Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Ross Andersen’s article for The Atlantic concerning an oddball star, designated KIC 8462852 (this is the link to the academic paper), roughly 1481 light years distant, is being noised across the Net:

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash. …

And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.

When I spoke to [postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

Well, I gotta say, 150,000 stars is peanuts in this Universe – in the Milky Way galaxy, even.  That bit of rhetoric fell flat for me.

But the rest is the stuff of dreams.  Sure wish I was an astronomer working on that team.  Or even the janitor.  About all I can guess at this point is it’s not a Dyson sphere – although maybe we’re catching a glimpse of one under construction.

Now to wait for our wonder to be deflated …

…. appears to be dancing.

This is going to make my hair itch for weeks.  Dan Jones investigates the problems of moral choice and big problems for NewScientist (26 September 2015, paywall) and comes up with a doozylicious problem, at least in my mind.  First, he covers the basics: intuitive moral sentiments are those gut reactions you have learned for local situations – you see it, you act.  These are good when the situation is, ah, local, or better put, when the effects of your action are limited to the local (geographical) area, and, although it’s not stated, an analogous statement about chronological measurements.

And then there is what Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene calls “manual mode”, where the situation calls for deliberate consideration.  The decision may not be quick, but it may more often be correct, especially if the intuitive reaction yields an improper result.  Manual mode appears to be more appropriate for situations where the choice, correct or not, will have a far-reaching affect.

He covers a bit of history, such as the British history of abolition (it involves shame), and then moves on to modern movements, which also utilize shame, which brings us to this:

However, harnessing the power of rational reflection, collective identity and shame may not be the only options for would-be moral revolutionaries. In their book Unfit for the Future, philosophers Ingmar Persson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford argue that our moral brains are so compromised that the only way we can avoid catastrophe is to enhance them through biomedical means.

In the past few years, researchers have shown it might actually be possible to alter moral thinking with drugs and brain stimulation. Molly Crockett of the University of Oxford has found that citalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor used to treat depression, makes people more sensitive to the possibility of inflicting harm on others. Earlier this year, for instance, Crockett and colleagues found that participants who had taken citalopram were willing to pay twice as much money as controls to prevent a stranger from receiving an electric shock (Current Biology, vol 25, p 1852).

I leaned back and wonder, Is this the loss of moral choice?

Of course that raises moral questions in itself – who to treat, how, and at what age? But Persson and Savulescu argue that if the techniques can be shown to change our moral behaviour for the better (who or what defines “better” is another question), then there are no good ethical reasons not to use them. Take the issue of consent, which children could not provide. “The same is true of all upbringing and education, including moral instruction,” says Persson.

But wouldn’t biomedical moral enhancement undermine responsibility by turning us into moral robots? Persson and Savulescu argue that biomedical treatment poses no more threat to free will and moral responsibility than educational practices that push us towards the same behaviour.

Assuming this was practical across a large segment of the population – it’s not, yet – can I agree with Persson & Savulescu that this is no different from moral instruction? I’m finding this difficult.

Education is the provision of known true facts (as best we can know them) and processes to sentient beings in order to facilitate better actions.  In other words, the brain is altered by the impact of knowledge.  However, as sentient, self-aware beings, we have at least the potential to understand why we react as we do to the world, such as understanding how increasing greenhouse gasses causes world wide climate change.  If the administration of a drug would cause a comparable change in reactions as does knowledge, well, how is this working?  The example is interesting, as it suggests an increase in empathy, but I have to wonder if it would a similar impact in manual mode.

Yet, unless one believes in the deterministic model of the universe, I see a difference in that the person subjected to education, general or moral, is still making a choice: a choice to believe, or disbelieve, the evidence, the processes, or even the inclinations of God, and whether or not the result of these actions are beneficial or not for themselves and those they are impacting in the non-local area.  Is this so true of the person with the medicated morality?  As I think about it (with my head-cold bound brain), it seems more and more fantastical to think a medication can change morality.  To be sure, the cited study appears to have modified the intuitive moral mode; would it also affect the manual mode?

Is it coercion?  Is shame coercion?  Yes, and yes.  Which is impermissible?

Another question: if a drug can make us “more moral”, does this imply there is a morality of some certainty, and that it’s known by our bodies if not articulated by our philosophers?  Or is it simply a matter of interpretation: sure, the behavior is modified by the drug, but whether this is more or less moral depends on the interpretation put on the action?

Yep, the hair will be itching for weeks.  Let me know what you think.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog has a post on the most recent poll results for the GOP in this thread:

1. Donald Trump: 24% (down two points from last month)

2. Ben Carson: 23% (up five points)

3. Ted Cruz: 10% (up two points)

4. Marco Rubio: 9% (unchanged)

5. Jeb Bush: 8% (up one point)

6. Carly Fiorina: 5% (down four points)

6. Mike Huckabee: 5% (up two points)

8. Rand Paul: 3% (up one point)
…

But it’s the top of the GOP standings that are hard to overlook. Indeed, the pattern should cause some consternation among GOP leaders. Over the summer, Donald Trump created several controversies for himself, making outlandish comments about all kinds of people and issues, and each time, a variety of pundits said, “Now he’s gone too far.” And soon after, in each instance, Trump’s poll numbers went up.

More recently, however, it’s Carson who consistently finds himself in the news for making comments that raise questions about his stability and connection to reality. And yet, the more unhinged Carson appears, the greater his support in national Republican polling.

It says something important about the perspective of GOP voters, and just as importantly, it creates an incentive for Republican presidential candidates to be as reckless and irresponsible as humanly possible.

This is the mirror of the constituents of today’s GOP – but will it be tomorrow’s?  The implications of the various stunts pulled by the occupants of the entire poll, where the more ridiculous the statement, the more support the instigator gains, indicates the GOP’s core is located, increasingly, on the fringes of American society.  Granted, our increasingly fragmented society makes this easier than it did in decades past, where the fringe was relegated to lithographic presses, late night dinners, and the occasional radio show, but at some point the saner elements of the GOP will either, from self-disgust, assert themselves and kick the bums out – or leave themselves, vowing never to vote for the bums.  Either way, the team politics would founder, and with it the ship the fringe-right has been riding.

And this would be a shame, since a single party does not debate well with itself, even the Democrats.  The movement towards ‘starve the beast’ is having a deleterious impact on the United States in far too many ways; worse, few adherents will be persuaded of this viewpoint as the defenders are quite inventive of not only persuasive technique, but even facts.  There is a lot of debate about the causes of this.  I’ll pass on figuring that out tonight.

Russia is doing what it can in the clandestine war waged by the United States and Saudi Arabia.  Dalan McEndree of WorldPress.org reports on how Russia is attacking the OPEC oil alliance:

Putin’s moves also are strengthening Russia’s influence with OPEC. Russia already has extensive and close ties with Iran and Venezuela, and is now laying the basis for such ties with Iraq. Putin has aligned Russia with OPEC’s have-nots—the members lacking the financial resources to withstand low crude prices for an extended period and that have objected to Saudi policies (Iran, Iraq, Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Ecuador and Venezuela)—against the haves (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar). He has continually supported Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s calls for an emergency OPEC meeting on prices and his efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to reverse its policy. At the beginning of September, Putin told Maduro that the two countries “must team up to shore up oil prices.”

In addition, Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of energy policy, Arkady Dvorkovich, made comments that mocked Saudi policy, saying that “OPEC producers are suffering the ricochet effects of their attempt to flush out rivals by flooding the world with excess output,” expressing doubt that OPEC members “really want to live with low oil prices for a long time,” and implying that Saudi policy is irrational.

Indeed, Russia can be seen as maneuvering to split OPEC into two blocs, with Russia, although not a member, persuading the “Russian bloc” to isolate Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab OPEC members within OPEC. This might persuade the Saudis to seek a compromise with the have-nots.

A strategic alliance with Iran and Iraq offers Putin two more potential avenues by which to pressure the Saudis. They can test Saudi determination to defend their market share at any price and its financial wherewithal to do so. Iran claims it can raise crude output by 1 million barrels within six or so months of the lifting of sanctions. The Saudis may be calculating that Iran must first rehabilitate its oil fields and that Iran, cash poor, cannot do so quickly. If this is the case, Russia could step in, offer Iran financing, and force the Saudis to contemplate prices staying lower longer than they anticipated and therefore continuing pressure on their economy.

He also addresses the Chinese market:

Russia also could cooperate with Iran and Iraq to take market share from Saudi Arabia in the vital Chinese market. As a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Iraq and other countries are vying intensely for sales to China, the second-largest import market and the major source of demand growth in coming years. Coordinating their pricing and consistently offering the Chinese prices below the Saudi price, they could seek to win market share. Such a price war would pressure the competitors’ currencies.

I feel less certainty about China being a major source of demand for fossil fuel.  In the case of coal, the rulers of China are beginning to demonstrate that, once a decision has been taken, they can follow through.  If this holds true – a large IF – and were to be extended to oil in concert with a growing renewables or nuclear-based energy grid, then the entire context changes.

Suppositions like this may render the Saudi Arabian strategy and associated goals moot – as well as the Russian export strategy.  The entire renewables movement, as much as it’s denounced and ignored by the American right-wing fringe, actually serves to further their purported goals – just not with bayonets and mustard gas.  (Appropriately enough, I’ll place in parenthesis the obligatory reference to covert goals, much of which is motivated by the oil industry, and thus the low oil prices are not desirable.) Of course, there are other uses for oil, so it’ll not go completely out of style – unless someone comes up with a replacement for plastics.

Continuing the theme under a new name, Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com believes he may have found evidence of another scandal, much like the VW scam:

Samsung likes to brag about its ‘smart’ televisions. Well, maybe they’re a little too smart for their own good. Drawing an uncomfortable parallel with Volkswagen’s emission rigging scheme, the European Commission is now investigating the South-Korean company to figure out whether its televisions’ are designed to modify their power consumption when they detect that they are being tested for energy efficiency. This alleged fraud has been uncovered by independent labs, once again.

From his source at the guardian:

The European commission says it will investigate any allegations of cheating the tests and has pledged to tighten energy efficiency regulations to outlaw the use of so-called “defeat devices” in TVs or other consumer products, after several EU states raised similar concerns.

Which sounds very upright, doesn’t it?  Outlawing defeat devices, that is.  Except we’re really talking consumer fraud here, and so there’s a law already in place to cover the situation.

But as an engineer, my question is this: why are the test engineers disclosing their test environment to the development engineers?  That’s madness barely understandable, and I do mean barely.  Additionally, the testing should cover a very wide range of conditions in order to understand the behavior of the device as conditions change – it’s close to insanity to suggest that recognition of a test environment is even possible for responsible testing.

At this point, it’s really on the test engineers to explain how the device manufacturers can possibly discern the difference between real environments and test environments, and why their test environments should be detectable.

Malcolm Gladwell addresses the tide of school shootings as well. His thesis is that this is a version of riot behavior spread over time and space.  I suspect this piece and Dowd’s earlier piece actually work together to some extent, as Dowd’s would provide an important communications element.  Gladwell doesn’t suggest, however, that these are just sexually deprived young men.

Newswise reports that melanin is retained during fossilization of mammals:

“We have now studied the tissues from fish, frogs, and tadpoles, hair from mammals, feathers from birds, and ink from octopus and squids,” said Caitlin Colleary, a doctoral student of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study. “They all preserve melanin, so it’s safe to say that melanin is really all over the place in the fossil record. Now we can confidently fill in some of the original color patterns of these ancient animals.” …

The researchers said microscopic structures traditionally believed to be fossilized bacteria are in fact melanosomes — organelles within cells that contain melanin, the pigment that gives colors to hair, feathers, skin, and eyes.

I wonder if this can be combined with modern scanning techniques for high volume processing.

(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com)

Steve Benen catches up to me after word comes that Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is too moderate to be Speaker of the House.

Having my second head cold in three months, Deb & I decided to watch THE MONSTER MAKER tonight.  It had some good acting in it, but the plot was uninspiring and the bad guy was decidedly unbalanced, rather than interestingly avaricious.  The guy in the monkey suit didn’t get a credit, despite a courageous effort, and the bad guy’s haircut was subtly awful, which we didn’t realize until halfway into the movie, and then couldn’t take our eyes off it.

Oh, and the special effects were actually subtle and well done.  I did notice that.  They just needed a better script.  Rotten Tomatoes’ Audience score is a … 3.  Which may be unfair – I’ve seen far worse in the horror series we’re grinding through.  But it wasn’t good.

I’ve wondered and dreamed about this for years.  The Materials Project doesn’t test new materials – it calculates them.

To date [The Materials Project] has calculated the basic set of properties for more than 58,000 compounds, says lead developer of The Materials Project Anubhav Jain, who is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – a lot of stuff, but only a start to the vision of sourcing new materials at a few key strokes.

(Leigh Phillips, NewScientist, 26 September 2015, paywall)

Definitely a site for professionals, not passive readers like me – but it looks fascinating not only as a repository of results, but …

It has also recently launched an app that allows anyone to dream up a compound and submit it to Jain for computation. Another enables you to input the qualities you desire and then uses machine learning to suggest compounds that fit. These tools are designed so that anyone can begin with a handful of atoms and a rough idea of a material they want to make and begin generating ideas for compounds. Personal jetpack, anyone?

For a materials scientist tired of throwing atoms at a wall and hoping they stick, this has to be the dream come to reality.  Apparently a genomic computation approach is used, as simulating reality in every detail is well beyond the capabilities of today’s computers – certain simplifications are made and this, I presume, forces some hunting about for materials with given properties in certain conditions.

Along with enjoying the idea of calculating what you need, rather than slopping about in a lab, I also found this bit interesting:

[The Materials Project] s part of a much wider Materials Genome Initiative coordinated by the US federal government. Just about every US research outfit and government agency with an interest in science is involved, from Harvard University to the Department of Defense to NASA. Since 2011, $250 million has flowed into the scheme, much of it spent on powerful computers that will “support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost”.

So once again, the US Government¹ is playing a key, probably indispensable part in advancing the state of science and the nation.  Having read REASON Magazine for far too long, I can hear the railing about interference in business and how business would have accomplished the same from here.

Guys, it’d be a private database held closely by P&G – if it even came into existence.

¹Random quote: “The business of America is Business.” – C. Coolidge.  Although History Central gives me to understand Cal believed government should interfere as little as possible in business; the quote is apropos in an alternative sense.

From gjohnsit@ The Daily Kos:

The Lumbees began firing into the air and yelling their warhoops as they charged the field. The nerve of the Klansmen broke and they fell into complete panic.
The Klansmen dropped their guns and scrambled for their cars. Some had brought their wives and children with them, who wailed in fear as dark-faced Lumbee milled around their cars and pointed flashlights at them.

James Cole, the Grand Dragon himself, was in such a panic that he ran into a nearby swamp, abandoning his wife and “white womanhood” in the process. Cole’s wife, Carolyn, also in a panic, drove her car into a ditch. After a few minutes several Lumbee helped push her car back onto the road.

“The only thing they left behind was their stuff and their families.”
– Littleturtle

Walk into a hospital wing, and what do you see and hear?  Ping ping, wavy lines on display monitors.  And where does the data embodied by the displays go?  At most hospitals….

Clinical staff might look at the monitors to check the data as it is collected. They might scroll back to see what happened 8, 12 or 24 hours earlier. Occasionally they might want that kind of information if something really bad or unexpected happens, but even then they would probably rely on the medical notes rather than the real-time physiological data that came off the monitors. So usually not much is done with this data after it has been collected and displayed.

Thomas Heldt, an assistant professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants hospitals to collect, store, and use that information to detect slow-progression problems – and stop them in their tracks.  Boston Children’s Hospital has started doing so, and is having good results.

(NewScientist, 26 September 2015, paywall)

… but your mate, he’s a bit blurry: only at 1mm.  If you want a digital recreation of real people, they’re now available.  The best?  Of a woman who died two decades ago, as NewScientist‘s Jessica Hamzelou reports (26 September 2015, paywall):

Now the woman’s body has been recreated, in far greater detail. She has been digitised at a much higher resolution, thanks to the thinner slices used. The male cadaver was sectioned at 1 millimetre intervals; the woman at intervals of just a third of a millimetre. …

Their phantom is the most detailed digital reconstruction of a whole human body ever to be pieced together. She has 231 tissue parts, ranging from windpipe to eyeballs, but is missing nose cartilage and 14 other bits of the body.

How useful is it?

“They have ten times as much information as you’d get from an MRI scan,” says Fernando Bello, who develops simulations for medical procedures at Imperial College London. “It means the team will have much more information about organs and their structuring.”

The high resolution of the model makes it ideal for virtual experiments. Each of the woman’s tissues has a well-defined set of parameters, such as density and thermal conductivity. This makes it possible to compute the impact that radiation, for example, and various imaging techniques are likely to have on living tissues.

“The phantom gives us a great opportunity to study human tissues without having to do human studies, which are lengthy and expensive,” says Ara Nazarian, an orthopaedic surgeon at Harvard Medical School who is collaborating with Makarov.

Makarov’s team has already started running tests that are too risky to try on living people. In one, they gave their model a metal hip or femur, and studied the effect of putting it in an MRI scanner. Metal implants heat up in the scanner’s strong magnetic field, and little is known at present about how best to scan people who have them.

And this data is publicly available here from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.  From their data page:

The dataset from the female cadaver has the same characteristics as the male cadaver with one exception. The axial anatomical images were obtained at 0.33 mm intervals instead of 1.0 mm intervals. This results in over 5,000 anatomical images. The female dataset is about 40 gigabytes in size. Spacing in the “Z” direction was reduced to 0.33 mm in order to match the pixel spacing in the “XY” plane which is 0.33 mm. This enables developers who are interested in three-dimensional reconstructions to work with cubic voxels.

This data is freely available.  I wonder how well their physics engine works – and the appropriate metric for such a question.

Our reader is piqued:

How exactly does that honey spoon work?

Imagine: you dip the spoon, like any of its cousins, into the blessed amber fluid, and then transfer the viscous nutrients to the waiting biscuit (or other, lesser, vessel).  Now comes the moment that leaves the honey spoon’s cousins bereft of utility, with a ghastly exception: what to do with the precious, drippy remnants clinging forlornly to the bowl of the instrument?  The cousins may only be plunged into the jar, which, if it is deep enough, will foul the handle of the spoon with our beloved liquid, which, despite our devotions, are repulsive when attached to the handle of the implement of transportation.

At this juncture, the topology of the honey spoon leaps into spectacular focus.  The crook unique to its construction performs a singular function: to secure the spoon upon the lip of the honey storing vessel, such that the honey will return to its sanctuary; and, further, permitting safe transport of the honey jar from celebrant to celebrant.  So long as the storage vessel’s lip is not of untoward width, the honey spoon enjoys success.

Another reader comments:

Nothing but local honey for me. Our city just changed an ordinance so now we can have beehives in our yards. Finally! Two people voted against because “people might get stung.” I guess they’ve never been outside.

Sadly, a few people do suffer from allergies to bee stings, such as my brother-in-law (and probably their kids).  According to Healthline,

Approximately 40 people per year die in the U.S. because of allergic reactions to bee stings. ?

Yes, the question mark does exist in the reference.

John Kasich, running for the GOP Presidential nomination, courtesy CNN:

“I’d rather have people be in a position where they’re aggravated with me so I can accomplish something, than have them love me and accomplish nothing, okay. I’m not there to run a popularity contest.”

A reader replies to this thread with a resource:

There’s some evidence that bison were part of the prairie eco-cycle via their hooves turning the soil. We have much less prairie today, too. So maybe just the homesteaders alone would have killed off large numbers of them by changing the land? (not a good reference, but somewhat similar: http://savory.global/…/eviden…/restoring-the-climate.pdf)

This seems to be a paper proposing the expansion of grasslands as they are an important approach to the sequestration of carbon.

A picture which is evocative of barren waste, loneliness, and desolation.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Fossil fuels run into some more headwinds, reports Sami Grover @ TreeHugger.com:

The latest to join the club is ANZ, one of Australia’s big four banks, which The Guardian reports is making a bold commitment to stop funding any new conventional coal-fired power plants that don’t deploy Carbon Capture and Storage and/or similar technologies that significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Additionally, ANZ is pledging $10 billion over the next 5 years to fund renewable energy, reforestation, energy efficiency and other low emission technologies.

This is a promising sign indeed. And it may be driven as much by economics as it is ethics. Indeed, ANZ acknowledged in a statement that its exposure to carbon intensive industries was considered by many to be an increasingly significant financial risk, and that the bank needed to play its part in helping to manage an “orderly transition” from fossil fuels: …

Banks are, supposedly, experts at evaluating risk.  When the business evaluation of the situation calls for moving away from fossil fuels, I think we can expect faster and faster movement towards the renewable sources of energy.

Sami’s source is this the guardian article.  It includes this statement:

But ANZ said it was committed to the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial times. The bank said it would transparently report its progress on climate and set targets to reduce its own emissions.

Australia three other largest banks – Westpac, Commonwealth Bank and NAB – are all signed up to sustainability commitments for their lending. But environmental groups have pressed them to do more by ruling out investment in coal projects, as overseas banks have done with Adani’s huge Carmichael mine in Queensland.

I’ll be interested in knowing how ANZ defines “transparently.”  Done properly and it can become an excellent example for other companies to follow, or not, depending on outcomes.

I wonder if the accession of Mr. Turnbull to the Prime Ministership pressured ANZ into making this commitment.  the guardian article also notes this about Australia’s situation:

According to University College London, 90% of Australia’s known coal reserves must be left unburned to keep the world on track to avoid warming above 2C. Analysis released by AGL last year showed that 75% of Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations were operating beyond their “useful life” but that it was too expensive to shut them down.

No clarification of “too expensive”.  To replace?  To make cleaner?

A reader shares his feelings about honey:

I like all kinds of honey. Never met one I didn’t enjoy, although I like some better than others. The problem with commercial, refined honeys is you may not even be getting 100% honey. There was a big scandal a year or so ago where China was exporting contaminated honey mixed with random sugar syrups, colorings, etc. Once it was caught in the USA, they simply transshipped it through 3rd party countries and it ended up back in the USA again. Some of it was contaminated with lead and animal antibiotics. It was banned in the EU, as well. Since, examination of other commercial, refined honeys presumably produced “here” as found them to be not all honey, either.

And I suppose we can expect that trend to continue so long as honey bee populations are seen as threatened, although some disagree with that view.  I do hope you have the approved honey spoon:

For those curious about the campaign against ivory poaching, news from the Elephant Action League indicates some progress in the problematic nation of Tanzania:

“The Queen of Ivory”, a Chinese national, arrested by a specialized Task Force in Tanzania. To date, she is the most important ivory trafficker ever arrested in the country.

Dar-es-Salaam, 8 October 2015 – A specialized wildlife trafficking unit under Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) arrested a number of high-level Chinese ivory traffickers led by a woman who is now thought to be the most notorious ivory trafficker brought to task so far in the war against elephant poaching. She is believed to be behind the trafficking of a huge quantity of ivory over the last several years.

The woman, now dubbed the “Queen of Ivory”, is a Chinese national named Yang Feng Glan, 66, and has been followed by the Task Force for over a year. She recently disappeared from Tanzania, moving to Uganda, but returned one week ago, when the Task Force swiftly moved and arrested her. After confessing to many of her crimes she has been taken to the high court of Dar es Salaam facing a maximum sentence of 20-30 years imprisonment.

(h/t Change.org)

Katherine Martinko @ TreeHugger.com reviews some information on raw honey vs refined honey, and, loving honey, I had to read it.  This caught my eye:

1. Raw unfiltered honey contains bee pollen, which has long been considered one of nature’s most nourishing foods. Bee pollen is packed with protein, and has been used in Chinese medicine to improve unbalanced nutrition, vitality, longevity, and energy. It is also used for weight control, beauty, anti-aging, allergies, and overall health.

Any time I see a reference to Chinese medicine, holistic medicine, etc, my ears prick up.  So I checked on bee pollen on WebMD.  It doesn’t address the topic directly, but rather simply says,

You may also hear recommendations for using bee pollen for alcoholism, asthma, allergies, health maintenance, or stomach problems, but there is no proof that it helps with these conditions. Before you take any natural product for a health condition, check with your doctor.

Bee pollen is also recommended by some herbalists to enhance athletic performance, reduce side effects of chemotherapy, and improve allergies and asthma.

At this point, medical research has not shown that bee pollen is effective for any of these health concerns.

Or anything at all, really.  On the other hand, it’s not considered dangerous except to pregnant women.  Another case of greener grass in other pastures, I suppose.  The nitty-gritty of the local variety of medicine can’t compare to the unverified claims for the one in the next valley over.

But I still like most honey.  (Didn’t care for buckwheat-derived honey so much, though.)

With regard to the fiasco currently underway in the American House of Representatives, in which the front-runner to replace Representative Boehner as Speaker of the House abruptly dropped out after some of his remarks were widely interpreted to indicate a House Committee was actually being used to interfere with the political fortunes of one of the Democratic candidates, Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog has come up with an interesting rumor:

In case you’re a Trump supporter because you like small, unintrusive government, Ilya Somin @ The Volokh Conspiracy takes apart Trump’s view of the government capability of takings.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Donald Trump, who has a history of abusing eminent domain for his own benefit, claims that the condemnation of property for transfer to private developers is “a wonderful thing” and “is not taking property”:

So eminent domain, when it comes to jobs, roads, the public good, I think it’s a wonderful thing, I’ll be honest with you. And remember, you’re not taking property, you know, the way you asked the question, the way other people—you’re paying a fortune for that property. Those people can move two blocks away into a much nicer house.

When the government forces you to give up your land against your will, that is pretty obviously a “taking” of property. That’s true as a legal matter, and it is also true as a matter of simple common sense.

It is true that victims of eminent domain get compensated by the government. But Trump’s claim that they get “a fortune” and can then “go buy a house now that’s five times bigger, in a better location” is, in the vast majority of cases, simply false. If it were true, people would be happy to have their homes condemned. It also isn’t true that victims of takings can usually just “move two blocks away into a much nicer house.” Since World War II, urban renewal takings and other condemnations for private development have forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were left far worse off than they were before.

I see takings as simply a weapon for those who’ve achieved elective office to use against those who are out of power – and often unable to defend themselves against the deprivations of the politically privileged class.  I know the Founding Fathers didn’t have that in mind – but that’s how it’s turned out.