Quotulatiousness

August 25, 2012

Yet another factor in obesity

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Antibiotics.

We aren’t single individuals, but colonies of trillions. Our bodies, and our guts in particular, are home to vast swarms of bacteria and other microbes. This “microbiota” helps us to harvest energy from our food by breaking down the complex molecules that our own cells cannot cope with. They build vitamins that we cannot manufacture. They ‘talk to’ our immune system to ensure that it develops correctly, and they prevent invasions from other more harmful microbes. They’re our partners in life.

What happens when we kill them?

Farmers have been doing that experiment in animals for more than 50 years. By feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy farm animals, they’ve found that they could fatten up their livestock by as much as 15 percent. You can put the antibiotics in their feed or in their water. You can give the drugs to cows, sheep, pigs or chickens. You can try penicillins, or tetracyclines, or many other classes of antibiotics. The effect is the same: more weight.

It seems reasonable to assume that this effect is also true for humans. And we dose ourselves with antibiotics far more than we should (often for things that do not respond to antibiotics at all … a twist on the placebo effect). In addition, many of the animals we raise for meat are regularly dosed with antibiotics.

For now, two things are clear. First, antibiotics have done a huge amount of good in treating bacterial infections and if we’re even talking about reducing their use, it’s because we have the luxury of health that they have provided. Second, they are clearly overused: prescribed for illnesses that they have no power over, and used to fatten livestock that aren’t sick. Currently, on average, every American child gets a course of antibiotics ever year.

The overuse of antibiotics has fuelled the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but their impact on our beneficial bacteria could be equally detrimental. Blaser has been vociferously banging on this drum for years. As he wrote in a comment piece for Nature, “Antibiotics kill the bacteria we do want, as well as those we don’t… Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma… We must make use of the available technology to protect and study our bacterial benefactors before it is too late.”

From wargaming to war-making

Filed under: Gaming, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Wargames have been used to plan real wars for more than a century, but in at least one instance, a commercial wargame was a significant planning tool for a real war:

By the end of the Cold War, American military planners had contingencies and plans for just about every conceivable crisis – Latin American counterinsurgencies, confrontations on the Korean Peninsula, a full out Warsaw Pact onslaught against NATO. But on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks surprised the world and rolled into the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, decision makers in the Pentagon had virtually no plans on the shelf for the defeating the world’s fourth largest army. Out of desperation, someone in the American military nerve-centre reached for a copy of a hobby store military board game entitled Gulf Strike. Designed in the late 1980s by a subsidiary of the commercial war game company Avalon Hill, Gulf Strike allowed civilian hobbyists to battle through a series of hypothetical wars involving the U.S., Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran on a hexagonal-grid map of the Gulf region. According to a 1994 Military History article on war games by Peter Perla, before lunch on the day of the invasion, the Pentagon had the game’s designer, Mark Herman, on the phone. By mid afternoon, he was on the military’s payroll. And by day’s end, Herman and a group of senior officers had already successfully played out a shorthand version of what in five months would go down in history as Operation Desert Storm.

Of course, the results of wargames can’t predict with great accuracy: the level of abstraction is too high and the “fog of war” quickly introduces far more uncertainty than any simulation can dispell in advance. However, disregarding the data from wargaming a battle or campaign has resulted in disaster at least once: the Japanese navy wargamed the attack on Midway Island in 1942. the wargame showed that the Japanese would lose at least one aircraft carrier from the attacking forces. The admirals, suffering as a group from what was known as “victory disease”, disregarded the game result and ordered the sunken ship “refloated” and the exercise continued.

In the real world, of course, the IJN lost not one but four aircraft carriers and the majority of their combat-trained pilots and crew. It was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.

August 24, 2012

It’s an odd sort of “austerity” that increases government spending

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Everyone knows that Britain’s current economic woes are because of the government’s harsh austerity measures, right?

The argument over ‘the cuts’ has now become wholly detached from reality. Listen to any BBC debate and you’ll find the debate presented along these lines: ‘The Coalition, aiming to eliminate the deficit by 2015, has cut spending; this has had the effect of reassuring the markets and preventing a Greek-style meltdown but, on the other hand, it has impeded growth, and so reduced the tax-take, which has meant that the deficit now won’t be abolished until at least 2017. Some people believe that we need to focus on growth, not austerity. They are calling for Plan B’.

Every assumption contained in that summary is false. Net government expenditure is higher now than it was three years ago. Such deficit reduction as there has been has come largely through tax rises rather than spending cuts. The reason that government borrowing costs are low is not because of the imagined austerity programme, but because the Bank of England has magicked up nearly £400 billion through quantitative easing, given it to banks and told them to buy government debt with it. Growth and austerity are not antonyms: it was debt-fuelled growth caused the disaster in the first place. As for Plan B, no one has yet tried Plan A: spending less.

The new Malthusian miserabilism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Brendan O’Neill on the once-again popular theories of Reverend Thomas Malthus:

Malthusianism is back in vogue. Not only in theatres in Sloane Square, but across the opinion-forming spectrum. Last year, the human population hit seven billion, giving rise to a boom in handwringing commentary. BBC reporters tell us that ‘uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet’. The Guardian’s environment reporters are forever warning of the dangers of our ‘rapidly growing global population’. Then there’s much-loved celebs like David Attenborough, who recently signed up to the population-panic group the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) and frequently declares: ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.’

The New Malthusians are getting cockier. At the UN Rio+20 Earth summit earlier this year, 105 respectable institutions, including Britain’s increasingly Malthusian Royal Society, urged the international powers-that-be to look beyond the ‘ethical sensitivities’ around the population issue and ‘confront rising global population’. All those wailing babies mean we are now ‘living beyond the planet’s means’, they declared. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping millions of dollars into the distribution of birth-control tools in the developing world. Well-off westerners can now even offset their carbon emissions by helping to prevent the birth of babies in less fortunate places. A website called Pop Offsets, launched by the OPT, allows you to work out how much carbon you emit in your daily life and then tells you how many births you must help to prevent in order to offset that carbon. You make a financial contribution to a reproductive charity; that charity encourages a woman somewhere not to have more kids; and, hey presto, your personal emissions are cancelled out by your contribution to the non-creation of resource-demanding babies. The Guardian’s report on this initiative was illustrated with a photo of babies, 12 of them, just lying there like the problematic drains on nature.

Malthusianism is so ingrained in the outlook of greens and other trendies that people can fantasise about loads of human beings dying off without anyone batting an eyelid. Population panic-merchants often claim that the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet is two billion human beings, so at least five billion less than at present. In a discussion on Radio 3’s super-respectable Nightwaves a couple of years ago, the psychologist and writer Sue Blackmore declared: ‘For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.’ There were no complaints to the BBC: the idea that humans are a problem in need of a solution is widespread in respectable ­circles.

The diminishing importance of borders in a supranational world

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

At sp!ked, Angus Kennedy reviews The Significance of Borders, a new book by Thierry Baudet:

A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.

First it is under attack from supranationalism, that is, from institutions like the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Security Council, and, most dramatically, the European Union. So while nations retain sovereignty at a formal level, increasing degrees of ‘material sovereignty’ have been acquired by supranational organisations. Baudet argues, for instance, that the official aim of the EU ‘is the negation of the concept of statehood’, because the nation state is held responsible, most notably by German theorists, for war. The EU’s immanent federalist logic leads to the necessary extension of its bureaucratic power (taking more and more countries into its orbit). Or — as an illustration of the attack on the democratic basis of national sovereignty — take the contempt in which the ECHR holds Britain for denying convicted prisoners the right to vote: this despite the fact that parliament voted 234 votes to 22 against the proposal. It seems the ECHR is happy to demand Britain change laws upheld by its own democracy.

Second, self-government is also under attack from below. Firstly, in the form of multiculturalism and its official support, legal pluralism (where the law is applied with cultural ‘sensitivity’ rather than justly). Secondly, from cultural diversity, which rejects the idea of a British or a Dutch identity in favour of overlapping multiple, provisional and lightly held, identities. Baudet gives the example of the Dutch crown princess, Máxima, who declared in 2007 that ‘the Dutch identity does not exist’, that the world has ‘open borders’ and that ‘it is not either-or. But and-and.’ When royalty — once the very symbol of national sovereignty — refuses to discriminate between citizens and outsiders, then even the most ardent internationalist might begin to smell a rat.

As Baudet argues, without a community of interest, a ‘we’, there is nothing. He notes that the ECHR outlaws ‘discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. Everyone must be treated equally. Baudet is correct to point out that such a widely drawn attack on discrimination ‘must necessarily implicate the citizens’ indifference towards those criteria’. Any form of particularity, of which nationality is one, is denied in the name of a totalising universality. The effect is not the widening of ‘minds and sympathies’ but rather their ‘Balkanisation’. In the process, the law becomes ‘no longer “ours” or “from within”, but from “out there”’. Our responsibility is eroded and our capacity to decide for ourselves (however we constitute that ‘we’) is further diminished, both at the level of the nation state, historically the basis for constituting a self-governing ‘we’, and at the level of the individual citizen.

Ukraine rejoins the submarine team

Filed under: Europe, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

The only submarine in Ukraine’s navy is seaworthy again:

The Ukrainian Navy got its only submarine (the Zaporozhye) back into service. The 40 year old Foxtrot class boat has been out of action for 18 years and was recently refurbished. Zaporozhye is the only sub in the Ukrainian Navy, which mainly consists of small, Cold War era frigates (one) and corvettes (seven). There are also two amphibious ships and six minesweepers. The Foxtrot class diesel-electric subs were designed in the late 1950s and 58 were built until production ended in 1983. These are 1,900 ton boats with ten torpedo tubes and a crew of 78. Russia retired all of its Foxtrots by 2000, but they were all obsolete by the early 1980s. The Zaporozhye is the last Foxtrot still in service.

The Black Sea has not been kind to submarines. Three years ago the Russian Black Sea Fleet suffered a major blow when its only operational submarine, a 19 year old Kilo class boat, broke down at sea and limped back to port on partial power. The only other sub in the fleet, a 32 year old Tango class boat, was undergoing repairs (and still is, but will soon be scrapped.) During the Cold War, the Black Sea Fleet had thirty or more submarines.


Image from Navy Recognition.

Wikipedia says:

Zaporizhzhia (U-01) (Ukrainian: Запоріжжя) is a project 641 (“Foxtrot” class) submarine, the only submarine of the Ukrainian Navy at the moment. She formerly carried the Soviet Navy pennant number B435.

Zaporizhzhia is run by a naval crew of 78, commanded by 1st Rank Capt. Oleh Orlov.

Digging up a municipal car park … to find the body of a king

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:51

An interesting story on the search for the lost burial place of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England:

Archaeologists are hoping to find the lost grave of a medieval monarch in a dig that is due to get underway today.

In what is believed to be the first-ever archaeological search for the lost grave of an anointed King of England, experts from the University of Leicester are set to begin their quest to find the site of a church where it is believed King Richard III was buried in the city more than 500 years ago.

It is thought the site of the church may be on land currently being used as a car park for council offices in the city.

King Richard III, the last Plantagenet, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

The most famous battle of the War of the Roses was fought on August 22, 1485, and famously saw the death of Richard III.

The battle ended decades of civil war and was won by the Lancastrians.

It paved the way for Henry Tudor to become the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

The battle also inspired the scene from Shakespeare’s play Richard III when the defeated hunchback king declares: ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

August 23, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:03

A day earlier than usual, my community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. With everyone waiting for the headstart period to begin in just over 24 hours, there’s lots of articles to read and videos to watch to while away the time.

Al Stewart live: “A Child’s View of the Eisenhower Years”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

“I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

At Politico, the story of a former NPR congressional reporter who finally had enough of the political lies:

After 14 years at National Public Radio, Andrea Seabrook left in July and, to hear her talk about her experience covering Capitol Hill, it’s clear that she had one takeaway: It’s damn frustrating.

“I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say,” Seabrook told POLITICO. “And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

If you’ve had any contact with politicians, you very quickly learn that they are always trying to spin: it’s just that some of them are naturally better at it than others, and some get help from the media to make them seem better at it.

The historical “locavore” diet: seasonal gruel and mush

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

sp!ked has an article by authors Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, on the disadvantages of the true locavore diet:

Perhaps the most ludicrous claim made by some ‘locavores’ — activists who argue that food produced near final consumers is superior in a myriad of ways to distant imports — is that the globalised food-supply chain is guilty of crimes against seasonality. Limiting our intake of fresh produce to whatever can be obtained locally at certain times of the year (and preserving the surplus for the remainder), we are told, will not only help atone for agri-business’ fossil fuel-driven ways and constrain us to live within regional ecological limits, but it will also make fresh local food more enjoyable when it is available. As one locavore puts it, ‘deprivation leads to greater appreciation’.

The emphasis on local seasonality by food activists, however, is problematic on several counts. For instance, why do militant locavores limit themselves to local seasonality when they could further insist on truly ‘native’ produce and livestock? Seen in this light, North American agriculture should be essentially limited to turkeys, farmed salmon and a few other fish and shellfish, sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes and some varieties of squashes. (Though the really hardcore North American locavore could go even further by reverting to problematic native crops such as sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, maygrass and little barley that were replaced about one thousand years ago by Mexican imports such as corn and beans.)

Basic logic aside, limiting our food intake to local productions is a one-way ticket to chronic famines and malnutrition. Having in most cases no direct experience with massive crop failures, locavores typically ignore the historical and contemporary toll taken by factors ranging from droughts, floods, heavy rains and frost to hail, windstorms, earthquakes and tsunamis, to say nothing of insect pests, rodents, soil erosion and plant and animal diseases. Yet, the historical evidence on the issue is unequivocal. It was only the development of cost-effective long-distance transportation (primarily the railroad and the steamship) that finally eradicated famines through the large-scale movement of foodstuff from regions that had experienced good harvests to those that had struggled with mediocre ones.

Quebec election: why is Pauline Marois getting a free pass for xenophobia?

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

Jonathan Kay wonders why the English language media in the “rest of Canada” are being so careful to avoid calling out PQ leader Pauline Marois for far greater sins than any Alberta politician committed during the recent Alberta election:

Given the close scrutiny that surrounded the recent Alberta election, it is somewhat surprising that more attention is not being paid to the genuinely alarming things coming out of the mouth of Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois.

During the Alberta campaign, every gaffe committed by a member of the right-wing Wildrose Party became a national news item. The Toronto media, in particular, lapped it up — because it played to our outdated stereotype of Alberta as a land of rural hicks. Yet nothing that was said in the Alberta campaign can compare to the declarations of Ms. Marois, who has easily established herself as the most xenophobic major-party leader in all of Canada.

So why has there been comparatively little uproar over Ms. Marois? It is as if Canadians in the rest of the country have become so accustomed to watching Quebec nationalists bottom-feed for votes that we no longer are shocked by it. But Quebec is, after all, part of Canada. And Ms. Marois might become the province’s next premier on Sept. 4. Surely, it is worth rousing ourselves to pay attention to the fact that this woman is proposing policies that are unconstitutional and even bigoted.

Crisis malware is particularly capable of damage

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

John Leyden in The Register:

Security watchers have discovered a virus strain that compromises VMware virtual machines as well as infecting Mac OS X and Windows computers and Windows Mobile devices. It demonstrates previously unseen capabilities in the process.

The Crisis malware typically arrives in a Java archive file (.jar) and is typically installed by posing as a Flash Player Java applet to trick a victim into opening it.

The archive contains executable files targeting Apple and Microsoft operating systems; the malware is able to detect which platform it is running on and serve up the correct variant.

Once launched, the worm puts in place a rootkit to hide itself from view; installs spyware to record the user’s every move on the computer; and opens a backdoor to the IP address 176.58.100.37, allowing miscreants to gain further access to the machine, according to a write-up of the threat by Kaspersky Lab. The malicious code also, unsurprisingly, survives across reboots.

The Windows variant can kill off antivirus programs, log keypresses, download and upload files, take screengrabs, lift the contents of the user’s clipboard, record from the computer’s webcam and mic, and snoop on these applications: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Microsoft Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.

August 22, 2012

Nash the (gay, conservative) Slash

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

I’ve always liked the music of Nash the Slash, but I didn’t know much about him — but that’s not uncommon when the artist performs his music while wrapped in bandages so you can’t see his face. Apparently he’s that rarest of creatures: a gay Canadian conservative:

The music industry has been dominated by left-leaning causes since the days of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, not to mention the countless artists who’ve been influenced by Bob Dylan and Neil Young. In Canada, rock stars came out in droves for the funeral of NDP leader Jack Layton, but it’s hard to find one musician who would openly admit to supporting Stephen Harper. While country star Paul Brandt performed at the 2008 Conservative convention and Nova Scotia’s The Trews have a song called Highway of Heroes that’s been adopted by the Tories, neither would agree to an interview about their political views.

“I feel that conservatives are pragmatic and more fiscally responsible [than the Liberals],” says Nash the Slash, the late-’70s-era experimental Canadian artist who has recorded with Neil Young’s famed producer, Daniel Lanois. “I think the left is more carved into stone in some of their intractability and I may get flack for that, but I don’t care. You never see conservatives out there parading at the G20 summit — we tend to be less demonstrative.”

Politically, Nash the Slash’s career tells an interesting story, as he’s also an outspoken gay musician who lives in Leslieville (a Toronto neighbourhood often painted as left-leaning) and used to hoist the occasional beer with Layton. Still, the musician voted for the conservative-minded Rob Ford over gay liberal candidate George Smitherman in Toronto’s 2010 mayoral election, and isn’t afraid to flaunt his right-wing leanings.

“I voted for Rob Ford because I believe in fiscal responsibility and you can call him a bumbling fool, but guess what? We’re not going to have any money to support the gay Pride parade unless we get our books straight,” he says. “If we don’t conserve our money, eventually, we’re all going to turn into Greece.”

It’s not surprising that outspoken right-wing rockers such as Nash the Slash are hard to find, though. Even when conservative politicians reach out to the music world, they tend to find their hands slapped back.

Wikipedia entry for Nash the Slash.

Since 1979 Nash has always performed with surgical bandages covering his face. “During a gig at The Edge in the late ’70s to raise awareness of the threat from the Three Mile Island disaster, he walked on stage wearing bandages dipped in phosphorus paint and exclaimed: “look, this is what happens to you”. The bandages became his trademark.” Prior to 1979, Nash performed three times on TV Ontario’s Nightmusic Concert, first as a solo artist (a live broadcast which was never re-aired), then with FM (Nash and Cameron Hawkins), then again as a solo artist. In all of these appearances Nash wore his typical black tuxedo, top hat, and dark sunglasses, but wore no bandages.

Born Jeff Plewman (as given in copyright depositions at the Library of Congress), he has attempted to keep his true identity the subject of some speculation. In a 1981 interview with the UK magazine Smash Hits, Nash’s response to a question about his real name was “Nashville Thebodiah Slasher”. By never officially confirming or denying his name, some fans came to believe Nash to be an alter ego of Ben Mink, who replaced him as FM’s violinist in 1978. This is a common misconception but he has been photographed onstage with Ben Mink.

Kicking the Baby Boomers while they’re down

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

P.J. O’Rourke laments the America that was, before the Baby Boomers came along and ruined everything:

The United States has set itself on a course of willful self-diminishment. Seventy-four years ago the perfect American was Superman, who happened to have been, like many of our forefathers, an undocumented alien. If Superman arrived today — assuming he could get past the INS and Homeland Security — he would be faster than the postal service, more powerful than a New York Times blogger, and able to ascend tall buildings in a single elevator.

[. . .]

America has had plenty of reasons to abdicate the crown of accomplishment and marry the Wallis Simpson of homely domestic concerns. Received wisdom tells us that, in the matter of great works and vast mechanisms, all is vanity. The Nurek Dam probably endangers some species of Nurek newt and will one day come crashing down in a manner that will make the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima tsunami look like an overwatered lawn. And we have better things to spend our country’s money on, like putting a Starbucks on every city block. But I suspect there’s a sadder reason for America’s post-eminence in things tremendous, overwhelming, and awesome.

My sad generation of baby boomers can be blamed. We were born into an America where material needs were fulfilled to a degree unprecedented in history. We were a demographic benison, cherished and taught to be self-cherishing. We were cosseted by a lush economy and spoiled by a society grown permissive in its fatigue with the strictures of depression and war. The child being father to the man, and necessity being the mother of invention, we wound up as the orphans of effort and ingenuity. And pleased to be so. Sixty-six years of us would be enough to take the starch out of any nation.

The baby boom was skeptical about America’s inventive triumphalism. We took a lot of it for granted: light bulb, telephone, television, telegraph, phonograph, photographic film, skyscraper, airplane, air conditioning, movies. Many of our country’s creations seemed boring and square: cotton gin, combine harvester, cash register, electric stove, dishwasher, can opener, clothes hanger, paper bag, toilet paper roll, ear muffs, mass-produced automobiles. Some we regarded as sinister: revolver, repeating rifle, machine gun, atomic bomb, electric chair, assembly line. And, ouch, those Salk vaccine polio shots hurt.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik caused a blip in chauvinistic tech enthusiasm among those of us who were in grade school at the time. But then we learned that the math and science excellence being urged upon us meant more long division and multiplying fractions.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

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