Discouraging space travel news

I knew prolonged periods of weightlessness were not good for bones, eyes and muscle:  not sure that I had heard before that it shrinks parts of brains too.   (Actually, this short explanation is kinda confusing):

Flying in space shrinks some regions of cosmonauts’ brains — an effect that persists long after crews come home.

Researchers know that spaceflight causes parts of the brain to swell and tilt, but Angelique Van Ombergen at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and her colleagues wondered precisely how time in orbit affects brain volume, especially well after the return to Earth. To investigate, the team studied brain scans from ten Russian cosmonauts before and after orbital stints of around six months.

About one week after the cosmonauts returned to Earth, some portions of their brains showed a larger volume of cerebrospinal fluid — which cushions and cleanses the brain — than before the flight. By contrast, certain regions of the brain’s grey matter, containing neurons that produce signals, shrank over the same time period. Most of the grey matter recovered in the following seven months, whereas the brain’s white matter, which transmits neural signals, withered in the months after landing.

The authors say that brain-volume changes might help to explain medical problems related to long-term space travel.

Another report about the study says this:

What these changes mean for the cosmonauts is still an open question. "However, whether or not the extensive alterations shown in the gray and the white matter lead to any changes in cognition remains unclear at present," study co-author Dr. Peter zu Eulenburg, a neurologist and professor of neuroimaging at Ludwig-Maximilians-Univeristat München in Germany, said in a statement.

Sort of ironic if Earth's best and brightest take off for Mars, but are too dumb to remember how to assemble their habitats by the time they arrive. 

Against the Word

Well, I'm always happy to read of people who think Word is pretty horrible as a word processing program, but Jason Wilson's explanation of why he doesn't like it is a bit odd.   Seems to be something about the purity of a program that does the bare minimum in terms of getting words on a screen that appeals to him.  As some people say in comments, he makes it sound like he should just use Notepad.

My beloved Wordperfect (windows versions) gets mentioned in comments a few times:  there is even a purist who has found a way to use WP5.1 on Windows 10!   That is taking things a bit far.

But the simple truth remains:  in terms of fixing formatting issues, Wordperfect with its "reveal codes" function is still much, much easier to use than the secret format coding of a Word document.

I still marvel at the way a university student who has only ever known Word will not know how to stop some formatting issue that I could fix in a flash if it was Wordperfect. 

I have been using Wordperfect X4 nearly daily for many years, and I don't see any great need to upgrade.   I see the latest version (X9) is pretty expensive though.  I don't know that Corel is really trying to sell it any more.

Oh look - you still get people posting stuff as recently as this year saying "They're still selling Wordperfect??!!"   And a couple of people in comments do note the wonder of the "reveal codes" feature.

I am not alone...

About the migrant caravan

I did mean to link to Vox's detailed explainer about the Central American "caravan" last week, but better late than never.   It's one of the best "fact checking" style articles about it that I have read.

And I have also been meaning to say - why would anyone think it made sense for a liberal like Soros to fund something that is so obviously able to be used by Trump and Republicans just before the mid terms to motivate the Republican vote?   It never made a scintilla of sense - but of course, since when have the Trump base been motivated by logic?

Stand proud, Fox News

There was also an interesting article at Vanity Fair as to how Fox News is being run under Lachlan Murdoch.   It claims he is actually pretty "hands off" and each producer runs their show however they like.   Also - and who know if this is true or not - says that the late Roger Ailes would have hated how Trump basically runs the network, because of the way he plays on the producers's desire to ingratiate themselves to their key fan.   

Yes, it's a mystery

Makes me feel lazy, but also sane (Part 2)

I have often linked to Bee Hossenfelder's Backreaction blog on physics.  She's a good writer, if presenting as somewhat eccentric in her music video hobby, and I should read her book and the current serious problems within theoretical physics.

She has made reference in the past to some mental health issues, but in this post, I'm surprise to read about her how bad her dissociative fugue problem when she was younger.   Quite remarkable, and actually something that sounds very suitable as a basis for a movie plot:

Horgan’s book “The End of Science” was originally published 1996. I never read it because after attempting to read Stuart Kauffman’s 1995 book “At Home In the Universe” I didn’t touch a popular science book for a decade. This had very little to do with Kauffman (who I’d meet many years later) and very much to do with a basic malfunction of my central processing unit. Asked to cope with large amounts of complex, new information, part of my brain will wave bye-bye and go fishing. The result is a memory blackout.

I started having this in my early 20s, as I was working on my bachelor’s degree. At the time I was living in Frankfurt where I shared an apartment with another student. As most students, I spent my days reading. Then one day I found myself in a street somewhere in the city center without any clue how I had gotten there. This happened again a few weeks later. Interestingly enough, in both cases I was looking at my own reflection in a window when my memory came back.

It’s known as dissociative fugue, and not entirely uncommon. According to estimates, it affects about one or two in a thousand people at least once in their life. The actual number may be higher because it can be hard to tell if you even had a fugue. If you stay in one place, the only thing you may notice is that the day seems rather short.

These incidents piled up for a while. Aside from sudden wake-ups in places I had no recollection of visiting, I was generally confused about what I had or had not done. Sometimes I’d go to take a shower only to find my towel wet and conclude I probably had already taken one earlier. Sometimes I’d stand in the stair case with my running shoes, not knowing whether I was just about to go running or had just come back. I made sure to eat at fixed times to not entirely screw up my calorie intake.

Every once in a while I would meet someone I know or answer the phone while my stupid brain wasn’t taking records. For what I’ve been told, I’m not any weirder off-the-record than on-the-record. So not like I have multiple personalities. I just sometimes don’t recall what I do.

The biggest problem with dissociative fugue isn’t the amnesia. The biggest problem is that you begin to doubt your own ability to reconstruct reality. I suspect the major reason I’m not a realist and have the occasional lapse into solipsism is that I know reality is fragile. A few wacky neurons are all it takes to screw it up.

Makes me feel lazy, but also sane (Part 1)

From the BBC:

Shirley Thompson is hoping to become the oldest woman to row solo across an ocean.
Remarkably, the 60-year-old, who is originally from Belfast, had never rowed before this year.

She plans to leave from the Canary Islands in November and aims to arrive 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean three months later.

Not a lot of owning this going on

As Adam Server writes in The Atlantic,  Trump's caravan hysteria (promoted, even with the Soros conspiracy theory connection, on Fox News) clearly motivated the Pittsburgh Synagogue killer.    

Of course, those on the Right in media commentary have rushed to the fact that he was not a Trump supporter, thinking that he had also sold out to the Jewish globalists.   It's a pretty lame excuse to say "hey, you can't blame us:  he started with a completely made up conspiracy supported by Trump and his virtual State television network - but then he went too far!"

As Slate writes in one article:

He was a staunch anti-Semite. A few hours before he set out to kill as many Jews as he could, he echoed a vile conspiracy theory that blames George Soros for most of America’s evils—the same conspiracy that the president himself validated as recently as Friday. And yet, unlike the man suspected of manufacturing the mail bombs, one of which was sent to Soros, the Pittsburgh suspect does not appear to have been a fan of the president’s.
Rather, he regarded Trump as a “globalist” who had sold out to the Jewish world conspiracy.

In another Slate take:  Why Did Synagogue Suspect Believe Migrant Caravan Is Jewish Conspiracy? Maybe He Watched Fox News. 

I note also that there is not a lot of "owning" of this going on in Right wing commentators:   Bolt, Blair, Hot Air - all saying nothing about how a Fox News promoted meme fitted right in with right wing terrorism.

I mean, two of those are unlikely to attack Uncle Rupert, but I was hoping someone at Hot Air might have the courage to address it.   Probably Allahpundit - as he is hated by many of its readers for being too critical of Trump.

I see that at least Jonah Goldberg has written about how dismaying he finds Right wing belief in conspiracy theories.  But this was written before the Saturday killings.  He should update it.

Update:   Also interesting to note the slackness of Twitter in dealing with false memes, debunked years ago, of a kind that are dangerous in the hands of nutters, so to speak:

Did God send Trump to Earth to flush out fools?

With all the false flag BS about the US mail bomber now evaporating away, we are left with Donald Trump whining like a 7 year old that of course he's entitled to use the appalling rhetoric about the media* being "the enemy of the people" and his political opponents deserving jail, because the media is "so mean" and "unfair" to him and Republicans.

The media, and his political opponents are, presumably, meant to ignore that his White House has leaked like a sieve about his child like attention span, the odd near fist fight between staff, his self-disclosed lack of understanding about economics and trade, and the stream of lies and BS that comprises his constant, narcissism fuelled mini Nuremberg rallies.  Oh, and his refusal to disclose his tax returns.  Or that his tax cuts are fuelling an unsustainable growth in the deficit, exactly how everyone except Laffer-ite fantacists predicted.

I am constantly aghast that he has any supporters at all - and in all honesty, when I read someone who I used to think was at least a well intentioned, if wrong, conservative defending him, or using their  "whatabout-ism" tactics to downplay how unprecedented, nasty and so patently narcissistic his behaviour is, it makes me feel not just that the culture wars can make people believe ridiculous things, but that they must have been secret idiots all this time. 

It's like he was sent here to flush out the secretly stupid.

Maybe I should call this my Trump Theodicy.



* except Fox News

Top TV

I have to say, Episode 6 of Fargo Season 2 was just fantastic.  The acting, direction, writing:  just all brilliant.  Maybe not entirely credible - I mean, how many black underworld killers can recite Jabberwocky?   But no matter - maybe it was just my mood, but I find it hard recalling another hour of TV that was so pleasingly well executed.

Have to get in some more Leyonhjelm ridicule before he departs the scene

I should have known that David Leyonhjelm would have voted for the stupid, Pauline Hanson "it's OK to be white" motion dog whistle last week.    Well, he said (stupidly), he felt if he didn't vote for it, it might be interpreted as meaning he doesn't think it's OK to be white.   He says that even while acknowledging that he knows that it's a favourite saying amongst white supremacist groups.

I suppose it's nice that he parses all motions just at their face value -  he won't miss the meaning when I say he's a woeful, grating, arrogant, moral moron who demonstrates all the reasons libertarianism is rightly regarded by 99% of the public as a stupidly over-simplistic, self indulgent wank of a political philosophy that appeals primarily to the selfish who fall somewhere on the Aspie spectrum. 

He will be missed by no one, save for the (in a political sense) handful of people in his party.*

There, I feel better after that...

Anyway, this post was inspired by an amusing bit of ridicule I can see by Ben Pobjie at the start of piece I can see at Crikey, (which I wish would sack Helen Razor so I can subscribe to it in good conscience that I'm not helping pay for her absurdly self indulgent word-spews):

Every now and then, in the course of history, it falls to one brave individual to draw a line in the sand. It should come as no surprise that in our age, that individual is David Leyonhjelm: he is after all the man who reintroduced guns as a valid sexual preference in this country. And it is Leyonhjelm who has today stared down the forces of Stalinist mind control and said “No More”, by stating clearly the simple truth that “if it is OK to be white, we should be able to say so”.

As the Senator says, by allowing ourselves to be cowed into not saying that it’s OK to be white, we are letting the white supremacists win. For just as if we make guns illegal, only criminals will have guns, if we make saying “it’s OK to be white” illegal, only criminals will say it’s OK to be white. Is that a future we want, or even understand?

*  Which reminds me - how well did it fare in the Wentworth by-election?   I'm glad you (by which I mean, "I") asked:  Came in behind the Animal Justice Party, Sustainable Australia, the Science Party, and even (in harbourside Sydney, about as psychologically far from outback Northern Queensland as you can get) - Katter's Australia Party (!).

Um, if anyone thinks there's a future for the LDP from people actually intentionally voting for it: well, you don't need legalised drugs - you're already living in a fantasy land.   

Damaged goods

Yeah, I heard Barnaby get very upset with Fran Kelly for even mentioning there had been a sexual harassment allegation against him (the one to which the internal investigation had found a solid "We dunno.")

He is very damaged political goods, I reckon.   Should give it away and become a house-husband, or something.  It would lower his Child Support Assessment, that's for sure.

A potentially dangerous pill

I didn't know that some people taking a green tea supplement in capsule form have had severe liver damage from it:

While millions of people take green tea supplements safely, at least 80 cases of liver injury linked to green tea supplements have been reported around the world, ranging from lassitude and jaundice to cases requiring liver transplants. Those harmed after taking green tea pills have included teenagers, like 17-year-old Madeline Papineau from Ontario, Canada who developed liver and kidney injury, and an 81-year-old woman diagnosed with toxic acute hepatitis.

The article says the dangers are highest if they are taken as a dieting aid. 

When the WSJ has to keep correcting Trump...

...you would think that at some point, Murdoch would tell his editors to start softening their support for him.  Latest example:

“We don’t have tariffs anywhere,” President Trump said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. In fact, his administration this year has placed levies on more than $300 billion in imports.

Mr. Trump said he views tariffs as a trade negotiating tactic. “We don’t even have tariffs,” he said in the interview. “I’m using tariffs to negotiate. I mean, other than some tariffs on steel—which is actually small, what do we have? ... Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.”

He was right when he asserted in the interview that not all tariffs threatened in trade negotiations have been imposed, such as tariffs on car imports.

And yet, so far this year, the U.S. has acted on threats to impose tariffs -- ranging from 10% to 50% -- on several classes of products. Here’s a list of the tariffs that have been put into place.

I strongly suspect that there are few businessmen who genuinely think Trump knows what he is doing, or understands anything properly.   It's just that they find him a useful idiot to get some of what they want by working on the people around him.

Thank you, internet repair men/persons

(I'm sorry, but they have all been men, in my experience.)

I'm here to praise the internet, and give myself a pat on the back, for having solved a dishwasher problem last night.  (I had no idea that solid material as small as a few lemon seeds, in the right spot, could result in a dishwasher leaving a substantial pool of grotty water inside.)

I think this is the third time in a couple of years where I've found the answer to an appliance problem on the internet (last night, courtesy of Youtube) and fixed it in light of the helpful information other people put up there.

One other thing - I was cynical about the use of bicarb soda and vinegar as a cleaning agent, but it did help my dishwasher problem last night in a very indirect way.   I didn't have the right tool to get a screw out (it needed a hexagonal head, like an allen key, OK?) to remove a plastic cover over a part of the machine I wanted to get to.   But I put in bicarb and a cup of vinegar in a general hope it would help de-grease things.   The fizzing up of the mix was what actually floated upwards, out from beneath the cover I couldn't remove, the lemon seeds that I suspect were at the heart of the problem.

Fascinating, I'm sure you'll agree.

Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose..

Human urine bricks invented by South African students

Actually, it's (literally) a cool technology idea for developing countries:

The engineering students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have been harvesting urine from men's toilets.

After first making a solid fertiliser, the leftover liquid is then used in a biological process "to grow" what the university calls "bio-bricks".

The process is called microbial carbonate precipitation.

The bacteria produces an enzyme that breaks down urea in the urine, forming calcium carbonate, which then binds the sand into rock hard, grey bricks.

The advantage:

Normal bricks need to be baked in high-temperature kilns that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide.

And the final round goes to: China!

Gee, in what has sadly become an unusual event, an interesting, detailed post has turned up at Club Troppo again.

Paul Frijters argues that China has got a lot of long term strength behind it, which means it will beat the US in the long run in any "one on one" power fight.  His concluding paragraphs:

So if you look carefully, America has no chance of really ‘winning’ a cold war against China. If the US teams up with Europe, which is still the likely longer-run scenario, it can hold its own against China. If it furthermore teams up with large parts of Latin America and India, it will for another 20 years or so be the largest player in the block facing China.

So, the US is no longer the biggest single economic or political player on the planet. That mantle already belongs to the Chinese whose only competitor this century will be India. The Americans just have to get over it, and the current phase of denial was probably inevitable in their grieving process. We should help the Americans get over it. Part of our task as allies.

In many ways, the relative weakness of the Americans is probably a good thing. It bodes for a relatively ‘warm’ cold war that makes it easier for the Europeans to push the US from its dominant Internet and financial positions, paving the way for a more multi-polar world where large blocks keep each other in check. If the Europeans can limit the damage that the Americans will inflict in their grieving process, there are good reasons to be optimistic about peace in the 21^st century!

And Republicans carried on about Hillary's emails being a security risk...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chinese spies often eavesdrop on President Donald Trump when he uses his unsecure cellphone to gossip with old friends, and Beijing uses what it learns to try to sway U.S. policy, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing current and former U.S. officials.

Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure and that Russian spies routinely eavesdrop on the conversations, but they say the president still refuses to give up his cellular phones, the Times reported.

The officials said U.S. spy agencies had learned from people in foreign governments and by intercepting communications from foreign officials that China and Russia were listening to the president’s calls.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the Times report.

China has a sophisticated approach toward the intercepted calls and is seeking to use them to determine what Trump thinks, whom he listens to and how best to sway him, the Times reported, cited the officials.

Of course, I can imagine his conversations with "old friends" probably contains a ridiculously high noise to useful information ratio.   I can imagine some intelligence analyst in Beijing grimacing about having to listen again to the time he got some model or other into his bed.

Update:  Allahpundit at Hot Air is pretty much spot on, I expect:

 The view on both left and right for the most part will be a fatalistic “this is just how things are now” even though there absolutely would have been impeachment chatter among the House GOP if the Times had dropped a story like this on Obama. (If you thought Emailgate was a strong attack line against Hillary, imagine if she’d been caught using a phone which she knew had been tapped by foreign spooks.) In fact, if I know MAGA Nation, I bet we’ll see a few hot takes online tomorrow that this is all eight-dimensional chess and that Trump wants the Russians and Chinese listening in because it’s easier for him to feed them disinformation that way.

 He also finds amusement (and/or dismay) with this:

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

He just doesn’t pay close enough attention to the details of his job to pose a real security risk. Whew?

Just the title is likely to cause Steve Kates to have a nervous breakdown

And Jason Soon will probably enjoy it too:

She should be pleased

That looks like a very flattering, and somewhat unconventional, official portrait of Julia Gillard:

It does look like a selfie blown up large, though; which I think will make it look out of place with the others.  Still, she should be happy with it.

And by the way - she continues to be one of the most dignified and likeable public figures around.   History will remember her as a basically good Prime Minster who had the job under very difficult circumstances.