Rich and Strange Aeons

Is Tesla overvalued? Argues Tesla either can't cause disruption, or can't monopolize it. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/26/15872468/tesla-gm-ford-valuation-justifying-disruption

did Seattle's minimum wage lower employment? two studies, two reports
and two summaries, differing about which sucked
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/27/15879346/study-high-minimum-wage-job-killer-seattle

Internet addiction and ethical web design https://aeon.co/amp/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it

Asian anthem authoritarianism http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/asia/philippines-anthem-bill/index.html

Air pollution still kills thousands. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/28/534594373/u-s-air-pollution-still-kills-thousands-every-year-study-concludes

Intravenous vitamin C as cure for sepsis? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-deadly-infections-be-cured-vitamin-c-180963843/

origin of Ashkenazi? https://theconversation.com/uncovering-ancient-ashkenaz-the-birthplace-of-yiddish-speakers-58355?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=facebookbutton

slow progress in parking reform: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/27/american-cities-are-chipping-away-at-the-burden-of-parking-mandates/

Sea Trek https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?805937-Star-Trek-Alternate-Trek-settings&p=21196309#post21196309

plate tectonics and evolution https://theconversation.com/plate-tectonics-may-have-driven-the-evolution-of-life-on-earth-44571

right to carry increases violent crime, maybe? It uses a fairly new statistical technique to make synthetic controls. The result sounds robust. But the abstract says "elevates violent crime rates, but seems to have no impact on property crime and murder rates". Isn't murder a violent crime?
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/06/21/violent-crime-increases-right-carry-states/
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23510

expert view on reducing gun deaths https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/10/upshot/How-to-Prevent-Gun-Deaths-The-Views-of-Experts-and-the-Public.html?_r=0

oil eating bacteria https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170626155740.htm
Neanderthal dentistry https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170628131510.htm
host specific enemies and tropical biodiversity https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629142949.htm

Vancouver sea wolves http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/sea-oceans-wolves-animals-science/

Powerful new intervention study causally linking lead and crime http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/06/powerful-study-lead-crime-hypothesis/

Story told by cat DNA https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/cat-domination/530685/

murky story told by dog DNA https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/the-origin-of-dogs/484976/

Social power causes brain damage https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/

America's rising class society https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/the-hoarding-of-the-american-dream/530481/?utm_source=atlfb

Tattooine's future moisture farms https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-solar-powered-device-can-pull-water-straight-desert-air

India cuts back on new coal, solar is eating its lunch: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/asia/india-coal-green-energy-climate.html?_r=0

Comparative advertising in the Middle East: http://www.boredpanda.com/saudi-arabia-middle-east-censorship/

The Dutch approach to global warming https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/15/world/europe/climate-change-rotterdam.html?_r=0

Growing YIMBY movements in SF http://www.beyondchron.org/rising-rents-green-activism-spur-pro-housing-movement/ and Toronto http://torontoist.com/2017/06/yimby-movement-taking-off/

Southern Baptists embrace a gender-neutral bible https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/southern-baptists-embrace-gender-inclusive-language-in-the-bible/529935/

Today I learned of a Stross story, Bit Rot, set between his robot novels Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood. I read it, it's cool, if dark.

It also led me to learn about soft gamma repeaters and magnetars, which can have magnetic fields so strong atoms are deformed into a 200:1 aspect ratio. I may have heard of this before, but still, wow.

Further link following brought me to pair-instability supernovas. Stars of mass 130-250 Sols can have gamma rays so energetic they form electron-positron pairs, removing the pressure imparted by the gamma ray and causing a collapse leading to total fusion of the star's contents, and total disassembly. No black hole remains, the star literally blew itself up, like a Type Ia supernova.

In turn I learned you can get nucleosynthesis by gamma ray. Also that there are proton-rich nuclei whose origin is not well-explained. We know the reactions that can produce them, we just don't know where those reactions would take place.

Also, there's a unit called the foe, a unit for 1e44 Joules, or 1e51 ergs. 'The word is an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power of] fifty-one ergs.[2] It was coined by Gerald Brown of Stony Brook University in his work with Hans Bethe, because "it came up often enough in our work".' as it does if you study supernovas.

And that reminds me of the later Heechee novels, which had energy-based aliens from the early universe known only as the Foe, as they genocided any species that might interfere with their project of returning the universe into a dense hot plasma, which one might say would involve many foes...

Annals of a banana republic:
Texas under Perry:cut school budgets, give corporate welfare, get campaign donations
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/us/winners-and-losers-in-texas.html?hp&_r=1&
bright note: Daimler says it avoids incentives out of school budgets
"our workers send their kids there"


Cambodia propaganda state via karaoke and comedians. Sounds like something out of Transhuman Space Broken Dreams
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/song-and-dance-hun-sens-other-power-play/?hp

MLK day poem
http://squid314.livejournal.com/353114.html

what's good for American Airline isn't good for their execs
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/18/amr_corp_s_creditors_should_listen_to_the_airline_s_unions.html

government can't save
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/17/government_can_t_really_save_it_can_only_invest.html


Several from the Economist:

Indian genes in Australia; stone tool upgrade
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21569688-genetic-evidence-suggests-four-millennia-ago-group-adventurous-indians?fsrc=rss|sct

soot pollution worse than thought
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21569686-soot-even-worse-climate-was-previously-thought-new-black

American embassy reported on Beijing pollution
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21569743-measures-air-pollution-go-scale-public-impatience-rises-something-air

Austrialia had 40 degree national average temperature , high of 50
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21569440-uncomfortable-time-australians-especially-climate-change-sceptics-up-eleven

global warming governance: geonengineering, migration
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/12/anthropocene

safe asset shortage
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/12/finance

China nuclear power
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21569774-china-wants-more-nuclear-plants-anyone-else-will-it-build-them-safely-back-front

four winged protobird
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21565922-why-microraptor-became-extinct-four-wings-good-two-wings-better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea#Diet

"In 1993, however, its nocturnal assaults were captured on video,[5] proving that at least some Kea will attack and feed on healthy sheep. The video confirmed what many scientists had long suspected, that the Kea uses its powerful curved beak and claws to rip through the layer of wool and eat the fat from the back of the animal. Though the bird does not directly kill the sheep, death can result from blood poisoning or accidents suffered by animals trying to escape."

The world's largest parrot, the Hyacinth macaw, is a meter long. Granted, a lot of that is a long tail. It's still strong enough to open coconuts. Your fingers aren't safe around any large parrot beak but this one seems particularly unwise to taunt.

I forget if I mentioned cannibal chickens here. When last in Spokane, my brother-in-law threw KFC scraps to his backyard chickens, and they went *nuts* over it. Nuts as in racing to pick at the bones. This ties in with things I've heard elsewhere but can't recall, to a hypothesis that there aren't any natural herbivores by inclination, just would-be carnivores with varying abilities to obtain meat and alternate backup strategies.

Ever since my mother told me about feral parrots in Hyde Park in Chicago, I've wondered how they survive the winter. I still don't *know*. My leading hypothesis was sheltering against warm buildings. But the star of North America, the monk parakeet, is kind of temperate zoned, being found as far south as Buenos Aires (up to 35 S, I guess. But Chicago is 42, and I've seen claims of colonies in Wisconsin.) It also uniquely (for parrots) builds big stick nests, which may help it shelter, and it's social in big flocks, so can huddle for warmth.

http://www.junipercivic.com/juniperberryarticle.asp?nid=224
http://www.ehow.com/how_2323394_find-wild-parrots-chicago.html

But the rose-ringed parakeet is outright tropical, with a Wikipedia map showing the Sahel and India as its natural range, and it's colonized Germany, London, and Manchester. What's up with that? I'm still looking at "warm building spots", but have added "they're warm-blooded and covered in feathers, they can survive as long as they get food regularly." Which is also where the urban nature fits in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-ringed_Parakeet#Phylogeny_and_distribution

It's comforting to know that if I ever want a parrot, there are multiple species with abundance levels of "pest" as opposed to "vulnerable", or extinct like the Carolina parakeet.

'parakeet' seems to mean "small parrot with a long tail", it's not a clade of specifically related spacies.

***
I have lots of other links, but I guess I'll make this only about parrots.

Except for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyletic I've often heard "reptiles aren't a real group, because they exclude birds (and mammals)", but there's a word for that, and the idea is of a related group minus members that have diverged sufficiently distinctly. Other examples are prokaryotes (eukaryotes are descended, but treated differently), primates or apes minus humans, ungulates minus whales (!), bony fish minus tetrapods, invertebrates minus vertebrates... pretty common.

I'm currently reading this book, on recent human evolution. It's not an evolutionary psychology book, as that capsule description made someone thing, though it probably will be talking about evolution and the brain. It's by an anthropologist and a physicist, which is a bit odd, but nothing's obviously wrong about it so far.

Main idea isn't new to me: that human evolution, far from being halted by civilization, has in fact sped up. See John Hawks, who *is* an evolutionary biologist (longer piece, by him). Basic idea is that more people = more mutations and thus chances to adapt, and new environments, many of them created by us, means new things to adapt to. (Environment also includes new foods and diseases, and things like cities.)

The book structure is a bit odd; it spends most of chapter 2 talking about the possibility of incorporating adaptive Neanderthal genes, something for which in 2009 they had no real evidence apart from some intermediate skeletons in a few locations, not like the recent genetic evidence of Neanderthal and Denisovian genes. (Which might about as a verified prediction, then.) Speculation on incorporating genes, speculation on what we could have gotten out of them... not entirely divorced from evidence, but still odd.

But there's also math. Simple math. A neutral gene variant -- one with no adaptive effect -- lives or dies by chance, with a chance of taking over a population of 1/2N, N being the size of the population. But, per Haldane, an *adaptive* gene which grants one s% more children (a highly statistical measure, obviously) has probability 2s of sweeping a population. So a gene granting 1% more fitness has 2% chance of taking over. Not high for one such gene... but out of a 100, we'd expect 2 to take over.

(I suspect small number simplification; a 50% adaptive improvement can't be 100% likely to take over, though we can expect good things of it.)

Per Hawks, imagine that the frequency of 1% beneficial mutations is 1 per 10,000 people. Then a population of 10,000 will have 1 such mutation per generation, and it'll take on average 50 generations for one of those mutations to start taking over rather than withering away by chance.

But in a population of a million people, there'd be 100 mutations, and so we'd expect 2 mutations a generation to start being fixed. In 1000 years, 100 successful adaptations, rather than 1.

And we do in fact see lots of genes in the process of 'sweeping' populations. Mostly in metabolism and digestion, disease resistance, reproduction, DNA repair, and the central nervous system. The first two have obvious examples and aren't politically alarming, examples adult like lactose tolerance (less than 8000 years old in Europeans, 3000 years old in Tutsi) and malaria resistance (also 3000 years old.) They say skin color might be another one; hunter-gatherers can get vitamin D from meat, so even in the north don't have a big need for light skin, and several light-skin mutations are younger than agriculture. White people may not have existed 10,000 years ago. Europeans and Asians have more inactive variants of an African gene that promotes salt retention -- useful for high-sweating tropical dwellers, less so in cooler climates, and also leading to hypertension in a modern diet. East Asians apparently have various genes reducing the risk of alcoholism, and the authors speculate that the high rates of diabetes and alcoholism among 'indigenous' populations owe a lot to a near total lack of genetic adaptation to agricultural diets with lots of starch and alcohol.

But the central nervous system? That's the *brain*. Suggesting differences there is politically charged in the way that fire is hot. Yet if evolution happened in other parts of our biology, and it did, why should the brain be immune?

They agree that the amount of time we're talking about isn't enough to build up complex adaptations from scratch. But they point out that you don't need to; simple adaptations can still have big effects. There's huge variation in dogs (chihuahua, Great Dane; smart and friendly border collie, dumb basset hound and mean pitbull), just from shifting the balance of traits present in wolves, plus adding something that means dogs are far more attentive to humans (with the pinnacle of border collies, who can learn words in about 5 repetitions.) They don't mention the prairie and montane vole species, where a single gene change means monogamous pair bonding or not. And shifting the frequency of existing genes is far easier and faster than fixing a new mutation.

So even with all humans sharing the same basic mental mechanisms of intelligence and personality, the proportion of those mechanisms in various populations could easily have changed in the past 10,000 years. But you'll have to wait until I read the rest to hear what...

Small businesses care about cutting arbitrary licensing regulations, not taxes. A libertarian attitude I could get behind. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_hive/2012/05/small_business_growth_depends_on_cutting_red_tape_not_taxes_.html

What President Romney would mean for women. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/what-president-romney-would-mean-for-women-20120515?link=mostpopular5

IMF calls out Cameron's austerity measures. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/britains-blunder/

Super round moon. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/05211206.html

Grover Norquist compares closing tax leaving to Nazis
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/godwinization/

on voluntarily shorter copyright terms
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2012/05/21/copyright-failure-terms-are-much-much-much-too-long-solution-needed/

veteran suicide rates. double the risk, 4x the risk for 17-24
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-veterans-death-the-nations-shame.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

ancient bacteria
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/05/18/millennia-old-microbes-found-alive-in-deep-ocean-muck/

chronotypes and school starting time teenage sleep
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2012/05/20/when-should-schools-start-in-the-morning/
sleep as simple sit still, evolution of wakefulness
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2012/05/19/non-adaptive-function-of-sleep/

Heartland Institute in climate change trouble
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/20/heartland-institute-future-staff-cash

euro unemployment rate
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/kings-of-denial/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/keynes-1921-and-the-euro-crisis/

NAACP endorses gay marriage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/naacp-endorses-same-sex-marriage/2012/05/19/gIQA5SFSbU_blog.html

The Do The Math blog has been going through the numbers on various forms of alternative energy, mostly with an eye to how abundant they are, e.g. solar is abundant, wind is useful, tides are niche (locally useful, globally irrelevant.) I'd been planning on summarizing and linking at some point -- but he went and did it himself, with table and links:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

His whole schtick, by the way, is back of the envelope calculations on growth, energy, and sustainability issues, fed by and sometimes checked against looked up facts. It's all pretty near. And depressing/alarming. Posts outside this series have included "if exponential economic growth continued, what would that mean?" and "is there enough lead to power the US for a week from lead-acid batteries"?

* Polly wants a synapsid: dinosaur feathers found http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaur-feathers-amber-photos-110915.html

* Big drop in child mortality http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-14930778

* Animals evolving; Moscow stray dogs riding the subway; polar-grizzly bear hybrids http://www.cracked.com/article_19213_7-animals-that-are-evolving-right-before-our-eyes.html

* Israel using water theft to "legally" steal land http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/14/west-bank-villagers-battle-water

* Energy efficiency of transport http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_128.shtml

* http://www.metaefficient.com/bicycles/longest-carfree-bicycle-routes.html

* Summary of Jane Jacobs on urban economics http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

* GOP war on voting http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gop-war-on-voting-20110830
* GOP cult, from an insider http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779
* GOP blocks disaster aid bill http://www.goupstate.com/article/20110912/APW/1109120811?tc=ar

* Flying while brown on 9/11: http://shebshi.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/some-real-shock-and-awe-racially-profiled-and-cuffed-in-detroit/ * http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/sep/11/us-airline-passengers-detained/

If the brain is a massively parallel computer progammed by self-evolving spaghetti code, are race conditions and deadlock useful concepts for human psychology?