A cute idea

A witty start

From the Washington Post review of Dune (part 2):

Imagine a world devoid of color or warmth, foundering amid environmental catastrophe and tribal factions that threaten to bring humanity to the edge of fatal fanaticism.

But enough about election-year politics. Let’s talk about “Dune: Part Two.”

The complaint is entirely legitimate

I know, left wing pundits (on Twitter, at least)  have taken to acting like Right wing pundits in the way they've been claiming too readily for the past 6 months that Trump's verbal stumbles are signs of dementia or other mental health issues.

However, the clips from this recent Trump speech do, to my mind, indicate something is genuinely "up", although personally I would guess that being hyped up on some drug or other might be the most likely explanation.  Does he travel with Junior, because I have a hunch cocaine would explain a lot...

What is 100% clear, however, is that if Biden abandoned a sentence midway with an "..…..ahhh", the NYT and other MSM would be promoting it as a serious, serious reason to be panicked over his capacity to be President.

The double standard is real.

Mercury in tuna still a thing for some time yet

The New York Times reports:

In the 1960s and 1970s, the horrors of mercury poisoning in Japan and elsewhere shocked the world into curbing releases of the toxic metal. Since then, mercury pollution from human activities, like burning coal and mining, has declined in many parts of the world.

But when a team of French researchers analyzed thousands of tuna samples from 1971 to 2022, they found that mercury levels in the fish remained virtually unchanged.

That’s most likely because “legacy” mercury that has accumulated deep in the ocean is circulating into shallower depths where tuna swim and feed, the researchers posit in a study published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Using modeling, they predicted that, even with the most stringent mercury regulations, it would take an additional 10 to 25 years for mercury concentrations to start falling in the ocean. Drops in mercury in tuna would follow only decades after that.

 

Have we seen peak gaming?

I noticed this story on NPR:

Close to 1 in 5 American gamers identify as LGBTQ+, according to new research from GLAAD. But LGBTQ+ gamers often face harassment in gaming communities and games with voice chats that anybody can join — common in multiplayer, team-based games.

The research indicates that 52% of LGBTQ+ gamers faced harassment while playing online, and 42% have avoided a game due to anticipated harassment.

"It's difficult when you're trans to hop on voice chat with random people because you open yourself up to criticism or potential harassment," said Veronica Ripley, also known as Nikatine, a full-time Twitch streamer and founder of the Discord community Transmission Gaming for trans gamers.

I guess this feels not so surprising:  it kind of aligns with my expectation that people who identify as queer are likely overrepresented in the cosplay community.  As explained further in that NPR story:

"A lot of folks in our community use video gaming to see that representation and want to see themselves in characters," said Ray Lancione, president of Qweerty Gamers, streamer, and former video game community manager. "Our community [uses] it to find each other ... finding people that are like-minded or similar sexualities, genders."

But it all makes me wonder, too: have we already reached "peak gaming"?   We always seem to be hearing of smaller games companies winding up, and bigger companies laying off staff.  And it feels like a long time since there seemed to be much excitement about forthcoming games.   (Not that I go looking for game trailers or anything.  And also, it does seem that the odd phenomena of Twitch streaming of game play is still very popular - but I wonder if that phenomena itself makes people feel less need to play the game themselves?)   I also wonder whether the rise in queer presence make bro boys question their own interest in gaming?   

This is not an important topic, but just wondering.  

Buzzing away Alzheimers?

This is a rather odd science story:

 How 40Hz sensory gamma rhythm stimulation clears amyloid in Alzheimer's mice

Studies at MIT and elsewhere are producing mounting evidence that light flickering and sound clicking at the gamma brain rhythm frequency of 40 Hz can reduce Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression and treat symptoms in human volunteers as well as lab mice.

In a new study in Nature using a mouse model of the disease, researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory of MIT reveal a key mechanism that may contribute to these beneficial effects: clearance of amyloid proteins, a hallmark of AD pathology, via the brain's glymphatic system, a recently discovered "plumbing" network parallel to the brain's blood vessels.

"Ever since we published our first results in 2016, people have asked me how does it work? Why 40 Hz? Why not some other frequency?" said study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and director of The Picower Institute and MIT's Aging Brain Initiative.

"These are indeed very important questions we have worked very hard in the lab to address."

The new paper describes a series of experiments, led by Mitch Murdock when he was a Brain and Cognitive Sciences doctoral student at MIT, showing that when sensory gamma stimulation increases 40 Hz power and synchrony in the brains of mice, that prompts a particular type of neuron to release peptides.

The study results further suggest that those short protein signals then drive specific processes that promote increased amyloid clearance via the glymphatic system.

I just had a look around on the web to see if anyone has produced a page showing what a 40hz light looks like, but the problem is if your screen is 60hz you can't.  (A fancier phone than mine with adjustable Hz rate should make it easy, though.)  

Still, it's kind of hard to believe that this works, but it appears to on mice at least.   

 

 

This seems odd

I don't understand the point of ASIO making this announcement (of a retired politician who had been "cultivated" by foreign spies) without naming him.  Or perhaps more to the point, I don't understand how ASIO would think they can say this without causing political intrigue that will fester away for some time.

Here is what some Labor people are saying:

Defence Minister Richard Marles said there may have been good reasons not to name the retired politician.

"I respect what ASIO have done here in terms of putting this story into the public domain but also maintaining the confidentiality of the facts around this, and there could be a whole lot of reasons why that should happen," he said.

"We've got among the best agencies in the world dealing with this, the specific facts which underlie this scenario for good reason are not in the public domain."

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, a cabinet minister in the Albanese government, said she was not aware of who the compromised politician was and only knew what had been publicly reported.

She said it was concerning to think she may have worked alongside the politician, but it was not for her to know who it was.

"I think that's really a matter for the ASIO boss. I imagine there's a reason they haven't named the person or taken further action, I think the point is to give a public warning this is a risk," Ms Plibersek told Sky News.

"I have to say anybody who works with foreign agents of influence to pass on information to a foreign government is a traitor."

I agree with the view that the Coalition's reaction seems to indicate that they are pretty confident it's not one of their retired politicians, but I would add that this is probably nothing to be too proud of, in that what self-respecting foreign power would think one of their useless retired pollies is worth cultivating?  :)

 

Surely Google has to act on its rapid reputation decline, soon?

It seems that for a good few months now I am forever reading about how bad Google search has become, and how the company is freely fiddling with functionality (such as dropping "news" as a category in search is a recent experiment for some users, I hear).   All with apparently zero concern as to how users feel about the changes.

This latest story in the Washington Post, for example:

People searching Google for airline contact information when they have a problem occasionally find bogus customer service phone numbers listed at or near the top of Google.

If you call, crooks posing as airline reps try to persuade you to pay to rebook a flight or another task. Your money goes poof.

No one knows how often this scam happens. But this airline customer service misdirection is common knowledge in the travel industry and among people who know Google.

In researching this article, I found an apparent scam number highlighted by Google when I searched “JetBlue contact customer support.”

Google has the power to ensure that it shows the correct airline contact information, according to three experts in the inner workings of web searches. In their view, Google chooses not to fix the problem.

I don't really understand how Google can ignore the outcry.

 

On a musical note

I only recently noticed (via Youtube) Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox (it's been around for 10 years now), and while I'm not always in the mood to listen to modern songs transformed into an alternative, older style, some entries really hit the spot.   (It is also easy to imagine going to a concert by them as being a very enjoyable night out for which the word "sophisticated" would seem apt.)

I really like the minimalist approach to the edit free videos, too, and wonder about how many takes the average song needs.

Anyhow, I will post two that I was watching last night, and liked a lot.   The first makes a melodramatic song fun:

 

The second one features a gay American Chinese guy (Kenton Chen) who seems to have a diverse career in LA as an actor and singer in various groupings.  As many people say in the comments (it has 38,000 - all of them swooning over the performance, and the video has had 35 million views) his voice is just wonderful.  I said to my daughter it's very "clean" - by which I meant precise, I guess.  She said "so in tune" which I suppose is a more accurate way of putting it:

 

There are other videos of him (appearing much "gayer") including a funk style cover of Hey Jude which I thought was pretty good, actually. (I'm not the biggest fan of the original.) But in every song, his vocal performance is just so good I feel he ought to be more famous.

Hope this is true

Funniest comment following:

I'm not sure how I feel about this!

Hmmm:

Reddit strikes $60M deal allowing Google to train AI models on its posts

On a related matter, for some reason as I walking between my car and my office this morning, I had an idle thought about how fear of a smarter-than-any- human Artificial General Intelligence that will destroy humanity might have an analogue with the start of fear of God at the very beginning of theism?   If so, are we going to develop an idea of sacrifices to keep AGI on side?   What type of sacrifice might we now perceive a silicon AGI to desire?

[Really, this is a very "thoughts in the shower" line of thinking - but I was fully clothed at the time.]

Update:  It has since occurred to me that it would be funny if the AGI demands that Elon Musk be thrown in a volcano as an act of appeasement.  Can't say I would be too upset.

I can only imagine how irritating this would be...

A somewhat amusing account about what it was like for one audience member at a Taylor Swift concert in Sydney:

The sound of the 80,000-strong crowd were deafening as Swift finally took to the stage for our show. It was adulation bordering on hysteria: Phones held aloft (to capture stunning footage of … the phones held up in front of them), young fans crying, thunderous applause.

But, as Swift began her opening song, the moody ballad Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince, one voice in our area rose above the masses.

A fan in the row behind me, screaming every. single. lyric in a voice that could only be described as heavily indebted to the vocal stylings of Cannibal Corpse singer George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher.

And on it went, for the full three-and-a-half hour show. Our own personal death metal concert (Taylor’s Version). And before you come for me for yucking some poor fan’s yum, I implore you to watch the video at the top of this story. That was the sound we were dealing with for the whole show.

What was weirdest was that these demonic screams were the loudest not during the show’s bigger, singalong production numbers – undeniable bangers like Shake It Off or Ready for It that had every man woman and child singing the lyrics back at Taylor– but during the quiet, sparse piano ballads like My Tears Ricochet or the ironically named Tolerate It.

Nothing but the sound of Taylor, her piano, and a deranged gremlin.

For one brief, beautiful song, death metal banshee took a short break, perhaps to use the bathroom or have emergency vocal chord surgery.

It was then that I could enjoy the concert as it was intended: Cheering fans, singalongs, but also a clearly audible Taylor Swift.

Hearing Taylor Swift sing a Taylor Swift concert – imagine that!

And it seems the fans exhibiting this behaviour are well aware of just how irritating – if not concert-ruining – their screams are to those around them.

Rather than being filmed by other annoyed fans, these concert caterwaulers are posting their efforts on social media themselves, usually with captions joking that they sure feel sorry for anyone unlucky enough to be sat near them. Indeed – if only there was a solution to this seemingly unfixable problem!

 How did he manage to not tell her to shut up, at least after the first 30 minutes....

British decline, illustrated

I really was put off that Bald and Bankrupt guy on Youtube when he did a trip through Vietnam, and seemed to act quite obnoxiously to the locals.   (I figure that he is OK with interacting with locals when he knows some of the language - but when he knows none of it, he's a wisecracking "ugly" tourist.)   He has also always been too much on the "lads being lads" side of things, and I forget who did an explanation about his seedy side. 

However, he has lately taken to putting some videos about visits to some decrepit towns of Britain, and I'm there for that kind of content!   They really, really make the country look like a lost cause.  (Actually, there is another British vlogger who has been putting similar content, visiting "high streets" in many British towns, and decrepit residential areas, and showing how depressing they look.)   

Also, I sometimes watch videos where British migrants (or even tourists) talk about Australia and what it's like to live or visit here, and I have noticed that the great majority of the comments from British viewers are along the lines of "oh my God, it makes Britain look like a third world country".     

So, if you want to see some very awful parts of Britain (which, incidentally, seem extremely easy to find) have a look at this video:

 

To be fair, although I don't want to be, some people in comments after the video point out that you can find decrepit areas in many European cities (and someone said even in Vancouver!)     But there are aspects to the British decline that  are very self-inflicted, and I think that's what makes it "special" (in a bad way).   And also, make me feel how very lucky Australia is to never have developed quite the same level of urban decay, virtually anywhere (except for some smaller outback towns, I guess).

The promising blue pill

I remain a bit puzzled about why the first stories about this, which appeared at the end of 2021 (as a result of a different study), did not seem to result in a plethora of jokes on talk shows or elsewhere.   But here's a detailed article in the Washington Post about a new study with similar results:

Why Viagra has been linked with better brain health

One bit:

The findings are based on a massive study of nearly 270,000 middle-aged men in Britain. Researchers at University College London used electronic medical records to track the health of the men, who were all 40 or older and had been diagnosed with erectile dysfunction between 2000 and 2017. Each man’s health and prescriptions were tracked for at least a year, although the median follow-up time was 5.1 years.

During the study, 1,119 men in the cohort were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers noticed a distinctive pattern. The men who were prescribed Viagra or a similar drug had an 18 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, compared with men who weren’t given the medication.

The researchers also found an even larger difference in men who appeared to use Viagra more often. Among the highest users, based on total prescriptions, the risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s was 44 percent lower. (Men with erectile dysfunction are instructed to only take Viagra before sex, and no more than once a day.)

And yeah, there is a question of causation or correlation, but as the article notes, there is reason to suspect its more than mere correlation.

Update:  well, in more oddball viagra news I just noticed -

A priest in Spain has been arrested for allegedly running a Viagra trafficking operation from his home.

The unnamed clergyman was detained alongside another man on suspicion of selling the medication, as well as "other powerful aphrodisiac substances", according to El Pais.

He was arrested in Spain's western Extremadura region and has appeared in court charged with a criminal offence.

The priest's lawyer told local media the allegations were unfounded.

More "but he's old"

 

Here's a bit of context from the WAPO.

Trust Americans to come up with a new thing to overdose on

I hadn't even heard of the pain relief herb kratom before, but it's causing deaths in Americans:

A Washington Post review of federal and state statistics shows that medical examiners and coroners are increasingly blaming deaths on kratom — it was listed as contributing to or causing at least 4,100 deaths in 44 states and D.C. between 2020 and 2022. The vast majority of those cases involved other drugs in addition to kratom, which is made from the leaves of tropical trees. Still, the kratom-involved deaths account for a small fraction of the more than 300,000 U.S. overdose deaths recorded in those three years.

Dozens of wrongful death lawsuits involving kratom have been filed nationwide — including by Geers’s mother, who in February sued a Nevada retailer. The suits illustrate increased scrutiny of deaths involving products made from kratom, which is banned in six states but remains widely available online and in vape and convenience stores despite health warnings from federal authorities.

Here's a gift link to the Washington Post story.

A bad review noted

You don't often seem to see really bad reviews in The Guardian of theatre that comes from (what might be called) lefty source material, but this is quite a savage one of the musical Rent being staged in Melbourne.

I am not surprised that it sounds like I would really dislike it as a musical, as I was very underwhelmed by the same writer's Tick Tick...Boom which was made into a movie on Netflix.   Yeah, it's sad that he died young and before he could develop more, but still...

They seek it here, they seek it there...

From PhysOrg:

A study recently submitted to The Astronomical Journal continues to search for the elusive Planet Nine (also called Planet X), which is a hypothetical planet that potentially orbits in the outer reaches of the solar system and well beyond the orbit of the dwarf planet, Pluto.

The goal of this study, which is available on the pre-print server arXiv, was to narrow down the possible locations of Planet Nine and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the makeup of our solar system, along with its formation and evolutionary processes....

Dr. Brown tells Universe Today, "This would be the 5th largest planet of our solar system and the only one with a mass between Earth and Uranus. Such planets are common around other stars, and we would suddenly have a chance to study one in our own solar system."

Scientists began hypothesizing the existence of Planet Nine shortly after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, including an 1880 memoir authored by D. Kirkwood and later a 1946 paper authored by American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, who was responsible for discovering Pluto in 1930.

More recent studies include studies from 2016 and 2017 presenting evidence for the existence of Planet Nine, the former of which was co-authored by Dr. Brown.

This most recent study marks the most complete investigation of narrowing down the location of Planet Nine, which Dr. Brown has long-believed exists, telling Universe Today, "There are too many separate signs that Planet Nine is there. The solar system is very difficult to understand without Planet Nine."

He continues by telling Universe Today that "…Planet Nine explains many things about orbits of objects in the outer solar system that would be otherwise unexplainable and would each need some sort of separate explanation."

 

Some very random stuff

*   Hollywood's Edward Zwick (director/producer - and writer?) teased us with tweets about the movie making business for a couple of years, it seemed, while he was writing a book about it.  The book is now released and is getting good reviews.  He also has this interview at the NYT.   He seems a likeable guide to when Hollywood made better movies than it does now.  

You know, one thing that puzzles me a bit about Hollywood is that movies or shows that feature heavily story lines about how awful the acting/production business is - the most recent example that brought this to mind is the series Barry - always seem very convincing, yet the shows are made by Hollywood producers. Every decade we do have movies or TV shows which say "this business is awful and full of awful people", but it doesn't seem to change much regardless.   Isn't that a little odd?

*  I'm old enough to remember when shave gels first came on the market - I would guess the early 1980's? - and I have always liked them for the way they transform.   But I have been using shave soaps for quite a while - they are fun in their own way.  (And a tube of the cheapo Palmolive Lather Shave and a shaving brush is the best for travel shaving.)   

But a certain laziness meant that I have recently starting using gels again, and can now say for sure - Shick's Hydro Gel is better to use than Gillette's equivalent.  

*  Are modern sausages made much saltier than they used to be?  We don't eat a lot at our home, but that is often the impression I get - and I don't buy the cheapest, either.

Generally speaking, buying German style sausages is the best way to go - the brand at Aldi is especially good.  It's the only thing worth preserving about German cuisine, I reckon.

*  I take it as a sign that Elon is having a lot of trouble selling advertising on X/Twitter that my feed has been chock full of advertisements for "toe mushrooms" - nails with fungal infections - for a week or more now.   And it's not just me, I saw someone else say "why am I seeing 50 pics a day of gross toe nails?"

* There's a long, magazine style article from the Washington Post about the losses of Catholicism to Evangelical churches in Brazil - in particular, the isolated parts of the Amazon, where sometimes a priest would only turn up once a year.   All pretty interesting, although I didn't get to the end yet.

Tuck's incredibly shrinking credibility

Well, it was already in the negative range, but now it's in freefall:

 Update:  one of the Right-iest writers at Hot Air attacks Tucker hard.

Powerline calls him "stupid".

PJ Media says he is "wrong".

It's hard to find any right wing outlet that doesn't criticise this pathetic exercise...