Category Archives: Uncategorized

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com talks about the latest use for … algae:

One interesting biotech company called New Wave Foods hopes to address all these problems [environmental degradation, shocking labor practices] in one fell swoop. It has pioneered a technique for making fake, plant-based shrimp out of algae. The algae turns the shrimp red and is a powerful antioxidant. The srimp are shaped like regular shrimp, and even have the rubbery texture and faintly fishy taste of real shrimp. They are vegan, kosher, have zero cholesterol, and are safe to eat for people with shellfish allergies.

Using the useless to replace the overworked is always an interesting approach, although our uselessness can be another organism’s critical requirement, which can circle around to bite us on the ass.

In American Archaeology (fall 2016, first few paragraphs online) Julian Smith writes about the Bears Ears Controversy in an eponymous article, covering in detail a proposal for President Obama to declare part of southeastern Utah a National Monument:

Source: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

San Juan County covers almost 8,000 square miles of Utah’s southeast corner. It is the largest and the poorest county in the state, and about half of its 15,000 residents are Navajo and Ute Indians. People have occupied its striking landscape of mountains, mesas, and river canyons for thousands of years. The Bears Ears region may have more archaeological sites than any other county in the United States, but many have not been documented and are effectively unprotected. A proposal to set aside a large part of the county as a national monument has set off a lively debate over how the federal government should go about protecting cultural resources on public lands in the West.

Utah’s quarter of the Four Corners region, where it joins Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, centers on a distinctive pair of 9,000-foot buttes called the Bears Ears. Visible for miles, they overlook Natural Bridges National Monument and Cedar Mesa, a broad plateau sliced by sandstone canyons and bounded by the Colorado and San Juan rivers.

Since this is an archaeology magazine, the bulk of the article covers what has been found and may still be found in the area, the enormous damage caused by looters and general recreation activities, as well as the campaign itself. There are several players here, starting with the archaeologists, whose value system is built around the knowledge they hope to extract from the artifacts left behind by ancient peoples. That’s their motivation.

Then there are the Indian Nations, who are also advocating for National Monument status. The Protect Bears Ears Coalition, consisting of the Ute, Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo Nation, collects and dispenses information, from Indian to archaeological to  “outdoor industry” support of the National Monument drive.

The UTL’s resolution is the most recent demonstration of overwhelmingly unified support for Bears Ears National Monument among sovereign tribal nations, grassroots Native Americans, and Utah citizens. The UTL resolution joins independent declarations of support from 25 Tribes throughout the Four Corners states and a joint resolution from the National Congress of American Indians with membership of nearly 300 Tribes. The Utah Tribal Leaders association has now formally joined the call for President Barack Obama to exercise his power under the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect Bears Ears National Monument.

As the traditional lands containing artifacts and religious significance, their motivation should be clear. The Grand Canyon Trust’s Advocate Magazine covers it from the inside:

Malcolm Lehi remembers the stories his father told him about the Bears Ears Buttes and the deep cultural ties of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe to the mountainous knolls, canyons, forests, water and wildlife of the Manti-La Sal National Forest and surrounding public lands.

It’s where Lehi, a lawmaker and member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council, harvests chokecherries,knowledge passed down by his father, who taught Lehi where to find them. It’s mid-July and the berries are about the size of a quarter.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is also behind the national monument.

On the other side? Legislators and others who don’t like the idea of the Federal government sucking up more land. The Salt Lake Tribune covers the opposition, which started with an alternative named the Public Lands Initiative:

Source: Light Pollution Map

Curious about light pollution distribution? Here’s a link for an interactive map. Here’s an FAQ. It handles multiple datasets and even user input data, but I’ve not been able to find much other information on it.

Source: You Can See The Milky Way

Here’s another one. This one features an alternative map and a satellite view. And I don’t have an explanation for some of the funky state names.

This Scientific American video covers light pollution’s effects in 60 seconds. It points out something I had not thought about: light pollution can effect nocturnal animals, so light pollution is an ecological problem and therefore elevated from mere annoyance for astronomers to another serious problem to be dealt with on a national level.

It would be interesting, at the next Minnesota governor’s race debate, to bring a snapshot of one of these maps centered on the Twin Cities and ask them how they intend to remove that blot of light from the map? I wonder if we’d just get blank looks, or if they’d question the need.

Murfster35 on The Daily Kos doesn’t believe Hillary Clinton made a mistake – s/he believes she’s just employing a carefully calculated whistle of her own:

Hillary has been playing this game with the press for more than 25 years, she’s a pro. The Orange Julius steals an entire news cycle or more with each outrageous statement. She’s turning the tables on Trump, but with an almost surgical purpose. If she had said “a few” or “some” of Trumps supporters were “deplorable”, it would have caused a minor tremor, but not overtake the cycle. In saying “½ of his supporters” I have no doubt that she was referring to the 61% who think that Obama is a secret Muslim-Marxist-Kenyan here to destroy the country. The “50%” was the hook to grab the attention of the press. Look how quickly and professionally the campaign walked back only the “50%’ portion, I’m betting that they had that written by the time she made the original statement. …

This is clearly aimed at one particular demographic. And it’s a big one, one that no Republican has ever lost since polling started tracking it, college educated white voters. As we speak, Trump is tied with Clinton with white college educated males, and he’s getting his ass kicked by a whopping 23% with white college educated women. And guess what? In a recent WaPo poll, 60% of college educated whites think that Trump is biased against women and minorities. Kudos to the WaPo for not poisoning the well on this poll! They very carefully used the word “biased”, as opposed to the more inflammatory “racist” or “bigoted” that could have skewed the honest results.

The next week or two of polls will tell the tale.

The Snowden leak of NSA documents concerning mass surveillance has certainly been one of the great earthquakes of the last 20 years. Now, on Lawfare, Timothy Edgar is advocating that Snowden be pardoned – because he caused so much damage:

Edward Snowden’s actions caused great damage to national security.  They should not have been necessary to achieve the sensible reforms of the past four years.  That they were represents a failure of leadership by the intelligence community and the national security teams of the previous two administrations. …

There is an inherent tension between the values of a free society and mass surveillance.  For Snowden and his supporters, the answer is easy.  End mass surveillance—which is to say, most of what the NSA does.  Those of us who believe that the NSA’s far-flung operations are essential to national security and global stability have the harder task of keeping mass surveillance under control.

If Snowden deserves our thanks for both this round of surveillance reform and the next, it is only because the laws and institutions we created to control surveillance had become so obsolete. Intelligence agencies should not need the shock of massively damaging leak to abandon programs that are not working and refine and improve those that are.  Disclosing details of classified programs should not be the most effective way to force change.

But apparently they were.

Recalling that Richard Nixon was preemptively pardoned by President Ford, I suppose Snowden could be pardoned for the charges that are currently lodged against him.

For those who worry about Iranian nuclear issues, they might want to look at the water situation, which appears to be dreadful. Alireza Ramezani in AL Monitor digs in on the capital city of Tehran.

Source: Wikipedia

Tehran’s population has ballooned so immensely in the past decade that Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian has warned of an impending failure to supply clean and safe drinking water to residents should the capital’s population — currently hovering at 12 million — continue to rise, Hamshahri newspaper reported on Aug. 22. “The water-security problem is very serious in Tehran and needs to be addressed immediately,” Chitchian said.

Some signs are emerging. A rising number of Tehran residents have been experiencing a drop in water pressure, according to leading economic newspaper Donya-e Eqtesad. People living on the third floor or higher have had to installpowerful water pumps to suck up more water from the urban pipelines, the paper noted. The wave of pump installations has further lowered water pressure, worsening the situation for citizens without pumps.

The use of pumps is now so widespread that water experts advise residents to also set up small water tanks on their roofs to draw from, to help minimize the pumps’ impact on water pressure. Water pressure has dropped in recent weeks by 30% in some districts, Donya-e Eqtesad reported.

Alireza references this article by Andrew Follett on The Daily Caller News Foundation, which reports:

Iran’s vice minister of energy for water announced Wendesday that several of the country’s major cities will have a water crisis this summer and that little could be done to prevent it. The minister pointed out that Iran’s per-capita water consumption is nearly twice the global average. The crisis has been largely caused by improper use of groundwater resources, a rapidly growing population, and decades of mismanagement by the government.

I’m somewhat non-plussed by the use of a comparison to a world average, and would be much happier if they had reported average Tehran water usage in terms of percentage of recommended consumption of water for good health for all purposes. If the consumption is substantially above the recommendation then consumption can be reduced without imperiling the health and welfare of the people involved – assuming consumption reduction is spread equally across all inhabitants.

Alireza reports on sources of water:

Tehran’s water is mainly supplied by five dams — Taleghan, Karaj, Mamlo, Latian and Lar — and 480 deep wells located across the city. As no further dams can be built around Tehran, the energy minister has warned that more water will have to be extracted from the wells if the situation gets worse — a move that could cause health problems for Tehran residents, as more intense extraction activities increase exposure to pollutants.

I wonder how climate change will affect water production in that area of the world. Just for fun, here’s a population graph of Iran:

Mark Sumner on The Daily Kos is really angry at the Associated Press regarding the Clinton Foundation scandal … or, in his eyes, the faux-scandal:

The truth is that the Associated Press examined the data and found, quite simply, that donors to the Clinton Foundation made up a very small percentage of visitors to Hillary Clinton’s office as secretary of state. Though they worked for an extended period to obtain records, dug through disorganized information to create searchable data, and spent days picking through the resulting information, in the end they found … nothing. They found no preferential treatment. No unethical contact. Not a hint of services rendered. Nothing. There was no story there.

It had to be frustrating, especially for Braun and Sullivan, who had been at the center of the endless-attention-generating email server story. So the Associated Press decided that “no story,” was not the story they would tell.

They chose to eliminate more than 1,700 meetings from the data, and to pretend that a tiny group of 85 meetings held with contributors to the Clinton Foundation constituted some sort of “majority” of “discretionary” meetings, even if that took treating as discretionary meetings with people who had met with previous secretary of states, people who were involved in projects funded by the State Department, and people heading up groups directly working to provide aid to refugees. In no universe were these meetings “discretionary” except that generated for the purpose of making a story.

It’s a lovely rant.

Elizabeth Lunday’s “Extra Toes Conferred Extra Status” (American Archaeology, fall 2016, print only) teaches me a little something about social prestige:

“Six-toed individuals [in Chaco Canyon] seem to have been treated well, but not as gods,” [University of New Mexico archaeologist] Crown says. The team recently published a paper in the journal American Antiquity.

The Maya revered individuals with extra digits, treating them as gods. Crown and her colleagues wondred if the Chacoans did the same. … High status could account for the high rate of polydactyly among the population. “If you have a trait people value, that can lead to greater reproductive success and the trait may appear more often,” says Crown.

So we’d ignore or remove an extra toe. The Mayans and Chacoans would revere them. Sort of like winning the lottery, but not really.

Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.com discovers an analysis of household dust:

While the possibility of noxious dust bunnies comes as little surprise – it’s a topic we’ve written about before – this new study is the first comprehensive meta-analysis of toxic chemicals found in house dust. It reveals that the average American is likely exposed to an icky chaos of chemicals that come from consumer products and building materials – chemicals that have been linked to numerous health effects including cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive problems.

The new data comes from a multi-institute team of researchers, hailing from Milken Institute School of Public Health, Silent Spring Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program.

“Our study is the first comprehensive analysis of consumer product chemicals found in household dust,” says lead author Ami Zota, ScD, MS, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Milken Institute SPH. “The findings suggest that people, and especially children, are exposed on a daily basis to multiple chemicals in dust that are linked to serious health problems.”

Melissa then gives ameliorative pointers. But will studies like these lead to a cloud of legal action? It probably should.

… and out pops something. Today it was,

In computers, virtues are additive; sins, multiplicative.

Philip Bump, writing for WaPo’s The Fix blog, points out that President Obama’s approval rating is well over 50%:

From The Washington Post

The last time that President Obama’s approval rating in Washington Post-ABC News polling was as high as it is in our new survey was six months after he took office. At 58 percent, Obama’s approval is 15 points higher than it was on the eve of the 2014 elections, where his party got blown out. Hillary Clinton’s hope is that the reversal of opinions on Obama two years later will also lead to a reversal of fortunes for other Democrats — and there’s reason to think that it will.

This must be a source of discouragement for the GOP, as Clinton is certainly hoping for a tailwind from her former boss, and he appears to be peaking at precisely the right moment to blow her along. But this is also a blast in the face of … Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, as Ben Caspit reports in AL Monitor:

On Sept. 9, Netanyahu had a small “slip” that betrayed a fraction of his real emotions: In an English-language public relations clip that was disseminated on the internet, Netanyahu spoke about the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samariaand said that the casting of settlements as an obstacle for peace is “perplexing.” He compared the presence of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank to the presence of “nearly 2 million Arabs living inside of Israel.” …

“This clip,” said a high-level diplomatic source to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “is a stab to the Democratic soft spot in general, and to Hillary Clinton specifically: the subject of settlements and the connection to human rights.” According to high-echelon Israeli sources, Netanyahu directed his arrows precisely: Trump said several times recently that he supports Israel’s right to build in West Bank settlements. “Trump differentiated himself from Clinton on the settlement issue in an effort to paint himself as a clear supporter of Israel,” a diplomatic source in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “Therefore, Netanyahu’s statements turning US policy on the settlements to supporting ‘ethnic cleansing’ is music to Trump’s ears.”

“Netanyahu did his homework,” a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “This time, he drops heavy hints without leaving clear footprints. He will not host Trump for a fundraising event in Jerusalem as he did for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. But he will say things from which people can understand that Trump’s policies are more favorable to Israel than those of Clinton. The last clip is only one example. But Netanyahu wants to keep all his options open in case Hillary does win, as opposed to what happened with his failed bet on Romney in 2012.”

But with President Obama flying high, this stab to the underbelly may have little effect in the United States – only is Israel, in which Netanyahu faces his own challenge. The buffeting Israel receives from United States presidential elections is interesting and makes me wonder if they ever consider refusing to buy military supplies from the US, thus mitigating our influence over their policies.

A new variety, or was I mistaken before? Wrap their seeds around your skinny necks and pretend you’re glamorous…

Arms exports to Saudi Arabia I knew about. But it’s leading to some bipartisan action in Congress, of all places, and, in conjunction with the previously noted bill to permit 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, it could be more strain on our allies in the Middle East. Julian Pecquet in AL Monitor documents the particulars:

The State Department requests — and Congress approves — a token $10,000 in military training every year, but the heart of the relationship is America’s massive weapons trade with Saudi Arabia: a record-shattering $115 billion approved and pending arms deals under Obama, according to a new report by the nonprofit Security Assistance Monitor. …

[Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif] has been leading the charge in Congress to stop a pending sale of tanks, guns and ammunition to Riyadh for its war against the Iran-backed Houthis. Saudi Arabia denies accusations that it has deliberately targeted civilians or acted recklessly in Yemen.

The vote suggests the kingdom’s influence in Congress has taken a plunge as voters on both sides of the aisle increasingly reject taking sides in what they see as proxy wars between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran for control of the region. At the same time, the recent release of 28 pages of previously classified inquiries into alleged, but unproven, ties between Saudi officials and the Sept. 11 hijackers has also rekindled public distrust of Riyadh.

Congressional resistance would likely only increase if the Saudis were to lose in court and then refuse to pay the victims’ families, as they’ve already indicated is their intention. Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir personally told lawmakers this spring that Riyadh would sell as much as $750 billion in treasury securities and other US assets rather than risk seeing them frozen by a US court. …

The day before the 9/11 bill vote, a bipartisan group of four senators — Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; Al Franken, D-Minn.; and Mike Lee, R-Utah — introduced legislation to block the proposed sale of $1.15 billion in tanks, guns and ammunition to Riyadh. And 64 House members signed on to a Lieu-led letter to Obama last month urging him to delay the sale.

Paul and Lee are certainly far-right, while Franken certainly leans left – so this is really bipartisan, and an interesting commentary on how the stock of the Saudis has fallen recently. Of course, it would be interesting to trace out how a fall in munitions exports would impact the American companies manufacturing them – and where they’re located. Members of Congress are notorious for protecting programs that require work by companies located in their districts / states. Are these four merely fortunate to not have impacted companies in their districts? The report from Security Assistance Monitor referenced by Julian includes this nugget:

Since taking office in January 2009, the Obama administration has offered over $115 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia in 42 separate deals, more than any U.S. administration in the history of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The majority of this equipment is still in the pipeline, and could tie the United States to the Saudi military for years to come.

U.S. arms offers to Saudi Arabia since 2009 have covered the full range of military equipment, from small arms and ammunition, to howitzers, to tanks and other armored vehicles, to attack helicopters and combat aircraft, to bombs and air-to-ground missiles, to missile defense systems, to combat ships.  The United States also provides billions in services, including maintenance and training, to Saudi security forces.  For example, Vinnell Arabia, a division of Northrop Grumman, is involved in a $4 billion effort to train and equip the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), which, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has played a key role in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. [references deleted by me]

A note clarifies the situation:

Of the more than $100 billion in offers reported to Congress, $57 billion have been translated into formal sales agreements.  The U.S. has delivered $14 billion worth of weaponry to between 2009 and 2015.  The gap between orders and deliveries reflects the fact that for deals involving major equipment like fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles and combat ships there can be a considerable lag time due to various factors …

The gap between delivered and on offer is the carrot for American defense companies to attempt to influence Congress to moderate its stance concerning Saudi Arabia.

This must be a little tough for Congress as Iran remains one of the more detested countries in the world, and Saudi Arabia is fighting a proxy war with them in Yemen. Perhaps we’ll see the anti-Saudi sentiment wane as this year’s 9/11 anniversary fades away; or perhaps more evidence will arise tying the Saudi royal family to the attack. How would the Saudis react if we were to demand the extradition of a royal family member? If they refused, would the matter be smoothed over – or would we eject them from our “valued allies” list?

… then you just have to quote them and admire them. In the print-only article, “The Better Angels of Our Nature vs the Internet“, Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2016, p. 56, David J. Helfand (professor of astronomy, Columbia University, etc) describes how our evolved nature clashes with the Internet:

Thus, I see the Internet as a qualitatively different kind of threat than the printing press or television. It is a powerful, free, global channel for propagating misinformation and disinformation. The devious tribesman who led his kin away from food supplies so he could have them all to himself was soon ignored or dispatched. Today, the climate change denier, homeopathic practitioner, or presidential candidate can easily, quickly, and cheaply raise armies of the uninformed, the gullible, and the disenchanted by providing their echo chambers with any endless diet of self-reinforcing nonsense. This undercuts any possibility that consumers can make informed personal decisions, and it poisons the climate for the creation of effective public policy. [typos my fault]

Thus everyone has a right to an opinion – but not everyone’s opinion is right.

I didn’t write anything about the tragedy of 9/11, mostly because I was ill, and otherwise because nothing reminded me of it, nor would I have been particularly motivated. Fortunately, the big reminder for me was this post of Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station, who manages to say what I would have said with more authority – and more flamboyance – than I could have summoned up.

You’re expecting some kind of obligatory 9-11 post, aren’t you?

Here it is, but you’re not gonna like it.

15 years ago today 19 shitheads attacked America.

They killed 3000 of us.

And then … America got its revenge for 9-11.

Yes we did. Many times over. We killed them. We killed them all. We killed their families. We killed their wives and their kids and all their neighbors. We killed whole nations that weren’t even involved just to make goddamned sure. We bombed their cities into rubble. We burned down their countries.

They killed 3000 of us, we killed 300,000 of them or more.

8000 of us came home in body bags, but we got our revenge. Yes we did.

We’re still here. They aren’t.

We win. USA! USA! USA!

Right?

You goddamned right. We. Win.

Except…

Every year on this day we bathe in the blood of that day yet again. We watch the towers fall over and over. It’s been 15 goddamned years, but we just can’t get enough. We’ve just got to watch it again and again.

& etc. Perhaps a bit prolix, but excellent nonetheless.

[9/13/2001 – h/t Tim Foreman]

NewScientist (3 September 2016) reports on some n=1 science:

WHAT an awakening. A man has been roused from a minimally conscious state by stimulating his brain with ultrasound.

The 25-year-old man, who had suffered a severe brain injury after a road traffic accident, progressed from having only a fleeting awareness of the outside world to being able to answer questions and attempting to walk.

He was the first person to undergo an experimental procedure that stimulates the thalamus area using pulses of ultrasound. “It’s extremely exciting,” says Martin Monti at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fascinating!

Completing a troika of food-poisoning-fueled movie reviews, we saw Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) last night, and found it mystifying. Between the ghosts of Martian survivors who fled to Earth eons ago when Ghidorah destroyed their civilization, fairy-humans who can talk to Mothra and Mothra’s child, Mothra’s child whose diplomatic skills cannot bring Rodan and Godzilla into a coordinated front against Ghidorah, a subplot in which a beautiful Himalayan princess is the target of assassins who manage to ignore rampaging monsters in their devotion to their profession, this movie lacks focus and theme, and consequently is only compelling in answering that common and morbid question, What could possibly rescue this hodge-podge from those who began it? Sadly, the answer to that question is neither good nor satisfying, and I would not recommend this movie even for a lazy Sunday afternoon in January.

Continuing this thread, on Lawfare Gabriella Blum, Dustin Lewis, and Naz Modirzadeh discuss a purported new concept – war algorithms:

How should policymakers, technologists, armed forces, lawyers, and others conceptualize accountability for technical autonomy in relation to war? In a recently-published briefing report from the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, we devise a new concept: war algorithms. We define a war algorithm as any algorithm that is expressed in computer code, that is effectuated through a constructed system, and that is capable of operating in relation to armed conflict.

Gilda (1946) is a tense, dialog-driven film illustrating at least two woes – soured love and greed – and how they can ruin the lives of those whose decisions lead to such woes. Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, and George Macready lead a great cast, sometimes luxuriating in lines with a double meaning, sometimes spitting them out in frustration and rage, as Ballin (Macready) rescues Johnny (Ford) from a hold-up in Buenos Aires, and offers him a job on the spot at his casino. Johnny works his way up the ladder to right-hand man, until one day Ballin goes away and returns with a wife, Gilda (Hayworth).

Johnny becomes a little sour, but nothing like Gilda, who’s a spitfire with poison for bullets. Ballin stands in the background, taking it all in, while juggling the management of the (illegal) casino which is actually a cover for another, vastly more important, operation. As events force characters to choose allegiances, both they and the audience entertain paranoid interpretations. Revenge on soured love leads our anti-heroes down paths better never trodden, until a climax which surprises us with its force and choice.

It’s difficult to fault any facet of the movie. Perhaps Johnny could have been more complex, and yet Ford’s few hints at just a character that I wonder if I just missed more hints. Hayworth, on the other hand, glories in her part, until my Arts Editor muttered, “She’s what we call poison!” Macready is more than adequate, concealing important clues until just the right moment to drop them. Even so, the mysteries of his backstory tantalize and leave the audience wanting more.

Strongly recommended.

Surely Professor Carl Jones, a conservation biologist who often clashes with fellow environmentalists, felt at least a twinge of the old schadenfreude as he describes some of his conservation work on Mauritius:

Aldabra Giant Tortoise

The original grazers had been giant tortoises, until they went extinct. So I figured we should introduce Aldabra giant tortoises. They were a different species, but it seemed to me they would do the same job. When I talked to my friends about this, they all thought I was mad. “How do you know they will be an exact fit?” they asked. Botanists were literally purple with rage, saying the tortoises would eat critically endangered plants. I said: “Sure, that’s the idea. Your plants won’t survive unless tortoises graze on them.”

We conducted some studies that showed tortoises would do far more good than harm. It turned out that the seeds of endemic plants that passed through a tortoise’s gut germinated far better than if they hadn’t. After the [Mauritian Wildlife Foundation] restored the tortoises, the native plants started to come back.

“Kestrel manoeuvres in the dark,” NewScientist (3 September 2016)

Perhaps viewing Godzilla’s Revenge (1969, aka All Monsters Attack, aka Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Ōru Kaijū Daishingeki, which translates to Godzilla, Minilla, and Gabara: All Monsters Attack) is the cause of my current gastrointestinal distress. Aimed at children, a little boy, Ishiro, is menaced by the local gang of slightly older children, and he retreats to fantasies about an island where monsters such as Godzilla, Gabara, and others appear to be in constant fighting practice, including Godzilla’s son, Minilla, who has his own fears inhibiting his attempts to live up to his father’s expectations. Reality then ups the ante as two bank robbers, apparently the inspiration for the burglars in the comedy Home Alone (1990), kidnap him as he stumbles across one of their driver license cards. Eventually, Minilla inspires Ishiro to escape, leading the robbers on a bumbling chase while the cops close in and finally capture them.

From horrid special effects to a drearily predictable story, monsters with no purpose but to inspire a little boy, and dubious acting, I can only think fast-forwarding through the more dreadful parts of this movie has upset my equilibrium; or, I didn’t use the fast forward feature enough, allowing myself to be overcome by pursuing bad taste.

In either case, this cannot be recommended, even to Godzilla completists.

NewScientist‘s Anil Ananthaswamy covers the broad topic of consciousness (3 September 2016, paywall). This caught my eye:

But how [does the brain give rise to consciousness]? That is a raging debate. At its heart is what philosopher David Chalmers at New York University termed the “hard problem” of consciousness: how can physical networks of neurons produce experiences that appear to fall outside the material world? As Thomas Nagel, also at New York University, put it in the 1970s: you could know every detail of the physical workings of a bat’s brain, but still not know what it is like to be a bat.

Broadly speaking, those trying to solve the hard problem fall into two camps, according to psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it’s a mirage, and so dismiss the problem entirely. …

Those [in the latter camp] say the hard problem creates one where there is none. “It’s an unsolvable mystery, because the problem is ill posed,” says neuroscientist Michael Graziano of Princeton University. He argues that consciousness is nothing but a trick of the mind. What’s more, the brain doesn’t just create the illusion of consciousness but also the feeling that there is a separate, immaterial “I” having a conscious experience. In other words: there is no need to explain strange interactions between material and immaterial things because the immaterial things don’t really exist.

From my limited perspective, I begin to wonder if the terms of the debate are ill-defined. I wonder if the question, What attributes typify consciousness, would elicit very different answers from the two camps?

panpsychism:

Is this aware?

… panpsychism, the view that all matter – even inanimate objects like rocks – is imbued with some degree of consciousness.

– Anil Ananthaswamy in “Metaphysics special: What is consciousness?”, NewScientist (3 September 2016, paywall)

We can see the success of the invaders here.

Stealthily coming over the garage roof

Leaving soldiers wherever it goes.

A hapless victim.