Cavalcade of Mammals

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter: Rachel Bitecofer’s radical new theory predicted the midterms spot-on. So who’s going to win 2020?
NEJM: Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted. Most interesting bit is that there may be many undiagnosed cases, making the death rate much lower–1%, maybe lower. Of course, this also means it has spread much more widely, and 20-70% of a population will get the disease.

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY An essay by Freeman Dyson, 8.7.07
Wrong at every scale and in uninteresting ways. Unfortunately, it means his opinion was unreliable after he published this (and likely for at least several years).

How to be a Democrat, according to Republicans: Beware the advice offered by your literal opponent. by Shuja Haider
Compilation of the terrible record of never-Trump and other unhappy Republicans.

Wild mushrooms poison thousands of people every year. USDA just introduced a device to detect the deadliest toxins. by Jessica Fu
Jokes I’ve Told That My Male Colleagues Didn’t Like. by Ali Kelley, Kate Herzlin, Danielle Kraese, and Ysabel Yates
Fareed Zakaria Is Completely Ignorant About the Nordics. by Matt Bruenig
Timeline on Jared Kushner, Qatar, 666 Fifth Avenue, and White House Policy by Ryan Goodman and Julia Brooks

The State of Georgia Is in Play: New voter registrations are outpacing Republican efforts to purge the rolls. by Nancy LeTourneau
David Rosenhan–How a fraudulent experiment set psychiatry back decades. by Andrew Scull
In the 1970s, a social psychologist published ‘findings’ deeply critical of American psychiatric methods. The problem was they were almost entirely fictional.
Don’t Just Get Mad. Get to Work.
The FlipSide –curious if there is anything useful here. Seems to cover–this is the what the conservatives are saying today. Not the same as ‘this is something conservatives are saying worth considering’.
Rep. Schiff at Senate Impeachment Trial: In America, Right Matters. Truth Matters.
9 highlights from the impeachment trial this week

Graphics Gems Repository

The Fire This Time: In the Face of Rising White Supremacist Violence, Police Continue to Investigate Victims and Activists. by Alice Speri

Knotweed. Invasive species in the US and UK.
Where Might Trumpism Take Us? For analogies that show us where the nation might be headed, look close to home. by Jamelle Bouie

This One Chart Explains Why the Kids Back Bernie. by Eric Levitz

Lean Morse code online.
How Troubling is our Inheritanchttps://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mvhkc/e – A review of genetics and race in the social sciences. by Philip Cohen (pre-print)

With the recent discoveries from planet searches–Kepler, etc.–it is clear that habitable planets are fairly common. The parameters of the Drake equation are filling in, and making it look likely there are many planets with life in the galaxy. So how to resolve the Fermi Paradox?

One possibility is that while life is common, intelligent life or technological civilization is rare. Certainly, there are no good estimates for this. But let’s assume that this is not the barrier, that say, 1:1000 planets with life develop a technological civilization.

Going past the existence of intelligent life, space is quite big. Likely FTL is impossible. Slower than light travel is expensive, slow, and difficult. So let’s assume everyone stays close to their home star.

How difficult is communication? Reception is fairly easy, but how expensive is transmission? How strong does a signal have to be to get received at 1000 light years, 100k light years? How much energy does it take? Also, the only stars that ‘count’ as communicating are those that can keep it up for a long time–100k, 1M years. Long enough for extended back and forth messaging.

The only potential communication partners we have–stars we can find by searching for messages (SETI)–are those with an active Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) program. That is, technological civilizations that have a long term program sending messages to all the nearby stars

You can run the Fermi numbers and get a reasonable chance there is a communication partner within 10k light years, but the conversation would still be slow, so the effort required is great.

Quid pro quo with a turn around time of 2X light years is very slow. So what form of communication is the most reasonable strategy? I doubt star ‘A’ wants to send a short message, and wait for a reply, leaving the channel closed 99.99%+ of the time. And yet if the star ‘B’ on the other end stops reciprocating, you don’t know for a long, long time.

Money Laundering 101 byCZEdwards

Building Prototypes Part 4 of 18 (video) by Dan GelbartMachine Shop 1 (video) by Henrik Bak HeydeEverything We Know About Birds That Glow. Owls, puffins, and lots of other flying friends exhibit fascinating patterns under blacklights. by Cara Giaimo

Can intelligence be changed? by Martin Lövdén
Broad cognitive abilities, narrow cognitive abilities, General crystallized intelligence (g_c), and general fluid intelligence (g_f)

The Progressive’s Guide to Corporate Democrat Speak by Richard J. Eskow

How Political Fact-Checkers Distort the Truth: Glenn Kessler and his ilk aren’t sticking to the facts. They’re promoting a moderate dogma. by Alex Pareene

Inside the Secret List of Demands Warren Gave Hillary: The Massachusetts senator pressured Clinton to stock her administration with officials very different than Obama’s team. by ALEX THOMPSON

For The Win (3rd Ed.) is field-tested to help even the smallest counties assemble a high-energy GOTV program with little money and limited computer skills. by Tom Sullivan

2016 Timeline: The future of driverless cars, from Audi to Volvo.
All these companies have blown the timelines. Very little progress since 2016!

UCHealth: Making pseudoscientific claims about acupuncture. by Orac. Shame on U of Colorado!

Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception by Yves Smith
“The income tax was a basic reform back in 1913. Only 1% of Americaís population had to pay the tax. Most were tax-free, because the aim was to tax the rentiers who lived off their bond or stock holdings, real estate or monopolies. The solution was simply to tax the wealthiest 1% or 2% instead of labor or industry, that is, the companies that actually produced something.”

Machine Shop 1 (video) by Henrik Bak Heyde
Building Prototypes Part 4 of 18 (video) by Dan Gelbart
Lathe info by BlondiHacks

“The Trials of Nina McCall” by Scott Stern
“The American Plan. The forgotten initiative had resulted over several decades in the detainment of perhaps 100,000 women or more around the country, all on the mere suspicion of carrying STIs. Many of the women were imprisoned – usually without due process – and forced to undergo painful treatments, typically injections of mercury or arsenic.”

ARS Culture Collection (NRRL) “The ARS Culture Collection is one of the largest public collections of microorganisms in the world, containing approximately 98,000 isolates of bacteria and fungi. The collection is housed within the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology Research Unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois.” Many beer yeasts!

Whole Foods is selling dangerous anti-vaccine propaganda in its checkout aisles. by Maddie Stone
Whole Foods carries the Well Being Journal, magazine that publishes anti-vax articles.

Precious Plastic v4 launch. Complete plastic recycling system.
How To Be a Nonconformist 1968 hand drawn pamphlet by by Elissa Jane Karg
IBM pitched its Watson supercomputer as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close. by Casey Ross

A polyploid admixed origin of beer yeasts derived from European and Asian wine populations.

Ale strains and the S. cerevisiae portion of allotetraploid lager strains were derived from admixture between populations closely related to European grape wine strains and Asian rice wine strains. Similar to both lager and baking strains, ale strains are polyploid, providing them with a passive means of remaining isolated from other populations and providing us with a living relic of their ancestral hybridization…

Serenity — Outtakes
Math 101: A Reading List for Lifelong Learners
-Mostly pop science math books. No one today needs to read Euclid.

GOP senators know Trump’s defense is based on lies. Here’s proof. by Greg Sargent

Iceland’s Yule Cat
Multi Material 3D Printing Makes Soft Robot
refs:Voxelated soft matter via multimaterial multinozzle 3D printing

Recipe:Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese Mallows
Laced with garlic and rosemary and topped with pecans and goat cheese, this easy casserole gives a savory wink to the traditional sweet-on-sweet Turkey Day staple.

Martin Gardner (1914-2010) site

My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles
Martin Gardner’s Table Magic
Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends
Relativity Simply Explained
Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner
Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics
The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays
A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered
The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications

EDM Electrodes Repurposed As Air Bearings

Git instructions, link

Glass idea: Penrose tiling

GOP Goes Gonzo
New drug forces flu virus into ‘error catastrophe,’ overwhelming it with mutations
Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer
Memorial Day Massacre: Ten demonstrators were killed by police bullets during the “Little Steel Strike” of 1937
Echo Dot 3rd Gen. hacking
Crystalline Process — photography in kiln
Hot Kiln Imaging — photography in kiln
High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder — Dan Gelbart
Two Bat Detectors
Compliments of Chicagohoodz: Chicago Street Gang Art & Culture by James “Jinx” O’Connor
John Barnett on Why He Won’t Fly on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner
PBS NewsHour skips Bernie Sanders

What if the foundational theories about how to run a company have been corrupted? by Lila MacLellan
The Economy of Evil: The Political Economy under Fascism should scare us. It is all too familiar.
The Eight Counts of Impeachment That Trump Deserves — The lessons from Nixon and Clinton by David Leonhardt

THE ONE HUNDRED NEAREST STAR SYSTEMS from RECONS (Research Consortium On Nearby Stars
List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs (closest 52)

GOP Healthcare plan.

I now publish #MeToo stories on my blog, for free. Here’s why. by Michael Balter. Academic sex crimes.

I Support Unions, Just Not This On. Liberalism in a nutshell… by Nathan J. Robinson

Come With Us If You Want to Live. Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley by Sam Frank
Designing the perfect society, without any consideration for pesky, disagreeable people.

Hubble finds C₆₀ in space, helps solve interstellar mystery

The Day One Agenda. The Next Administration: Using Presidential Power for Good by David Dayen

Two test pieces. One a 10 cm square, the other a 12 cm square. For both, arranged 3 mm colored pieces over a 3 mm clear base, filled in gaps with medium clear frit. Tacked down the larger pieces with craft glue. COE 90.

Fired:
300F 60′
600F 60′
900F 60′
1000F 35′
1480F 60′
960F 60′
800F 60′
off

Cleaned up frit that had fallen off and stuck to the edges with a Dremel.

Slump smaller square over a 10 cm bowl. Drape larger square over a 10 cm bowl upside down suspended on two small posts. Put kiln paper over the bowls to prevent sticking.

Fired:
300F 60′
600F 60′
900F 60′
1000F 40′
1250F 40′
960F 120′
880F 24′
800F 24′
off

Middle Eastern food in Chicago, link

Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans by Saul Justin Newman, BioRxiv

Interesting post on C.S. Lewis and Fred Hoyle arguing by writing books at each other. I had never run across Ossian’s Ride. link

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. (1993). K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer pdf

“crackpots” who were right: the conclusion

How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation by Alexey Guzey, link. Some insights.

Open Borders Made America Great. For most of U.S. history, all immigrants were undocumented. It’s a fact Democrats should embrace. by Aaron Freedman, link

The three technologies bioinformaticians need to be using right now. by biomickwatson, link
BioConda/Docker/Singularity, SnakeMake/NextFlow, Cloud computing

Encyclopedia of Chicago History, link
Ancient Indian Earthworks in the Chicago Region

Republican terrorist threats shut down Oregon legislature, link

Concluding they can’t win the vote, Republicans abandon democracy, link

Grover Cleveland’s Sex Scandal: The Most Despicable in American Political History by Charles Lachman

Some Notes on Chinese Communist Party Internal Resilience by Bill Markle (10 part post on Chinese government)

The Truth About Chlorinated Chicken review – an instant appetite-ruiner
Britain fears low US food standards will come to Britain post-Brexit

Cave debris may be the oldest known example of people eating starch:
Charred material found in South Africa suggests humans digested starch long before farming
Looks like the paleo diet will need to be updated with potatoes

Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret: The U.S. military prison’s leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise. by Ben Taub
People are imprisoned for decades at Guantánamo Bay because it would be embarrassing to the military to admit there was never a reason to hold them. Also, they were tortured.

GM fungus rapidly kills 99% of malaria mosquitoes, study suggests. by James Gallagher

Birdbath mosaic, link

Use a teflon spatula to remove warranty sticker without leaving the ‘void’ mark: youtube
Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart, link

Slide mounting options, link

“A Tall Tail” by Charles Stross

EquiFax hacking settlement–apply for $125-$425. Affects most US adults. link

Senescent cells exhibit depletion of metabolites from nucleotide synthesis path- ways. Stable isotope tracing with 13C-labeled glucose or glutamine revealed a dramatic blockage of flux of these two metabolites into nucleotide synthesis pathways.  Blocking the pathway in replicative cells induces senescent phenotype.
Inhibition of nucleotide synthesis promotes replicative senescence of human mammary epithelial cells. May28, 2019.  JBC. Alireza Delfarah, Sydney Parrish, Jason A. Junge, Jesse Yang, Frances Seo, Si Li, John Mac, Pin Wang, Scott E. Fraser, and X Nicholas A. Graham. DOI10.1074/jbc.RA118.005806.