tip it over as he ran out of the room?   Rarely do reports of odd incidents cover off such obvious matters, which is somewhat disappointing.  

Stories of footsteps in unoccupied upstairs rooms are a very common haunting trope, and one that is certainly sometimes capable of mundane explanation.  But I also have little doubt that it can be pretty convincingly concerning, in the right circumstances.   

Things moved to wildly improbable locations are perhaps harder to explain, unless you sleepwalk.  I like this story, though (from comments in the NYT) to a follow up article:

Never believed, just thought here are some things we may not know about our world/universe. Then stayed at a hotel (not that old) and woke one night to a the absolute conviction that someone in the darkness was standing behind me. I whirled around and clicked the light as fast as I dared....no one. The large, closet doors were suddenly wide open though. I closed them, thinking I had perhaps left them like that (knowing full well I never leave closets open, since childhood). My room door had it's latch on, no one could have entered. The next morning, my small camera, charging in it spot, was gone. The chord was still there. I looked everywhere, called housekeeping asked about stollen goods, etc...nothing. Finally, upon packing to leave a couple days later, I pulled out my pair of floppy-top boots I never wore on that trip-- and out fell my camera from inside. There was no way it could have fallen into them. I left bewildered--- and when I mentioned it to the receptionist, he shrugged in a bored manner--- "Oh room number 225? Yeah, he likes to move stuff around sometimes." I chose another room the next time.

OK, nothing particularly convincing about waking up and feeling a presence, as tha's a common feature of sleep paralysis (from which my daughter suffered, so I'm pretty familiar with first hand descriptions.).  But if this was the first time you ever had the experience, and it was combined with the camera moving to a weird hiding spot, it would creep you out.   (Frustratingly, sleep walking would be a possibility impossible to disprove unless you had the foresight to set up cameras, and who is going to do that before the object is lost?)

Similarly with stories of ghost voices - highly suggestive of something supernatural, but also explicable as convenient auditory hallucinations.   This story, for example:

As an engineering major with a strong education in science, I didn’t believe in the supernatural. But then I lived ten years in a house my wife insisted was haunted. One day, I was watching my three year old son while my wife and daughter went shopping. I was surfing the net while he toddled around the room. Then I zoned out reading an online article. Then I heard a voice: “where is your son?” I looked around and wondered where the voice came from. “You need to find him,” the voice said. I thought that was probably a good idea so I went looking for him and found the front door open. I went outside and found him toddling down the driveway toward the street. I raced over and snatched him up. When I got back inside, I said to the air: “thank you, whoever you are!” Years later I told that to my wife and after scolding me for my negligence, told me I’d heard the ghost. And for the epilogue, that son just called me from college to check in and see how his old dad is doing. I’m still grateful to that ghost who may very well have saved my son’s life.

The ghost voice that is challenging rather than useful is perhaps less readily explained as the brain  talking to itself.   I think I wrote here before that the woman in charge of the nursing home my mother lived in until she died told us that she would not work in her (somewhat isolated) office in the old convent building at night, as soon after she started there she had heard a clear voice ask aggressively "who are you?" and felt her hair being flicked, when no one was around.   

Some people in the article are like me - quite fascinated with the topic, and very open to the possibility of experiencing something personally, but it never happens.  About the most puzzling thing that has happened to me overnight is waking up one morning (in my 20's) perfectly reversed in my (single) bed in the dorm style room in which I lived alone: my feet on my pillow, my head at the foot of my bed, and somewhat tangled up in the sheet.  Has happened exactly once in my life! 

Anyway:  in another, somewhat charming story from Singapore, I like the way the government respects, but tries to handle co-operatively, the Chinese tradition of burning joss paper to provide goods to the family deceased.  There are incinerators around apartment blocks to allow for this, although it does cause complaints when the smoke and waste interferes with residents.   This is such a significant issue that the government news service likes to point out there has been a reduced number of complaints about this year:

 

I funny it a little amusing that there are public servants there whose job it is to keep track of complaints about burnt offerings to ghosts.  Well, more charming, really.  

We're dealing with idiots (part 10,000)

The conspiracy addled brain, once having decided it has spotted a conspiracy, will cling to "there must be a conspiracy of some kind here" regardless of evidence.

Hence, despite the publication of interview admissions by the assailant himself, Right wing conspiracy stupified people are insisting there must be more to the Paul Pelosi attack.  Here's the dumb as a rock Gateway Pundit:

Update: The Department of Justice on Monday announced two federal criminal charges against David DePape.

“DePape was charged with attempted kidnapping, and with retaliating against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member.” CNBC reported.

The US government will now control and hide the evidence – and shape the national media narrative.

As to any inconsistencies or changes to the initial reports about the incident - what moron could have missed that this is exactly what happened in the recent Uvalde shooting case, to a spectacular degree.  Initial stories often aren't 100% clear, with both journalists and police not always being accurate.    Hence, someone made up (then retracted) that the assailant was in his underwear - and millions of conspiracy addled Trumpists will never believe otherwise, as well as the ludicrous elaboration that all stem from that piece of misinformation.   

 

 

 

Ezra Klein decides to "both sides"?

So Ezra Klein, who I thought was reliably liberal, has a column in the NYT headed "Do the Democrats deserve re-election?".  His conclusion - 

What can be said, I think, is this: Biden and the Democrats got a lot done, despite very slim majorities. They rolled out vaccines and therapeutics nationwide but we remain far from finishing the job on pandemic preparedness. They have run the government in a dignified, decent way, but we remain far from turning the page on Trump.

I am completely on side with this comment that follows (and I am surprised that there are not more who are upset at the framing):

Paul
Phoenix, AZ2h ago

Notice the harm done to the country by op-eds like this one.

It is bad enough the mainstream media has made pro-democracy/anti democracy int just another political horse race issue like taxes or crime or climate change, but now they are asking if the pro democracy party deserves to even be re-elected.


Arguing over granular issues like the prioritizing of BBB components  while the Speaker's husband is getting his head bashed in by a Trump motivated supporter (his mental status is a non factor, as is Trump's, it seems), as well as stating openly they will not accept any result of the 2022 elections that does not make them the winner, shows how completely out of touch the media has become in its now out of control false equivalences.

Update:  many on Twitter get it:

Well, a sliver of good news

Brazil’s electoral authority has called the runoff for leftist Lula da Silva, which means he has won presidential election, defeating far-right incumbent Bolsonaro.

Far closer than it should have been, though.

Waiting for the Twitter alternative to arise

With Musk's disgraceful "I'm just asking questions" style of promoting Right wing conspiracy (you can read all about it at the WAPO - gift link), I'm sure that, more than ever, most of the people I follow on it would be happy to abandon Twitter so as to watch it become a valueless conspiracy sewer like the other failed social media outlets. 

Update:   Elon really is trying to seal the failure of Twitter in record time -

So, trying to joke his way out of the seriousness of promoting conspiracy mongering from a junk Right wing site by encouraging the Trumpian Right wing that the MSM is full of fake news and can't be trusted.    That'll work.