Category Archives: Uncategorized

On 38 North, Ruediger Frank has a longish report on the area of Rason, North Korea, the Special Economic Zone. Something odd is going on:

Nothing new on the northeastern front? Not quite. After just five days in “ordinary” North Korea we got used to the fact that taking photos from the bus is deemed, well, not appropriate. Not that this would have prevented us from taking a snapshot once in a while, of course, but admonishment usually followed and made the experience a bit straining. Now in Rason, what is the guide saying? “Take photos as you wish, no problem, you are tourists—isn’t it natural for visitors to do that.” Exactly; this is what I have been preaching to dozens of DPRK guides over the years. But it was like talking to a brick wall. Now that we have official permission to take pictures, it is almost no fun anymore.

Interesting. An experiment by the regime? To what purpose? This might be interesting to keep an eye on.

On Lawfare Andrew McClure recounts an uncomfortable moment for the Clinton team at the post-election get-together at the Harvard Institute of Politics:

After some more back and forth, a visibly rankled member of the Clinton camp sighed. “Were you guys worried about being hacked?… Were you guys hacked?”

Barely heard above the commotion was Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale: “That’s why we put security on our email… There’s this thing called two-layer authentication that came out like eight years ago. They should try it at the DNC.”

The sarcasm prompted a rare moment of vulnerability for the Clinton team: “At one point we asked the RNC a fair amount, like what kind of precautions they had taken. Did you guys take precautions after the hacking?”

Parscale’s response – “Yeah, of course. Like any business in the world we take precautions against all of our information technology.”

Evidently the wrong IT staff was hired by the Clinton campaign.

Readers react to the labeling of groceries report:

My first reaction is that Michael Le Page does not know what the hell he is talking about.

He starts by cheating with words: heated greenhouse grown produce “can” use more energy than produce flown in from “thousands” of miles away. Yes, if we make sure to waste a huge amount of energy in the greenhouse, and we somehow make that flight as short and efficient (and hey, maybe the airplane was already going that way) as possible.

Otherwise, it’s complete nonsense. Does he have any idea how much fuel a pair of jet engines gulp down per hour? Hint: lots. A Boeing 777 (twin engine) burns about $10,000 worth of kerosene in one hour.

So let’s say we flew some produce in from Arizona. That’s 1276 miles, not even “thousands”. Flight time is just over 3 hours. That’s $30k worth of kerosene. I bet one could heat a one acre greenhouse all winter in Minnesota for a less money (aka fuel aka greenhouse gasses) than that.

As for organic not being healthier — people argue both sides, but I know what I believe based on extensive reading on the subject. I believe I’m not ingesting as many man-made chemicals, most of which are harmful to my health. This can be discussed at length elsewhere.

And organic for environment? Sterilizing millions of acres of top soil with glyphosate (RoundUp) hardly seems good for the environment, yet is standard practice in the non-organic world. This too could be discussed at length.

Another reader:

He says yields on organic foods are lower. Proof? I contend he is making it up. Organic farming resulting in higher greenhouse gas emissions than chemical? Proof? This dude gets less believable by the paragraph. Climate labeling? Whose standard will be used? Not a bad or good idea, outside of the concept that some people will pay attention to some labels. It sounds as if LaPage is making a name for himself, not for the issues he’s discussing. If there is a new label every year for the “trendy” concept, people stop paying attention to any of them. Strawberries in January are not a bad idea, but the cost should reflect the actual input of flying them in from a warm place. There are plenty of heated greenhouses which use “waste” heat from power plants and other industrial processes. There are also unheated greenhouses which are insulated/double-walled and grow cold-tolerant plants for winter markets. In Maine.

I did check and Mr. Le Page is listed as a staff reporter for NewScientist.

Dan Jones discusses the post-fact world in NewScientist (3 December 2016, paywall) and who may be the worst malefactors:

In the real world of flesh-and-blood humans, reasoning often starts with established conclusions and works back to find “facts” that support what we already believe. And if we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we find clever ways to dismiss them. We’re more wily defence lawyer than objective scientist.

Psychologists call this lawyerly tendency motivated reasoning. Take climate change. The science here is unambiguous: climate change is happening and human activity is driving it. Yet despite this, and the risks it poses to our descendants, many people still deny it is happening.

The major driver, especially in the US, is political ideology. A Pew Research Center survey released a month before the US election showed that, compared with Democrats, Republicans are less likely to believe that scientists know that climate change is occurring, that they understand its causes, or that they fully and accurately report their findings. They are also more likely to believe that scientists’ research is driven by careerism and political views.

Many liberals like to think this is a product of scientific illiteracy, which if addressed would bring everyone round to the same position. If only. Studies by Dan Kahan at Yale University have shown that, in contrast to liberals, among conservatives it is the most scientifically literate who are least likely to accept climate change. “Polarisation over climate change isn’t due to a lack of capacity to understand the issues,” says Kahan. “Those who are most proficient at making sense of scientific information are the most polarised.”

I wouldn’t call it motivated reasoning, but rather retrograde reasoning – know your conclusion, then prove it. Classic bad logic.

I suspect this simply betrays the background of the conservatives, which is not, for the overwhelmingly most part, in science. They have backgrounds in business and/or politics – where the motivations they attribute the scientists’ behavior to is common and even mythic. (A religious background is even worse, as the conclusion is divinely mandated.) But that’s not how scientists function; in my experience, they are driven individuals who search relentlessly for the truth.

Not a sinecure.

This also reminds me of the Skeptical Inquirer article (discussed here) on who believes and disbelieves Evolution – with highly educated conservatives being the least likely to believe in evolution, rather than the poorly educated. (Incidentally, the original article is now available online here. While a trifle dry, its surprising findings are fascinating.)

Jones continues:

For Kahan, this apparent paradox comes down to motivated reasoning: the better you are at handling scientific information, the better you’ll be at confirming your own bias and writing off inconvenient truths. In the case of climate-change deniers, studies suggest that motivation is often endorsement of free-market ideology, which fuels objections to the government regulation of business that is required to tackle climate change. “If I ask people four questions about the free market, I can predict their attitudes towards climate science with 60 per cent certainty,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK.

I can’t help speculating if plotting understanding scientific information against properly applying the information to a specific problem would not yield a linear result, but rather a non-linear result. By this I mean that until mastery is achieved, the application of the scientific information yields wildly improper results, even without realizing it. Only when mastery is achieved do results correspond with reality.

I know I certainly experienced that in my formal education.

And sometimes the anti-regulation stance of libertarians just appears to be a denial that there is something like responsibility to the community. Here in the USA, where Money is the idol, the red-hot pursuit burns away the concepts of responsibility to anyone beyond the immediate family; thus when people are caught pouring pollution into rivers, there’s not even embarrassment.

It’s just a cost of doing business. We’re caught, we pay a fine. No shame here, no sirree.

Sort of like Trump refusing to pay his bills. If he can win in court, then the money is all his.

Sad, really. It’s so divorced from the underlying foundation of being able to run a just society, the ability to trust the person with which you’re doing business. Well, enough of this tangent. Trump will destroy the elevator he’s ridden to the top, and he’ll tumble to the ground, far below, in disgrace and dishonor. My guess is he’ll never even realize it.

Anyways, back to Dan’s article, which I found personally encouraging in one respect: who’s not as vulnerable to motivated reasoning.

Until recently, researchers had found no personality trait that mitigates motivated reasoning. But earlier this year, Kahan discovered something intriguing about people who seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure, a trait he calls scientific curiosity. Having devised a scale for measuring this trait, he and his colleagues found that, unlike scientific literacy, scientific curiosity is linked to greater acceptance of human-caused climate change, regardless of political orientation. On a host of issues, from attitudes to porn and the legalisation of marijuana, to immigration and fracking, scientific curiosity makes both liberals and conservatives converge on views closer to what the facts say.

Perhaps even more encouragingly, Kahan’s team found that scientifically curious people were also more eager to read views that clashed with those of their political tribe. So finding ways to increase scientific curiosity, perhaps by increasing the influence of people with this trait, could take the heat out of partisan disputes more effectively than promoting scientific literacy.

Which explains my conservative climate change scientist friend. And I think I fit right in there – I know I read about science with relish. So perhaps I haven’t misled myself as badly as some.

On this thread, Trump’s pick for the Ambassador to Israel has been announced, and its roiling up the Israelis. WaPo reports:

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Mr. Friedman, whose outspoken views stand in stark contrast to decades of American policy toward Israel, did not wait long on Thursday to signal his intention to upend the American approach. In a statement from the Trump transition team announcing his nomination, he said he looked forward to doing the job “from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Through decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, the embassy has been in Tel Aviv, as the State Department insists that the status of Jerusalem — which both Israel and the Palestinians see as their rightful capital — can be determined only through negotiations as part of an overall peace deal.

Mr. Friedman, who has no diplomatic experience, has said that he does not believe it would be illegal for Israel to annex the occupied West Bank and he supports building new settlements there, which Washington has long condemned as illegitimate and an obstacle to peace.

Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Paul Rosenzweig are incidentally on location and have a report on Israeli reaction:

Unsurprisingly, the reaction in Israel to the appointment has been sharply divided along ideological lines, with the right-wing nationalists who make up the current government enthusiastic and more moderate figures ranging from reserved to despondent. The lefty daily Haaretz actually called on the Senate to reject Trump’s choice. “If the settlers had a state of their own in the West Bank, he might be suitable to serve as ambassador there, and maybe not even that, because his basic identification must be with overall American interests,” the paper commented. “If Friedman’s appointment fails to pass in the Senate after close scrutiny of his background and a thorough hearing, that will be a blessing for Israel.”

Their concern?

I generally find slice of life descriptions to be interesting, even fascinating, and this one is no exception. It’s from NC state senator Jeff Jackson (D), describing the recent emergency legislative session – wherein the emergency is the GOP loss of the governorship – and is published in OrthoCarolina:

Protesters are chanting.

Lobbyists are running around, asking if anyone knows what’s going on.

Legislators from the minority party are speculating, caffeinating, reacting.

Legislators from the majority party are ducking in and out of conference rooms, saying little, and generally avoiding the press.

It was a legislative ambush. …

Inside the ambush, there are actually two fights going on.

The political fight is between Democrats and Republicans. But the legislative fight is between Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate, because they control both chambers. The way we calculate probabilities around here is by figuring where the common ground is between those two groups.

So, I have a question for the Democrats. Because the court threw out the gerrymandered districts and has mandated a special legislative election, everyone in the legislature faces an election some time in 2017.

Suppose the Democrats win.

Will they be just as punitive to their brethren as just happened now? I’d assume some or all of this legislation would be dismantled – over the shrieks of the GOP. But would they go further and indulge in their own bit of madness?

Or would they appeal to the better natures of the electorate?

Alexey Kljatov:

More here.

The view from our broccoli plant last summer. Ah, it was such a disappointment – it never broccolized!

Plagioclase:

Plagioclase is a series of tectosilicate (framework silicate) minerals within the feldspar group. Rather than referring to a particular mineral with a specific chemical composition, plagioclase is a continuous solid solution series, more properly known as the plagioclase feldspar series (from the Ancient Greek for “oblique fracture”, in reference to its two cleavage angles).

Seen in “Moon-dust cake mix shows moon may have had water from the start“, by Andy Coghlan, NewScientist (3 December 2016):

Only when water was included in the mix, at levels of just 0.5 to 1 per cent by weight, did the types and amounts of rock formed match those that have been observed on the moon.

Most importantly, the water-based mixture generated a layer of plagioclase – the main component of the crust – that when extrapolated to the moon would be around 34 to 43 kilometres thick, matching the average thickness measured with satellites. Dry mixtures led to a plagioclase layer twice as deep. This suggests that the moon’s current geology could only have evolved if water was there at the outset (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/btz8).

So this year we’ve already seen some warm blazing hot temperatures in the Arctic. But last year? Discover’s D-brief blog brings us this video from NASA.

Want more? Check out D-brief.

Regarding inhumation jars, my Arts Editor asks:

How does this differ from an ossuary? Or is an ossuary just one type of inhumation jar?

From the article:

… inhumation jars, which are buried ceramic vessels containing bones.

And from Wikipedia’s article on ossuaries:

An ossuary is a chest, box, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce.

An inhumation is another word for interment or burial, so I think the difference is that an ossuary is above ground.

Gog and Magog.
Magog and Gog.
Someone find the user’s manual!

In the somewhat mysteriously titled Gog (1954) we have a movie trying to be multiple things: future documentary, murder mystery, Cold War thriller, science fiction, romance.

Sadly, none of these are a success. The science is sometimes right, sometimes wrong. The murder mystery may be mysterious, and the bodies of high powered scientists really do pile up, but the mystery lacks finesse and the deliciousness of a good head feint; the romance is little more than a mask for the polite lust of the 50s; and the Cold War aspect is given only the merest hint.

THE PLOT? A hidden American science complex, tasked with the creation and launch of a space station, has suffered two mysterious deaths, as two researchers are found dead in a cryogenics lab. Another scientist, whose specialty doesn’t seem to have been stated, is sent out to investigate; his introduction to the lab offers an excuse for talking about the wonders of science in long and leaden dialog. Finally, it’s interrupted by several more emergencies, which have the positive of actually piling up on each other, giving us a bit of tension. The scientists and their assistants are not immune to sudden death, which takes the air out of them.

And the eponymous Gog? He and his mate, Magog, are robots which are used for dangerous tasks. But how Gog earns the naming rights to this flaccid little specimen of a movie is obscure, unless it’s a Biblical allusion to the enemies of Israel, as the Cold War opponent pops up to take a bow. It’s a stretch, but maybe.

But don’t tire yourself by watching this in order to answer the question. While possibly a sensation when released, this is a dated relic of another age, and even a connoisseur of the era or these films will find this one hard going. I waited patiently for subtlety, hidden motivations, shocking consequences. They never came.

NewScientist’s Michael Le Page tramples all over the toes of the organic food movement in his concern for climate change (issue 3 December 2016, paywall):

You might think buying local food is always preferable to imported food when it comes to carbon emissions, but even this is not a reliable guide. Food flown thousands of miles can still have a much lower carbon footprint than, say, local produce grown in heated greenhouses.

The one label you’re likely to find on many food items is the “organic” one. But if you care about the environment, don’t buy it (it’s not healthier either, but that’s another story).

For starters, you are not helping wildlife. Yes, organic farms host a greater diversity of wildlife than conventional ones. But because the yields are lower, organic farms require more land, which in the tropics often means cutting down more rainforests.

And organic food also results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.

The trouble is, there is no way to tell whether that basic loaf of bread is better in terms of greenhouse emissions than the organic one sitting next to it on the supermarket shelf.

And since the organic movement has rejected GMOs, Michael consigns the various organic food movements to the dustbin of history. What does Michael want, if he can’t have GMOs?

What we really need are climate labels on foods, so consumers can see whether, say, gene-edited bread is far better in climate terms than organic bread. This isn’t going to be easy. Measuring all the emissions associated with producing food and getting it onto a supermarket shelf is extremely complex, not to say expensive. Most schemes so far have foundered. Tesco tried introducing its own carbon labelling in 2007, for instance, but eventually abandoned the idea.

And it’s pointless unless the labels are easy to follow. One promising proposal is to describe the greenhouse emissions associated with particular food items in terms of what percentage of a person’s typical daily carbon footprint they represent.

Climate labelling is definitely worth pursuing despite the challenges. The only alternative is to allow consumers to continue being hoodwinked by feel-good mumbo jumbo – and the stakes are far too high to let this happen.

Perhaps not the most diplomatic of approaches – but sometimes the best diplomacy is to just lay your cards out and dare a rejoinder. It makes me wonder why I didn’t think of climate labels, although it’s not obvious that American consumers would pay much attention to them. As Michael notes, the proper metric (designed to alarm and motivate the informed consumer) is not immediately apparent; no doubt the cited proposal will be rejected since it doesn’t use a target level of emissions. And a target level of emissions will lead to pitched political battles between those who think they are too high and those who question the need for their very existence. Whether or not this will go anywhere is not immediately clear.

(Tesco, mentioned in the article, is a British grocer, apparently with an advanced social conscience.)

NewScientist‘s Sophia Chen reports (3 December 2016) on the discovery of word life cycles:

THE media tends to interpret culture in annual cycles. Critics publish end-of-year best-of lists and Oxford Dictionaries just selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. But the actual words we use seem to operate on a 14-year cycle.

Marcelo Montemurro at the University of Manchester, UK, and Damián Zanette at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research identified 5630 commonly used nouns and analysed how their popularity changed over the last three centuries.

A curious pattern emerged. They found that English words rose in popularity and then fell out of favour in cycles of about 14 years, although cycles over the past century have tended to be a year or two longer.

They also found evidence of 14-year cycles in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The popularity of related nouns – such as king, queen and duchess – tended to rise and fall together over time (Palgrave Communications, doi.org/btwd).

They don’t know why – or even if it’s a statistical fluke. I did like the analogy:

These results support previous work suggesting that language evolves in a patterned way, similar to how genes are transmitted from parent to offspring, says Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK.

“Language is not all over the place,” he says. “It’s remarkably consistent.”

From the abstract of the academic article:

The specific phase relationships between different words show structure at two independent levels: first, there is a weak global phase modulation that is primarily linked to overall shifts in the vocabulary across time; and second, a stronger component dependent on well defined semantic relationships between words. In particular, complex network analysis reveals that semantically related words show strong phase coherence. Ultimately, these previously unknown patterns in the statistics of language may be a consequence of changes in the cultural framework that influences the thematic focus of writers.

A reader has more information on a reported pipeline leak:

I “reported” (commented) on this a week or so ago. This is very topical for DAPL / Standing Rock for two reasons. One, the monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak, yet DAPL will use the same or similar technology to monitor their pipeline — and have made claims along the lines of “don’t worry, we have tech to make sure it’s safe”. Not very reassuring when we see how easily it fails. And two, the above leak went directly into, yep, a creek that is a tributary to the Missouri River.

Doesn’t just about everything in that part of the country?

Concerning the proposal to reform the Internet protocol, a reader writes:

Hmm. Individual IP packets don’t have return (sender) addresses, but TCP connections do, since replies have to be sent somewhere for the connection to work. Since both web (HTTP) and mail (SMTP) are built on top of TCP… I’m not sure the protocol is very much to blame for Bad Anonymous Behavior on the internet really. Is it?

Good point. Way back in my formative years, I decided that, having written a network of my own, I didn’t really wish to study another one in great depth, so I can’t claim great knowledge in this area. However, it does occur to me that Denial of Service attacks would be affected by the proposed changes, as it would permit tracing attacks.

inhumation jar:

By the end of the first season, more bones and numerous teeth had been uncovered from at least six burials of three types: primary burials, where the location is the original burial spot; secondary burials, a common form of burial rite often associated with megaliths; and, finally, inhumation jars, which are buried ceramic vessels containing bones.This variety adds to the complexity of the site and offers researchers the opportunity to consider questions they had been able to examine before: … [“Letter from Laos“, by Karen Coates, Archaeology (January/February 2017, offline only – typos mine)]

Brother and sister

An old cult horror classic appeared today and we jumped on it like metaphors jumping into a lake of jellied similes. Actually, my Arts Editor was quite reluctant. The movie is the famous Motel Hell (1980), starring Rory Calhoun. A brother and sister, now in their later years, are running a motel and smoked meat store; their little brother is the sheriff. People tend to have accidents rather easily in the area, and then disappear, but this doesn’t bother the proprietors none. After all, everyone loves their smoked meats. Even if they’re hiding a secret.

They use preservatives.

A young lady, fresh from the accident that kills her boyfriend, comes under their care, and if the sister is a bit unstable, perhaps even jealous of the young lady, the brother is more than willing to stand up for what’s right. Hell, he won’t even accept a kiss from the youngster without a proper marriage proposal. But the sister has her uses, including the medical skills needed on the small farm the pair run to support their little store. And all is well.

Until the produce breaks free and starts running around.

The production values were surprisingly good, my Arts Editor remarked, even as she gagged a little bit. Several of the vehicles appeared to be spotless antiques, at least at the start of movie; near the end, they might have been a bit banged up. And the acting was actually fun, with the actor playing the sister, Nancy Anne Parsons, doing a particularly good job of chewing the scenery. There was even a good bit of logic to the plot, and it seemed apparent that the scriptwriters really did care for the story, as they covered what appeared to be plot holes quite nicely.

Still, this is an acquired taste, so you’d better like campy horror if you’re going to appreciate Motel Hell.

Talking Points Memo has news about that State that prays for the fossil fuel industry. Now they want to tell you how to run your life while you’re heading for the toilette:

You often read that in the era prior to modern medical practice that soldiers were more likely to die of illness than from the fighting, but I rarely run across a salient example like this on the Body Horrors blog:

In 1779, over half of [General Washington’s] 10,000 strong Continental Army had contracted the debilitating [smallpox] virus during an epidemic, a grave tactical setback in the face of a largely immune British army.(5) “We should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy,” he wrote.(6) In February 1777, Washington would demand the use of an innovative technique, variola vaccination, to protect against smallpox and prevent the decimation of his troops in the face of the ensuing British onslaught.(7) He also instituted mandatory quarantine to prevent further spread of the infection among unvaccinated volunteers. By the end of the year, nearly 40,000 soldiers had undergone variolation and the rates of infection were dashed from 17% to 1%.(5) Washington’s oft-overlooked campaign against smallpox would be one of the most successful public health achievements of the era. The rest, as they say, is history.

The numbers are references within the original entry.

Hepatitis can be caused by overdoing energy drinks, as reported in Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog:

But take it easy on those Red Bulls, Monsters and 5-Hour Energy bottles — your liver will thank you. Case in point: Doctors at the University of Florida report what they believe to be the second documented case of acute hepatitis brought on by chugging too many energy drinks.

Those Aren’t Wings

The patient was a 50-year-old, otherwise healthy, man who had been nagged by abdominal pain, vomiting and drowsiness for a few weeks. He brushed it off as flu-like symptoms, but grew alarmed after he noticed darkened urine and signs of jaundice. After visiting with doctors, he was promptly diagnosed with severe acute hepatitis.

Doctors ruled out drugs, alcohol and sexual behavior as causes, and tests revealed this wasn’t a typical viral hepatitis infection. However, levels of B vitamins — used as “energy blends” in beverages — in his liver were literally off the charts. Sure enough, the patient told doctors he had been consuming four to five energy drinks daily, for three weeks straight, to get through his labor-intensive days as a construction worker.

I had a similar experience with Vitamin water and a kidney stone a few years back. The vitamin C, at ridiculously high levels in the nutrient-packed water, acted as an attractor for the material making up the stone (I forget which variant I had).

The lesson? Keep an eye on the constituents of what you’re drinking. A little enhancement is probably not going to hurt you, but when it says 1000% of the daily requirements and you’re chugging two or three a day, watch out.

And an example of the Standing Rock protesters‘ fear has come to pass. From The Earth Child:

A faulty pipeline has leaked 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a creek and the surrounding countryside 2.5 hours away from the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota.

The spill, which went undetected by the pipeline owners until a local stumbled on it, has spread almost 7 km (5.4 miles) from the site of the leak, and at this stage, it’s not clear what caused the pipe to rupture, or how long it’s been leaking.

According to CNN, an estimated 4,200 barrels of crude oil leaked from the Belle Fourche Pipeline in Billings County, 150 miles (241 km) from Cannon Ball in North Dakota, where protesters have been fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

This article seems to be guilty of using inappropriate units, in this case measuring distance by time. Perhaps it was in the original CNN article. But even more interesting:

It’s also not clear how the pipeline ruptured in the first place, but Belle Fourche Pipeline spokesperson, Wendy Owen, told the Associated Press that it might have occurred when the hillside slumped due to increased snowfall.

“That is our number one theory, but nothing is definitive,” she said. “We have several working theories and the investigation is ongoing.”

Perhaps even more concerning than a freak accident splitting the pipe is the fact that electronic monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak – something that would have prevented the pipe from spilling so much oil out into the countryside.

Indicating the technology is not perfect. That is not something to panic about – it takes time to perfect technology in the face of reality – but the maturity of the technology must be a factor when judging projects such as these, just as the viability of continuing the massive use of fossil fuels should be a factor. As the demand for fossil fuels drops, projects like these have less and less justification.

And justifies the promotion of safe, carbon-neutral sources.

A friend sent me this article from the guardian concerning the abandonment of British Fencing by the UK Sport, the Olympic funding authority for Britain:

Last week  [British Fencing] was informed by UK Sport that its Olympic funding had been withdrawn. Over the next four-year cycle, leading up to the Tokyo Games, it will receive not a penny to match the £3.1m it received from the national lottery, via UK Sport, to prepare its campaign for Rio last summer.

Why?

Zero funding amounts to official confirmation that your sport has no chance of producing a medal from the 2020 Games, or even in 2024. UK Sport’s policy is to look at each discipline from an eight-year perspective, assessing the division of about half a billion pounds on the basis, as it put it, “of the medals won, the number of medallists developed, and the quality of the systems and processes in place to find and support the nation’s most promising future champions”. Its support generally equates to between £20,000 and £60,000 per athlete per annum. For this, results are not just expected but demanded.

I believe this is how the US Olympic Committee (USOC) also operates, funding winners while ignoring the losers. On its face, it’s a baffling approach to asking a sporting federation to improve its top-line athletes, by eliminating the very support which one might think it needs in order to produce what is requested. However, the article does go on to note:

But it should be remembered that British Cycling, currently riding a boom with 130,000 members, had barely 20,000 less than a decade ago. And whoever dreamed that British gymnasts would one day be winning Olympic medals? Our fencers, who thought they had parried the worst, must now launch a swift and decisive riposte.

That suggests two things: First, the funding is not utterly necessary to produce top of the line fencers. Second, and more subversively, it suggests the funding, and the strings that come with it, could be done without. I know US Fencing was in danger of being taken over by the USOC a few years back due to a lack of financial soundness (inefficiency, etc – not criminal), and I assume this was possible because they accepted USOC funding.

I wonder if US Fencing ever considers rejecting USOC funding.

Enjoy!