Drinking to remember, not to forget

Do not tell any university student you know, because going out for drinks the night before an exam may become rather more popular, if they believe this result:

Drinking alcohol improves memory for information learned before the drinking episode began, new research suggests.

In the University of Exeter study, 88 social drinkers were given a word-learning task. Participants were then split in two groups at random and told either to drink as much as they liked (the average was four units) or not to drink at all.

The next day, they all did the same task again -- and those who had drunk alcohol remembered more of what they had learned.

The researchers are keen to stress that this limited positive effect should be considered alongside the well-established negative effects of excessive alcohol on memory and mental and physical health.

"Our research not only showed that those who drank alcohol did better when repeating the word-learning task, but that this effect was stronger among those who drank more," said Professor Celia Morgan, of the University of Exeter.

"The causes of this effect are not fully understood, but the leading explanation is that alcohol blocks the learning of new information and therefore the brain has more resources available to lay down other recently learned information into long-term memory.

Finally, we're at the "Trump Youth" stage

I find it hard to conceive of a man in America less likely to be a good role model for the Boy Scout movement than Donald Trump - and his biggest experience of the outdoors in his life seems restricted to being on golf courses. 

But there are lots of reports of what sounds like a bizarre campaign style speech being given to a Boy Scout Jamboree, and the (apparently easily manipulated) youth going rah! rah! for Obamacare repeal!

The sub-Hitler comparisons are obvious, and frankly, unavoidable.

Next up:  night time, fire torch lit rallies on the streets of some city or other, with copies of  the NYT and WAPO being thrown onto a bonfire.  Burn Fake News!  Burn Fake News!

Not just my imagination - intense rainfall is increasing in Japan

Floods and record rainfall in Japan in summer don't seem to attract all that much attention internationally, but my feeling was that "record rainfall" has become a near routine summer headline in the Japanese news.

And yes, Googling "record rainfall Japan" does seem to bring up on the first page stories headed that way from 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and now 2017.

The most recent cases -

*  15 were killed in floods earlier this month, and the damage looks large

*  Just a day or two ago, reports of rainfall in the Akita area (which I visited on my last trip) also used the word "record".  No one killed, but 12,000 told to evacuate and 500 houses flooded:

According to the Meteorological Agency, one part of the city of Akita had received a record 340 mm of rainfall during a 24-hour period that ended at 7 a.m. Sunday.

Record amounts of precipitation were also recorded in several other parts of the prefecture, with some areas breaking their monthly rainfall records for July, it said.

OK, and here is a report less than a day old, wherein the Japan Meteorological Agency, clearly a part of the Chinese/UN/socialist international conspiracy about climate change (sarc), confirms the impression:

The number of times it rains cats and dogs in Japan has jumped alarmingly in the last 10 years compared to when records of rain intensity began to be compiled.

The annual occurrences of a heavy downpour exceeding 50 millimeters in one hour has increased by a whopping 34 percent nationwide in the last decade compared with that in the 10 years from 1976, according to observation results by the Japan Meteorological Agency.

This means that repeats of the torrential rain that caused enormous damage to northern Kyushu at the start of this month are likely in the future.

Rainfall exceeding 50 mm per hour is often described in Japan as "rain falling like a waterfall," which signals a time when one should think about evacuation.

Most of drainage facilities in urban areas are designed based on that amount of rain, but when it exceeds 50 mm in an hour, water could gush into underground shopping complexes and other places.

The annual number of occurrences of heavy rainfall exceeding 50 mm per hour in the 10 years from 1976, when the agency started its observation, totaled 1,738. In the decade from 2007 it totaled 2,321, increasing 1.34 times, according to data collected by the agency’s Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System, known as AMeDAS.

TV noted

*  I've never watched Masterchef before, but I did have a look at it this year when they came to the Japan week episodes, given that I figured that the locations and food there could be particularly interesting.  

I have to say, the skills expected of the contestants seem a bit ridiculously over the top.  None of this home cooking by people who have had a few successful dinner parties of My Kitchen Rules.  And the personal drama and personality foibles are kept to a minimum too, unlike MKR, where their manipulation is key to the show.  The hosts are serious but personable, and presumably none comes close to the nuttiness of Pete Evans' private views on food and health.  

Yet despite this, I can't say that I warmed to the show.  The cooking and skills are too technical, and the tasks too daunting.  The show is not trashy and manipulative, as MKR routinely is, but it's not much fun, either. 

*  Ninja Warrior will finish its short season this week, but I am very puzzled as to the decisions made when putting this show together.    Each episode is too long, but even then, they make strange decisions as to which contestants to show and which to shorten.  

Often it seems a case of coming back from (one of the many) commercial breaks to be told that one or two guys have succeeded on the course, and you get to see them celebrating for 10 seconds, followed by showing the run of some person having a doomed run that ends half way through.  If I were one of the successful contestants, I'd be pretty annoyed about having my achievement barely acknowledged in the final show, after busting a gut like that.

If it's rating spectacularly well, why don't they make it into one hour episodes, say, 4 or 5 days a week, stretching the season out instead of a odd rush to finish, and show all of the successes.  It's the failures that you can afford to cut, I would have thought.  They could well do with fewer contestants too, I think...

Over mall-ed?

Time magazine talks about the death of American shopping malls, and someone quotes some figures about which I would love to know the Australian equivalent:

Some of the great mall die-off is what economists refer to as a market correction. "We are over-retailed," says Ronald Friedman, a partner at Marcum LLP, which researches consumer trends. There is an estimated 26 sq. ft. of retail for every person in the U.S., compared with about 2.5 sq. ft. per capita in Europe. Roughly 60% of Macy's stores slated to close are within 10 miles of another Macy's.

I've commented before that the shopping centre/mall nearest me seems to be having a sudden downturn in tenants, making their last expansion now look ill considered.   Certainly, my feeling is that centre owners in this country have become ridiculously greedy in terms of rent increases, and it seems they are hurting themselves in the long term by doing so.

But three of the largest suburban shopping centres in Brisbane - Indooroopilly, Chermside and (particularly) Garden City - always seem very busy.  They have large cinema complexes that I think help support their food outlets, at least.  

Update:  have a look at this Axios article too, about the plunge in a lot of commercial real estate valuations in the US, particularly in regional areas.  Here, I'll cut and paste part of it:

The shift to on-line shopping is now striking at the underlying value of malls, and commercial real estate as a whole.

• About $120 billion in U.S. commercial mortgages mature this year: Borrowers went delinquent on about $2.4 billion of it in June alone, according to Trepp, a real estate data provider, quoted by the WSJ.
• It was the largest rise in delinquencies in six years, according to Fitch, the rating agency. Fitch's silver lining: it's not as bad as it expected at the beginning of the year.
• Still, more defaults are coming: The credit industry expects delinquencies on such debt to escalate over the coming year, according to a new poll of portfolio managers, and to spread globally.

• Look at this number: In the FT, Blackstone executive Nadeem Meghji said the value of regional malls in smaller cities may be down 40% on average over the last two years.

Flying Harry

Having seen Harry Styles in Dunkirk yesterday gives me an excuse to post his pretty remarkable video for Sign of the Times.  (I saw this a few weeks ago and had meaning to post it here since then.)   As with Dunkirk, it looks in large part to have been made with "practical effects", and is all the better for it:

The Greenlight Zone

The video parody that appeared on Insiders yesterday was particularly funny:

A few Dunkirk comments

Saw Dunkirk today and was suitably impressed.

I tried not to "over review" myself about this movie before I saw it, but I did see enough from them to agree with these observations that have already been made:

*  it's very Nolan, with its use of different narrative time lines cut together;

*  If comparing it to the work of another director, Kubrick does come to mind, partly because of the very innovative score (as with Kubrick's crucial use of music in 2001), but also because of a certain emotional coolness that comes with how they both handle character.  I think in both directors there is always something of an awareness that the characters are mainly to serve a story, rather than to be an emotional anchor for the viewer.  (Some critics somewhere will have explained this clearer, but that will do for now.)   This is not necessarily a bad thing in a movie, although I would say it is entirely the reason I thought Full Metal Jacket was terrible.  It's more of an observation - a Kubrick movie can be fantastic and memorable regardless (2001, The Shining.)

* Perhaps the very best thing about it is that which attracted everyone's attention as soon as the first trailer appeared - the realism that comes with using real boats, ships and planes.  It looks for all the world like a film made with nearly no CGI effects, and it's a great reminder of how that be can be a fantastic thing in a movie. 

I was also pleased to read the Slate article about its historical accuracy after I saw it, and found that there is very little that is objectionable from a historical perspective.     (There was one minor detail that I found jarring, but I won't mention it here just in case it bothers someone reading who hasn't seen it yet.)

But, yeah, a pretty great film, and I hope it gets rewarded with generous box office success.

Lego movie worry

I thought the first Lego movie was enjoyable enough, without being as great as some people seemed to think.

But last night we watched the Lego Batman Movie, and things have taken a worrying turn for the worse.

Look, it's a funny concept: Lego Batman as a lonely jerk version of the modern brooding Batman, but I thought the execution was terrible. 

The main problem is that visually, the movie is just ridiculously "busy" and cluttered - virtually ever single shot ridiculously full of, well, things.   And as for the extremely rapid action and editing - I saw someone on Rottentomatoes say that it was like Fury Road for 5 year olds,  and that's a pretty good way of putting it.  Maybe the directors (different from the guys who did the first movie) thought they would appeal to the un-medicated ADHD audience, or something, but by half way through I was finding it tedious.   And despite one great idea in the second half (all of the various franchise villains in the Forbidden Zone), it does get less funny as it goes along.

I reckon the Lego team needs to sack whoever was involved in this project (which made $310 million internationally compared to $470 million for the first Lego movie) because I suspect this one mainly gave a headache to parents accompanying their kids to it, and they may well take some convincing to see the next one.

Whoops

Did a Glowing Sea Creature Help Push the U.S. Into the Vietnam War?

News from the war front

Your Saturday dose of paranoia from Catallaxy, where "struth" is one of the most overwrought inmates:

The insanity that we are seeing now will only become worse as those repeated left wing lies are gradually believed (from stolen generations to white privilege, to there being more than two sexes) and then they build on those.
It won’t end until there is a bloody revolution.
Right now, the defenders of the west (men , and mostly white) are being set up as the enemy.
Blah, blah de blah.
We all get this.
We get that they are using a captured institution to do this, the education system.
There is nothing for it except to fight.
The right must realise that this is going to get much worse, and end up with violence and death poured upon us.
You will be pulled from your houses kicking and screaming and will not be heard from again.
This shit doesn’t take a century to occur.
It will be you.
Especially cat commenters.

He's great company at dinner parties, I bet.

6,700 flights per day??

Science magazine has a short article this week on the geoengineering idea of spraying sulphur in the atmosphere to counter global warming.   But read this extract:

Gosh. Is that number of flights correct?

Floating power

This is an impressive photo, from a Time magazine story on China and renewables:

And how's this for the symbolism:

....the world’s largest floating solar farm on a lake formed on top of a collapsed and flooded coal mine just northwest of Anhui province’s Huainan city. A tapestry of 166,000 glistening panels bob and bask below an ochre sun, producing almost enough clean energy to power a large town, as fish break through the inky water all around.

Other photos in the story show that its construction is pretty low tech - the solar cells are on simple plastic floats.

I would have thought that this is a pretty good idea for water storage dams in Australia - I'm sure I've suggested this here years ago.  I don't think there is any substantial risk of polluting the water if some sink, is there?  Furthermore, in a hot area, the coverage might help reduce evaporation, I would have thought.

When am I going to see this on , say, the Wivenhoe dam near Brisbane?

Because sometimes, even stupid arguments have to be answered

It's one of the golden oldies by climate change denialists:  "The climate has always changed.   Nothing to see here - move on."

It has never made sense as an argument, and it can be taken as a reliable sign that any person promoting it has never tried to read about the issue seriously and it will be pointless arguing with them.  

But, just in case you know a denialist who is not beyond reason, and who you can forgive for not already realising how vapid the argument is,   Stefan at Real Climate has set out the detailed rebuttal.  

How women are murdered in America

Again from The Atlantic, some startling figures about women as murder victims in the US:

The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths. Of those, 55 percent were intimate partner violence-related, meaning they occurred at the hands of a former or current partner or the partner’s family or friends. In 93 percent of those cases, the culprit was a current or former romantic partner. The report also bucks the strangers-in-dark-alleys narrative common to televised crime dramas: Strangers perpetrated just 16 percent of all female homicides, fewer than acquaintances and just slightly more than parents.

About a third of the time, the couple had argued right before the homicide took place, and about 12 percent of the deaths were associated with jealousy. The majority of the victims were under the age of 40, and 15 percent were pregnant. About 54 percent were gun deaths.

Black women were most likely to die by homicide of any kind, at 4.4 deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Native American women, Hispanics, and finally whites and Asians. Data from earlier reports suggest a far smaller percentage of men—around 5 to 7 percent—were killed by intimate partners.

I'm pretty sure the way women become murder victims is not dissimilar in Australia.

Economics and babies (or lack thereof)

Quite a convincing argument put forward at The Atlantic that all of the "employment flexibility" beloved of the parts of the Right, and which has caused major changes to the way men (in particular) work in Japan, is behind that country's dramatic drop in marriage and making babies.

Update:  I think it's often fair enough to be cynical  of the way Australian unionists and Labor politicians talk about the importance of strongly enforced workplace laws so that workers can have a work/life balance, as well as penalty rates fairly compensating workers for time away from family on weekends, etc.   They can over-egg the argument.

On the other hand, if you look at a country where companies can get away with extraordinary pressure on workers, and implement policies that maximise profit, you can see the harm that removing all sense of employment fairness entails.  

Police shootings in the US

It's common sense to just about all Australians who aren't libertarians that the large number of police shootings in the US is in substantial part due to police having to be always on edge there that they are dealing with an armed person, whether they be legally armed, or not.  But the international comparisons between US police shootings and that in other countries is even more surprising than I expected:

Police officers in the US shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people a year, according to the Washington Post’s database — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Australia, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.

For example, an analysis by the Guardian found that “US police kill more in days than other countries do in years.” Between 1992 and 2011, Australian police shot and killed 94 people. In 2015, US police shot and killed 97 people just in March. These differences are not explained by population, since the US is about 14 times as populous as Australia but, based on the Guardian’s count, has hundreds of times the fatal police shootings.

Low carb not so important as Taubeians claim

For all those who are dedicated believers in Gary Taubes's diet ideas, where carbs are basically evil and you just can't get enough fat and protein in your diet if you want to be healthy, this article at Vox talks about a very rigorous study that indicates that his theory about how low carb diets are supposed to work doesn't really hold up.

I think it's pretty simple:  breads and a lot of other carbs are pretty delicious and part of human diet for so long it's a bit silly to think they are evil.   Just don't eat too much of them.

Blasphemy in the Gulf (again)

At Gulf News:

A businessman, who threatened his former partner and sent him blasphemous and offensive SMSes over a financial dispute, has been fined Dh500,000.
The 39-year-old Lebanese businessman was involved in a business partnership with the Emirati man before they had a financial dispute in October.
After the two men failed to reach an amicable settlement, the Lebanese man sent several SMSes in which he cursed God and threatened the Emirati man.
The 39-year-old sent to the Emirati’s mobile three SMSes in which he offended the latter, threatened to harm him and cursed God as well.

The fine equates to about $172,000 Australia dollars, I think.

Taking offence on campus, revisited

The current problem on (mainly*) American campuses regarding offensiveness is given a going over again at the Atlantic: Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence,  and it puts up a very good argument.

The only misgiving I have about this issue is that I hate the way that the Wingnut Right takes a bad argument by the too-precious-for-reality Left as justification for complete incivility in debate, and for genuinely offensive claims to be made  - it's like the opposite of a virtuous circle. (Which I see Google says is a "vicious circle/cycle.")

* you could say that the recent silliness of the QUT case is an illustration of the same disease, but at least we rarely have riots here of the kind you see in the US over controversial speakers on campuses.