Owner of obnoxious clown rodeo still likes clown rodeos, apparently

So, Sinclair Davidson got his noggin on the most ridiculous and embarrassing advertisement for the state of Right wing politics in Australia - Outsiders on Sky News, headed by laughing mop head Dean Rowan and "I think Donald Trump may be the greatest man on Earth" Ross Cameron.   (Yes, something very close to those exact words was his assessment of the outcome of the Singapore meeting last week - I saw it on The Weekly.  Not to mention his various gay ridiculing comments made from time to time - a bit rich from a founding member of a parliamentary Christian fellowship who promptly lost his seat after his history of adultery was revealed.) 

He was talking up his and Chris Berg's plan on how to end the ABC as a government funded organisation, and I have to say, the details of the suggestion sound even sillier than I expected.   (Give shares in it for free it to current and ex ABC staff, who will pay capital gains tax when they sell them off if there is any profit in selling them off.   I have many questions, but honestly, am not very interested in the answers.)

What interests me more is that the hosts of the show gave a call out to Catallaxy, for which Sinclair was apparently appreciative.

The big question, which has bothered me for many years, is why isn't he embarrassed to be the owner/controller of the hate filled bile that passes for reader participation (and, increasingly, post content) at that blog?

He is, personally, socially liberal and was obviously at ease with gay marriage, supports high levels of immigration, appears open minded to Muslim immigration, and admits to being friendly with at least one Labor economist politician (Andrew Leigh).    He has always sounded cynical of Trump.

Of course, he is frequently flat out wrong or deeply eccentric in his views (I won't bother listing them again now, it gets tedious), but his libertarian social liberal bent would seem to indicate that he doesn't hate strongly.

But look at the blog!    It is brimming with Right wing conservatives who genuinely think that centre Left politics and economic views are literally evil and threatening the end of Western civilisation.   Many report how they have lost friends and take pride in their obnoxious arguing with people who do radical things like, you know, believe science on climate change.  Several have mentioned past bouts with depression - I judge that many, by the content of their contributions, have actual psychological personality defects for which they could well do with therapy.  Misogyny, ridicule of homosexual public figures and outbreaks of racism are just routine, extremely rarely moderated, and self-moderation amongst participants is rare too.

Steve Kates routinely posts his complete bewilderment of how anyone cannot see Trump as the saviour of the world, and repeats regularly the view that he is one of the few economists who understands it properly.   As for the Left culturally - just a couple of days ago he wrote  how "the scum on the left know no bounds to their vile subnormal behaviour."   And the other contributors, they are full of condescension and ridicule of the mainstream as well, whether it be on climate science, or anything really.   They don't just disagree, they invite no respect because of their complete rudeness and arrogance towards others economists or experts.   No one of a professional standing ever now appears in comments to dispute or correct a post - surely because they know it is a poisonous place in which respectful debate is impossible.


In short, the blog is full of genuine, nutty, irrational hatred, and works as a mutual support network for those obnoxiously ungenerous towards others.   It is in large part,  I have come to believe, the cry of despair of the cultural loser - but ironically, on their one unifying issue (not believing in the existence or seriousness of climate change) they continually think that they are on the verge of "winning".  

Why would he like being in control of such a clown rodeo?   He might think it gives voice to the frustrated - but they've always been able to go to other offensive unmoderated blogs to do that - Larry Pickering and  Michael Smith's come to mind.  Why would you want to hurt your own credibility by heading a blog that is the home of the bitter and nasty social conservative who doesn't even agree with his own socially liberal views?


It is a complete mystery to me.   

A good Krugman on the somewhat illusory benefits of corporate tax cuts

Again, I think Krugman has a talent for straight forward explanations of economic matters, and this one explaining that corporate tax cutting actually seems to be a lot more about profit-shifting, is a good example.  His final paragraph:

So, am I saying that the case for cutting corporate tax rates is unadulterated nonsense? No, it’s adulterated nonsense. There’s some reason to believe that lower tax rates will, other things equal, have some positive effect on capital formation. But the vision of a global market in which real capital moves a lot in response to tax rates is all wrong; most of what we see in response to tax rate differences is profit-shifting, not real investment. And there is no reason to believe that the kind of tax cut America just enacted will achieve much besides starving the government of revenue.

A new idea: a spinning space catapult?

Don't think I have ever heard of this before, even as a vague idea:

On Thursday, a Silicon Valley startup called SpinLaunch Inc. will reveal the first details of its plans to build a machine meant to hurl rockets into space. To achieve that goal, SpinLaunch has secured $40 million from some top technology investors, said Jonathan Yaney, the founder.

The company remains tight-lipped about exactly how this contraption will work, although its name gives away the basic idea. Rather than using propellants like kerosene and liquid oxygen to ignite a fire under a rocket, SpinLaunch plans to get a rocket spinning in a circle at up to 5,000 miles per hour and then let it go—more or less throwing the rocket to the edge of space, at which point it can light up and deliver objects like satellites into orbit....

SpinLaunch’s so-called kinetic energy launch system would use electricity to accelerate a projectile and help do much of the dirty work fighting through gravity and the atmosphere. In theory, this means the company could build a simpler, less expensive rocket that’s more efficient at ferrying satellites. “Some people call it a non-rocket launch,” said Yaney. “It seems crazy. It seems fantastic. But we are actually using relatively low-tech industrial components to break this problem into manageable chunks.”

Well, spinning at that speed there won't be any smuggling of a person on board to get into space.  Nor would I assume anything very delicate in a satellite.  I am sceptical of the usefulness of the concept, actually.

Pointless fist waving continues

Ah, I hope that in retirement, like a reverse Jim Cairns, Sinclair Davidson and his best buddy Berg can be found sitting at a card table at some outdoor market selling their latest self published screed about how important it is that (in their case) the ABC sees its comeuppance. 

They may be admired by the more obnoxious, meat-headier parts of the Coalition and the wingnutty internet for their pointless campaigning on this, but it's a ridiculous campaign that has every chance of helping ABC loving Labor votes, rather than helping those who want to abolish it.

When Rupert dies and stops funding the IPA, perhaps the campaign will slow down anyway.

About that CO2 sucking machine

I've been waiting for some nuanced commentary on the recent report about extracting CO2 from the air for fuel production.   David Roberts does a pretty good job at that in his article at Vox:

Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change

I say again - send Jonathan Swan back to Murdochland, where he belongs

Typical Swan - look at his tweet giving support to the Trump FBI conspiracists on old news, when the report itself says it found no evidence that the political views expressed in texts affected investigation decisions.  Make sure to read the comment following the tweet too.

Swan is an idiot for thinking that anyone working in the FBI shouldn't have a private view that Trump is a dangerous idiot.   Because we all know he is.   Even a substantial proportion of his cult supporters really know it - they are just willing to encourage him anyway for culture war reasons, based on their absurd belief that Obama was the worst president ever.   Look at Hugh Hewitt's defence of Trump's quip that he'll probably never admit he was wrong about Kim, even if he is.   That's a good sign of "candor" in the perverse world of conservative politics now. 

Update:  to be clearer - of course, it is not a good look for an investigator to be texting that - and it is clearly right that he be taken off any role in the investigation when they were found.   So, yeah, the guy's been foolish.   But, ultimately, if there is no evidence of wrong doing from an investigative point of view, the view the investigator has of the suspect hardly matters.

How long can a cult last in the internet age?

There has been an upswing in people noting that the Republican Party, and about 30% of Americans, are acting like cultists when it comes to Trump.  

This is, of course, depressing in that cult members are not swayed by rational argument.   Or at least, they think they are being rational, when in fact they have lost all objectively.   Getting them out of a cult mindset usually takes a long time.

On the other hand, I was musing idly while in traffic this morning, cults, whether they be of religious or political nature, rarely last all that long, as far as the big picture of history goes.   The tensions, power plays and rivalry within them eventually cause a break up, with members finally giving up and looking for another key to life.   Think of the various Indian gurus gone bad, or your dictators with former public acclaim who end up on the end of a rope.  

What's unique about the current situation is the role of the internet and private media (principally, of course, Rupert Murdoch) in prolonging cult worship and the complete lack of objectivity that is key to a cult's existence.  

It would be more interesting if it weren't so worrying, this matter of how long modern communications and media can keep a political cult alive.    But I guess I remain somewhat optimistic that the dam wall will break, and the disgust with which history will view the enablers of the cult will be long lasting.

The Right wing intellectual decline, continued

Niall Ferguson is copping a lot of criticism for his latest newspaper column, in which he mounts an argument that the chaotic, who-knows-what-he'll-do-or-say-next, style and instincts of Trump is just what the globe (or at least, America) needs.  This is the particularly offending part:

Yes, there is much to be said in principle for an international order based on explicit rules; and yes, those rules should favor free trade over protectionism. But if in practice your liberal international order has the consequence that China overtakes you, first economically and then strategically, there is probably something wrong with it.

The key to the Trump presidency is that it holds out probably the last opportunity the United States has to stop or at least slow China’s ascendancy. And, while it may not be intellectually very satisfying, Trump’s approach to the problem, which is to assert American power in unpredictable and disruptive ways, may in fact be the only viable option left.

As people are saying on twitter:

Yes, once upon a time, conservative intellectuals valued, well, intellectualism.  Now they're reduced to cheering the opposite because "that'll show them." 

And this:

And there are many other worthy Twitter comments as well, noting that wrecking Western alliances is playing exactly into Chinese (and Russian) hands.  

But the best analysis of how Ferguson has dumbed himself down is a Krugman thread, which you can read here.

Record rainfall watch - France this time

France soaked by record rainfall as deluge continues

Spider raccoon gets to climb another skyscraper

Well, this is a nice story.  

A daredevil raccoon that became an online sensation when it spent almost 20 nail-biting hours scaling a 25-storey office tower in Minnesota has been safely rescued and released back into the wild after making it to the top of the building unscathed.

The animal’s ascent on the outside of the UBS building in downtown St Paul city was watched across the world on social media on Tuesday, with updates on its progress posted regularly by the Minnesota Public Radio under the hashtag #MPRraccoon. Crowds also gathered at the scene to watch.

Seems about right

I've usually like William Saletan's commentary, and his take on Trump/Kim sounds nearly right to me.   (I think he gives too much credit to Trump though when he calls him a "skilled salesman".)  

Sickophantic

There're millions of words being written about the Trump/Kim summit, and I'm finding it tiresome to choose which seems to me to sum it up best.   So I'll just show throw a few of my own thoughts down:

*  I think it likely that Trump's limited range of rhetorical and social skills means that he has no other way of sounding positive about a political leader without coming across as inappropriately gushing.  I mean, really - can you imagine the Republican reaction to Obama talking about a "special bond" with a "very talented" North Korean dictator who has internment camps and kills his political rivals and poorly performing generals?  It's quite absurd that conservatives (or at least, more conservatives - there are a couple) are not horrified - but then again, their childish, blind, tribalistic support of Trump is absurd at the best of times.   Ironically,  I think the regular media is actually being light on the criticism of Trump for such sycophantic language, perhaps because they have made the same judgement as me (that he just doesn't have the skill to do anything better)?

* The agreement as signed means nothing.   No one will know if anything productive has come out of the meeting for another 12 months at least, I would guess.

*  I have been a bit puzzled by South Korea being too lavish in its praise of Trump early on.  Now that he seems to be making decisions affecting them without being pre-warned (cancelling joint military exercises) I think they may be realising they're not exactly dealing with a reliable ally.    Sucked in, as teens of my era used to say.

My best guess as to what Trump and Kim just signed ...

....is that's a time share deal for some Trump resort, and an associated golf course membership. 

CRISPR and cancer

Techno optimists of the "let's genetically engineer humans to make them better" extreme might need to reduce their expectations of the use of CRISPR as a gene editing technique:

Editing cells’ genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk that the altered cells, intended to treat disease, will trigger cancer, two studies published on Monday warn — a potential game-changer for the companies developing CRISPR-based therapies.

In the studies, published in Nature Medicine, scientists found that cells whose genomes are successfully edited by CRISPR-Cas9 have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient. That could make some CRISPR’d cells ticking time bombs, according to researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and, separately, Novartis.

CRISPR has already dodged two potentially fatal bullets — a 2017 claim that it causes sky-high numbers of off-target effects was retracted in March, and a report of human immunity to Cas9 was largely shrugged off as solvable. But experts are taking the cancer-risk finding seriously.

Somewhat interesting post on GDP

Tax havens make GDP screwy

She's been told for years that uncertainty is not her friend, but still she goes on...

Both unsurprising and surprising

They ran tests on kitchen towels which had been used by families and not been washed for a month (!) and found lots of bacteria on them.   (Come on, surely families which aren't headed by someone hooked on ice or heroin wash or change tea towels more often than that?)

But even so, the bacteria found weren't the worst kind:

As for the bacteria found in the study "what's listed here doesn't initially raise concerns with me," Chapman said. The study didn't find any of the common culprits of foodborne illness, such as Salmonella, Campylobacter or pathogenic types of E. coli, such as E. coli O157:H7, he noted.

Although staph can indeed cause foodborne illness when it's found in food, the bacterium is also very common on skin. "The fact that it's [on] the towel isn't as concerning as [it being in] food," Chapman said.

That's surprising.

God looks a bit like..Jimmy Fallon with bigger hair?

Some psychologists seem to have too much time on their hands:

A team of psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used a new technique to construct what a large sample of 511 American Christians think God looks like.

Participants in the study saw hundreds of randomly varying face-pairs and selected which face from each pair appeared more like how they imagined God to appear. By combining all the selected faces, the researchers could assemble a composite "face of God" that reflected how each person imagined God to appear.

Their results were both surprising and revealing. From Michelangelo to Monty Python, Illustrations of God have nearly always shown him as an old and august white-bearded Caucasian man. But the researchers found that many Christians saw God as younger, more feminine, and less Caucasian that popular culture suggests.

He's the uninspiring result:

Annihilated

I saw the reasonably well reviewed made for Netflix science fiction movie Annihilation on the weekend.

I'm puzzled that it got any good reviews.  None of the characters felt real;  the reason for and aim of the all female expedition was poorly explained; the science was vague and bogus;  and the alien thing causing all the problem was destroyed pathetically easily.  

Science fiction dealing with fast evolution and genetic changes is rarely good - I'm thinking of the not very funny Evolution, the rapidly growing alien thing on the space station in Life, and now this.  At least those movies got bad reviews.  This one should have too.

Trump cult watch

Of course Steve Kates and his not-very-merry band of Western Civilisation catastrophists at Catallaxy think the instant classic G7 photograph is great because (on their interpretation) it shows a resolute Trump resisting the pressure of Europeans who are the source of all that's wrong with the world: what with their social security safety nets, universal health care systems, higher taxation and acceptance of refugee immigrants from regions destabilised by the US. 

Here's one of their oh-so-funny quips (if you are living in 1950, if not earlier):

"Percy Popinjay" is quite the gentleman, apparently. 

Back in reality land, I liked Krugman's tweet take on Trump:

Etc.   (He goes on to complain about the inadvertent "pro Trump" bias that is given by journalists who don't want to just call out Trump, but try to "both side" the argument. He's right.)

When deplorables meet

Who knows what could come out of the Singapore summit?   Surely anything is possible when you put two vain, autocratic idiots in a room.  (Sure, Trump hasn't blown up any generals - although I have often wondered whether the stories of movie style show killings by Kim Jong-Un have been propaganda pieces.) 

I do wonder what might happen if, through some bit of espionage intrigue, Kim is struck down via poisoning or some other sophisticated assassination attempt while in Singapore.   Would the faithful generals back home try to launch a nuclear attack, or would they think that it was a great opportunity to get rid of his dynasty? As to who would try to take out Kim:   well, if the Putin plan is to bring disorder into the rest of the world so Russia can fill the vacuum, it seems to me that he may well think there could be advantage in it happening.

If I were looking after security in Singapore, I would be looking very carefully at any person with a Russian connection who happens to be in town. 

Update:   I didn't read this before I wrote this post, but I see that Hot Air has a post speculating on the security risk to Kim, too.   It says a Russian cargo jet followed Kim's jet to Singapore too, with an armoured vehicle and a private supply of food.   That would suggest it might be easier for Russians to cause him harm that I realised.

Catching up with TMBG

I used to follow They Might be Giants very closely, but as with all bands, I found some diminishing returns on a couple of CDs and drifted away.  Spotify has let me catch up with there albums of the last 8 or so years.

I have to say, I'm very keen on Glean from 2015.   And listening back on my favourite albums (Mink Car, and Factory Showroom), it's really incredible that a decade or two after those they were are still making songs that are so distinctly TMBG in quirky lyrics (often on dark or vaguely sinister themes) but counterpointed by enormously catchy, upbeat tunes.   The appeal of the band has always been the absurdist amusement of this contrast (right from their first song - Don't Let's Start) - and as I say, it's hard to believe they have been able to mine that successfully for so long. 

These clips are just graphic, but here are two songs I like, a lot.  (Erase a bit more so.)  If you can tell exactly what it's about, let me know.





Have I said this before on this blog - if ever there was a band that could have a musical play made based on their songs, this would be it.  Forget Queen - TMBG's output has been enormous, with a huge number of immediately likeable songs which could be thematically tied together.  Of course, it might have to involve obsessive boyfriends, and death, and a touch of mental illness - but Little Shop of Horrors managed fun with a supposedly dark theme.

About Bourdain

Seems that Anthony Bourdain was way more popular than I had realised.   There's a really major outpouring of grief and upset at his death underway.

I didn't mind him, but wasn't his greatest fan.  I thought Kitchen Confidential was a bit over-rated, but it certainly did serve as a (perhaps inadvertent) warning (as was Ratatouille, now that I think of it) to any young adult interested in a career as a chef  that a good proportion of their fellow careerists will be crazy.   (It seems that before his book, there was no clear understanding in the public mind as to just how crazy the profession could be.)   And I do tend to worry about memoirs which talk too cheerfully about the dissolute days of youth spent under the effects of copious amounts of drugs - they can work as an inadvertent advertisement for experimentation, as well as miss the perspective of other people who had to put up with them at that time. 

His TV persona was generally likeable, and he did go to interesting places, even if the food there wasn't always appetizing.   But I still had my reservations (pun unintended):   perhaps he came across as a bit too cheerful and relentlessly convivial at times;  rather like some comedians, that can cause me to wonder whether some of it is a front. 

Still, yeah, it's sad.

Update:   Gee, in reaction to Bourdain's suicide, Zack Beauchamp at Vox has written one of the clearest and best optimistic takes on depression and overcoming it that I have ever read, based on his personal experience.    Maybe it should be prescribed reading for all teenagers....

Cynical about treaties

First the usual disclaimer:   like most white Australians, I don't have any detailed knowledge about aboriginal community management, particularly in the Northern Territory.   So anyone who does is welcome to call my comments ignorant and ill informed.

That said - I am completely cynical about the latest round of "but if only we can get the aboriginal communities involved in decision making process, then everything will start to get better" talk that has culminated in the Northern Territory starting a "treaty process":

On Friday the chief minister of the territory, Michael Gunner, arrived at Barunga festival to sign an agreement to undertake a treaty process that he called “an open slate. We will start with nothing on or off the table.”

Gunner’s message was also directed at his own side of the table. “Change of this order may be the hardest within government itself. We’re the biggest risk.

“So I’m saying to the departments, this is non-negotiable. The old way is finished.”
“At the pace communities are comfortable, the government is ceding decision-making power back to where it belongs – the communities.”

Gunner told the crowd he was proud to have signed the memorandum of understanding, calling it “the most significant Aboriginal affairs reform in the NT this generation”.

“It is right we lead this process because it is decent, because we are alive to Aboriginal culture like no other jurisdiction, but also because it is smart. Treaty – reconciliation, healing, empowerment – is fundamentally good for every Territorian.”

We seem to be in some sort of perpetual cycle of "government will cede more control to communities/elders/land councils and that will improve everything"  to "hey, wait: the way we've set this up just isn't working - maybe governments need to take more direct control here"  and back to "this time, when government cedes more control to the communities/elders/land councils it will improve everything."  The cycle period seems to be around 20 - 30 period.    We are currently in a period where the "ceding more control is the answer" is on the upswing again.

The immediate problem I see with this feel good talk from Gunner is that the communities aren't truly going to be able to control the source of their money - government revenue and budgeting - so telling them they're going to have real power to make all important decisions is pretty illusory.   I would bet my last dollar that it is still going to be a case of "well, of course it would be ideal if residents in this isolated community X didn't have to go to town Y to get service Z - but there's only so much money to go around.  Someone has to make the tough, financially constrained, decision."

And surely it's not as if Northern Territory departments over the last 40 years haven't tried consultative engagement with the representative community groups of the day.

I don't want to sound like a letter writer to The Australian on this issue, but there does seem to be an inordinate amount of fanciful thinking along the lines "if just we can get the way Aboriginal voices are reflected in decision making right, everything will be better."   And the problem is that all of the effort wasted on "getting the model right" must be wasteful of money and effort that could be put into more productive things.

Some things are pretty obvious:

*  isolated communities with no ties to economic activity (and which cannot sustain themselves with local farming and maintenance)  are never going to easily survive as healthy, good places to live or visit - regardless of the colour or race of the resident.  

*  aboriginal groups and representatives are never of unified voice and argue a lot amongst themselves.   No representative system is going to be perfect - find one that is modest in cost, not obviously capable of easy corruption, and stick with it - but don't ever imagine that it will keep everyone happy.

*  the alcohol, drug and social problems are typical of what you see in indigenous communities around the world  which suffer the culture shock of being suddenly hit by modernity.  Pride in maintaining at least elements of previous culture might help, but it's been tried everywhere and is certainly no cure all.  Obsessing too much about culture - going on about cultural appropriation and whinging if an aboriginal word is obscured on a magazine cover - is utterly unproductive and self -indulgent to the real problems.

*  pinning hopes on changes to representation in government decisions is just rearranging the deck chairs on a ship that, if not actually sinking, is always going to be barely seaworthy, springing leaks everywhere.

Western civilisation and universities

I'm not entirely sure why people, including Jason Soon, should be so concerned over ANU or Sydney University saying "no thanks" for funding for a degree in "Western Civilisation".

Brian Schmidt says it was due to it being clear that the funders wanted an "unprecedented" level of influence.  Given Tony Abbott's comments in Quadrant, I find that far from an implausible claim.  Can you imagine Tony taking it well if some academic or student on the course started writing articles cynical or critical of aspects of the civilisation that, apparently, hasn't been studied enough?

As for the complaint that if universities take funding from foreign governments for "research centres", why do they baulk at conservative's money?:   it probably does come down to whether it's a matter of soft influence, or hard influence.   Surely, foreign money is given in at least the hope of encouraging sympathetic treatment; but if it is given on a clear basis that all studies are expected to be positive, well, I can understand universities rejecting it.

And besides, isn't the money going to be accepted by some university or other (wasn't the Australian Catholic University saying "pick me", or what about Bond University?)   Or is it that the Ramsay Centre is wanting to deliberately annoy only universities with a Leftist reputation by buying their way inside?     

Talking up a need for somewhat old fashioned study of the glories of Western Civilisation has been a thing coming from the IPA and its fellow travellers for some time now.   Conservatives like the idea because they want to fight cultural relativism; libertarian/classical liberals tend to want it more so they can go on and on about how fantastic capitalism is, because that suits their own small government/low regulation/low tax agenda.  (You have to give capitalism free space to breath - how could you want to hurt something that has done so much for you?)   

I have some sympathy to the anti-relativism view, but I can't really see that this is likely to be a successful way to promote it.   And libertarians can always comfort themselves with already owing RMIT - where Davidson, Potts, Berg and even Trump's world champion suck up Kates make a living.

I don't really see the Ramsay plan being a good use of money... 

Counting bees

I suppose I am a little surprised about this, too:

Math Bee: Honeybees Seem To Understand The Notion Of Zero

The details:

Howard trained one group of bees to understand that sugar water would always be located under the card with the least number of symbols. "They could come and see two circles versus three circles, or four triangles versus one triangle, or something like that," she explains.
The bees quickly learned to fly to the card with the fewest symbols, an impressive feat.
But then they got another test: The researchers presented the bees with a card that had a single symbol — and a blank card that had nothing on it.
The bees seemed to understand that "zero" was less than one, because they flew toward the blank card more often than you'd expect if they were choosing at random — although they weren't that good at distinguishing between the two.
It got easier for them when they had to compare zero with a larger number. "When we showed them zero versus six, they did that at a much higher level than zero versus one," Howard says. "So what tells us is that they consider zero as an actual quantity along the number line. They're actually better at doing zero versus six because those two numbers are further apart."

The reaction:

"This is quite amazing, in my view, that bees can really do it," says Andreas Nieder, a scientist who studies how animals' process the idea of "nothing" and was not part of the research team.
He says zero was discovered relatively recently in human history, and was essential in the development of both mathematics and science. "It's a hard and very abstract concept," Nieder says. "It is a sort of eccentric uncle in the number family."
Previous experiments have shown that honeybees have some facility with numbers, because they were able to count landmarks as they foraged around for a sweet reward. But in these tests, the insects couldn't count very high — only to about four.

Update:   Now that I think about it...isn't a simpler explanation that the bees were just learning the rule "the less cluttered a card appears, the more likely a reward"?    If so, can you interpret this as understanding "zero"?   I mean, a blank card is less cluttered than anything with symbols on it, and the more symbols, the more obviously less cluttered is the blank card.  

Is this a case of over-interpretation of a result?

Culture war noted

Tim Blair's been busy ridiculing Jonathan Green (that's nothing new) over the Meanjin cover storm in a (not very important) tea cup, but this time he has a point.  He notes that Warren Mudine, who has drifted so far Right that he attended the Friedman libertarian/we-hate-taxes/climate-change?-meh   conference a couple of weeks ago, has joined in ridiculing the rush to apologise for a bit of magazine cover art that obscures an aboriginal word.   I don't trust the judgement of Mundine - I think he's auditioning for the role of aboriginal Mark Latham - but as with Blair, despite this, he has a point.

The aboriginal cultural grievance industry can get quite ridiculous.   And, as I noted in a post earlier this year, it seems that some aboriginal groups are increasingly  radicalised in terms of expectations of some sort of self governance within government, and the making of treaties that would mean some sort of land rights/compensation way beyond Mabo.   It isn't going to happen.

As I've said before, I would not care if Australia Day is moved, given that it's a poorly historically justified day for celebrating the start of a new nation.

Beyond that, there comes a point at which activists and their supporters need to be told they're denying the obvious - that cultures blend and change all the time;  the symbolism of the change of place names does extremely little for the well being of people;  cultural pride does not extend to being able to stop other people using parts of it creatively.   (I heard on some Radio National show earlier this week a familiar female aboriginal activist talking about the upset that tribal elders had years ago when they realised how many European people, including women, were using didgeridoos for busking and general entertainment, and they discussed it for years before finally realising that the cat was already out of the bag, and what can you do to stop people playing them anyway.  I could have told them that at the start.)   

To have sympathy to the genuine problems of aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders should not require that you have to lose sight of common sense and obvious facts about the nature of culture and unrealistic expectations as to control over it.   Yet that is what is a large part of aboriginal advocacy now insists upon, and the likes of Jonathan Green are too happy to go along with it.

Deserves time off

I presume that office workplace productivity in Brisbane, if not Australia, is at some sort of record low today as a result of the exquisitely off the chart, absurd embarrassment quotient of how the "poo jogger" was outed via explicit, crystal clear, in-the-act photo posted by news sites.    Throw in his position as a "national quality manager" of our best known (and controversial) retirement village corporation, and how can you not talk about that at work??  It's impossible.  And the amount of puns and poor taste jokes - I think managers all over the city should just be telling staff they can have an hour off, get it out of their system, before starting work again.

As for Mr Macintosh - I think he should just look at leaving the country, not only his job.

We already knew this, but still worth reading

Trump, Fox News, and Twitter have created a dangerous conspiracy theory loop

It shows how the latest Trump conspiracy tweet originated with - for God's sake - Gateway Pundit, from which it was promoted on Fox "News" and then into the President's brain.  

If you don't see the dangerous nature of that, and aren't appalled by Rupert making money out of running a conspiracy news network, there's something wrong with you.

More Jordan Peterson criticism

This review of his 12 Rules for Life book in the Times Literary Supplement pretty much seals it for me - Peterson can be safely ignored as having little of value to say.   The criticisms of his selective quoting of nutty male shooters is particularly effective.   

A discouraging bit of information

Someone at the Interpreter looks at the military capacity of China to stage an invasion of Taiwan, and makes this observation:

....the Chinese are doing the necessary training and planning needed to master amphibious operations. President Xi Jinping told the PLA to prepare to take on Taiwan by 2020, and it is doing so.

I can't imagine the sort of international turmoil an attempted forced takeover of Taiwan would entail.  

An unexpected way for climate change to kill (in India, at least)

I hadn't heard this before, from an interview about India suffering under climate change:

Now let’s come to violence. What is really startling was the dowry deaths. The study I’ve quoted found that many people treat dowry deaths as income smoothing, and that’s a very provocative way of putting it…you kill your wife and marry a new wife and have an income when crop income goes down because of the drought. But they’ve seen that correlation. It’s something to keep in mind.

Meanwhile, I hadn't even noticed that parts of India have been having a heatwave:

Northern India, like neighbouring Pakistan, is in the grip of a heatwave, with temperatures reaching 47C. A blanket of hot air has settled on Delhi clearing pavements across the usually busy capital. India is particularly vulnerable to temperature increases associated with climate change. Since 1992, about 25,000 Indians are estimated to have died because of heatwaves. Yet the country is quietly optimistic that it can prevent at least some of those deaths.

The problems of Europe

Found via Peter Whiteford's tweets, an interesting blog post by Branko Milanovic about why Europe is having problems caused by its wealth, and how they are not likely to just go away.

Speaking of Europe, another example of how Brexiters just tried to wing their way through the enormous practical problems of their scheme:

Brexit nightmare: The 27km traffic jams at the Dover border

The three new drivers of the Australian economy

*  craft beer
*  burger joints (other than the fast food chains)
*  salmon (farming and eating)

As it happens, I pretty much approve of all three (with a reservation about the number of burger joints).  

PS:  my daughter observed last weekend that she could live purely on salmon (pan fried with crispy skin), mashed potato, and garlic beans.   I then cooked that for dinner.   [My wife is a fantastic cook, but I do make the best mashed potato.] 

Whiteford on progressive tax

A good article here by Peter Whiteford, looking at the question of how much tax the rich pay.

I liked this part in particular (my bold):

The most obvious reason why the top 1 per cent or 10 per cent pay a higher share of tax is that they receive a much higher share of taxable income. Tax Office figures show that in 2015–16 the highest 1 per cent of income taxpayers — just over 100,000 people earning $330,000 or more per year, which adds up to about $72 billion of taxable income, or an average of roughly $720,000 per taxpayer — paid 16.9 per cent of net tax but received 9.6 per cent of all taxable income. (After their income taxes, that 1 per cent of taxpayers still netted about 7.2 per cent of all after-tax income.)

So even if Australia had a completely flat tax — a single rate with no tax-free threshold — very high–income earners would still pay close to 10 per cent of all income taxes. They pay 16.0 per cent rather than 9.6 per cent because Australia has a progressive income tax scale: the rate of tax paid increases as the taxpayer’s income increases.

Puts all of the "but the rich pay too much tax" whiners into perspective.

Whiteford is like the perfect antidote to Sinclair Davidson, Adam Creighton, and David Leyonhjelm:  knowledgeable, fair, reasonable and always polite.

Wondering about American employment

Recently, I was talking to an Australian businessman (a high level corporate manager type in supermarket retail) who had taken on a job for a (I think Southern State based) US supermarket chain for a few years.   He was based in Florida, but had travelled a lot with the job.

You may well think that Australia goes too far with its workers' rights (I do, having recently only realised that a worker can have unpaid sick leave of up to 3 months before they can be fired for, well,  never being at work) - but it is pretty incredible to hear about how draconian the work conditions in a Red state in the US can be.   Absolutely minimal leave (I think, 5 days p.a. for any reason?) for the first few years (with consequences such as a mother being at work the afternoon after her son's funeral);  the low, low, low minimum wage (with no chance of top up from customers, as with tipping in the hospitality industry);  a significant number of workers aged over 80 simply to keep health insurance cover; and 18 year old shelf stackers wearing pistols at work, which makes an Australian feel a touch nervous given the number of times you read of workers who "go postal".

Given this, it does make me wonder whether "full employment" in the US is all that it's cracked up to be compared to a country with strong work and pay standards such as Australia.  I mean, surely a significant percentage of those in the US could be the working poor.

But, I was surprised to read this column a couple of days ago in the WAPO by Robert Samuelson:  Why the economy is roaring.

He makes the obvious point - things were headed this way under Obama, and it's ridiculous and partisan blindness to claim Trump is solely responsible.

But what was more interesting was survey results regarding satisfaction with their lot:

“Nearly three-quarters of adults say they are either living comfortably (33 percent) or doing OK (40 percent), when asked to describe how they are managing financially,” the report says. The share “doing OK” has risen more than 10 percentage points since 2013. Similarly, in 2013, 13 percent of Americans found it “difficult to get by”; by 2017, the comparable figure was only 7 percent.

Labor markets are tighter. In 2017, 52 percent of workers received a wage increase, up from 46 percent in 2016. Gains were especially large for workers with a high school degree or less; 49 percent of these workers got a raise, up from 38 percent in 2016. Although many indicators of economic well-being were lower for blacks and Hispanics compared with whites, they were much higher than in 2013.

I am really curious about the 40% figure for "doing OK".   Does this reflect innate US optimism about their lot in life and/or potential for upwards social mobility, or is it more a case of substantial ignorance about how good the social safety net is in more centrist political countries like Australia, Canada, and most of Europe?

I mean, other parts of the survey indicate there is something a bit odd about the "doing OK" category:

About 40 percent of adults say they would have trouble meeting a $400 emergency expense; however, the share was 50 percent in 2013.   

So, about 25% are not financially "comfortable" or "doing OK", but a further 15% who are presumably in the "doing OK" category would have trouble finding a spare $400 for an emergency?

This points to somewhat lower standards to what "doing OK" might mean, surely.

Americans might be feeling pretty good about the economy for the moment, but to an outsider, their judgement about such matters seems peculiarly, well, American.

Striking similarities

Let's see:

*     widely understood to only have power due to the support of a foreign nation [tick]

*     considers himself an autocrat completely above the law [tick]

*     fires underlings on a whim  [tick]

*     has a weight problem, and is generally weird looking [tick]

*    maintains position due to 

       a.    cowardice of other national politicians [tick] and

       b.    a large element of brainwashed population who only view his approved propaganda [tick]

*     thinks meeting other autocrats is cool [tick]

*     is rarely seen with his wife [tick]

I'll probably think of more during the day....

Conspiracy talk is only fair in one direction, apparently

Ha.  Karen Townsend at Hot Air complains about the "conspiracy theories" surrounding Melania Trump not being seen for the last three weeks (after spending a week in hospital for a minor procedure - something which apparently itself was unusual.)

This is all a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, according to Townsend. 

If you ask me, the mainstream media has actually downplayed the peculiar circumstances of her absence - last week, they noted her having tweeted that she is busy working while out of the public eye, without expressing any doubt (as far as I could see) as to whether the tweet was genuinely written by her.

This absence is genuinely suspicious, if you ask me.   If I had to take a guess, it would be more about workshopping with someone representing Donaldas to how she can get out of this marriage during the presidency with minimal damaging optics for him. 

And how ludicrous is it for anyone even half supportive of Trump, who thrives on conspiracy theories that are as nutty and illfounded as hell, complaining about a moderate bit of speculation from the Left? 

Something worth seeing in Dubai

I have always felt ambivalent about visiting Dubai - I'm pretty sure it would be impossible not to be impressed by some of the structures and facilities, but the history of imported, poorly treated labour that built it is somewhat off-putting.   (I'm also disinclined to visit any nation where sorcery is still a crime.)
 
Anyway, the Burj Khalifa is something that I'm sure I would spend a lot of time looking at, both during the day and at night.   They use it for some pretty remarkable light show displays:



Got that via Gulf News.

The Enlightenment and all that

I noticed an interesting thread on Ross Douthat's twitter feed about the matter of the Enlightenment and racism.    I think he's basically supporting Jamelle Bouie on the matter, but to be honest, I haven't read Bouie's threat to get to the bottom of the argument.

But - it is basically about saying that the Enlightenment was not all sweetness and light, to the extent that it lead to scientific arguments to justify racism.  The arguments against racism essentially came from enlightened religion more than from a scientific view of the matter.

This seems a fair summary, from someone else on twitter involved in the debate:

Yzaguirre says elsewhere that he thinks it's wrong to "fetishise" the Enlighenment.

Which brings me partly to the reason I wanted to blog about this.  

Libertarians tend to be big on promoting the Enlightenment and science - yet as a political movement, they have been at the forefront of funding and promoting anti-science denial of climate change, simply because they don't like the obvious policy prescription (a tax on carbon).

How hypocritical is that?   Extremely, and with dangerous consequences for the entire planet.  

A mystery

The ABC has been heavily promoting Mystery Road, and it received some good reviews by Left-ish reviewers, so I gave it a go last night. 

I was underwhelmed.    Very, very thin character writing if you ask me, and an outback atmosphere that felt cleaned up for inner city audiences.   (Well, I have to admit I am not expert at knowing the atmospherics of remote Australian towns, but then, I've never been to a lot of European countries either but can still get a sense of authenticity from a crime show.)  

Very, very little about it (actually, nothing) felt convincing to me, and its only benefit might be as an advertisement for sunscreen to prevent premature ageing.   (That's mean, but it's either that or really, really unlucky genetics that account for Judy Davis's extraordinary appearance.) 

From my camera today

Yes, it's the wood frame office block, the construction of which I've been following:

You're all fascinated I'm sure!

Yet more wood:

And here's an older pic, just to continue the theme:

Once a jerk, always a jerk

I had the impression that the (now pardoned) Dinesh D'Souza had become an unhinged jerk only later in life.   Remember this quote from Max Boot?:

The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. Now, as the Daily Beast notes, he has become a conspiratorial crank who has suggested that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was staged by liberals, that Barack Obama is a “gay Muslim” and Michelle Obama is a man and that Adolf Hitler, who sent 50,000 homosexuals to prison, “was NOT anti-gay.” He managed to sink even lower last week by mocking stunned Parkland school-shooting survivors after the Florida legislature defeated a bill to ban assault weapons: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

But I see from this Mother Jones article from 2014, being widely tweeted today, that he was well and truly a jerk even in college:

Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome?

As to Trump's decision to use his pardon power, David Roberts' comment sounds right:

More about Babylon Berlin

Gee, this Netflix show (watched episode 5 last night) continues to impress, for the following reasons:

*  the cinematic scale and direction is obvious in every episode - so many extras costumed up;  streetscapes, nightclubs and subway stations that are completely convincingly art directed (if that's the word) for the era.   No doubt, some of it is digitally created (I have read that one recurring street setting is), but it is very hard to tell where it begins and ends, and most of the settings look satisfyingly large and real.   No wonder it was so expensive to make.

*  I don't know if this will continue for the whole series, but it's pleasantly different to find that the main character, an out of town police detective trying to investigate something in Berlin, seems to be so hapless in so many ways.    It's not played for laughs, but he just seems so unlucky all the time, and it's starting to amuse me.

*  If you ignore the sordid sex aspects, it does make nightclubbing in the era look a hell of a lot more fun than nightclubbing seems to have ever been in my lifetime.   No chemically induced party drugs or electronic doof doof music for them to have a good time - just champagne or spirits and live music.

*  It makes you want to know more about the actual history.   That's not a bad thing at all...

Some links of interest:

The Truth About Babylon Berlin, featuring this take: 

There is some gratuitous sex and violence in Babylon Berlin, which at first had me thinking the show would be just another titillating TV sensation. But the attention paid to costumes, architecture, historic events and other details kept me watching, and it paid off. Aside from being an over the top noir thriller with a labyrinthine plot, the series also serves as a basic primer on the Weimar years.

Heh:  Salon praising it for showing that some women of the time did not shave their armpits.

A professor of German studies has a slightly different take on the aim of the show.  Not entirely sure if he is right, but worth reading.

Spygate is failing

Trump's died in the wool "base" may soon have a problem on their hands - support for Trump's cynical and stupid "branding" of "spygate" is not getting support from Republican congressmen, or even some key Trump supporters on Fox News.    Has Rupert had enough??  (I doubt it, but this is an odd turn of events in the propaganda network):

Asked to respond to Gowdy’s remarks, a Fox News commentator known for defending the president also cast doubt on Trump’s claims. Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano (better known and often quoted by Trump as Judge Napolitano) said claims that the FBI placed an undercover spy on Trump’s campaign “seem to be baseless.”

“There is no evidence for that whatsoever,” Napolitano said. The fact that the FBI source spoke with “people on the periphery of the campaign,” he said, “is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations.”

Update:  Politico has a story to the same effect, noting this:

Late Wednesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted a lengthy segment on the matter featuring appearances by two Trump campaign aides who alleged came into contact with the informant — Carter Page and Sam Clovis. But despite Hannity’s protestations, neither affirmatively said a spy had infiltrated the campaign.

"Were you spied upon. Did a spy approach you?" Hannity asked Page.
“I’m not sure, Sean,” Page replied.

Clovis, who oversaw the campaign’s foreign policy team, told Hannity that the informant contacted him, but didn’t pump him for information.

And this:

Dershowitz joined in Wednesday morning by conceding that he was “on the way to being persuaded” that the FBI’s use of an informant was proper.

The most clueless and ridiculous political commentator in Australia

It's a wonder RMIT isn't looking for ways to sack Steve Kates, given that his political commentary on Donald Trump and the e-vil Left (by which he means anyone who does not see Trump as the masterful saviour of the world just as he does) is so deeply, deeply embarrassing he must surely be putting off some people from studying there:

Political derangement is a mental disease for which the left is highly susceptible. PDT is demonstrating that every principle they have lived by is wrong, but rather than being willing to learn, they have become even more worm-eaten than ever. It is not just sickening to watch, of course, but frightening. 

Climate denialist will be forever in denial

Another good column by Graham Readfearn showed the dishonesty and ignorance of "Jonova", who claims that the old "carbon rise lags temperature rise" argument was what set her off on her life of climate change denial, despite the fact the explanation for it was always well known.

Note the conspiracy ideation she shows too:

  She was asked if there had been a “Road to Damascus” moment for her on climate change.  She said it was in February 2007 when her husband had told her that in the Earth’s geological past, there had been a 700 year lag between a rise in temperatures and a rise in CO2.

This led JoNova to Google for a bit. While this didn’t shoot down the argument that CO2 causes climate change, it did make her think that “the media is hiding something.”  According to Jo, all the scientists know this fact, but they don’t want to debate it.

It is obvious:  to deny AGW and climate change is caused by our CO2 emissions requires strong belief in conspiracies.  

The very definition of ...

...clueless white privilege:

[And look, I'm as cynical as anyone of the overuse by the Left of "white privilege", but you really only have to visit Catallaxy to see confirmation that as a concept, it certainly exists.]

Update:  a funny-cos-it's-true tweet spotted:

As I have been saying for some years now....

Heavy Rain, Not Sea Level Rise, Is the More Immediate Climate Change Threat Now

But don't worry, the sea level rise problem will be here soon enough.

Sack Jonathan Swan

I keep complaining about how Axios, a good site with generally objective judgment, employs Jonathan Swan, whose twitter feed keeps confirming he dislikes the cultural Left and is too sympathetic to Trump because of it.

Latest evidence - he "liked" another NRO column endorsing the "Obama and the FBI were spying on the Trump campaign, this is just wrong".

Sack him!

Didn't take long

As I wrote only two months ago, regarding the revived Roseanne, it's a wonder that all of her co-stars and (I think) some of her old writers and producers agreed to go back to the show, given her history of ludicrous and offensive tweets, nutty interviews and famous fighting with her production staff in the later years of her first show.  They must have known it would be like working with a ticking bomb.   I hope John Goodman, a great character actor, didn't knock back too many movie roles for it.

I see that Breitbart has the best, wingnutty outrage comments about the cancellation, ranging from "they're shutting down free speech!" to "it is not racist to call a black woman a monkey!  have you seen her photo?" 

More twitter stuff I agree with

It's the paranoid streak in American (and Australian wingnut) politics writ large, and it is obviously unhealthy and dangerous to democracy, and why I despise Rupert Murdoch for using it for profit:

Impossible to disagree

David Frum deals with it at greater, more eloquent, length:

Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.

It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others. But Trump’s version of this disconnect comes most especially to the fore at times of national ritual.

The brightness on distant planets

I watched Stargazing on the ABC last week, and enjoyed it enough.  (The "world record for number of people looking at the moon" seemed rather pointless, but people seemed to support getting out and it was a science-y thing, so what the hey...)

Back here in my backyard, while I wait for the dog to finish its wee before going to bed, I've been noticing how bright Jupiter and Mars seem to be at the moment.   The brightness of Jupiter in particular put me in mind of the question of how bright things would seem if you were an astronaut on one of its moons.  I remembered that this had been dealt with in a Robert Heinlein juvenile, where he had written that the eye on Earth is flooded with light during a bright day and just ignores the excess (so to speak); the result being that even on a Jovian moon, daylight would still look pretty much as bright as a day here.

I wondered last week if this was right, and have now just Googled the topic.   It would seem to be not too far off the mark, according to explanations at Quora and this table, which indicate that being on moon of Jupiter would be brighter than a hospital operating theatre.   They're all pretty bright, aren't they?  (Oddly, it makes one comparison indicating that being on Neptune the brightness would be able the same as "typical public bathroom".)

Things would be starting to look pretty dim at Pluto (somewhere between "public bathroom" and "typical night lit sidewalk"), but you would still be able to see colours.  In fact, this very neat NASA web page lets you enter your location, and come up with the next time that the light outside would look like midday light on Pluto!   Neat.  For me, it will be tomorrow morning at 6.24 am.   (Sunrise is 6.29am.)   I know the sky is still pretty bright at that time, but I will take particular note tomorrow while at the breakfast table.   I hope my son is still there too, so I can inflict some unwanted science on him.  I love doing that to my children....

Distant, small objects

How many small planets (asteroids?) do you think they've now discovered way beyond the orbit of Pluto and Neptune?    840, apparently, which does seem a lot to me.

And one will be visited next year by that New Horizons probe that went past Pluto last year.  

Speaking of that probe, there was a talk by the NASA folk who worked on it on Radio National last week (in the Big Ideas series.  Here's a link to the podcast.)   It was very interesting.  

Live in a nasty fantasy world of their own

I am gobsmacked at the ludicrous conspiracy/fantasy world uber Catholic CL lives in, when he has this to say about the video of an African guy who quickly scaled the outside of an apartment building in Paris to rescue a dangling child:

and:

Then the commenter with the name that is no doubt meant to be sardonic, but I reckon it's accurate, weighs in:


It's not just foolish, it's nastily foolish - Muslim, African = fraudsters prepared to put 4 year old in danger, in their tiny minds.  

Nearby sorcery

NPR has a lengthy story up about poor old PNG and the uptick in sorcery motivated killings.

If ever a country could do with some re-invigoration of modern Christian evangelism, this would be it.

A sitcom appreciation

Oh look.  The very fine American sitcom (which never really took off here) The Middle has come to an end, and someone at Vox writes in praise of it as a very underrated show.  I agree.

Regarding current sitcoms from America:   have tried looking at Modern Family a few times - seems pretty awful to me.   Last time I saw Big Bang Theory, I thought it had run out of steam again (after having staged something of a recovery after the silly story lines involving Howard being an astronaut.)   I have also seen a bit of the revived Roseanne.   Sorry, but it doesn't have the same spark as the best of its first incarnation.   That actress who plays Darlene, though - she seems to have never aged.

In short, good sitcoms from the US are currently hard to find.

Marijuana legalisation scepticism noted

There's a column at WAPO by a former pot smoker, now a research psychologist (I think), who gets annoyed by the over-simplication of debate on marijuana legalisation.

Given that's what I complain about too, there's a lot in the article that I can agree with.

One matter which is new to me, though, is this suggestion:

Recent data is even more alarming: The offspring of partying adolescents, specifically those who used THC, may be at increased risk for mental illness and addiction as a result of changes to the epigenome — even if those children are years away from being conceived. The epigenome is a record of molecular imprints of potent experiences, including cannabis exposure, that lead to persistent changes in gene expression and behavior, even across generations. Though the critical studies are only now beginning, many neuroscientists prophesize a social version of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” in which we learn we’ve burdened our heirs only generations hence.

Wood framed office block goes up quickly

In King Street, Fortitude Valley.  I posted a photo of it earlier this year.

The photo above was taken a week ago.  Here's a photo taken today:

You can see the frame has gone up another  level.  I know nothing about construction, but still, this looks a fast way to build...

Back to the count

I see via Hot Air, of all places, that Gallop has published polling indicating that the number of Americans identifying as falling within the LGBT category has gone up six years in a row.

Funnily enough, back in 2013 I looked at some studies and made my own guess that for men, the percent who would would say they were gay or bisexual was probably 4 to 5%.   And what do you know - the Gallop poll shows that 4.5% of all Americans are now claiming to be LGBT.   But, there are fewer men than women in that figure:

Overall, 5.1% of women in 2017 identified as LGBT, compared with 3.9% of men. The change among men over time has been minimal, with the LGBT percentage edging up from 3.4% in 2012 to 3.7% both last year and this year. On the other hand, the percentage of women identifying as LGBT has risen from 3.5% in 2012 to 5.1% today, with the largest jump occurring between 2016 and 2017. 

Still, my spitball estimate seems pretty close.

Anyway, the biggest feature of these figures is the very big growth in young people identifying this way.   Look at the table:

You would have to strongly suspect that the increase in millenials identifying as such says more about their susceptibility to experimentation and social fashion than a settled view of their own sexuality.   (I mean, if it was a case of social mores meaning more people are happy to come out, you would expect some growth in the numbers of older folk identifying, but it's just not there.)  

It certainly indicates that the Catholic Church is just going to continue to be bypassed in influence in the matter of its teaching on sexuality.

Historical dentistry

The somewhat gruesome history of the development of dentistry is always a good topic, and apparently there is a new display about it in England.   Some things I didn't know (after the part about Elizabeth I having black teeth, and the English problem with decay being caused by sugar):

A major culprit in decay was, of course, sugar, a product of globalization and the slave trade. In the late sixteenth century, a German visitor to Queen Elizabeth I’s court noted that the monarch had black teeth, “a defect that the English seem subject to, from their great use of sugar”. But consumption of the sweet stuff was initially confined to the super-rich. Two centuries after Elizabeth, the habit became more widespread, and fixes for the inevitable rot and tooth loss sprang up. It’s therefore not surprising that a hint of the macabre emerges in this show.

That is notable in a section on technologies devised to replace lost teeth. Efforts to fashion dentures from hippopotamus ivory or even porcelain failed to mimic the durability and appearance of the human tooth. Later, dentists resorted to what were known as Waterloo teeth — harvested from corpses — for use in dentures. These were named after the momentous 1815 Battle of Waterloo in present-day Belgium, whose 50,000 dead supplied plenty of material.

Understandably, extracting teeth from dead bodies made some squeamish. Eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon John Hunter experimented with an alternative to dentures: transplanting teeth from living donors. The fruit of a bizarre early experiment is on display — a human tooth transplanted into the comb of a cockerel. Hunter considered the work a success, thinking that the tooth had actually integrated itself into the comb. Modern examiners have since concluded that he merely did a good job of firmly shoving it in. Yet transplantation thrived for a few decades, says curator Emily Scott-Dearing. Five transplanted teeth are on display, as is one of the most chilling sights in the collection: a cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson from around 1790, depicting an impoverished child in pain after having a tooth yanked to fill out the smile of a wealthy woman.

Just what you want around nuclear missiles

'Bad trip': air force members guarding nuclear missiles took LSD, records show

Interestingly, the article notes that sitting around all day looking after a stationary weapon that never gets used makes for an unhappy workplace:

None of the airmen was accused of using drugs on duty. Yet it’s another blow to the reputation of the Air force’s nuclear missile corps, which has struggled at times with misbehavior, mismanagement and low morale.

Although seen by some as a backwater of the US military, the missile force has returned to the spotlight as Donald Trump has called for strengthening US nuclear firepower and exchanged threats last year with North Korea. The administration’s nuclear strategy calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending in coming decades.

Slow news

That investigation into the Malaysian plane shot down over Ukraine is taking so long, I had assumed it was over. 

Investigators looking into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, say the Russian missile that hit the plane originated from a Russian military unit.

The passenger jet crashed, killing all 298 people aboard. Moscow has denied being responsible.

I wonder if Trump will have anything to say about it.

Some humour for a Friday

Seen at The Onion:

Joining the club

From the Guardian:

For kids in Greece, Spain and Italy, the Mediterranean diet is dead, according to the World Health Organisation, which says that children in Sweden are more likely to eat fish, olive oil and tomatoes than those in southern Europe.

In Cyprus, a phenomenal 43% of boys and girls aged nine are either overweight or obese. Greece, Spain and Italy also have rates of over 40%. The Mediterranean countries which gave their name to the famous diet that is supposed to be the healthiest in the world have children with Europe’s biggest weight problem.

Yet other European countries are still doing OK, although these lines are obviously confusing about what the true rate for Ireland is:

France, Norway, Ireland, Latvia and Denmark also have low rates, ranging from 5% to 9%. Ireland’s rate is 20%. The UK does not contribute data to the study, but about one in three children are overweight or obese when they leave primary school at the age of 11.

I'm betting Ireland would be 20% - all those potatoes and Irish stews.