From Pedro Dias on Google+:
September 13, 2012
iPhone fans are going through this progression right now
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September 12, 2012
The real reason for the Cairo and Benghazi attacks
Tim Cavanaugh on the real as opposed to claimed reason for the attacks on American diplomats in Egypt and Libya:
Mohamed al-Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, says he called a “peaceful protest” in Cairo as part of the 9/11 anniversary attacks on U.S. embassies that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya dead and the U.S. embassy in Egypt in shambles.
The putative cause of the attack in Cairo was anger over a satirical movie depicting the founder of Islam’s life. The attacks in the adjacent North African countries, both of which last year saw secular autocrats toppled, came on a day commemorating the Zawahiri family’s direct role in coordinated terror attacks that killed more than 3,000 people from more than 60 nations.
[. . .]
But there is no real point in rebutting Zawahiri’s stated claims about a movie. I’m not even sure the movie Innocence of Muslims exists, given that producer Sam Bacile told the Wall Street Journal it had a budget of $5 million, and that doesn’t match up with the production value in Bacile’s trailer. (Bacile’s “100 Jewish donors” seem to be the real victims here.)
The purpose of the attacks in Egypt and Libya was for the Sunni leadership to show it can unleash mob attacks against American diplomatic assets. (There may be some historical exceptions, but it’s more or less axiomatic than mob attacks cannot happen without government approval.) That point has been received by everybody except U.S. State Department employees.
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Geddy Lee talks to Peter Mansbridge
Update:
Wishing a very happy birthday to Mr. Neil Peart.
— Rush (@rushtheband) September 12, 2012
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September 11, 2012
More evidence that a bit of dirt can be a healthy thing for kids
Matt Ridley reviews a new book by Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
In a remarkable new book, “An Epidemic of Absence,” Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms-before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.
I’ve touched on the “hygiene hypothesis” in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument-that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen-isn’t very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over.
Moreover, just as brains outsource much of their development to the outside world-the visual system is refined by visual input, the language system can only develop in a language-using society — so the immune system seems to have happily outsourced much of its regulation to friendly microbes. Without them, the immune system becomes unbalanced.
[. . .]
One of Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s most surprising chapters is on autism, a disorder that almost exactly parallels asthma in its recent rise among affluent, urban, mainly male, disproportionately firstborn people. Better diagnosis explains perhaps half the rise, but the brains of people with autism are often inflamed, and there’s anecdotal evidence that infection with worms or viruses can tame autistic symptoms, at least temporarily.
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September 10, 2012
The non-romantic reality of a book tour
Poor Charles Stross has experienced one-too-many book tours. It’s so not conducive to anything like comfort or a normal life:
A book signing tour sounds romantic, but actually it’s not. It’s like one of those cheap package holidays in which you get to tour South America or Europe in seven days. Each day you have to get out of bed at dawn or earlier and head to the airport for another cavity search and economy-class ticket to a new city. When you arrive, a new guide meets you in, shovels you into their car, and then takes you on a whistle-stop tour of sights of the city. (On a tourist tour, it’s museums or monuments; on a signing tour, it’s bookstores, where you render the stock non-returnable by defacing it with your signature.) You might be allowed to dump your bag in a hotel room if timing permits. The hotel room will be luxurious and expensive and you will spend so little time awake in it that it seems like a cruel joke, because your time will be programmed so tightly you barely have a chance to eat. It is possible that you will be dragged in front of microphones or cameras to answer confused or confusing questions by journalists who haven’t read your book; then, each evening, you will show up at a bookstore where hopefully there will be an audience who will listen to you deliver a canned speech and/or reading and then buy books which you will then sign. And you will have to be nice to everybody, on pain of potentially not getting another tour (which might sound like a blessing in disguise until you work out what’s going to happen to your income thereafter). Finally, your head hits the pillow around 11pm — don’t forget to check in for tomorrow’s exciting anal probe and air-sickness theme-park ride! — for as much as five or six hours’ sleep.
But then, the nightmare thought: a book tour reality TV show…
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September 9, 2012
You know who are really sick of the Euro crisis? Press photographers
The unsung heroes who provide you with those ?memorable? images of Euro coins being eaten by toy sharks to illustrate stories about the Euro crisis:
Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won’t end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas.
His colleagues have resorted to using children’s toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it’s eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.
Photographers call such images illustrations, they use them to help visualize abstract events. Most crises don’t hold the public’s attention for more than a few weeks or months, but it has been different with the ongoing euro-zone debt debacle. Stratenschulte has had enough of it.
“It is difficult to keep finding a new approach,” he says. “I’m glad the euro coins have different designs in each country. That makes it possible to vary things at least a bit.”
H/T to Tim Harford for the link:
https://twitter.com/TimHarford/statuses/244699544028315648
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Winner of the Democratic convention? Conservative trolls
Dave Weigel on the fascinating fact that a few conservatives were able to successfully troll the Democratic convention in Charlotte:
Whatever lessons the Democrats take from Charlotte, whatever it did for the president or for the ambitious senators and governors who stalked delegate breakfasts and whispered “2016,” this is a fact: The convention was successfully trolled.
I don’t use troll in the pejorative sense. Actually, I may be trying to craft a neutral meaning of troll where none previously existed. The term, in its modern Internet usage, refers to people who want to start fights online to bring the universe into an argument on their terms. It comes not from Grimm literature, but from a fishing technique in which multiple lines are baited and dragged to haul in the maximum amount of cold-bloods.
Democrats did not expect to spend Wednesday arguing about the capital of Israel and the appearance of the word “God” in their platform. There were, reportedly, 15,000 members of the media in Charlotte, of whom maybe 14,980 could have given a damn about the party platform. On Tuesday night, when the Obama campaign and the DNC released its platform, none of the bigfoot media outlets in town spent time on the text.
[. . .]
Maybe the word “historic” is out of place for the modern convention. To say that they’re clichéd and staged is, in itself, a staged cliché. But who thought, just 11 months after the launch of the Occupy movement, that 99 percenters would have less influence on the platform than conservative media?
This is what I mean: We live in the age of trolling. Any comment made online, if it’s given the right forum, is as relevant as any comment made by some media gatekeeper. Think about a politician or a journalist on Twitter, and what he sees. If a colleague wants to tell him something, it appears in his feed with an @ symbol. If someone who just logged on and wants to bait a nerd logs on, he will send a message that appears with an @ symbol. Both are equally valid, at least in how they appear on-screen or on a phone. There is no ghetto-izing of comments into the bottom of a page, or into media that you don’t pay attention to.
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September 8, 2012
Fifty shades of legal action
This is just too amusing not to share:
EL James wants 50 Shades parties shut down. "You can’t just hijack something someone else owns": http://t.co/5i3YApnE
— Cleolinda Jones (@cleolinda) September 8, 2012
I hope somewhere Stephenie Meyer's lawyer(s) just lit up with joy, all "OH SO WE'RE DOING THIS NOW? YAAAAAY"
— Cleolinda Jones (@cleolinda) September 8, 2012
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Rush wins “Album of the Year” at first Progressive Music Awards
In a “how is this possibly the first time” event, Rush won the Album of the Year award for Clockwork Angels.
Clockwork Angels picked up "Album of the Year" at last night's Prog Awards. Here's BBC's wrap up of the event: http://t.co/u8ZsUfrS
— Rush (@rushtheband) September 7, 2012
Veteran rock band Genesis have been honoured at the first Progressive Music Awards, alongside other bands including Pink Floyd and Rush.
Genesis members Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks picked up the lifetime achievement award at a ceremony at Kew Gardens on Wednesday.
Keyboard legend and ex-Yes member Rick Wakeman was given the Prog God Award.
The awards, created by Prog Magazine, were hosted by BBC Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler.
Prog rock, which grew out of 1960s psychedelia, was originally associated with 70s bands including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and King Crimson.
[. . .]
Canadian rock band Rush’s latest concept album, Clockwork Angels, was named Album Of The Year.
With its dystopian steampunk theme, the three-piece’s 19th studio album has earned rapturous reviews, even in the mainstream press.
Describing it as Rush’s “most solid and compelling set of songs in years”, The Guardian went on to say: “Those who worship at the temple of Rush will be in raptures; for those who remain agnostic, there may well be enough here to justify a leap of faith.”
It was also a handy reminder to me that I hadn’t actually bought the album yet: it was on sale in the Canadian iTunes store for $6.99. Sold.
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September 7, 2012
“When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.”
John Kay suggests you always ask how a statistic was created before you consider what the presenter wants you to think:
Always ask yourself the question: “where does that data come from?”. “Long distance rail travel in Britain is expected to increase by 96 per cent by 2043.” Note how the passive voice “is expected” avoids personal responsibility for this statement. Who expects this? And what is the basis of their expectation? For all I know, we might be using flying platforms in 2043, or be stranded at home by oil shortages: where did the authors of the prediction acquire their insight?
“On average, men think about sex every seven seconds.” How did the researchers find this out? Did they ask men how often they thought about sex, or when they last thought about sex (3½ seconds ago, on average)? Did they give their subjects a buzzer to press every time they thought about sex? How did they confirm the validity of the responses? Is it possible that someone just made this statement up, and that it has been repeated frequently and without attribution ever since? Many of the numbers I hear at business conferences have that provenance.
[. . .]
Be careful of data defined by reference to other documents that you are expected not to have read. “These accounts have been compiled in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles”, or “these estimates are prepared in line with guidance given by HM Treasury and the Department of Transport”. Such statements are intended to give a false impression of authoritative endorsement. A data set compiled by a national statistics organisation or a respected international institution such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or Eurostat will have been compiled conscientiously. That does not, however, imply that the numbers mean what the person using them thinks or asserts they mean.
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September 5, 2012
Nobody is getting to “have it all”
I read Gregg Easterbrook’s NFL column partly for the football content and partly for the very-much-not-football stuff. Here’s an example from this week’s column where he reflects on the “having it all” meme:
Lately The Atlantic has been on the case of après-feminism. Hanna Rosin’s 2010 cover story showed how the double-XX cohort is taking over colleges and offices, positing trends in education and economics are such that “modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women.” Those sci-fi stories set on worlds ruled by Amazonian females, where males exist solely for women’s amusement? Rosin sees this coming.
Then in 2011, an Atlantic cover had Kate Bolick declaring that men are already so inutile, a woman would be a fool to walk down the aisle. Her ideal evening: a romantic candlelit dinner for one. Bolick praised “the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers under cover of night.” That cheerful article ended by endorsing the Beguines, a Dutch order whose members live in secular chastity, vowing never to touch men.
Then this year came “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a cover by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton dean and recent State Department official. Slaughter filled 14 magazine pages with angst about how despite a high-paying super-elite job with lifetime tenure, personal connections in the White House and a husband who does the child care, despite writing about herself for the cover of the world’s most important magazine, nevertheless she feels troubled that every moment of her days is not precisely what she wants.
The assertion that women “can’t have it all” was received as earthshaking by the commentariate, a magazine article making the front page of The New York Times. Living a favored life and yet looking for something to complain about is part of the Upper West Side mindset, so perhaps the Slaughter article appealed to the part of the Times demographic that searches desperately for new complaints.
Some of Slaughter’s points were solid, but they were the grievances of the 1 percent — 99 of 100 women would love to have what Slaughter presented as her burdens to bear. Nobody’s ever satisfied. Jacques Brel wrote, “Sons of the thief, sons of the saint/Where is the child without complaint?”
What was vexing was that the article seemed to misunderstand its own topic. The phrase “having it all” meant a woman could pursue a career and also be a good mother. This is something millions of women have now achieved, proving career and motherhood are not mutually exclusive, as men long claimed in order to keep women out of the workplace. But “all” never meant a woman could have everything she wants at every second without ever facing hard choices or bending over to pick up a piece of laundry. Men can’t “have it all” in that sense either. No one has ever “had it all” and no one ever will.
The Atlantic‘s female readers have been told they finally hold the upper hand, but this seems hollow victory if men become motes. They’ve been told marriage is so awful, get thee to a nunnery. And Atlantic‘s female readers have been told if they achieve tremendous career success under ideal conditions while miraculously finding the last desirable man on planet Earth, they will be riven with anxiety anyway. But hey, have a nice day!
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September 3, 2012
Volokh on the GOP “war on porn” platform plank
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh points out that aside from satisfying a checklist item for some constituencies, the GOP’s stated intention to crack down on pornography just doesn’t have a lot of benefits:
As we know, there’s lots of porn of all varieties out there on the Internet, including porn that might well be seen as offensive to “community standards” in at least one American state (the standard that would be applicable under the plurality view in Ashcroft v. ACLU (I) (2002), if prosecutors choose to bring a case in that state), or perhaps even under some “national community standard” (the alternative standard urged to varying extents by the other opinions in that case). In principle, the government might well be able to prosecute many American pornography producers and distributors under current obscenity laws.
[. . .]
So we have three possible outcomes:
(1) The U.S. spends who knows how many prosecutorial and technical resources going after U.S. pornographers. A bunch of them get imprisoned. U.S. consumers keep using the same amount of porn as before. Maybe they can’t get porn on cable channels or in hotel rooms any more, but that’s so twentieth century; instead, consumers will continue to be able to get more than they ever wanted on the Internet. Nor do I think that the crackdown will somehow subtly affect consumers’ attitudes about the morality of porn — it seems highly unlikely that potential porn consumers will decide to stop getting it because they hear that some porn producers are being prosecuted.
[. . .]
(2) The government gets understandably outraged by the “foreign smut loophole.” “Given all the millions that we’ve invested in going after the domestic porn industry, how can we tolerate all our work being undone by foreign filth-peddlers?,” pornography prosecutors and their political allies would ask. So they unveil the solution, in fact pretty much the only solution that will work: Nationwide filtering.
[. . .]
(3) Finally, the government can go after the users: Set up “honeypot” sites (seriously, that would be the technically correct name for them) that would look like normal offshore pornography sites. Draw people in to buy the stuff. Figure out who the buyers are. To do that, you’d also have to ban any anonymizer Web sites that might be used to hide such transactions, by setting up some sort of mandatory filtering such as what I described in option (2).
[. . .]
So, supporters of that plank of the platform, which do you prefer — #1, #2, or #3? Note that I’m not asking whether porn is bad, or whether porn should be constitutionally protected. I’m certainly not asking whether we’d be better off in some hypothetical porn-free world (just like no sensible debate about alcohol, drug, or gun policy should ask whether we’d be better off in some hypothetical alcohol-, drug-, or gun-free world).
I’m asking: How can the government’s policy possibly achieve its stated goals, without creating an unprecedentedly intrusive censorship machinery, one that’s far, far beyond what any mainstream political figures are talking about right now?
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A bit of common sense in food news
Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:
Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.
Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.
[. . .]
Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.
Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.
Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:
While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.
[. . .]
The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).
Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.
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September 1, 2012
Celebrities as honorary colonels
I had not heard about this little innovation in the long-established practice of appointing honorary colonels, lieutenant colonels, and captains:
Typically, honorary lieutenant colonels or colonels for the Army, RCAF honorary colonels, and honorary captains for the Navy, were ceremonial titles primarily handed out to retired Canadian military officers to foster “esprit de corps” within the unit, according to Royal Canadian Navy Captain Michel Charron, director of senior appointments for the Forces. But over the past decade, the selection criteria for the honorary appointments’ “gene pool” was expanded to include non-retired military folks from the worlds of academia, business, politics (excluding Members of Parliament), and arts and entertainment. “One of our objectives is to increase the connection to the communities in which the units are located,” explained Capt. Charron. “By their presence and name, these distinguished Canadians provide a public profile — and a public face — for the unit.” An honorary officer nomination begins at the unit or squadron level, and must be approved by regional command and national headquarters. The recommendation is sent to the Defence Minister, who officially makes the appointment. “The whole idea we have is that if we can make people a little more aware of what the Air Force is involved in, maybe they’ll take more interest overall in our operations,” said retired Col. Dave Peart, who spent 39 years with the RCAF and now manages the program.
[. . .]
Appointed for a renewable three-year term, honorary officers don’t get paid, but their expenses — such as travel to a military base — are covered by the Forces. They’re expected to help their unit organize and participate in parades, change-of-command ceremonies, mess dinners and charitable activities, such as through the CF’s Military Family Resource Centres’ programs. In June, marketing entrepreneur Arlene Dickinson, of CBC Television’s Dragons’ Den fame, became an honorary captain for the Royal Canadian Navy. A month earlier, Man in Motion Rick Hansen was made an honorary colonel of the Forces’ Joint Personnel Support Unit, which provides services to serving and retired ill and injured military personnel. Comedian Rick Mercer, rock star Tom Cochrane, country music singer George Canyon, Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin, and CBC Hockey Night in Canada sportscaster Ron MacLean have also served as honorary colonels with the RCAF.
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