Category Archives: Uncategorized

The institutions that dominate the lives of humans quite naturally dominate the news. I found this report, concerning how the Internet is having a negative effect on a Mideast institution, an interesting response. From Ahmed Fouad on AL Monitor:

Al-Azhar Fatwa Global Center was established in November 2016 based on a decision from Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb to detect extremist fatwas online and to respond to them. The center serves as a platform for communication for those who want to know about fatwas from Al-Azhar online. Around 300 researchers and clerics work there.

These new measures launched in August revived the Egyptian public’s connection with the center and sparked the interest of internet and social media users. There was not much marketing for the trial website that launched in November 2016, so many internet users were unaware of the center.

Youssef Amer, the general supervisor of the center, indicated in a press statement Aug. 28 that the center will play a key role in fighting extremist thought and the credo of the Islamic State (IS). He said, “The most dangerous issues the center is tackling include Islam and citizenship among terrorist groups, mainly IS. The national and religious identities do not conflict, unless the national identity dictates committing acts forbidden by God.”

Al-Azhar refers to a university and a mosque in Cairo, and I believe this reference is to the University. This is not the only activity at the center.

Although Amer revealed the center’s resolve to tackle thorny extremism issues, most fatwas are focusing on matters not related to detecting extremist fatwas and fighting extremist thought, more than 20 days after the launch. For example, the center issued a fatwa on Sept. 9 allowing the earning of a fee for reading and memorizing the Quran, and another fatwa on Sept. 8 approving a man’s right to marry another woman without the knowledge of the first wife.

Back to extremism, this is just one response taken by the Egyptian government:

Yusri al-Azbawy, a political researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told Al-Monitor, “The center and electronic website are very important, and their significance is yet to be seen. Radical fatwas have taken one of three paths to reach Egyptian minds. The first path is religious channels funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and by Salafist groups. The state resolved the issue by taking a decision to shut down religious channels July 3, 2013. The second path constitutes some mosques that were controlled by extremist currents. The state tightened its grip on them in the past years by forbidding preachers unlicensed by Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry from speaking out in minarets and pushing them to unify the Friday sermon through the Ministry [of Awqaf].”

He added, “The third path is electronic websites. Radical groups have many fatwa websites that cannot be banned because they are numerous. For that reason, an electronic platform … was necessary to give fatwas to those seeking them so that they don’t fall in the trap of extremist fatwas, especially since most youths don’t visit Al-Azhar or Dar al-Ifta to get fatwas and just resort to the internet.”

Others believe Al-Azhar is dancing around the issue of Al-Azhar’s own extremist origins. This may just be a way to make something new seem normal by assuming a voice of authority. I really can’t say from here.

I kinda like this half-turned tree, blowin’ about in the breeze this afternoon.

A self-portrait.

Ever wonder how we get from the dirty present to the clean future? Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford and his colleagues have been working on just that, as published in new journal Joule:

SUMMARY
We develop roadmaps to transform the all-purpose energy infrastructures (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry, agriculture/forestry/fishing) of 139 countries to ones powered by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). The roadmaps envision 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050. WWS not only replaces business-as-usual (BAU) power, but also reduces it 42.5% because the work: energy ratio of WWS electricity exceeds that of combustion (23.0%), WWS requires no mining, transporting, or processing of fuels (12.6%), and WWS end-use efficiency is assumed to exceed that of BAU (6.9%). Converting may create 24.3 million more permanent, full-time jobs than jobs lost. It may avoid 4.6 million/year premature air-pollution deaths today and 3.5 million/year in 2050; $22.8 trillion/year (12.7 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 air-pollution costs; and $28.5 trillion/year (15.8 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 climate costs. Transitioning should also stabilize energy prices because fuel costs are zero, reduce power disruption and increase access to energy by decentralizing power, and avoid 1.5C global warming.

I must admit that, due to time considerations, I haven’t gone farther than this summary, but it’s certainly an intriguing and exciting proposal. I wonder which variables they’re holding constant improperly and other such mistakes – not that I mean to criticize, but in a project of this magnitude, those errors are inevitable.

gravamen:

1. a grievance
2. Law the essential part of a complaint or accusation [Your Dictionary]

Noted in “The Bully Podium: Is the First Amendment Defenseless?” Anne Tindall & Ben Berwick, Take Care:

Our sense, however, is that when the White House goes after its critics, the gravamen of the concern is an affront to the First Amendment.  So for this post, we’d like to focus on whether there’s a First Amendment claim against government bullying of the press, and, if so, what that claim looks like.

A friend has been bugging me for months to look into ThugNotes, and I finally viewed a few episodes of Dr. Sparky Sweets holding forth on the plots and analyses of various classic works of literature, from the works of Dr. Seuss to The Epic of Gilgamesh.

In gangster talk.

It’s an interesting way to do things, and according to my friend, the analyses are on the mark. They’re brief, little more than five minutes per episode in my small sampling, and they’re entertaining.

Go on, you know you want to. Here’s Where The Wild Things Are. Not your speed? How about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

I’m trying to find the time to enjoy his analysis of Don Quixote.

A reader comments on the increase in carbohydrates in crops:

This is what I’ve been saying for years. I had a gut feeling based on many suggestive facts. We’re now starting to see outlines of the smoking gun, so to speak. As you allude, we’ve already bred corn and wheat to be far more carbohydrate-full and sweet than it ever was naturally (to say nothing of much larger and easier to harvest causing perhaps both good and bad knock-on effects) — and in the process, almost certainly made them less nutritious. How true is that of other crops? How many plant-based foods have followed the goldenrod’s path since the industrial revolution? And how has that affected the ruminants, grazers and browsers we so love to eat? For that matter, what’s going on in the sea? Mankind is literally killing itself. It’s a race of Elon Musk versus the Great Filter.

It’s not clear to me that cross-breeding or direct genetic engineering caused the greater carbohydrate loading, and I don’t think that what this article is saying. So far as I can see, it’s pointing out a strong correlation between higher CO₂ atmospheric concentrations and higher carbohydrate densities in our food crops.

That said, I agree with the general sentiment. I’ll also say that I doubt this is a unique situation, as cycles of the populations of many critters are well known to be tied to their overuse of local food sources, resulting in occasional mass deaths – or, for that matter, bacteria drowning in their own wastes.

But perhaps we’re the only species with the capacity to realize what’s going on – and still deny it.

Another reader remarks:

This is what gets vitamin companies profits.

And, ironically, they are not well-absorbed, as this ten year old Scientific American article notes:

The best way to get vitamins is through food, not vitamin pills, according to Susan Taylor Mayne, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health’s Division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology. A major problem with supplements is that they deliver vitamins out of context, she says. The vitamins found in fruit, vegetables and other foods come with thousands of other phytochemicals, or plant nutrients that are not essential for life but may protect against cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic ailments. Carotenoids in carrots and tomatoes, isothiocyanates in broccoli and cabbage, and flavonoids in soy, cocoa and red wine are just a few examples.

The Guardian has a report on an academic study regarding the characters in children’s stories:

Forget the morals that millennia of children have learned from the Hare and the Tortoise and the Fox and the Crow: Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters, at least according to new research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). …

Before they were read the story, the children chose 10 stickers to take home and were told that an anonymous child would not have any stickers to take home. It was suggested to the children that they could share their stickers with the stickerless child by putting them in an envelope when the experimenter was not looking. After they had been read the story, the children were allowed to choose another 10 stickers, and again asked to donate to the stickerless child.

The study, which has just been published in the journal Developmental Science, found that those children who were read the book with human characters became more generous, while “in contrast, there was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphised animal characters and the control book; both groups showed a decrease in sharing behaviour,” they write.

The academics, led by Patricia Ganea, associate professor of early cognitive development at OISE, said that existing studies using the same method showed that before they are six, “children share hardly any stickers with their friends, and even after age six, children keep most of the stickers for themselves”, so the task “offers a lot of room for children to change their sharing behaviour after reading the story”.

But reading a book about sharing “had an immediate effect on children’s pro-social behaviour”, they found. “However, the type of story characters significantly affected whether children became more or less inclined to behave pro-socially. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphised animals or a control story, children became more selfish.”

Which is not all that surprising. While the same impetus drives all species, which is for the reproductive members to survive long enough to reproduce successfully, there are a multitude of methods, and associated, if implied, rules (read: moral systems) for succeeding. Within the single species homo sapiens many moral systems are found, which may make homo sapiens unique.

The key to most stories is a character to which you can build a reasonable sympathetic link, and then through that link learn lessons concerning situations which you may encounter. If you look at a character and it appears to be another species, then it’s reasonable, even for children, to wonder about the real-world moral system vs the one presented. After all, if nothing else they look different in fundamental ways. By creating that question mark in the reader’s mind, the strength of the lessons are diluted.

Not everyone agrees with the study’s conclusion:

Chris Haughton, author and illustrator of animal picture books including Oh No, George! and Shh! We Have a Plan, felt that while “a simple instructional moral message might work short term”, the stories that have longer impact are the ones that resonate deeply. “I read Charlotte’s Web as a child and I know that made a big impression on me. I thought about it for a long time after I read the story. I identified with the non-human characters. That, among other things, did actually turn me into a lifelong vegetarian. I think a truly engaging and quality story that resonates with the child will be replayed in their mind and that has the real effect on them and the course of their life,” he said.

I, on the other hand, do not recall non-human characters having that sort of impact, despite being a bookworm throughout childhood. I actually actively have avoided stories such as The Lion King because I anticipated the cognitive dissonance of some predator playing King over herbivores and the like to be quite painful – at least as an adult.

On the other hand, how does this play out with science-fiction characters, specially those of the extra-terrestrial variety? I’m not talking about UFO conspiracies and the Greys, but sophisticated SF stories in which characters from other planets make a substantial contribution to the story. Of course, the best SF would include moral systems reflective of the conditions of the extra-terrestrials, which is a bit of a row to hoe; an example is in the Enterprise episode “Cogenitor,” in which an ET species named the Vissians require three individuals to reproduce, one representative of each of three genders, and one of them is deliberately kept in a state of complete ignorance: members of this gender can hardly communicate. One of the Enterprise crew members discover it is quite intelligent and, through interaction, begins to increase its knowledge level relatively quickly. Eventually, it suicides, ruining the chance of the alien triad to reproduce.

Would such a story have much of an impact on a child?

Katherine Martinko of Treehugger.com obviously has a different opinion on the purpose of stories in our species:

As for this question of morality, though, I can’t help but wonder why imparting a moral lesson is considered so important. To put it bluntly, who cares? Kids should be reading books for the sake of reading, because they are interested and amused, not because there always has to be a life lesson takeaway.

I think Katherine has this precisely backwards, although I’ll grant it’s not obvious. While we’re certainly offering moral lessons through our stories, it’s not that we’re pressing them on poor, unsuspecting children who’d as lief not have them. The reality is we’re offering them to children who are desperately looking for the rules of how life works – as befits any living creature out to help the species survive, either through reproduction or through other services.

So, Katherine asks who cares? The children care.

In the leaks thread, Susan Hennessey, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare analyze the recent leaks in The New York Times and CNN in which Paul Manafort is revealed to be under apparent imminent indictment and was wiretapped under FISA, and discuss the nature of these leaks:

The CNN story is a different matter. The story discloses FISA wiretaps against a named U.S. person. Whatever Paul Manafort may have done, he is a citizen of this country, and this is an egregious civil liberties violation. It’s also a significant compromise of national security information. Simply put, FISA information should never leak. When it does, it erodes the systems through which the government protects national security—and it rightly erodes public confidence that the systems designed to protect civil liberties work as intended.

Political leaking of wiretapping information is the stuff of the Hoover era. It has no legitimate place in our politics.

Who is responsible for this particular leak is unclear. …

For what it’s worth, a congressional or political echelon leak here seems to us more likely than either an investigative leak from Mueller’s shop or a leak from the court. The FISA court has been a black box since its creation in 1978. Mueller’s shop has been very quiet since its inception—and these leaks are to a considerable degree at his expense. The world, after all, now knows (assuming the story is true) that he has Manafort tapes during a period in which Trump was talking to Manafort; and Trump now has a great talking point about how his claims of having had his “wires tapped” have been vindicated. In that sense, at least, it’s a bad day for Mueller.

I think they are a little ambiguous in the first paragraph, and I will simply have to guess the civil liberties violation is the leak itself, not the FISA wiretap.

This is an interesting report and response, as reported by The New York Times:

Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.

The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program, led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.

Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed.

In my mind’s eye, I see a slightly oily Democratic spokesman intoning, “Is the Trump Administration trying to impoverish the United States for partisan reasons? Isn’t he supposed to be the President for all Americans, not just Republicans? Well, your Representative voted the way President Trump wanted him to vote, against the prosperity of the United States. Why should you vote for this Representative?”

Could be quite the talking point. I’d prefer to see the electorate repulsed by an Administration that picks and chooses the facts that it accepts, but I’d be happy enough with this ad making inroads.

The remains of a tree, Como Park, Ramsey County, Minnesota.

I’m not so attached to these two.

Out of focus? No, it’s she’s going so fast!

A driving beat and a woman running like mad. This is how to take the audience’s mind off the primary question in Run, Lola, Run (1998), which is just why is the lead character jumping back in time? As the primary plot mechanism, this is an important question, but we need some context to understand it.

Manni and Lola are low level criminals looking to move up in the world, and to that end Manni takes on the task of transporting some illegal funds from one group to another. Frightened by the police on the subway, he inadvertently leaves the money behind, and cannot find it at the next subway stop. Now he’s on the phone with Lola in total despair, certain he’ll be summarily executed for losing the money – and contemplating taking the risk of knocking over a supermarket to cover his sizable mistake.

Lola’s task? To gather up $100,000 while running across town in 20 minutes.

Skipping all the details, she’s late and barges in on Manni’s robbery, helps him finish it, and then is shot and fatally injured by the police.

And then she finds herself at the starting line again, as it were. How? We don’t really know. And, truthfully, we don’t care all that much, because this is a frenetic plot with gestural dead-ends designed to activate the imagination that hurries us along from detail to detail behind her flying heels, from her father of dubious morals to a man who just can’t stop having variants of the same car accident over and over to the man who is her partner and her lover – and fairly incompetent in that angry, self-hating way.

Add in the industrial music, some fairly insipid dialog, and a good supporting cast, and I could watch Lola run again. But it doesn’t answer the question of why, not only the concrete why, but the thematic why – why make this movie? Is it a sophisticated exercise in adrenaline rushes? I know I was not inclined to stop the movie to say, Hey … wait. Her drive, her running, throwing herself into the task, is so infectious that we forgive the unexplained. And trying to explain it may lead to weak analogies with the butterfly effect and Gleick’s Chaos.

So sit back and enjoy it. The dialog’s a bit primitive, but the visuals are intriguing and the story is just fine. And don’t make my mistake of trying to figure it all out at the end.

Como Lake, Sunset, Today.

I mean my Arts Editor.

The AP reports on an infringement of its stomping grounds, and not very politely:

Republican governors are getting into the “news” business.The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.

Only after The Associated Press inquired about the site last week was a disclosure added to The Free Telegraph’s pages identifying the publication’s partisan source.

[BOLD mine]
This is interesting from a couple of different perspectives. First, we can view it on the spectrum of bias. While I don’t doubt the professionalism of the reporters who work for news organizations, such organizations often feature editorial departments, and there we can find opinion which can occasionally bleed into the news product of the organization.

Or sometimes quite a lot, as I’ve noted a time or two.

So while the AP may not view TFT (The Free Telegraph) as some sort of legitimate opponent, no doubt some readers will think of it as a legitimate alternative because of the relentless din of the “liberal media bias”.

The problem, of course, is that the source of the funding, organization, and material is an openly and legitimately politically partisan organization, the Republican Governor’s Association. But it has no allegiance to the important principles of news reporting, and in fact it is intruding into the news collection & reporting sector of the democracy without proclaiming any adherence to those critical principles.

Beginning, as the AP notes, with its dubious attempts at hiding the affiliation:

As of early Monday afternoon, The Free Telegraph’s Twitter account and Facebook page still had no obvious identifiers tying the site to RGA. The site described itself on Twitter as “bringing you the political news that matters outside of Washington.” The Facebook account labeled The Free Telegraph a “Media/News Company.” That’s a contrast to the RGA’s Facebook page, which is clearly disclosed as belonging to a “Political Organization,” as is the account of its counterpart, the Democratic Governors Association.

That leads to my second perspective: how this fits into the ethics-free approach the GOP has adopted of late to all its activities. We have the dubious processes used by the GOP in both the Senate and the House to attempt to repeal the ACA, which Senator McCain ended up denouncing in shaming the Senate; the refusal to even consider the nomination of Judge Garland to SCOTUS, which was bad enough on its own, but was accompanied by shameful, bald-faced lies concerning the traditions of the Senate; the letter to Iran which caused embarrassment and showed a country divided at the moment when it should have been united. Even their primaries have devolved into ludicrous lies fed to a electorate who apparently is considered to be ignorant backwater jerks.

Do they think they’re immune to backlash? This sort of misinformation will be revealed for what it is quickly enough on social media; hopefully, that will penetrate into the communities which might not see it in social media.

But it’s really emblematic of the depths to which the GOP has sunk.

Derek Markham on Treehugger.com remarks on an interesting approach to taking advantage of Gravitational Potential Energy – or pushing loaded trucks downhill while bringing them back unloaded. Big trucks.

A consortium of Swiss companies is working on an electric vehicle project that will never hit public roads, but which could be pivotal for electric mobility, and a gamechanger for heavy industry. The so-called “e-dumper” is being built from a massive Komatsu dump truck that weighs 45 tons when empty and has tires as tall as a person, and although that might initially seem like a strange choice for electrification, its intended usage is expected to produce a net surplus of electricity rather than draw a huge amount of grid power.

The project will capitalize on one of the strengths of electric vehicles, which is that the electric motors that drive them can also be used to brake the vehicle, which generates electricity. This regenerative braking feature isn’t meant to, or able to, fully recharge the vehicle’s battery in most cases, but for a big electric vehicle that travels downhill while fully loaded, using the electric motors as brakes and generating electricity, and then travels back up again when empty, it can produce a surprising amount of electricity. In this case, the Swiss e-dumper will generate an estimated 10% surplus with each trip it makes, essentially becoming an “energy plus” vehicle instead of a net consumer of electricity.

It’ll be interesting to see how they work out.

If you’re young, you may not be as well informed as you think you are. Jen Hayden on The Daily Kos has the low-down:

The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania have released the downright disturbing results of a recent survey that shows a majority of Americans don’t know anything about their rights or the rights of others according to our own Constitution. Read it and weep:

• More than half of Americans (53 percent) incorrectly think it is accurate to say that immigrants who are here illegally do not have any rights under the U.S. Constitution;
• More than a third of those surveyed (37 percent) can’t name any of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment;
• Only a quarter of Americans (26 percent) can name all three branches of government.

Why? Another unintended consequence:

How did we get here? The Atlantic says the decline in civics classes was accelerated during the George W. Bush administration and the launch of No Child Left Behind:

Despite this extra focus on math and science, social studies managed to make it through the end of the Cold War relatively unscathed (in fact, the number of classroom hours dedicated to teaching social studies in grades 1-4 peaked in the 1993-1994 school year at 3 hours a week). But drastic change came a decade later with the passage of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation.

No Child Left Behind was signed into law in an attempt to address the growing achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. It was a controversial piece of legislation from the start, mainly because of its “one size fits all’” approach: It uses annual standardized tests to determine how well students are performing in reading and math and then uses those scores to determine the amounts of federal funding schools receive.

I’m beginning to think most laws should come with a sunset and evaluation provision. Click on Jen’s link and you can get the Schoolhouse Rock lesson on the Constitution. Think of it as some honey to make the meds go down smooth.

Unctuous:

1. characterized by excessive piousness or moralistic fervor, especially in an affected manner; excessively smooth, suave, or smug.
2. of the nature of or characteristic of an unguent or ointment; oily; greasy.
3. having an oily or soapy feel, as certain minerals. [Dictionary.com]

Heard on America’s Test Kitchen in reference to their version of Charlotte Russe. I’ve also run across it in fiction, usually in a slightly repulsive context.

I understand starting Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford is out with a bad knee – maybe for several weeks. Bridgewater, who he replaced, is still not available.

But I understand Colin Kaepernick is available, and has great credentials. Has the Vikings head office thought about bringing him around for a look-see?

So it’s been a bit since Trump tentatively bit on the cookie the Democrats offered over DACA, and how’s Ann Coulter’s attack going?

So far, nothing ascertainable. I’d say if this rolling 3 day average poll doesn’t start showing results soon, we’ll have to deem Counter’s attack to be an utter failure. That would imply that Trump’s followers don’t necessarily support him for the positions he articulated in the campaign, but for his judgment calls.

And, ya know, that is how this is all supposed to work. The alternative of everyone having their hands on the steering wheel has never appealed to me, since most of the electorate is going to be ill-informed on a randomly selected issue, no matter how important; the idea behind electing representatives to a Congress, and for that matter a President, is that they’ll have the time and, one would hope, the perspicacity to make wise decisions.

So the sad part here isn’t that they’re backing their man even when he changes course, but that they picked a lying, uninformed, incurious, narcissistic, unsuccessful, boastful, vindictive and emotionally immature man in the first place.

I can’t decide if I’m pleased that Coulter, so far, appears to be failing, or dismayed that Trump’s support level, scandalously low as it is, remains this high. It certainly brings doubts as to the ability of large masses of mankind to govern itself with any system at all.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog is upset over Sean Spicer’s satiric appearance on the Emmy Awards last night:

My point is not to begrudge Spicer for an unnervingly successful public-relations campaign. Rather, my concern is over the emerging set of incentives: if officials, particularly in Trump’s White House, realize that they’ll face no public penalties for their misdeeds, they’ll have no reason to act responsibly.

And I can see his point. But it also occurs to me that a primary part of the American mythos is the theme of redemption, that we can regret our willful mistakes and try to do better. It’s one of those parts of America that makes it a great place – and has it perpetually teetering on the edge of being a mark, a victim of the repeat scammer.

Spicer certainly does not have a serious reputation left, given his repeated lies and outré behavior in his position as White House Press Secretary. But is he regretful of his behavior? Beats the hell out of me – I haven’t tried to keep track of him since his departure from the White House in humiliation over the hiring of Scaramucci, nor did I watch the Emmy show last night. He may be trying to finesse his way to a better public standing through willing self-parody. I’d prefer the traditional full public apology (and none of this “if anyone was offended”, which puts the responsibility on those lied to – I’ve discussed this before) to this new-fangled self-parody approach, but perhaps that’s the best the morally defective right-wing extremists can offer these days.

And Colbert? I keep in mind that he’s a comedian/commentator, an entertainer, and the entertainer who’s not exploring the edge of the art is not going to be leading edge. I don’t know if the offering of Spicer was successful – but it’s in keeping with the tradition of being on the edge.

Besides inspiring conspiracy theories concerning scientists, another problem of CO₂? Inadvertent carbohydrate loading, according to Politico‘s profile of Irakli Loladz, a mathematician assisting biologists puzzling over why adding algae to zooplankton’s food source was killing them, rather than causing them to grow more:

Not as nutritious as it once was?

The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend. …In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?

Maybe it’s a negative feedback loop – starve the critters causing the planet’s atmosphere to go out of balance. Keeping in mind that “fat” doesn’t mean they have too many nutrients, only that their intake of certain substances is out of balance for the organism.

Carbohydrates have an empirical formula of C_m(H₂O)_n (where m could be different from n), so keeping in mind the rise of CO₂ in the air, and being a simple software engineer just freehand speculating here, this shouldn’t actually be that big a surprise – an increase in the density of atmospheric CO₂ should displace other atoms in an organism that processes for CO₂, once the CO₂ is decomposed. Assuming plants break down CO₂ for the constituent atoms / molecules. Anyone know if I’m just blathering here?

The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect [Loladze] had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO₂ levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

It also shoots holes in the argument that higher CO₂ concentrations will benefit us through better plant production, as they point out. It’s a good article – go and read it. Even bees are affected:

Sugar crash city?

[Lewis] Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.

Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.

They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO₂. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.

That gets a wow out of me. If you’re interested, here’s an academic report by Ziska, et al, as published in the Royal Society Proceedings B.

I wonder if we can blame the fall in human sperm counts on this as well. Scientific American reports:

Sperm counts in men from America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have dropped by more than 50 percent in less than 40 years, researchers said on Tuesday.

They also said the rate of decline is not slowing. Both findings — in a meta-analysis bringing together various studies — pointed to a potential decline in male health and fertility.

“This study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp ongoing drop in sperm count,” said Hagai Levine, who co-led the work at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem.

No definitive cause is known, although various factors get generous helpings of blame. But consider, for those of us who believe the evidence of observations leads to the inevitable conclusion that biological evolution is a real-world process, we then must conclude that organisms, and the processes which they utilize, are always evolving, slowly, towards some optimal state in relation to their environment. For a couple of million years our forebears evolved in an environment in which CO₂ concentrations were much lower and relatively stable. Now they’re changing rather rapidly, as measured at Mauna Loa and other data collection locations, and given the likely pace at which species change and adapt, I doubt our current operating environment is much like the one we evolved to fit. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that this mismatch is causing our bodies to misfire.

This entire apparent revelation depresses me, convincing me once again that the human population on this planet is driving the ecology that it depends on towards the edge of stability, and once it’s over that edge, the human population level will be at risk of being forcibly lowered – by Nature and by War. We’re over-populated.

Our current population is in the neighborhood of 7.5 billions (short scale – 10⁹). My estimate, based on nothing but gut feeling, is that a human world wide population of 500 millions would assure long term survival for the species, in a tolerable civilization, in combination with long term ecological stability, all other variables held constant.

That’s so easy to write, but so hard to consider. 7 billions dead would be a horrible tragedy that would paralyze a generation, but I fear it’s either that or 7.5 billions dead, with scattered survivors faced with some awful plague that will keep people from banding together, or radiation from a war contaminating most of the surface and unbalancing the world-wide ecology.

Or worse.

We raised these last year as well: candy-corn plants. This one’s just hanging out with the gang, being a wallflower.

Now he appears to be rushing to scale the walls and pay back its war debts in full with interest. Silly flowers!

And lazy insouciance is the final pose for this series. He may know the winter is coming, but for now he’ll enjoy the heat.

I thought this was an interesting bit of unsettled science. Gina Rippon discusses sex roles, nurture, and nature in the pages of NewScientist (2 September 2017):

And the relevance of social and cultural context was demonstrated by a paper showing that differences in cognitive abilities between men and women in 26 countries varied as a function of attitudes to gender roles.

Now comes a timely paper by researchers in Australia, Israel and the UK suggesting that the roles of biology and environment as sources of stability and variability might be reversed when it comes to the evolutionary processes shaping sex/gender differences. …

The authors propose a model emphasising biology as a source of variability and environment as a source of stability, suggesting that biological variability is in fact being “suppressed” or masked by highly stable cultural forces and socio-environmental conditions.

Why might this matter? The authors, admirably cautious in discussing the balance between biology and environment, do note that the long, intense socialisation of infants is full of emphasis on differences between the sexes, via toys, clothing, names, role models and expectations.

They talk of this influence as creating stability, of holding the phenotype steady. But it could equally be described as repressing the benefits of variability.

And the idea that gender is accompanied by a collection of genetically preset preferences is actually fairly risible in the context of evolution. After all, flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human survival, the flexibility to live in the heat of Africa or the barren tundra of Scandinavia. Why should we expect certain parts of ourselves be described in such a cast-iron manner?

In case you’re wondering about the Cassini probe’s last views, here’s a video from SciNews:

I wonder if we would dare to put an artificial intelligence on such a probe, knowing it to be a one way trip – or if we would dare not to do so. The ethical debate would be intensely interesting.

Andrew Sullivan, an insomniac and asthmatic, is also a stoner (habitual user of marijuana), and after years of experience gives forth on its effect on him. Summing up:

My mind, moreover, shifted into a much more nonlinear and creative mood when I was high. I never write when stoned. But I do let my mind wander, revisit my writing in my head, see better its flaws, drill down past my defenses, and allow myself to explore alternative ideas. One more thing: My experience of music changed. For the first time, I was able to turn off the ordeal of consciousness and allow myself to listen properly. It hasn’t really enhanced my appreciation of food (eating still basically bores me) but it has sharpened and deepened my visual capacities. It can make Cape light even more transcendent and transforming.

But my memory? Much worse. My lungs? They’ve taken a hit, even if vaping has helped. Weed may shorten my life by hurting my lungs — but endless insomnia might have shortened it more. Could I go cold turkey? I have from time to time, but it’s not easy, largely because the insomnia always returns. In that sense, I’m busted. By some criteria, I am dependent. Others may find that dependence an impediment to their lives and work, and legalizers don’t need to deny that. We’re all different, and weed most definitely isn’t for everyone. But compared with all the other substances available, and most other avenues to chill and friendship, it remains, it seems to me, a no-brainer to legalize it, and for many sane adults, one of God’s great gifts to humankind.

Given weed’s effects, both negative and positive, on the human organism, it seems to me this should be one of those decisions left up to individuals rather than taken away by government. In a sense, government embodies the most overwhelming opinions of the day, tempered by certain timeless principles. Weed does not appear, to my eye, to fall into the category of overwhelming opinion, but rather the sort of thing that should be explored by individuals and evaluated as to its usefulness in their lives. Andrew, for example, is well aware of the tradeoffs and is willing to pay the costs for the benefits.

Me? I’m not interested in trying it. Maybe when I’m a bit older.