Still, the disease barely registers on global health watchlists;
outbreaks largely occur in rural areas bordering forest land and affect a
tiny percentage of India's population. But the spread of the disease is
indicative of a much larger, more worrying trend, as highlighted most
recently by the Covid-19 pandemic: the increasing likelihood of zoonotic disease spilling over into human populations.
US health officials say that eyedrops may have killed one person and severely injured several others due to drug-resistant bacterial contamination.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have identified 68 patients across 16 states with a rare strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
The strain had never been found in the US before this latest outbreak.
In addition to the one death, eight patients have suffered vision loss, and four have had eyes surgically removed.
Most of the patients diagnosed with the infection reported using eyedrops and artificial tears, according to the CDC.
Ten
different brands were initially identified as possibly linked to the
outbreak, the CDC said. Eyedrops that are made in India and imported to
the US under two brands were subsequently pulled from shelves in January
and February.
In
January, the CDC warned people to stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears
and Delsam Pharma's Artificial Tears. The next month, the company that
owns the brands - Global Pharma - issued a voluntary recall following a
formal recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice - but the Musk fiddling with Twitter is really making it a complete mess. It seems to be a on "watch this funny/scary video" bender now. And really, I just seem to get shown about 10% of the tweets of the people I follow and want to see - or I can change to the "following" tab and it sometimes works to change the view, sometimes not.
I kind of wish it would give up the ghost entirely, so we really can get a decent replacement going.
I don't really know what to think of the AUKUS deal, now that it has been warmly embraced by a Labor government, savagely attacked by an ex Labor PM who always seems far too willing to endorse China and attack those who criticise it (while at the same time, being correct that the SMH was being ridiculously bellicose in its recent "this is how a war with China will go down" articles), and met with scepticism by the likes of Hugh White and John Quiggin (the latter having long had it in for defence spending on navies, though.)
The trouble is, of course, that the term "armchair expert" seems to just about have been invented for opinions on defence programs and procurement, as well as international relations. Everyone thinks they have a better idea.
So my opinion is certainly going to be ill informed, but I will put it out there again anyway: we should have gone with Japanese submarines, with some built in Adelaide.
Update: There's an article at SMH today by a former diplomat (not sure that's much of a qualification on technical defence issues, TBH) who argues that submarines are going to be made redundant soon anyway:
Manned submarines are nearing the end of their utility in hostile waters
because of developments in smart sea mines, unmanned underwater
vehicles (UUVs) and underwater sensors. China has already made a strong
start on this, and will deploy them in large numbers in its coastal
region and strategically important areas of the South China Sea and East
China Sea.
Australia plans to buy at least three American Virginia-class
nuclear-powered submarines while it proceeds to build its SSN-AUKUS
subs. The acoustic signature of the Virginia-class is known to China. It
will be programmed into China’s defensive and offensive capabilities,
which are cheap counters to an extremely expensive submarine – one that
carries 132 increasingly vulnerable sailors.
By the time Australia
gets the submarines from the US in the 2030s, it will be simply too
dangerous to deploy them to contested areas that could take advantage of
their performance and firepower. They will be restricted to home or
benign waters, undercutting their main justification. Russia has already
shown this to be true in the air. Its air force rarely ventures into
contested territory, preferring to fire missiles from a distance. That
is also the future of underwater warfare.
While that sounds sort of plausible, predictions as to the future use of naval power always seems to be a bit of a guessing game. Going way, way back to when I used to be in navy cadets, and hence sometimes heard the opinions of actual navy officers, I remember that in (probably) the early 1980's there was an Australian senior submariner talking about how the (then new) technology of cruise missiles was going to make surface ships redundant. Navies would move to having more submarines full of cruise missiles, he argued, with which to sneak up within range and launch from afar, with no significant danger of detection and destruction, in the way surface ships are vulnerable.
Again, sounds kind of plausible, but things haven't exactly panned out like that, have they? Perhaps because you can fit a hell of a lot more missiles on a surface vessel than a submarine? Perhaps because the visibility of (say) an aircraft carrier armed to the gills is helpful towards defusing some potential attacks?
So I don't know - I'm a little skeptical of the "submarines will be redundant soon anyway" argument.
On the other hand, it's a little hard to see where we are going to get enough Australians who want to serve on submarines. Perhaps we should follow the rest of shipping and just contract Filipinos to do it!
In a study in PLOS Computational Biology, scientists at The
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory compared measurements of brain
cell activity in an animal performing a working memory task with the
output of various computer models representing two theories of the
underlying mechanism for holding information in mind. The results
strongly favored the newer notion that a network of neurons stores the
information by making short-lived changes in the pattern of their
connections, or synapses, and contradicted the traditional alternative
that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active (like
an idling engine).
While both models allowed for information to be held in mind, only
the versions that allowed for synapses to transiently change connections
("short-term synaptic plasticity") produced neural activity patterns
that mimicked what was actually observed in real brains at work. The
idea that brain cells maintain memories by being always "on" may be
simpler, acknowledged senior author Earl K. Miller, but it doesn't
represent what nature is doing and can't produce the sophisticated
flexibility of thought that can arise from intermittent neural activity
backed up by short-term synaptic plasticity.
Sounds like synapses must reconfigure themselves very, very quickly, then. How do they do that, I wonder?
Anyway, now for the silly bit. For some reason, every now and then a memory of a bit of music written for just one episode of Lost in Space, and which I haven't heard for decades, bubbles up to my awareness. This happened yesterday, and it's the "groovy" music that nearly brainwashes poor Penny (girls being much more susceptible to such things), but fails to win over good old, sensible boy Will Robinson.
Actually, I had trouble remembering the context in full until I went to Youtube. For a while I wondered if it was from Get Smart, as I had an idea that it featured an episode with hypnotic hippy music too. But the internet sorted me out - the Get Smart episode has a track with the message to kill, kill, kill the dean, and bump off a square. (How could I forget that!)
It turns out that someone has gone to the trouble of editing together and fiddling with the various dance bits from the Lost in Space episode in question ("The Promised Planet") to make a whole video of the track, and it's exquisitely silly:
If you don't like this self made clip, there is this alternative, which is also repetitive but maybe better?
I like this comment following:
I needed this video...that weird Penny Dance has haunted me for years
and needed to see it like this...a 10 hour cut would be epic...this song
is my Ring Tone by the way...
And wow - the audio track is up on Youtube too and I guess I could convert it to a ringtone too? I have never bothered with silly ringtones, but I am tempted.
As for the whole story of that episode of Lost in Space (season 3, when they were getting desperate for ideas), I have a watched some guy's commentary on it to refresh my memory. The Robinsons think they have landed on Alpha Centauri, but the station is run by teenagers, who turn out to be aliens who cannot turn into adults even though they want to. Before I re-watched the end scene, I remembered how at age 9 or 10 I thought the line "all I wanted to do is be able to shave" was sort of poignant:
Lost in Space was sometimes like that: the execution may be very, very silly, but sometimes there was the hint of an idea that might make for something decent if told another way.
Anyway, I wonder why my brain is dredging this up for my attention every now and then? Must be something about the strength of the synaptic connections made when 9 years old!
Update: I just remembered that there's another track last heard by me about 50 years ago, which I remember bits of every now and then: a cover version on some cheapo LP of this "psychedelic" song by a German band that I don't think was ever played in Australia. My mother bought the LP, not me.
As noted in this story at Nature, gene editing by CRISPR on human embryos is still not a thing, basically because it's too clumsy a technique:
As well as addressing broader concerns about ethics and social
justice, editing embryos would require a safe and effective
genome-editing platform to minimize the chances of harm to the embryo,
the resulting child and any descendants. Most research on genome editing
in embryos, however, has been done using animal models such as mice,
which might not accurately reflect what happens in human embryos. And,
although potential genome-editing therapies have been widely studied in
adult human cells, embryos might respond differently than adult cells to
the DNA damage caused by some of the tools.
Only a handful of
laboratories have directly tried to edit the genomes of human embryos
using the popular editing system CRISPR–Cas9, and several of these
presented concerning results at the summit.
The Cas9 enzyme works by breaking both strands of DNA at a site
designated by a guiding piece of RNA. The cell then repairs the break,
either by using an error-prone mechanism that stitches the two ends
together but sometimes deletes or inserts a few DNA letters in the
process, or by replacing the missing DNA with a sequence copied from a
template provided by the researcher. DNA breaks created by Cas9 in
embryos are usually repaired using the error-prone pathway, said
Dietrich Egli, a stem-cell biologist at Columbia University in New York
City, at the conference.
Egli and other researchers also reported on the consequences of the
double-strand breaks made by Cas9. Developmental biologist Kathy Niakan,
now at the University of Cambridge, UK, recounted that her lab found
that some human embryos lost large regions of chromosomes when they were edited using CRISPR–Cas91.
Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist at Oregon Health &
Science University in Portland, also said that his team had found large
DNA deletions at the editing site in human embryos, and that these
deletions might not be detected using standard tests2.
“Can
human embryos at this stage really tolerate this kind of intervention?”
asked Dagan Wells, a reproductive geneticist at the University of
Oxford, UK, who also reported concerning responses to DNA breaks in
human embryos. About 40% of the embryos in one of his genome-editing
studies failed to repair broken DNA. More than one-third of those
embryos continued to develop, he said, resulting in the loss or gain of
pieces of chromosomes in some cells. That could harm the health of the
child if such embryos were allowed to develop further. “These results
are really a warning,” he said.
I've had Youtubes recommended to me about "toning" this nerve (really, a bunch of nerves), and none of it sounded very convincing:
In recent years, the vagus nerve has
become an object of fascination, especially on social media. The vagal
nerve fibers, which run from the brain to the abdomen, have been
anointed by some influencers as the key to reducing anxiety, regulating
the nervous system and helping the body to relax.
TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times and there are nearly 70,000 posts
with the hashtag on Instagram. Some of the most popular ones feature
simple hacks to “tone” or “reset” the vagus nerve, in which people
plunge their faces into ice water baths or lie on their backs with ice
packs on their chests. There are also neck and ear massages, eye
exercises and deep-breathing techniques.
Now,
wellness companies have capitalized on the trend, offering products
like “vagus massage oil,” vibrating bracelets and pillow mists, that
claim to stimulate the nerve, but that have not been endorsed by the
scientific community.
Apparently, stimulation of it by implanted devices has seemed to help some conditions, but if you aren't going to go under the knife, you've still got to resort to things like putting your face in ice water.
Gee, I would not have guessed that it is now over a year since I had a fairly lengthy post about the confusing issue of the difference between the ideas of "retrocausation" and "superdeterminism" as explanations for (or solutions to) the quantum measurement problem.
But there is an article up at the Conversation which tries to explain the distinction between the two:
I have to say, though, that the explanation doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense to me. (Ha!, you might laugh - I'm expecting intuitive sense from quantum mechanics?) I have the strongest feeling that Sabine Hossenfelder is going to have a problem with these paragraphs:
Superdeterminism agrees with retrocausality that measurement choices and the underlying properties of the particles are somehow correlated.
But superdeterminism treats it like the correlation between the
weather and the barometer needle. It assumes there’s some mysterious
third thing – a “superdeterminer” – that controls and correlates both
our choices and the particles, the way atmospheric pressure controls
both the weather and the barometer.
So superdeterminism denies that measurement choices are things we are
free to wiggle at will, they are predetermined. Free wiggles would
break the correlation, just as in the barometer case. Critics object
that superdeterminism thus undercuts core assumptions necessary to
undertake scientific experiments. They also say that it means denying
free will, because something is controlling both the measurement choices and particles.
These objections don’t apply to retrocausality. Retrocausalists do
scientific causal discovery in the usual free, wiggly way. We say it is
folk who dismiss retrocausality who are forgetting the scientific
method, if they refuse to follow the evidence where it leads.
From the Oscars today, and a little movie from 1984:
Incidentally, Stephen Colbert did a protracted interview with Steven Spielberg (alone, and with John Williams) and showed it segmented over a couple of nights last week.
I have said it before, but Spielberg always comes across as a very decent and quite humble man who has made no significant enemies in his career, and makes for a loyal and good friend. He and Williams have been close friends for 50 years! And for a man in his 90's, Williams still seems as sharp as a tack. Their discussion of Williams' music in some of Spielberg's key movies is enlightening:
I also liked this short clip of Spielberg talking about the movie he has watched most often (excluding any of his own). As it happens, I've never seen it all - only bits and pieces:
Update: for the first time in quite a few years, I watched all of the Oscars because, although I don't think it's the greatest movie ever made, Everything Everywhere All at Once did seem to have an unusually large number of likeable personalities attached to it. And it was, at heart, good natured and positive, and made on a small budget: all things that it's nice seeing a film being rewarded for. And hey, Spielberg was going to be there too (I feel guilty for not having seen The Fabelmans yet), and I like Jimmy Kimmel as host, so it was worth a look.
The reviews for the show have been positive - the near universal theme being that it felt like a relief to watch a version which wasn't, um, trying too hard. It felt like a throwback to an older style, with one slightly sardonic male host making relatively safe jokes, and although I suppose Asian representation was a significant theme, it didn't feel like the show was an intense complaint about it, in the way that in recent years they seemed to be in relation to black and female representation.
So, good job everybody.
My main complaint about the awards given: I reckon that song from RRR is pretty awful, as is all of that silly movie. I don't understand why it received such sympathetic reviews in the States.
The Washington Post has another deep dive into the Dominion defamation evidence - communications between Fox management, some of whom formerly worked for Trump.
The evidence is just red hot, but you have go a fair way in the article to get to the worst of it, and look at the bland headline:
That's ridiculously soft. Read what they were saying amongst themselves:
Despite
his behind-the-scenes lobbying, Shah counseled a middle course in
dealing with her claims on air. On the day after Carlson publicly
challenged Powell, Shah and a Carlson producer weighed whether Carlson
should devote time in his next show to Powell’s claim that she had an
affidavit that would link Dominion to Venezuela.
“Might wanna address this, but this stuff is so f------insane. Vote rigging to the tune of millions? C’mon,” Shah wrote.
Carlson’s
producer, Alex Pfeiffer, responded: “It is so insane but our viewers
believe it so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t
proof might insult them.”
Shah
advised that Carlson should mention the affidavit noting it was “not
new info, not proof” but then quickly “pivot to being deferential.”
Pfeiffer, who has since left the network,answered that the delicate dance was “surreal.”
“Like negotiating with terrorists,” he added, “but especially dumb ones. Cousin f----- types not saudi royalty.”
In
the following weeks, Trump continued to court voices who embraced his
false claims the election was stolen — and Powell continued to appear on
Fox.
On
Jan. 3 — three days before the Capitol was attacked by Trump supporters
as Congress met to confirm Biden’s win — Shah exchanged text messages
with another former White House spokesman, Josh Raffel, who had been
primarily responsible for handling communications for Trump’s daughter,
Ivanka Trump, and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner.
Raffel
flagged to Shah a tweet noting that Trump’s daily schedule now carried
with it the vague assurance that the president would make “many calls
and have many meetings” and “work from early in the morning until late
in the evening.”
“I
think what they meant is The President will wake up early and commit
many, many crimes including but not limited to obstruction of justice,
attempted fraud, and treason in an effort to conduct a coup. Then he’ll
fly to a rally in furtherance of the same,” Raffel wrote. (Now a public
relations executive in New York, Raffel declined to comment on the
text.)
“It’s really disheartening,” Shah responded. “The only clear cut evidence for voter fraud is the failed attempts from Trump.”
Hey John: next time you are over at New Catallaxy, can you bring to cranky old Tom's attention that he's been had? For years his theme has been "MSM journalists hate their readers" because they don't write stuff that endorses his political and social biases.
Now the evidence is out there, in black and white, that in fact Fox (the heroic network that tells it like it is - hahaha) has management, including those who work with Carlson, who secretly despised the stupidity of their audience - such as Tom. And Carlson himself despises Trump.
It's a harsh lesson, but time for Tom, and a host of New Catallaxy participants, to admit that they've been had, as those on the MSM side have been trying to tell them for years....
I enjoyed George Monbiot's take down of Russell Brand (and Rogan and Greenwald) both in The Guardian and on Twitter. (I also learned for the first time that George has a full public disclosure of this income and assets - and it certainly appears he hasn't become rich through journalism and advocacy. It's quite refreshing to see this openness from someone like him and I wish there were more of it.)
I happened to watch Brand's smug, loudmouthed performance on Bill Maher's show on Youtube last week. I don't care for Maher, who suffers to a much milder degree from "a pox on both their houses" form of criticism, while actually complaining most about the Left, but his guests can make him worth watching. Brand is like Maher X 20, though. As Monbiot says:
I can’t help noticing that most of the people who say “left? right? It’s all meaningless, man” are those who have made a major shift from left to right. Denying that left and right exist any longer seems to be a form of self-justification.
Someone else on Twitter made this wry observation of Brand as guru, too:
I am also more on the side of those on Twitter who responded to Monbiot with "actually, I've never cared for Brand, there always seemed something off about him, and his true addiction has always been to seeking attention".
Monbiot thinks that Brand is merely chasing money and been corrupted by the algorithm, so to speak:
I don’t believe for a moment that his transition is ideological. I think it’s cynical.
Here I think George is not giving enough credence to the psychological rule that if you pretend something long enough, you start to believe it. But that rule also tends to make me agree with him here:
I think Russell, like Glenn Greenwald(@ggreenwald),@joerogan and other such entrepreneurs, who do not seem to be not committed to the far right themes they now amplify, but appear to use them to ramp up their numbers, are more dangerous than the actual fascists.
I think that second "not" is an error, by the way; but I agree with the idea that someone who makes a lot of money by spouting fascist arguments while privately not believing or fully endorsing them (to a degree, surely we can put Carlson in that group now too?) may be more dangerous simply because of their successful reach and greedy motivation to never admit error.
I'm having a hard time getting around to writing up a holiday report on Hanoi and nearby areas, but before then, I will note one minor oddity I didn't know about Vietnam: the popularity of chicken feet as a packaged snack, as is shown by their continual presence in convenience stores:
I mean, I sometimes eat chicken feet at a yum cha restaurant, but the idea of eating a pre-cooked one from the shelf is not highly appealing.
The Malian discovery was vivid
evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from
seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary
to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all
over the world, like oil and gas—but not in the same places. These
researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously
generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes
accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen
to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Yet some scientists
have become true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University
of Bern, left a career at French oil giant Total because it wasn’t
moving fast enough on hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery might end
up in the history books alongside one that happened 163 years ago in
Titusville, Pennsylvania. At the time, the world knew about seeps of oil
in places such as Iraq and California but was blind to the vast
deposits that lay underground. Then on 27 August 1859, a nearly bankrupt
prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine
and cast-iron drill pipes, struck black gold at a depth of 21 meters,
and began collecting it in a bathtub. Before long, U.S. companies were
harvesting millions of bathtubs of oil every day.
“I am thinking we are not very far from that with
hydrogen,” Gaucher says. “We have the concept, we have the tools, the
geology. … We only need people able to invest.”
Last year, around two-thirds of Pakistan was affected by widespread flash flooding, with more than 1,500 people killed and around 33 million made homeless.
Almost 2,000 people died in flash floods across Africa, and parts of
the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Yemen were
inundated with water.
Flash floods are a growing threat in some
of the world’s driest regions. Deluges can trigger sudden and rapid
torrents of run-off that flow down dry river beds and rocky channels.
Because
parched soils repel water rather than allowing it to soak in, flash
floods can be more devastating in drylands than in wetter areas. Surges
can result from relatively small amounts of rain, as little as 10
millimetres in one hour. By comparison, floods in wetter regions
typically follow more prolonged bouts of rainfall.
Look at this:
A slew of other factors will put many more people at risk from flash
floods in future (see ‘Drylands: flash-flood risks’). Climate change is
making such events more intense and frequent1–3. In parts of Pakistan, for example, the 5-day maximum level of rainfall is 75% greater today than it was before 1900 (see go.nature.com/41awzzj).
Our analysis shows that globally, the rate of dryland flash flooding
was 20 times higher between 2000 and 2022 than it was between 1900 and
1999 (numbering 278 and 64 floods, respectively).
....Or are they just too dumb to admit they're the willing victims of the Murdoch empire's fully exposed mantra "making money is more important than truth, fairness, or confidence in democracy?"
As far as I can make out, the Australia decrepit Right wingers who love Tucker Carlson and Trump so far seem to be taking a "shrug shoulders" attitude to the fact that the opinion leader they admire and watch religiously actually hates the politician they thought he did a good job defending. (And lies continously about his true views on whether the election was fraudulently conducted.)
They are too dumb and shameless to argue with.
Update: what a classic juxtaposition of photo and caption by the New York Times:
So, the New York Times reports that Alan Alda asked ChatGPT to write a scene from MASH for him and former co-star Mike Farrell to perform.
I think MASH was only really good for the first few seasons, and sort of blanded out for the rest of its run, with increasingly uninteresting characters gradually replacing the sharp and memorable original cast. I still mostly watched it, but cared less and less if I missed an episode as time went on.
So, the banter that the AI has made between the characters strikes me as about as bland as many of the exchanges that were written for the show.
By the way, I have said little about the hype surrounding ChatGPT and its ilk, because I just don't really see the "threat" they yet represent. Seems to me a bit like the "self driving cars are just around the corner, and will change everything!" hype of about 4 or 5 years ago: too much overestimation of the importance of a modest technological improvement.
Why hasn't some Pentagon official been asked this at some congressional hearing? Or have they?
I mean, my general impression from the Trump years is that the top levels of military are (with rare exception) too smart to go along with Trump MAGA-isms, including that the last election had any significant fraud. So why would they allow the lower ranks to be potentially influenced by politically dangerous rhetoric known to be wrong?:
