Mosquito reduction by bacteria

Nature reports on a clever, relatively natural, way to reduce mosquito populations.

There is a caution towards the end of the article against killing off mosquitoes everywhere - they are part of a food chain, after all.  

Getting confused by the number of generals

I'm starting to lose track of the reputation of the Generals Trump has appointed around him.

I thought initially that Kelly was the thoughtful, monk like one - but no, that is Mattis.  McMaster has apparently been shouted at by Trump, but apparently convinced him to stick to the Iran deal.  So maybe he's OK?

But Kelly - well, he apparently doesn't doubt intelligence on Russian meddling, and was critical of the Trump firing of Comey, but on the other hand has been using Trumpian style fear rhetoric about immigrants.

I have my doubts he is going to last, somehow...

Ice problems

This article explains how use of methamphetamine is bad for the health, generally.

Cult watch

Do economics students who go to RMIT realise that one of the lecturers has become a full blown cult member?  Steve Kates yesterday, making his undying confidence in Trump and all who surround him very clear:

You know, she may not even have wanted him at the birth. But if you are the kind of loon who thinks we should not be thankful that Trump is president because his Communications Director prioritises his work in the White House over attending the birth of his child then you should drop political commentary....

[After listing various international problem headlines]:

I have no idea how to solve any of this, but I do believe that there is no one I’d rather have thinking these issues through than Donald Trump.

Kates' family members should be thinking seriously about some intervention.

Amongst the fellow cultists at Catallaxy, I see that some are a little bit shaken by the 10 day reign of "The Mooch" .    Kates won't be:  it will all be for the greater good, somehow.

As for the "misanthrope mutual support club" vibe of Catallaxy threads, I see that it's time for confessions from one of the more depressive figures there:

Bizarrely, I think he makes a living as a travelling entertainer in country regions.   Farmers can be a miserable lot at times, maybe that's how it works.

I feel a bit guilty for doing this, as it does feel like mocking people who actually need help.   But  as I argued before, it's doing them harm, the way misanthropes and denialists of various shades are finding comfort in company at that blog.

Cannabis and impairment

One of the issues with legal use of cannabis is the unavailability of any test to reliably test for impairment (for driving, for example) after its use.  It's why some employers (airlines, railways, defence forces) will simply have a zero tolerance of its use.  

This story at NPR notes the problem it presents for policing in Colorado. 

Yet another unwanted movie review

Kong: Skull Island.  

Yes, yes:  reviewers were correct - it's like a cross between Apocalypse Now and ye olde King Kong, with a bit of additional spin (new, unexpected, giant creatures, for one; and Kong doesn't fall for the diminutive woman, thank heavens).   It looks pretty great - a lot of that interesting Vietnamese multi-island-just-off-the-coast scenery features, and the CGI is good.   The script is occasionally quite funny, and the direction is sometimes pretty noticeably clever.

But - it is still a "gigantic creature lives on an island surrounded by constant storm" scenario.   It does get a little gory towards the end.

It's officially:  OK. 

(Partly filmed in Queensland too, but you would never recognise it.)

Lots to worry about

*  North Korea:   how exactly does Trump think China can instantly stop North Korea from lobbing missiles towards the West?   Obama's policy adviser doesn't think it's easy peasy like that:

Ben Rhodes, who was a foreign policy adviser under President Barack Obama, contradicted Trump’s message, writing on Twitter that it “is not at all true” China has the ability to solve the North Korea issue quickly, and warned that the president’s message involves a “very dangerous and destabilizing approach.”

Maybe Trump should be talking more to Putin, too, about his attempts to subvert the US role in the region.

*  Islamic terrorism and aircraft:  it is a worry that there are Sydney based wannabe terrorists trying to come up with plans to take down an airliner.

I would assume this plan was detected via eavesdropping on internet and other communications.   Meanwhile, Australian IPA aligned libertarian  types, I saw last week, are against the government enforcing tech giants to provide a way to unencrypt stuff, because (hey, it's libertarians) - money!

* Both Italy and large parts of  Australia are very dry at the moment.  There is also recent concern about the loss of fertile land in Africa.

Comedy and the public service

I usually watch Utopia, but I've never been 100% sure whether to fully endorse it.  (Well, I did say I was enjoying it back in 2014.  Perhaps my doubts are growing.)

It does have good acting, I think - with the possible exception of Rob Sitch, who has a very limited range - and some lines can be sharp and amusing, if not lol funny.

But the problem with the show is that it's still mainly a satire of Public Service managerialism (and secondarily, of political obsession with spin), but it feels that the heights of faith in managerialism are well in the past, perhaps by two or three decades now.

The result is that I never am sure whether the satire is accurate, or dated.  Certainly, last week's episode, featuring the hoops that the female lead (I don't really remember any character's name) had to go through to get a promotion her boss had promised her struck me as relatively accurate from what I had heard of the public service from a friend in it - back in the 1980's.   (And by the way, the female actor who was the HR person inventing procedural roadblocks was really good in a well written role, I thought.) 

I'm not sure how anyone on the outside, who no longer knows anyone in the public service, finds out how the character of public service life has changed in recent decades.  But I hope it has...   

Back to Dunkirk

After watching Dunkirk, it's good to read some real life accounts about it.  This article at The Conversation is good.

Laffer, Krugman, comedy

I don't watch Full Frontal much, but happened to see it this week, and thought that this story (not by her) was the best bit.

It centres on the puzzling continuing grip of Arthur Laffer on Republican and IPA brains, and also features Paul Krugman.   Worth watching:

 

When even Melanie Phillips understands it's a case of the Right hyperventilating in ignorance...

Gee, it's one of those one in a hundred days on which a link found via a Catallaxy thread is actually worth reading.

The very conservative Melanie Phillips, who is a climate change denialist and therefore of routinely unreliable opinion on anything, is actually quite correct in her take on the Charlie Gard case.  The Right wing campaign, largely emanating from America, in support of the grief stricken parents of Charlie, was entirely ill conceived in virtually every respect.

Of course, the great majority of threadsters at Catallaxy sided with the American Right too, because ignorance and bad judgement loves company.  

Warning sign

In a remarkable series of leaked comments, all the incredible infighting in the Trump administration is set out by that Scaramucci character, whose opinion of Trump turned around even faster than an ex-IPA staffer grabbing a lucrative government job.

But perhaps the biggest sign that he's an annoying idiot - he refers to himself in the third person.

An unfortunate head

Peter Dutton's head, with the additional loss of hair in recent years, seems to have taken on a profound roundness, particularly in the top half:

I have kept feeling that it's reminding me of something, but couldn't put my finger on it.  I think it might be this:

In a dumbed down version, of course.

Coal for the poor

I've always thought that the argument beloved of climate change denialists that being anti coal was condemning the poor to stay poor was a bit of a crock.  Here, in a good article by David Roberts, is the explanation as to why:

The energy poor fall in two basic categories. Around 15 percent of them live in urban areas, in close physical proximity to power grids, but they aren’t reliably hooked up to those grids.

Both technical and political barriers prevent connection. Those households tend to be dispersed and consume very little energy, which means connecting them is a money loser for utilities. And in many poor countries, utilities are not under social pressure to provide universal access; indeed, they are often centers of patronage and corruption.

Building more coal plants and hooking them to those grids won’t help these households at all. Indeed, in countries like India where this is a serious problem, there is already excess coal capacity on the grid, so new plants are likely to sit idle.

Hooking these households to the grid requires better governance, better financing for the upfront costs of connection, and reform of electricity subsidies and tariffs.

The other 85 percent of energy-poor households are rural, distant from any centralized grid, mostly in Africa, India, and the rest of developing Asia. Putting more coal power on those centralized grids is obviously not going to help them.

EAS Sharma, former Indian minster of power, notes that some 6 million urban and 75 million rural Indian households lack electricity access. "These figures have not changed appreciably since 2001," he writes, "though around 95,000 MW of new largely coal-based electricity generation capacity was added during the intervening decade."

New coal plants are not targeted to areas with poor electricity access. Why would they be? Those households are poor! There’s no money there. Instead, coal gets built where there’s large-scale commercial or industrial demand.

Go read the whole thing, and email it to Sinclair Davidson, Henry Ergas et al ...

Scratch that off my potential holiday destinations

I thought Sri Lanka was supposed to have some nice enough parts, but they sure have their problems with the nasty dengue fever:

Sri Lanka celebrated its eradication of malaria last year. But now the country faces another mosquito-borne illness: dengue fever. It's also sometimes known as "breakbone fever" because of the severe pain it can cause.
A dengue outbreak has left some Sri Lankan hospitals so full that they're turning away patients, says Gerhard Tauscher, an operations manager with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He is based in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.
More than 107,000 suspected cases of dengue have been reported so far this year, according to Sri Lanka's ministry of health.
That's almost twice the number of people diagnosed with dengue in Sri Lanka last year. The death toll from this outbreak is about 300 people, the IFRC says.

Electric highways

I didn't even know they were a thing:

Queensland will have a 2,000km network of electric vehicle charging stations that make up one of the world’s longest electric vehicle highways within six months.

The state government announced on Thursday it would build an 18-station network stretching along Queensland’s east coast from Cairns to Coolangatta and west to Toowoomba.

The stations, which recharge a vehicle in 30 minutes, will offer free power for at least a year in what the environment minister, Steven Miles, said was a bid to boost the number of electric cars on Queensland roads, currently about 700.

I had no idea electric cars were so well catered for in the US:

Queensland’s “electric highway” will span a comparable distance to the “west coast electric highway” in the US, which runs from California to Oregon and Washington state. However it is dwarfed by the Trans-Canada EV highway, which, at about 8,000km, is the world’s longest.

But the US in total now boasts 16,107 stations and 43,828 charging outlets, according to the US Department of Energy. Tesla drivers can reputedly make journeys of 20,000 km.

Flying over Dunkirk

I'm still thinking about Dunkirk - always the sign of a good movie.

One thing I did particularly like was the flying in the film.   (In fact, the portrayal of the relative intelligence of the 3 services indicated in the film pretty much matched my own biases, based on past experience.)

Here's an Air and Space article on the filming of the flying sequences.

No politics today

Instead:

*  I think this article at the Catholic Herald looking at the history of the 20th century splintering of the Anglican Church (and warning that the Catholic Church could well be heading towards the same path) was interesting.   I hadn't heard of these categories before:

For most of the 20^th Century this diversity was even viewed as its strength because, thanks to a shared pension board and the clever use of ambiguity in official statements, the three main factions with Anglicanism – which one wag labelled ‘high and crazy’, ‘broad and hazy’ and ‘low and lazy’ – were happy enough to rub along together despite their radically different set of beliefs. It seemed as if the Nicene Creed, a very loose application of the 39 articles and strong civic approval gave just enough common ground to hold the show together.

But the question as to how Catholicism is going to handle the same pressures is far from clear.   I can see how very liberal churches essentially lose their raison d'etre, and become more or less just purely Left wing social clubs; but I also see how the highly conservative Catholics are now extremely uncharitable and  unpleasant Right wing culture warriors who are amongst the worst examples of religious devotion.  It's hard to see how the Church is going to keep weaving a path between the two extremes...

*  Pop philosophy apparently is big in Germany at the moment.   Who knew?:

Philosophie Magazin now has a circulation of 100,000, proof that Eilenberger’s approach paid off. Indeed it would appear there is a new demand for ideas in Germany, one ripe for the plumbing. In 2017, philosophy in Germany is booming. Student enrollment in philosophy courses has increased by one-third over the past three years. Its leading practitioners are giving TED Talks and producing best-selling books, top-ranking TV shows, and festivals such as phil.cologne, which attracts more than 10,000 visitors to the German city each June.

*  I care little for poetry (by which I mean, I care not at all), but this book review talking about an apparently famous Polish one still seemed interesting.

*  And as for science - Nature explains how scientists are really fretting over what are appropriate P values for different disciplines.   Seems it took an awfully long time for this problem to be recognised.

What an utter shambles

To Reader JC:  as usual, your political judgement is guided by testosterone, gullibility and believing only Right wing spin on Clinton or Obama stories.  No one in their right mind thinks that Trump's threats to Sessions for doing an ethical thing, when Sessions was loyal from the start, makes moral or political sense.   Even that other regular blowhard at Catallaxy, Fisk, understands that.   As for going after Clinton when the FBI has already determined there is no point?   You actually want the American Presidency to look like a vengeful tin pot dictatorship that tries to jail its enemies, do you?   Yes, because "winning", or some such idiocy.

And as for those at that other blog who can't even see the inappropriateness of Trump giving a campaign speech to a boy scout jamboree - as I have said before, this is, in miniature, what it must have been like during the popular rise of Hitler - normal people not being able to make sense of the developing cult status around a weirdo figure.   (Actually, if anything, I suspect if I had shared the problems Germany faced, I would find the Hitlerian appeal easier to grasp - he probably worked ten times harder than Trump, for one thing.)   In any event, polling shows that he is not doing well with the population overall - which just make the pockets of undying devotion to him, like Kates and Catallaxy, just the stupidest places on the planet.

There has never been anything like the incredible infighting and leaks from within the White House from day one.   I see there are rumours that Tillerson wants to resign, and who could be surprised at that?    Environment and science positions are filled (when they are filled at all) by people who are antagonistic to both:

In the past  month, the last few scientists have exited the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) Science Division. The OSTP is staffed at approximately a third of the level it was during the Obama administration; President Trump has yet to name a head of the office. Last week, the State Department’s top science and technology adviser, Vaughan Turekian, resigned amid a swirl of rumors that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was planning on shuttering his entire science and tech operation. There have been a number of non-scientist appointments in posts with major scientific elements, including the appointment of Samuel Clovis to be undersecretary in charge of the Agriculture Department’s research, education and economic efforts. Clovis, who has virtually no science background, will oversee efforts on vital issues ranging from the spread of diseases to the effects of pesticides...

Speaking of the need for qualified scientists in top jobs, Arati Prabhakar, the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), put it succinctly when she told me, “These positions demand deep expertise and thoughtful leadership. Anything less risks the future.”
Of course, it is not just science under siege. More broadly the administration attacks facts and evidence wherever they do not suit their policy views. All evidence-based communities are under attack — the intelligence community, law enforcement, think tanks and journalists. Attacks come in all forms — disregard for data, ad hominem attacks on the messengers and their motives, deflections and false analogies.

Trump's downfall will ultimately be his narcissistic complete lack of loyalty to anyone other than his immediate family, as well as his utter unreliability on any issue and lack of judgement, due in large part to his most trusted source of facts being morning show sycophants on Fox News.  If smarmy suck up Steve Doocy said he thought a nuclear strike on North Korea was a good idea, Trump would be picking up the phone to the Pentagon. 

His departure can't come soon enough.

  

The NBN - works for me

I know there are lots of horror stories about people having technical troubles when moving over to the National Broadband Network, but (at great risk of jinxing it), my change over from ADSL to NBN whatever-it-is-I-dunno seems to have gone very smoothly.

My house did have Foxtel cabling already (put in by the previous owners, and used by us for a while, but we stopped with the stupidly priced Foxtel maybe 5 years ago.)  The NBN box just plugged into that cable, which sits besides the TV, and a broadband connection was made immediately.  The modem plugs into that.   I did have to ring the service provider to check where the password for the modem was, but I got onto someone immediately.  In fact, I rang them in total 3 times today, and each time spoke to someone immediately each time.   The company - Exetel.   So far, I am impressed.

As for the speed test - on ADSL, the best download was about 9 Mbps (with a truly erratic upload speed of 1 or 2 Mbps);  checking today on the NBN it was downloading at about 22 Mbps and uploading at a steady looking 5Mbps.  I had paid for the mid-range speed service with "up to" 25 Mbps speed.  So 22 is pretty good.  

What's more, for the ADSL service, I think I was paying $40 a month for it, with 150 Gb a month download limit (not that we were ever using all of that, even with four people in the house each with their mobile devices browsing the net), but I was also paying around $40 a month for the Telstra phone line and calls from it.

With the Exetel plan I'm paying $80 in total per month, but with more than twice the internet speed, unlimited download, free phone calls, and free phone calls to several overseas destinations (in Exetel's case, including Japan.)  

So, all in all, provided it continues to work properly, the NBN has been a valuable upgrade to my internet and telephone service.  

I feel I ought to be putting myself forward for some advertising endorsement for either Exetel, or the NBN.   Especially if they pay me!

Anyway, I will advise in future if the service goes bad.   Let's see.