All about crossing the road

Sounds like a bland post, but it's surprisingly interesting.  I didn't know anything about the recent move in the UK to deliberately build "shared spaces" at intersections, and how well they work for most people:



(On a minor point - I'm pretty sure this American narrator actually pronounces analysis as "anal - ysis", with "anal" as in the body part.  How many Americans do that?)

Things have improved

First:  Hey, Jason, it is not a case of a "few drunken rants" by Gibson.   According to Joe Eszterhas,  Mel's views in private were (are?) just shockingly nuts and he was (is?) a completely gullible antisemite.  Read this article, if you never have.   I don't know how he has kept any other than the most superficial of friends.  Update:  this article asks a good question - How on earth did Mel Gibson get forgiven by Hollywood.?

Back to the point of the post:   I suspect it was my relatively late use of sunglasses as an adult that might have doomed me to this (I used to read books sitting in the sun in the Botanic Gardens without sunglasses all through university) but my increasingly smeary vision in my right eye means I'll be having a cataract operation in January.

Which has led me to wonder about the history of cataract surgery.  It's more lurid than I knew:

Cataract surgery is one of the oldest surgical procedures known, first documented in the fifth century BC.^[12] In ancient times, cataracts were treated with a technique called couching, which could only be performed when the lens had become completely opaque, rigid, and heavy to the point that the supporting zonules had become fragile. The eye would then be struck with a blunt object with sufficient force to cause the zonules to break so that the lens would dislocate into the vitreous cavity, restoring limited but completely unfocused vision. Centuries later, the technique was modified so that a sharp fine instrument was inserted into the eye to break the zonules to cause the dislocation.

Fast forward 2,000 years or so, and things improved, a little:

The first reported surgical removal of a cataract from the eye occurred in Paris in 1748.^[13] The advent of topical anesthesia made this procedure more practical. The early techniques involved removing the entire opaque lens in one piece using an incision that went halfway around the circumference of the cornea. It was critical that the lens remained intact as it was being removed, so surgery was restricted to so-called ripe lenses: cataracts so hardened that they would not break into pieces as they were being removed. This limited the surgery to only the most advanced cataracts. Since fine sutures did not exist at that time, patients were kept immobilized with sandbags around their head while the wound healed. Consequently, the early literature reporting cataract surgery routinely documented the mortality rate (secondary to pulmonary emboli).

Fortunately, now they need the tiniest of holes:

The evolution of smaller surgical incisions was matched by the development of new lens implants created out of different materials (such as acrylic and silicone) that could be folded to allow the lens to be inserted through a tiny wound. At the present time, commercially available lenses can be inserted through wounds a little over 2 mm.

 This is a pretty good period of history to be living in...

Right wing pays out

The Guardian notes that the Australian Spectator, edited by the clown haired (and brained) Rowan Dean, has had a big loss in a defamation case:

Spectator Australia, the conservative magazine already struggling to survive with paid sales of about 8,000 copies, will be deeply wounded by a $572,674 payment to a Toowoomba family who say they were defamed by the publication. Editor Rowan Dean, who was Mark Latham’s co-host on the doomed Sky News show Outsiders, has maintained his silence about the eye-watering sum and how it will affect the Australian arm of the UK magazine.

Denis Wagner, one of four brothers to take legal action, told Weekly Beast the family just wanted justice after the magazine published an article, “Dam Busters! How Cater and Jones burst Grantham’s wall of lies”, which implied they were to blame for the Grantham flood. “We are pleased with the successful resolution of the claim, which vindicates the stance we have taken in this matter,” Wagner said. “We are now focusing on vindicating our reputations in our cases against Alan Jones and Channel Nine.”

The large out-of-court settlement was made ahead of a defamation trial that had been set down to start in Queensland this month. The Wagners took action against conservative commentator Nick Cater, as well as broadcaster Alan Jones, radio stations 2GB and 4BC and Channel Nine for a 60 Minutes story involving Cater. A commission of inquiry in 2015 cleared the Wagners of any responsibility and inquiry head Walter ­Sofronoff QC concluded the flood was “a natural disaster and that no human agency caused it or could ever have prevented it”.

At a $100 a year to get the magazine, the payout is the same value as 5,000 odd subscriptions.    Ouch.

Presumably, flood conspiracists Alan Jones and Nick Cater are going to be coughing up dollars too.

By the way, whatever happened to the class action against the Queensland government that started in a fanfare of Hedley Thomas articles, but seems to have petered out?    Would like for it to die, too, given that it was mainly promoted by climate change denialists.

Globally ill

I often can't find much to post about on a Friday, especially if it's a busy day ahead.  Of course, I could go over to Catallaxy and watch the further self debasement of Steve Kates going so far beyond mere "brown nosing" of Donald Trump that only his feet are still visible, but even that gets boring after a time.

Anyway, here's one article from Discover that looks interesting - the matter of the global reach of mental illness, and how one researcher is trying to get treatment available in all countries, not just the rich ones.

The silly Senator

Where's Jason lately?   Because I'd like to know his reaction to this:

Senator Leyonhjelm to bring Milo Yiannopoulos to Parliament House

I've always said Leyonhjelm had no good judgement.  This is just further evidence.

A good spice

If you go this page, you'll see an article about cinnamon possibly being useful in burning up fat.  But look to the left - there's a bunch of other articles of hopeful cinnamon health effects, too: from Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, and liver health too!

And, of course, tumeric seems to be having its day in the fad sun, with vendors of a tumeric tea type drink to be found around shopping centres lately.

Seems that some spices are "hot" at the moment, in the matter of health.

More Yglesias

I'm finding Matthew Yglesias's explanations on economics to be rather like Greg Jericho's in Australia:  neither are economists (I think) but both have a convincing way of explaining economics issues.

Hence, Yglesias's article on the likely effect of the Republican's desired tax cuts sounds about right to me.

Pandamania

I strongly recommend that the gentle reader make haste to view a series of cute and kooky looking photos of pandas, many also featuring Chinese carers dressed as said animal, in this charming feature in The Atlantic.   An example:

I know that Star Trek IV featured aliens coming to Earth to find out what had happened to their favourite animals, the humpback whales, but I think it more likely that it would be this charming, but  inept, creature that looks like it was dropped off here for safekeeping 10,000 years ago...

A funny Travel Man

Yay:  SBS Viceland (I think) is showing another series of Travel Man, and they are up on SBS on Demand.

While Richard Ayoade is never unwatchable, some episodes are funnier than others, depending to an extent on the person he's travelling with.

The episode we watched last night, in Valencia (a gorgeous looking place to visit, incidentally), with a female comedian who I am not familiar with, struck me as particularly funny.   The paella cooking lessons were a highlight for my amusement:

Yes, pretty amusing (and sort of encouraging)

Spotted on Twitter:

Premier pro-Trump website in Australia is run by Sinclair Davidson

I see that the increasingly potty Rafe Champion, who used to respected enough to have blogging rights at Club Troppo, has been utterly convinced by a book by Newt Gingrich (who more sensible people blame for starting the rapid, poisonous decline in the dynamics of American politics) that Trump is just a great, salt-of-the-earth, man-of-the-people sorta guy, with remarkable political talent.

So Sinclair Davidson, libertarian and Trump skeptic himself, now hosts two of our nations most gullible and slavishly pro-Trump commentators on Catallaxy.   Sure, he has one (maybe two?) anonymous contributors who put the boot into Trump occasionally, but the blog commenters run about 90% in favour of Trump, I reckon.

I don't know how Davidson reconciles himself to the fact that running a supposedly libertarian/centre right blog has been taken over by the most wingnutty/conservative voices in the country.

The only - and I mean only - unifying thing about anyone who regularly participates at that blog is that they all know climate change is a crock.

Aliens any day now

I'm not sure how accurate this estimate could be, given that this is the first interstellar asteroid/alien star destroyer detected swanning through the solar system, but The Guardian reports:

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.Surprisingly, they calculate that another 10,000 could be closer to the sun than the eighth planet, Neptune, which lies 30 times further from the sun than the Earth. Yet these are currently undetected.

Each of these interstellar interlopers would be just passing through. They are travelling too fast to be captured by the gravity of the sun. Yet it still takes them about a decade to cross our solar system and disappear back into interstellar space.

If this estimate is correct, then roughly 1,000 enter and another 1,000 leave every year – which means that roughly three arrive and three leave every day.

Presumably, this means that, despite decades of attempts to detect asteroids around the solar system, we could find that on any day of the week one that comes from interstellar space does a braking burn and our alien overlords will have arrived.  

The asteroid that looked suspiciously like a spaceship

I posted as soon as I read about that interstellar asteroid that zoomed in and out of the solar system last month because I thought that it may well be a spaceship instead.

Lo and behold, the observations made in a rush as it left the solar system indicate this:

Karen Meech explains the significance: "This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape. We also found that it has a dark red colour, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it."

These properties suggest that `Oumuamua is dense, possibly rocky or with high metal content, lacks significant amounts of water or ice, and that its surface is now dark and reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over millions of years. It is estimated to be at least 400 metres long.

and the artists impression is this:

which seems to me, if you add more red, to be a fair approximation to this:

That's one of the versions of Red Dwarf, for those who don't know.

As usual, someone else on the 'net has probably already made the comparison - because it does seem kind of obvious to nerds.

Tim Wilson - migration skeptic?

Judith Sloan has been whinging about migration for a while now (a couple of years?)   She thinks there's too many and that they don't really bring economic benefits that others claim.   She has a column in The Australian today making her arguments, in which she seems to concede they may have a small net economic benefit.  

Seems her gripes are exaggerated to me.  Where does she live, Melbourne?   Migrant neighbours bothering her, I wonder?

And then, to my surprise, Tim Wilson comes out in support of her views today:

What is it with these small government, IPA types getting into quasi One Nation migration whinging?

It's very peculiar.

That doesn't seem very sporting of God

Some researchers have studied flu infection rates in Middle Eastern countries with the timing of the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, and Hanukkah in Israel, and the results look very clear:

You'd think they would have done this sort of study before, but apparently Saudi Arabia doesn't like to play ball by providing its figures.  So this is for 6 neighbouring countries, plus Israel.

How ludicrous can he get?

I refer to Steve Kates, Trump cultist, who seems to honestly believe that as soon as the Presidency changed, every economic indicator was obviously due to incredible awesome powers of Trump.   And that everything under Obama was crushingly bleak:

The parlous state that Obama left the American economy in will require an astonishing amount of luck combined with a great deal of very well constructed policy to move past. You do know that in the entire eight years Obama was president, the US economy on not a singe occasion achieved a growth rate as high as 3%. Trump has now achieved it twice, with more to come. Obama even inherited the recovery phase following the GFC which is almost invariably an economy’s period of strongest growth since part of what happens is the recovery of ground lost during the recession. Instead, there were eight years of low growth and stagnant employment. There is not an economic story to tell to his credit, even with interest rates at near zero and public spending at an all-time high, which in standard economic theory are a good thing. Of course, both are harmful to an economy’s prospects but don’t expect your friend to know it or believe it if you tell him.

But why take my word for it. Here is Conrad Black pointing out that Trump is already the most successful U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. And as you can see from the beginning of this excerpt, he is not PDT’s greatest admirer, but even so:

Conrad Black!  Kates is outsourcing his economic analysis to the ex con who been writing odes of  praise for Trump for, what, years? 

monty:  how can you resist not telling Kates he's an embarrassment to his profession?

A New Zealand themed post

*  SBS on Demand has the popular New Zealand movie Boy, made by writer/director/actor Taika Waititi, available for viewing at the moment.  I had not seen it before.   There's a lot to like about:  it looks great for a small budget film; the child actors are excellent and quite charming; and it has a real sense of place.  On the downside, the story doesn't have much propelling it forward, and a clearer change in Waititi's character by the end might have been welcome.  But overall there's something about some of its imagery, scenes and music that made it rattle around in my dreams, and in my mind throughout today, after watching it last night.   That's always a sign of a good movie - when it clings to your brain, even if you don't quite understand why.

* Taika Waititi is, presumably, very happy with how many people have seen and liked Thor: Ragnarok.   it's been out for all of 16 days and will probably have taken over $700 million internationally.   I wonder if he gets a percentage of the take? Incidentally, I was surprised to see in Boy that there is a section where his character talks about the Incredible Hulk, which seems quite prescient.

I am happy to read that he is wanting to make a spinoff to What We Do In the Shadows, concentrating on the werewolves (not swearwolves.)   A clip of the vampire/werewolf confrontation, which amuses me more than it probably should, is here:



*  Well, that's a bit sad:  I see on IMDB that James Rolleston, the lead actor in Boy, made a couple of other movies, but was in a serious car accident in 2016 which involved some pretty major brain injury.   New Zealand media says that he has had to undergo a lot of rehabilitation, which sounds like is ongoing.  He was only recently sentenced for a dangerous driving charge from the indicent.Sounds unclear as to whether he will make a full recovery.

*  On a more serious note, Ed Yong writes at The Atlantic about how New Zealand conservationists who want to try to eradicate all rats and other introduced mammals are very keen on a kind of scary CRISPR technique called gene drives to spread extinction causing genes (for infertility, for example) throughout the rat population.  

I don't know:  getting rid of stoats I can understand; rats I feel sorry for, even if they like bird eggs.   I just can't see that it is worthwhile using gene modification techniques that could risk accidentally eradicating rats worldwide.  That would make for some major ecological changes, surely.   

A fake, I'd say...

On the public's understanding of Brexit

The SMH has a report about how badly Brexit is going, with experts complaining that the public, which apparently in polls still narrowly supports it, just don't understand what's involved:

Menon says the public wrongly equate a "no-deal Brexit" with the status quo. "They think 'no deal' is going to buy a car and you don't like the car so you come back with the car you have. They don't think it means they blow you up inside the old car."

Now this is disgusting

I've been meaning to post about this for some weeks, after I saw a bit of NRA TV on some site or other, with a talking head woman going on about this topic, as Time explains:

The overriding message is that the NRA identity is under attack. There’s a tone of simmering indignation and a sense of persecution that curdles into hostility toward government, media and other cultural institutions. “Their hateful defiance of [Trump’s] legitimacy is an insult to each of us,” Loesch says in one video. “But the ultimate insult is that they think we’re so stupid that we’ll let them get away with it.”

Yes, the NRA is encouraging people to arm themselves because Trump is "under attack" - it seemed as clear as day to me that it was a call for people to arm themselves for a coming civil war, except they are careful enough not to use the words "coming civil war".    And yet the danger of this pandering to armed paranoia is largely ignored by the media and politicians.

The liberals in America ought to be calling this out as dangerous and disgusting.