That insect movie

A quick review of Ant-man and the Wasp:

*  Perhaps not quite as wittily enjoyable as the first Ant-man, but fun enough, and certainly amusingly inventive in its action use of varying sized cars, buildings and people.   I think it's likely to be one of the most appealing Marvel movies to the under 12 demographic.  

* Quite a funny cameo by Stan Lee.

* You might think it ridiculous that I say this, given the genre, but my fantasy physics toleration boundary was being pushed to its limits at quite a few points.   Even for Marvel, it seems particularly careless about providing  explanations of how some things happen (how the lab building has power no matter where it's enlarged, for example.)  But then again, some science-y explanations attempted in parts were very cringe worthy, especially the "healing quantum power" that features at the end in the post credit sequence that, nonetheless, achieves one of those satisfying tie ins with the greater Marvel universe storyline.

*  I do admire Disney/Marvel for making entertainment that is readily embraced by adults and children of all ages.   The ability of these films to appeal to the 9 year old, the cynical teenager, and the 50 something year old who never even cared for superheroes in their comic book incarnation, is quite the achievement.

The return of syphilis

The other night, I tried the first episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles on Netflix (it was OK, but after the lush, expensive looks of Babylon Berlin, the production values looked a little on the cheap side.  I'm also not that big a fan of Sean Bean).   I was interested to see that the main character is revealed to be suffering from syphilis.   (I would guess that, going forward in the series, this might be significant for introducing ambiguity as to whether what he is investigating is real or not.)  The show is set in  1829, from memory.

My son asked if taking mercury, as the guy does in the show, really did cure it.  Good question, I said.  I didn't think so - it might have helped a little, but there was always the risk that the mercury would kill the patient before the disease.   I had to double check, but I think my summary was right.   See this article from 1990, but there are several around discussing the many centuries of attempting to use mercury successfully.

Anyway, that's by way of background to some startling bad news from my home State:

In the last six years, six babies have died in the state from syphilis — a sexually transmitted disease that was nearly eradicated in the early 2000s.

In 2008, two cases were diagnosed in Queensland, and in the decade since, more than 1,100 other cases have been recorded in the north of the state, with about 200 new presentations each year.

The numbers continue to grow, despite penicillin being a cheap and effective cure.

Cairns sexual health clinician Dr Darren Russell works in the epicentre of the outbreak and said it was "out of control". 

It is, unfortunately, centred on the aboriginal communities in the north:

The outbreak started in the Indigenous community of Doomadgee, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in 2011 with a handful of cases.

At the time, sexual health services across Queensland were cut by the Campbell Newman-led Queensland government, and health workers claimed the opportunity to stop the escalation was missed.

The number of cases quickly spiralled out of control because of the transient nature of people in Indigenous communities, and the outbreak spread across Queensland, into the Northern Territory, and into South and Western Australia.

I thought that it was at least one of the more obvious diseases to have realised you have caught, but according to this health worker:

Aboriginal Health worker Neville Reys from Wuchopperen Health, said testing — and therefore treatment — was hindered because of shame and stigma.

"Syphilis can draw out up to six months before you really realise that you have got it, and in that timeline there's lots of sexual activity, so it can be spread around really easily."

Well, now that I double check the timing, I see that the first, painless chancre can take  10 days to 3 weeks to appear, and particularly in women, may be internal and not noticed.  The secondary rash can take 2 to 10 weeks after the chancre.  So, yeah, that is getting close to 6 months if the primary indication is missed.   I would assume, however, that most men who have it for more than a few months have ignored the sore on their penis.  

Still, its appalling that the disease has been spreading so widely without successful public health intervention.

Clown culture wars continue

Everything has to be seen through the prism of culture wars, if you're an idiot with his own Sky News slot to fill:

The same high five-ing of men for being all round great was on the Catallaxy open thread too.

An appropriate feminist response might be along the lines of shrugging shoulders and saying, "well, now that you mention it, when was the last time you had a woman lead a bunch of teens into a cave  that might not have been the safest place to go in the circumstances and needing rescuing?"  

But note, no feminist went there first (as far as I know.)

Universal Basic Income discussed

A pretty good article (by way of a book review) of the dubious idea of a Universal Basic Income is at Slate.   Here are a few paragraphs:

 UBI is having a moment right now. The idea has been around for centuries, but there’s something about UBI that’s resonating today, with dozens of books written on the subject from all manner of different perspectives. The most common takes come from the left (as Lowrey does), from the right (as a means of dismantling the welfare state), and from the techno-dystopians, who worry about a future where the robots have taken over and no one has a job. The appeal of a UBI to all three groups is easy to see: It appears to be a very simple solution to any number of incredibly complex problems. Think of it as the “put it on the blockchain” of political economy....

Lowrey’s UBI is “an ethos,” she writes, as much as it is an actual proposal. It’s a way of espousing a certain set of beliefs; it’s “a lesson and an ideal”; it’s a push “to keep imagining, so that when the future arrives, we are ready.”

Perhaps that’s because UBI is a pretty inefficient way of giving poor people money. Think about it this way: Just 40 percent of a UBI’s expenditure would go to the bottom 40 percent of the population, and a mere 10 percent would go to the 10 percent who need it most. What would happen to the rest of the money? 

Study after study has shown that when you give money to the homeless and the very poor, they don’t spend it on frivolities like booze and tobacco: In fact, rates of drinking and smoking invariably go down rather than up. On the other hand, if you gave me an extra $1,500 per month, no strings attached, I’m sure a significant chunk of that would end up in my wine fridge. That might be popular with my local wine merchants, but as a means of redistributing society’s wealth in the interests of fairness and equality, it does leave something to be desired.....

Lowrey understands this, and is not particularly wedded to a truly universal basic income. In India, she toys with the idea of excluding anybody fortunate enough to own an air conditioner. In the U.S., she says, the UBI could be applied only to the bottom 60 percent of the population. She also brings up the idea of instead giving “baby bonds” of $50,000 to everybody born into the lowest wealth quartile, or implementing some kind of jobs guarantee. At one point, she writes that an “even better idea would be to implement a UBI as a negative income tax” that takes your annual income and, if it’s below a certain minimum level, raises it to that level. 

There are always trade-offs. A negative income tax would not benefit anybody much above the poverty line, and in that sense, it would lack a key feature of the UBI, which is that it’s needs-blind and benefits everybody. If only the poor benefitted from a negative income tax, that would create resentment among the middle classes: The slogan coined by British sociologist Richard Titmuss is that “a policy for the poor is a poor policy.”

Fishy

On the weekend, I was looking for a white, firmer fleshed fish to cook.  Fresh Australian caught fish has become ridiculously expensive.  Even at Coles, the most suitable looking stuff (ignoring barramundi, an overrated fish with flesh that is usually too mushy) was $32 a kilogram.

I went into Aldi and found frozen ling (which I know from past experience is a reliably firmer fish) for $16 - I think for a kilogram pack.  It was from Iceland, of all places, and had 5 thick fillets packaged in individual plastic pockets, so you can cook as many as you want and save the rest.   It worked fine in my baked Mediterranean fish recipe. 

Seems to me there is something a bit out of whack with the way the world operates when it is much cheaper to buy highly processed, conveniently packaged (yes, I feel a bit guilty about the plastic packaging) ocean fish from Iceland rather than any fish from Australia, or even New Zealand.  

Odd news

I'm feeling like there's little blogworthy news today:  sure, Brexit is blowing up (see David Frum's pretty good article);  the death toll in Japan is shockingly high (and the coastal town of Mihara, which my family went through on the way to Okunoshima, the Rabbit Island, a couple of years ago has featured in Japanese media as badly hit);  everyone loves a successful underground rescue;  and Sinclair Davidson is complaining about the ABC continually reminding everyone about his and Berg's IPA connections, when it turns out that they wrote their anti ABC book on the RMIT payroll.   (Why does RMIT pay its economics academics to write books about the ABC?  Seems a weird institute.)  

But, here's the odd news that I will post about: 

Samsung has just opened the world's biggest smartphone factory in - India?    Surprising.

And:   I watched a doco on SBS last night by Michael Mosley in which he looked at e-cigarettes and came to conclusions which I thought were strangely unjustified by the evidence he presented during the show.   Britain has been remarkably soft on e-cigarettes, it seems to me, with much support for them (including from Mosley now) as an aid to stop smoking.   Yet, he ran a mini trial of people who were trying to stop, and I think the group that used patches or other nicotine replacement stopped just as successfully as those who used e-cigarettes.   So why complicate health issues by supporting a product with completely unresearched long term effects of inhaling flavourings and carrier chemicals if nicotine via a simple patch or gum can work just as well?  

And behold:  this morning, I see another report that indicates smoking nicotine laced e-cigarettes may be pretty much as bad for vascular effects as smoking a real cigarette.

Mosley also ignored evidence about teenage use in other countries, such as the US.   It was not one of his best efforts.   

You can't please everyone

So, some guy writing in the Washington Post complains that he thinks that the latest series of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee shows that it has "run out of steam".  

As it happened, I watched the first, longer than usual, episode with Zach Galifianakis last week, and thought it was particularly funny.  

The whole concept of the show ensures that individual episodes will be pretty hit or miss - much depends on the mood of the interviewee on the day, surely.   But Jerry himself always comes across as a very non judgemental, empathetic ear interested in all sorts of comedy.    He doesn't really deal in emotion at all - and can sometimes feel a bit coldly practical - but I like the way he keeps things in perspective (such as in the Galifianakis episode, he shrugs off being recognized in the public as no big deal).  

Not so incredible

Went and watched Incredibles 2 yesterday.

I'm not sure if I can review it fairly - even though it was a midday screening, I felt unusually tired during much of it.   The cinema was pretty empty, too, so there was no reliable sense as to how well it was or wasn't playing with a bigger audience.  The people who were there were pretty quiet during the whole thing

But I have to say, based on the trailers, which I thought were uninspiring, I went in with pretty low expectations and they weren't exceeded.

I think it's far too talky (and Brad Bird wrote the script, so he only has himself to blame there) and while many people seem to find the action is great, it didn't have the same innovative feeling about it as did the first movie.   It felt a bit too overwhelming - sometimes throwing in too much movement and busy-ness on the screen reduces its effectiveness and becomes a tad tedious*, and I think that's why I didn't really get a thrill from the action this time around.   (Interestingly, my son, who said he liked the movie, came out of it complaining about having a headache, which is pretty unusual for him.  He wondered if the flashing light sequences might have caused it, and I'm not sure if they could, but I think it was a mistake including those sequences in the movie because they aren't much fun to watch, headache or not.)

There are funny sequences, but they're too far apart.  And to be honest, I didn't even really care for the additional detail in the character animation.  This (to my mind) was a bit distracting rather than engaging.

I'm making it sound as if I really disliked it, which isn't quite accurate.  It was just more of a feeling that I was unmoved and it was wasted effort by a talented director.   I can honestly say I liked the ideas and execution of his Tomorrowland much more than this one - despite the fact that it got much worse reviews, overall.   

* see my comments on the visually awful Lego Batman movie

Climate change deaths in Japan, noted

Nearly a year ago, I posted about the regularity of record summer rainfalls in Japan causing death and destruction. 

This year's record rainfall story seems particularly bad:

The Japan Meteorological Agency reported on Saturday that rainfall in many of the affected areas had reached record levels — with some areas reporting rain two or three times as high as the monthly average for all of July over just five days.

“This is a record high rainfall which we never experienced,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a Saturday morning ministers’ meeting, urging his cabinet to take “every measure to prevent the disaster from worsening by taking advance actions.”

It's affecting some famous cities, too (Hiroshima and Kyoto):

By Saturday evening, at least 51 people were dead and 48 were missing, according to the public broadcaster NHK. More than one million people in 18 districts had been ordered to evacuate their homes and 3.5 million had been urged to leave.

The infrastructure damage in that country is hardly likely to be able to explained away as being caused by new development - it's not as if it's a booming population expanding out into the countryside.  Quite the opposite.

I would also like to know how the economists and their rubbery calculations of "up to temperature increase X, benefits of warming outweigh damage" manage to figure in the loss of life and infrastructure from floods.  

Climate change is real and causing deaths now.

Victorian medicine remembered

From the London Review of Books, a review of this:  The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.

Go read the whole thing, but here are some highlights: 

Even the worst corner of the worst slum couldn’t compete with hospital wards and dissection rooms for filth. Berlioz trained as a doctor and recalled a visit to the ‘terrible charnel-house’ of a Paris dissecting room. ‘The fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off’ made him feel ‘terrible revulsion’. Sparrows squabbled over morsels of lung; a rat gnawed at a vertebra. Berlioz jumped out of the window and ran home to take sanctuary in music. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; Robert Liston, who pioneered the use of anaesthesia, stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. The mortality rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly succumbed to pyaemia, a kind of blood poisoning caused by the spread of pus-forming organisms which cause abscesses. The pus drained from his body could be measured by the pint.

 The Great Stink played a role in advancing the state of medical science:

... one of the strongest challenges to the anti-contagionist theory came not from a paper in the Lancet, but from the Great Stink of 1858. The Thames, by this stage little more than a sewer conveying effluent to the North Sea, began to emit a stench which, according to Faraday, could be observed ‘rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface’. Londoners fled; there was a proposal that the Houses of Parliament be evacuated. And yet there were no epidemics that year, contrary to the expectations of proponents of the miasma theory.

 And then Lister got the idea of cleaning wounds with carbolic acid by a bit of luck:

Lister’s greatest advance was prompted by a newspaper report. In Carlisle, sewage engineers gagging at the smell of liquid waste spread over nearby fields had addressed the problem by covering it with carbolic acid, a substance used with indiscriminate enthusiasm for tasks including preserving ships’ timbers and preventing body odour. But a curious side-effect was observed: an outbreak of cattle plague in the carbolic-soaked fields was halted, the plague-causing parasites having been eradicated. Lister, who had abandoned his trials with potassium permanganate, quickly obtained a sample of carbolic acid. Shortly afterwards, treating a child whose leg had been shattered by a cart, he faced a choice: whether to amputate to forestall the inevitable gangrene, or to test his theory that carbolic acid could prevent infection. With the arrogance necessary to the practice of medicine, Lister decided to put carbolic acid to the test. Some weeks later the boy walked out of the hospital.

He then went on to treat Queen Victoria:

In a broadside reminiscent of those levelled at Darwin, one opponent castigated Lister for portraying nature as ‘some murderous hag whose fiendish machinations must be counteracted’. Nonetheless, when Queen Victoria could no longer bear the pain caused by an abscess under her arm, it was Lister who was summoned to Balmoral, accompanied by a copper pumping mechanism known as a ‘donkey engine’, which sprayed a fine mist of carbolic acid (including, to the horror of onlookers, into the queen’s face). The abscess and the surgical instruments were soaked in antiseptic; the pus was drained; the wound healed well; and Lister – with what one imagines to have been a rare flash of humour – declared himself ‘the only man who has ever stuck a knife into the queen’.

Moral philosophy of the Aztecs (just ignore the human sacrifice bits)

I'm not entirely sure whether there is much to be gained from the study of a human sacrificing society's moral philosophy, but this intermittently interesting article at Aeon indicates that Aztec moral reasoning wasn't all that far from your ancient Greek ideas.   Take this:

At its core, Aztec virtue ethics has three main elements. One is a conception of the good life as the ‘rooted’ or worthwhile life. Second is the idea of right action as the mean or middle way. Third and final is the belief that virtue is a quality that’s fostered socially.

 The difference with Greek virtue ethics is said to be this: 

While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.

This distinction bears on an important question: just how bad are good people allowed to be? Must good people be moral saints, or can ordinary folk be good if we have the right kind of support? This matters for fallible creatures, like me, who try to be good but often run into problems. Yet it also matters for questions of inclusivity. If being good requires exceptional traits, such as practical intelligence, then many people would be excluded – such as those with cognitive disabilities. That does not seem right. One of the advantages of the Aztec view, then, is that it avoids this outcome by casting virtue as a cooperative, rather than an individual, endeavour.

The article goes on about moderation as being important, and the "aptness" of behaviour, which sounds fairly practical and sensible, except when taken too far (my bold):

Our actions are virtuous, then, when they are aptly expressed. This aptness of expression turns on the circumstances (eg, how formally we should dress), our social position (eg, male or female, commoner or noble), our social role (eg, warrior or physician), and whether we are performing a rite of a specific sort. A memorable example of this last kind concerns drunkenness. Public drunkenness was severely punished in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire; for nobles, the penalty was death. But the elderly at a wedding were not only permitted, but expected to become drunk.

Anyhow, it's interesting how he doesn't address the elephant (being a still beating, ripped out human heart in this case) in the room.

Maturity level in the negative

Here's a reaction at Catallaxy to the news that a judge with Army Reserve experience has been investigating SAS members about some long standing war crime allegations:

Just when you think you might have seen peak school boy immaturity from that convalescent home for the Perpetually Angry Rightwing Culture Warrior (who really wish they could just get out and shoot a few people, like the SAS get to do), you're proven wrong.

Stand proud again, Sinclair Davidson, for the service you provide in ensuring that cohenite and his angry, like-minded kin need never feel alone.  

Gina and and her minions

Damn.  Isn't it annoying when you get to a paywalled article once via someone's Tweet, but find you can't a second time, even on a different device?

Anyhoo, was fascinated to read a Courier Mail story this morning about this:

Daughter's bid to involve Barnaby Joyce in bitter court battle an attempt to embarrass former deputy PM, Gina Rinehart says

Bianca Rinehart seems to want clearly disclosed in her ongoing court fight with her Mum the amount of donations Gina has made to Barnaby Joyce and the IPA.

The report  mentioned Gina's donations to the IPA and some other body (was it their fake environmental lobby group?  not sure)  of around $5 million, which is not small change for a lobby group that shows revenue in 2016/2017 of $6.10 million, and cash freaking reserves of $3.83 million.

(Doesn't stop them panhandling regularly for yet more donations.   Defending the right of billionaires to make yet more money by mining the coal that's destined to flood scores of cities both rich and poor doesn't come cheap, obviously.)  

She is, of course, an Honorary Life Member - more like puppet master, by the sounds.

The only puzzle about her involvement at the IPA is the Alan Moran scandal.   He got sacked from the IPA in 2014 for some anti Muslim tweet, but continues to write his completely untrustworthy analyses of energy policy (wherein renewable is bad, always bad) at Catallaxy (and the AFR, I think.)

Anyway, Alan's shtick is surely right up Gina's alley (perhaps I should re-phrase that), so I wonder if she was upset at his IPA sacking?   Did she try to stop it?  Or did he cross her in some other fashion?   Because I've always found his departure a bit odd - I mean, really, how much Muslim support do you  think the IPA would have?   


 

Yet more Nietzsche summarised

Over at the TLS, yet another summary of what Nietzsche was on about.

I like to read these to reinforce my continual surprise as to why people respond to his pessimism and ambiguities which are obviously dangerous for their ready application by those who want to refute a morality based on a common sense view of decency.  [And, quite frankly, his complaint that morality - whether based on Christianity or utilitarianism, according to this article - is "inhospitable to the realization of human excellence" and/or "makes man ridiculous and contemptible" is just nonsense of the kind that barely separates him from Ayn Rand, and I have trouble understanding why people continue bothering to study him.]

Anyhow, I was interested in this section, talking about the philosophical background he was coming from, and in particular, a writer who was obviously very influential in Germany in the mid 1850's, but of whom I had never heard:

Nietzsche’s classical training had educated him about ancient philosophy; the Presocratic philosophers (with their simple naturalistic world view) were his favourites, while his disagreements with Socrates and Plato persisted throughout his corpus. But it was only by accident that he discovered contemporary German philosophy in 1865 and 1866 through Arthur Schopenhauer and, a year later, the neo-Kantian Friedrich Lange. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (which was first published in 1818, but only came to prominence decades later, contributing to the eclipse of G. W. F. Hegel in German philosophy) set Nietzsche’s central existentialist issue: how can life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, possibly be justified? Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict:  we would be better off dead. Nietzsche wanted to resist that conclusion, to “affirm” life, as he would often put it, to the point that we would happily will its “eternal recurrence” (in one of his famous formulations) including all its suffering.

Lange, by contrast, was both a neo-Kantian – part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy after Hegel’s eclipse – and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, the other major reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s.  Materialism exploded on the German intellectual scene of the 1850s in such volumes as Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, a publishing sensation which went through multiple editions and became a bestseller with its message that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”. (Think of Büchner as the Richard Dawkins of the nineteenth century: a popularizer of some genuine discoveries, while also an unnuanced ideologue.)  Nietzsche, who first learned of these “German Materialists” from Lange, wrote in a letter of 1866, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else”.

More on working in America

Last month I wrote about a chat I had with an Australian who had some first hand knowledge of American work conditions, and how there's good reason for full employment to not result in everyone feeling good about their situation.  (Mind you, they also seems to have lowered their expectations as to what "doing OK" means, too.)   Here's some more grist for that argument:

*  an article at The Guardian noting the high injury rate in American pig meat processing plants:

Records compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reveal that, on average, there are at least 17 “severe” incidents a month in US meat plants. These injuries are classified as those involving “hospitalisations, amputations or loss of an eye”.

Amputations happen on average twice a week, according to the data. There were 270 incidents in a 31-month period spanning 2015 to 2017, according to the OSHA figures. Most of the incidents involved the amputation of fingers or fingertips, but there were recordings of lost hands, arms or toes. During the period there were a total of 550 serious injuries which cover 22 of the 50 states so the true total for the USA would be substantially higher.

Obviously, with their love of pork, there must be many who work in this industry, but that still sounds like a high rate of serious accidents.   It would be good to see some international comparisons.  (Except from China - I would assume that their records, if they were ever available, would be appalling.)

*  in the Washington Post,  an article with the self explanatory title:

Is it great to be a worker in the U.S.? Not compared with the rest of the developed world. 

is worth a read.  It's about a lengthy OECD report that does some comparisons.   This is a key finding:

In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

It's also interesting to read about how temporary American jobs can be:

Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study.

If people are moving to better jobs, labor-market churn can be a healthy sign. But decade-old OECD research found an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.

Now, sure, getting rid of an employee in Australia can be ridiculously difficult, but once again, America sets itself out as ridiculously uninterested in fairness for the worker:

The United States and Mexico are the only countries in the entire study that don't require any advance notice for individual firings. The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.

So, yeah:  full employment in the US can, understandably, make people not feel as happy as it does in other countries.

No report?

Lots of women on Twitter are calling this Guardian journalist's piece about being attacked by men (strangers on the street) not once, but twice, in her young lifetime a "powerful piece".

I'm nervous to express dissent because, basically, I sympathise with its main point about women who have been sexually attacked being unfairly asked why they put themselves in harm's way by being on the street, alone. 

But... I just can't get my head around how a young woman, not long out of high school, could be raped by a stranger outside and not report it to the police due to being "ashamed" of having put themselves in danger within 10 minutes of their flat.    She does say "violated" and the post rape description sounds like it was digital, but I could be wrong.   Perhaps that kinda, sorta, explains how she could rationalise not reporting it?

OK, no not really.    Let's face it, it's still absolutely nuts to just go on knowing that there's some man in the neighbourhood willing to attack and push to the ground random women on the street/in the local park at night and not report it to the police.

So, yeah, of course I'm sorry for her having been attacked.   But her reaction to the first one, I just can't see that as doing anything other than hurting the "power" of her piece. 

Testosterone is an up-seller's best friend

Isn't it odd that anyone even thought of doing this study?   Testosterone (allegedly) makes men do this:

....testosterone, the male sex hormone, increases men's preference for status goods compared to goods of similar perceived quality but seen as lower in status.

The paper, "Single-Dose Testosterone Administration Increases Men's Preference for Status Goods," is published in Nature Communications. The research reveals that consumption of status goods (e.g., luxury products or experiences) is partly driven by biological motives. The results are the first to demonstrate that testosterone causally influences rank-related consumer preferences and that the effect is driven by consumers' aspiration to gain status rather than power or a general inclination for high quality goods....

To gain more insights on the role of testosterone on social rank and status associated behavior, a study was conducted involving 243 men of similar age and socio-economic background. Randomly, half of them received a single dose of testosterone that mimicked a testosterone spike that could occur in an everyday situation causing an increased testosterone level; the other half received a placebo treatment. All subjects then participated in two tasks.

In the first one, they were asked to choose between pairs of brands. The pairs were composed of brands that were all pretested to have polarised social rank associations but did not differ in perceived quality. That is, one brand was seen to lift its owner much higher in the social hierarchy (e.g., Calvin Klein) than the other (e.g., Levi's). For each pair, participants were asked "which brand do you prefer and to what extent?", on 10-point scale anchored with each brand. The findings reveal that men who received the testosterone doses showed a higher preference for the status (positional) goods associated with higher social rank (such as a luxury brand). This suggests a causal link between testosterone and rank-related consumer preferences.

The second task meant to investigate the effect of testosterone on the two distinct routes to high social rank—status and power. While status refers to the respect in the eyes of others, power comes from one's control of a valued resources. The research team used six different product categories from coffee machines to luxury cars and created three different framings for each product category, with a similar wording but emphasising the target product in terms of its status benefits, power benefits or high quality.

For example, the mock ads variously described a Mont Blanc pen as "the internationally recognised symbol among the influential" (status), "mightier than the sword" (power) "an instrument of persistence and durability" (quality), says David Dubois.

The researchers then asked participants how much they liked the product description and the product itself. Here testosterone did not increase liking when the product was perceived as a quality product or a power enhancing one but only when it was described as conveying status. These results establish a causal link between testosterone and increase of preference for status-enhancing goods.

I say again - that's really weird.  And sort of funny.  

Unbearable indeed

I finally got around to looking up the details behind the recent headline about some town in Oman recording a record high minimum temperature.   It really is pretty amazing:

The small fishing village of Quriyat located in Oman's northeast coast has just set a new world temperature record. Last week the temperature remained above 108.7 ^oF (42.6 ^oC) for 51 straight hours, making it the highest low temperature observed on Earth's surface.

Despite being in a desert environment, Quriyat's is also a very humid place as the water temperatures off the sea of Oman are usually very warm this time of year, with values reaching 93 ^oF (34 ^oC). So imagine a night in Quriyat with such high temperatures and such a humid environment. Unbearable!

So, a 42 degree night in a town surrounded by water of 34 degrees!  It's a wonder the fish caught aren't already poached.   

Update:   there's a lot of water which (at the surface) is between 30 - 35 degrees.   Here's the global temps for 4 July:

I don't know who runs that site - it seems to have no information about that at all.  Odd. 

Speaking of mobile phones...

Wow.   I wonder how many relationships might end as a result of this:

Accidentally texting a photo to the wrong person can be mortifying. But when your phone spontaneously texts your photos to random contacts without your knowledge, that’s downright freaky, especially if you have private or sensitive pictures in your camera roll. 

According to Samsung users posting on Reddit and official Samsung forums, this is exactly what is happening to them. In one instance, a Reddit user said that his Galaxy S9+ sent his entire photo gallery to his girlfriend in the middle of the night. Another user said that both his and his wife’s phones spontaneously sent photos to each other. 

It appears that the photos are being sent through the default Samsung Messages app, and some users have reported that there is no trace in their Messages app that the files have been sent at all—instead, people are finding out that their phones have sent the photos after the recipient replies to their unintentional message. 

Initial reports indicate that the bug has affected Galaxy S9/S9+ and Note 8 phones, but it is still unclear how many users or models may be impacted.  A Samsung spokesperson told the Verge that the company is “aware of the reports” and that it is “looking into” the problem.

A series in desperate need of a science adviser

My son and I (more at my insistence and facing his reluctance) have been ploughing through Netflix's Lost in Space.   Just one more episode to go.

I still like its looks, and the actors are fine, all with the possible exception of the regularly grimacing face of Parker Posey as Dr Smith.  (I'm still not convinced by her acting, or the role as written - it has taken far, far too long to get to the bottom of what's going on with her, and I find it hard to credit how Maureen could feel a friendship with her in the early stages.)    The show has moved too slowly, generally speaking.

But the main, screaming out problem with it is the obvious lack of any attempt at all to make key parts of it even vaguely scientifically plausible.   I mean, the Jupiter spaceships run on methane, which seems to be in liquid form but doesn't seem to be pressurised or cold in one episode?  And which they can cook up from alien dried poop in a waste converter in sufficient quantity within a few hours to get off the planet???

Not to mention the misuse of Hawking Radiation as a dangerous thing in and of itself.

I know, in my first post on the show (in comments following) I defended the loose use of science as not being important - but as the series has gone on, and sciencey/technological aspects have become more important to the plot, yes it has started to bug me more and more.   It's like the writers have a little knowledge of science (they know that black holes make Hawking radiation, for example), but then use the concept in completely unscientific way.   Same with the methane - it's a potential fuel for a rocket engine, but there's no talk of LOX as a oxidiser (as all spacefaring rocketships need), and you have alien creatures that eat and swim in it, with no obvious place on their planet where they would have developed their love of it.    And yes, the writers obviously know that you can get methane from a sewerage system, but the idea that concentrated alien poo will make thousands of gallons of the liquidified gas in a "waste converter" within a few hours - that's ridiculous. 

They just keep doing this - taking a tiny bit of real science, then blowing it up in an completely unrealistic way.

I see that the show has been renewed for a second season.   Please, I beg of you writers:  start using science consultants, and give them power to demand changes to make it at least vaguely more accurate.

Update:   Actually, I'm wondering if what happens is something like this:

Writers to science consultant:   well, we want the planet or its sun to be in danger and they have to leave quickly.  What's a good scenario for that?

Science consultant:   maybe a black hole close to the sun - so close that the daylight brightness means they don't notice it with the naked eye

Writer:  Cool.   How might they detect it?

Science consultant:   The right instruments could see the sun's gas swirling into the black hole - and maybe some subtle orbit changes?

Writer:   don't black holes make Hawking radiation?

Science consultant:  yes, but, I reckon that's not so -

Writer:  OK, thanks.

Script:   Maureen hears warning "Danger - Hawking radiation"

Science consultant watching show:   tears hair.