Category Archives: Uncategorized

In a prior post on this thread, I expressed curiosity concerning the motivations of the players in this grisly tragedy. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has now indicted four more officials, according to CNN:

… and one is the Center For Inquiry (CFI), publisher of Skeptical Inquirer. From a funds seeking email received today:

 •  Betsy DeVos, the private school vouchers enthusiast tapped to lead President-Elect Donald Trump’s education department, once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.”

•  And take a look at this video of Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence, taking to the floor of the US House of Representatives to denounce evolution.

•  Just last week, Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s EPA director, had harsh words for Trump’s pick for the EPA: “I don’t recall ever having seen an appointment of someone who is so disdainful of the agency and the science behind what the agency does.”

•  And President-Elect Trump has met with anti-vaccination groups, and has made it clear that he sees a connection between vaccinations and autism.

Crusaders against church-state separation, climate science deniers, intelligent design proponents, and anti-vaccination activists used to be at the fringe of society. Now they are poised to run the country. Make your voice heard by giving a year-end gift that ensures we have the resources to fight.

Become a member, or give an outright gift… has it ever been more important than right now?

Just thought I’d point out that CFI fights the good fight, and you may want to help fund it.

NewScientist (3 December 2016) reports that Dutch policemen are now trialing augmented reality systems so that experts remote from crime scenes can direct first responders in their investigations:

You’re the first police officer to arrive at the scene: a suspected ecstasy lab. There’s drug paraphernalia everywhere, but which piece of evidence could be most helpful for your investigation? Then, a massive virtual arrow appears, pointing out a bottle of chemicals, accompanied by a note saying: “Bag this please”.

And what happens when an officer, following directions, suffers injury or death? Will the remote expert have counseling? And do these augmented reality systems carry their own vulnerabilities? How hard are they to hack?

Not that I’m nervous or anything.

… is the name of a blog which I ran across today while reading on FiveThirtyEight. Turns out they keep an eye on retracted papers. From a quick interview with FiveThirtyEight:

The first Retraction Watch post was titled “Why write a blog about retractions?” Five years later, the answer seems self-evident: Because without a concerted effort to pay attention, nobody will notice what was wrong in the first place. “I thought we might do one post a month,” Marcus told me. “I don’t think either of us thought it would become two or three a day.” But after an interview on public radio and media attention highlighting the blog’s coverage of Marc Hauser, a Harvard psychologist caught fabricating data, the tips started rolling in. “What became clear is that there was a very large number of people in science who were frustrated with the way that misconduct was being handled, and these people found us very quickly,” Oransky said. The site now draws 125,000 unique views each month.

From their current latest entry:

It has been a tough couple of years for surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, once lauded for pioneering a groundbreaking procedure to transplant tracheas.

After a series of documentaries prompted his former employer, Karolinska Institutet (KI), to reopen a misconduct investigation against him, KI has today released one verdict regarding a 2014 Nature Communications paper: guilty.

KI said it is contacting the journal to request a retraction of the paper, which has already been flagged with an expression of concern.

The government of India has apparently decided to take on a mega project in order to solve its problem of too much water in one place, while not enough in another. From T.V. Padma in NewScientist (3 December 2016):

The Interlinking of Rivers scheme, which government officials say is to get the green light from India’s environment ministry “imminently”, will create a water network 12,500 kilometres long – almost twice the length of the world’s longest rivers, the Nile and the Amazon.

Some 14 rivers in northern India and 16 in the western, central and southern parts of the country will be linked via 30 mega-canals and 3000 dams, costing $168 billion. In the process, 35 million hectares of new arable land will be created, as well as the means to generate an extra 34,000 megawatts of hydropower.

Geologists and ecologists are concerned, but India has its worries. From The Hindu, earlier this year:

For the purposes of monitoring, the CWC divides India’s rivers into 12 major basins. The largest of them – the Ganga basin – is not the worst case. The CWC figures for April 28 show storage to be 7.8 BCM. While that may be less than the 10.6 BCM storage at the same time last year it is 22.8 per cent more than the decadal average of 6.35 BCM.

However the numbers for the Indus basin and the Krishna basins are far from inspiring. The Indus this year is 35 per cent and the Krishna 67 per cent less than their 10-year normal.

The most updated estimates of per capita water availability in India’s river basins show stark inequality. The Brahmaputra basin, for instance, can annually support nearly 13000 cubic metres per person, whereas the Mahi has a scarce 260 cubic metres per person.

The Guardian estimates …

This year, 330 million Indians have been affected by drought. State governments used emergency measures to deliver water by train in the western state of Maharashtra; in other areas, schools and hospitals were forced to close, and hundreds of families were forced to migrate from villages to nearby cities where water is more easily accessible.

And Oblity provides this lovely diagram, along with an overview:

So what is the cost of the project? It’s in Quartz’s title of an article on the subject, “Why India’s $168 billion river-linking project is a disaster-in-waiting“. They interview a number of local experts, such as Professor Rajamani of Jawaharlal Nehru University:

The interest in river-linking now is due to the big bucks involved in it for dam builders. A canal is not a river and it cannot support an ecosystem. What happens to everything that is living in the river? When water flows, there are a number of factors associated with it. There are micro organisms and there are marine life. We are taking away all of that by building dams and diverting water for something that is not even natural. When you build dams, you are displacing too many people. What will they do? They land up in slums in cities. River-linking is a social evil, economic evil and will ultimately lead to collapse of civilisation.

Perhaps a bit of hyperbole. However, I do wonder if this is just a way for the current ruling party to secure its place through the provision of jobs on a long term basis.

The Diplomat reports on India’s neighbors’ reactions:

The ILR program’s Himalayan component envisages construction of reservoirs on the principal tributaries of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra in India and Nepal, and involves transfer of water from the eastern tributaries of the Ganga to the west, apart from linking the Brahmaputra to the Ganga and the Ganga to the Mahanadi.

As the Ganga and Brahmaputra are transboundary rivers, India’s proposed engineering of their waters would impact Nepal and Bhutan, where these rivers originate, and Bangladesh, the lower riparian country.

Nepal and Bhutan fear that, as in the case of other river projects in the past, India will pressure them to cooperate with the ILR through building dams and other storage infrastructure. There is “strong popular opposition to this idea” in these countries, Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden, has pointed out.

Such opposition could weaken already fragile ties between India and Nepal.

Bangladesh, meanwhile, is deeply apprehensive over the diversion of water from the Ganga’s tributaries upstream, and the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers to the Ganga, as this would reduce water flows into its territory, increasing salinity of the water, rendering the soil unfit for cultivation, and resulting in the desertification of large parts of the country.

And, finally, back to NewScientist for one of the more unexpected potential results of this project:

[Chittenipattu Rajendran at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangaluru] says that the dams required by the scheme would push down on Earth’s crust, adding extra strain and possibly increasing the risk of earthquakes in the already quake-prone Himalayas.

Sirocco (1951) puts Humphrey Bogart in a familiar role, dancing on the line between legality and illegality, raising questions of morality, commerce, and conflict. He’s a gunrunner, Harry Smith, in Damascus, Syria, supplying whoever bids for his weaponry as the French Army invades under orders from the League of Nations. As an outsider, he has a few contacts in the local underground, and is making a mint supplying them.

The French Colonel in command of Intelligence also has a French woman with him, one who wishes to leave and tries to use Harry’s contacts to escape. At the same time, the French are trying to stop the flow of arms, and “Mr. Harry” finds himself caught in a squeeze, and his escape route is chancy at best. The world turns into quicksand, threatening to drag him down.

But the Colonel is also caught in a squeeze play, and Harry may have the contact the Colonel needs. He offers Harry a chance, and Harry takes it. The Colonel is looking for peace, for communication. Will the Syrians listen?

A few hours later, the French come to Harry again, offering him life … or the opportunity to do the right thing. Can he live with himself if he doesn’t accede to their request? Can he live if he undertakes the right thing?

While no Paths of Glory, this movie does not romanticize war, and does explore the impossible moral situations which war produces – but not as steadfastly, as thoroughly, as painfully as it might have. Harry doesn’t experience the full range of anguish he might have. He could have led us through a lot more of the lessons as a truly amoral gunrunner, and if he goes back into danger to rescue a man who, for all his own failures, is at least reaching for peace, it’s not entirely clear how painful the path to that decision might have been.

The movie has potential, with good actors and a fair script, but never quite gets their, as the story doesn’t have the guts to pursue the question as far as it might go. Bogart fans should certainly see this, but it’s not nearly as good as such classic fare as The Maltese Falcon.

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.