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Links 9/17/2024

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Ig Nobel prizes 2024: The unexpected science that won this year New Scientist (Micael T)

Gorillas self-medicate with plants. We could soon use them for our own medicine ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)

How the world’s smelliest fruit is making coffee more expensive BBC (Robin K). Durian is supposed to be delish. You see huge piles of them in outdoor markets. so they have to sell well.

Skyscraper Tsunami Unleashed by Seismic Anomaly Never Seen Before Science Alert (Chuck L)

‘All good here’: Last messages revealed from Titan submersible before implosion: Coast Guard ABC (Kevin W)

Why You Can Never Tune a Piano Open Culture (Micael T)

Why Are Bands Mysteriously Disappearing? YouTube (Micael T)

Cancer, the Master of Hijacking Eric Topol (Robin K)

#COVID-19

Climate/Environment

London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids Grist

It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says Associated Press (Kevin W)

Heavy flooding in central Europe has countries seek EU aid, funds Euractiv

AI ‘accelerating’ climate crisis, uses 30 times more energy than search engine: analyst South China Morning Post

Climate protesters block Dutch highway while police strike Reuters

China?

China needs ‘bazooka stimulus’ to hit growth target as economy slows across the board Fortune

China’s Fading Hunger for Grain Spells Trouble for World Farmers Bloomberg

Japan

Japan’s faith in US eroded by impolitic election rhetoric Asia Times (Kevin W)

Down Under

Albanese has a second chance with AUKUS Pearls and Irritations (Kevin W)

Africa

Sudanese city pounded as analysts report ‘unprecedented’ combat New Arab

Briton and Americans among 37 given death sentence over DRC coup attempt Guardian

Could Egypt and Ethiopia’s tensions escalate into a war? DW

South of the Border

In Honduras, Libertarians and Legal Claims Threaten to Bankrupt a Nation Inside Climate News

European Disunion

German Border Checks Take Effect as Tensions Over Migration Rise Bloomberg

Dresden bridge collapse symbolises German decay Unherd

Old Blighty

Starmer under pressure to distance UK from Italy’s hard-right immigration plans Guardian (Kevin W)

‘Our winter fuel payment goes into the holiday kitty’ BBC (Kevin W)

Gaza

Hamas official says despite war losses, terror group has recruited ‘new generations Times of Israel

New Not-So-Cold War

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians abroad reportedly want to renounce their citizenship Overton via machine translation (Micael T)

NATO Secretary General drops bomblets on way out​ the door Responsible Statecraft (Kevin W)

Ukraine war turns into Russian roulette Indian Punchline (Kevin W)

Seventy-two minutes to end the world George Galloway, YouTube. Ritter can be excitable but he has sources….

US Provoked the 1979 Russian Invasion of Afghanistan: Parallel to the Ukraine War? Antiwar.com (Kevin W)

Imperial Collapse Watch

Canadian military admits new sleeping bags are not suited to Canadian winters Guardian (Kevin W). Overly aggressive global warming estimates?

Bloomberg assessed likelihood of civil unrest in 20 largest economies in world… The US ranks third MSN

The Crumbling Nuclear Order Foreign Affairs

Second Trump Assassination Attempt

Would-be Trump assassin exploited security hole that Secret Service has known about for years — and the pictures prove it New York Post

Kamala

Kamala Harris helped shut down Backpage.com. Sex workers are still feeling the fallout. Politico

2024

Inflation has slowed, but the economy remains a big issue for voters in picking a president Kansas Reflector (Robin K)

Pennsylvania court rejects Cornel West’s bid to get on ballot and clears way for mail voting Associated Press

Police State Watch

This Is What Happens When We Flood the Subway System With Police Intercept

Our No Longer Free Press

Some Truth Bombs At the UN Craig Murray

Lawsuit Takes on Federal Campaign to Silence Vaccine Injury Claims Reclaim the Net (Micael T)

Elon’s Brazilian Corporate Law Surprise Adam Levitin, Credit Slips

Mr. Market Gets What He Wants

It’s a big week for central banks around the world, with a slew of rate moves on the table CNBC

AI

Chat GPT’s new O1 model escaped its environment to complete “impossible” hacking task — should we be concerned? ZMEScience (Dr. Kevin)

Nvidia CEO: “We can’t do computer graphics anymore without artificial intelligence” TechSpot (Kevin W)

Class Warfare

A quarter of young adults don’t plan to have kids, citing financial woes as fertility crisis escalates Fox

Security guard at Boeing draws a gun in altercation with picket Seattle Times

Radhika Desai’s Marxist lens illuminates the path to a post-capitalist future Morning Star (Robin K)

Antidote du jour. Tracie H: “The San Diego Botanic Gardens in Encinitas California has a lovely little pond that attracts these beauties.”

And a bonus (Robin K):

A second bonus (Chuck L):

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34 comments

  2. Terry Flynn

    Tuning a piano has always fascinated me (as a UK Associated Board Grade 8 pianist and violinist). When doing mathematics (both single subject and further) at A level (age 16-18) I simplistically thought that equal temperament (based on a simple power series of 1/12ths) was all you needed to tune a piano.

    These days there are various YouTubers that debunk that – and some of them even say it in ways I “get” due to my knowledge of upper harmonics etc that can be exploited (or not) when playing other instruments like the violin. It gets REALLY insteresting when you consider how a string section of an orchestra plays (no frets remember) when playing alone, compared to when playing as part of a wider ensemble that has fixed frequencies (like, say, a piano concerto). I’m not certain, but I’ve strongly suspected that Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations sounds so “attractive” partly because this strings heavy piece causes the players to use natural temperament for the written key, NOT what they’d do with instruments that do not have the ability to adjust the frequencies (like a piano). I freely admit some of the stuff goes above my head but I did understand that piano tuning is an art. If it were a science we could use a simple PC to match powers of 1/12 and do away with the human.

    If you want a fun experiment in how a full orchestra uses something approximating equal temperament but which illustrates how “wrong” this approximation can sound then I suggest you listen to the final chord in the first phrase of Beethoven’s 6th *in isolation* after having got the key of C in your mind – NOT F, the key the first movement is written in. Sounds like a kids’ orchestra due to sounding so out of tune!

    Reply ↓
    1. Paul Jonker-Hoffren

      I think for me (as a passionate amateur musician) the video to summarize this issue best is the one below by Adam Neely.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZftrA-aCa4&t=365s

      Alternative tunings are a real rabbit hole. I am also fascinated by the Indonesian gamelan orchestras, because there is a slight tuning difference in the two parts of the instrument, which is somehow crazy. But synesthetic me likes the colorfulness of that music!

      Reply ↓
      1. Terry Flynn

        Thanks. I think I must have got distracted by something because that video seems to be one I watched a few minutes of but didn’t complete, so it’s good that I now have a reminder to watch the rest.

        David Willcocks conducted the Bach Choir in London and I sang in it for 2 years in mid 1990s. I remember how the handful of singers with perfect pitch would go APE when he decided to transpose a piece up or down a tone. I began to understand their almost physical pain at reconciling the music on the page with what they had to sing. Thankfully I was on the musical sweet spot: I could perfectly sing A 440 to tune my violin or sing but I never had perfect pitch. I MUST have had 440 in my “learnt” memory because after a decade of not playing I discovered I’m off :(

        Going back to the original subject, my Dad did amateur experiments with mum (when they were part of a band) to see to what extent my mum “naturally” sang in a particular temperament. His findings were interesting and led me to the Beethoven thing I refer to above.

        Reply ↓
    2. Stephen V

      Very much appreciate this as one who is re-learning how to sing as an oldster and who enjoys conversing with young homeschoolers who play piano. Will run this by my professional pianist / math tutor friend!

      Reply ↓
      1. Terry Flynn

        You’re welcome. Though I’ll be the first to say I’ve been humbled by some YouTubers who have made me question some stuff I previously thought was “solved by the maths” etc so I consider this whole subject to be one I need “continuing professional development” courses on ;)

        Reply ↓
  3. The Rev Kev

    ‘Insider Paper
    @TheInsiderPaper
    BREAKING: A massive pipeline fire shooting a towering pillar of flame over suburban Houston, Texas’

    Apparently an SUV drove through a fence and struck a major valve causing that fire. The vehicle – and presumably the driver – were incinerated but no word yet if it was a accident or deliberate. The radiant heat is ferocious coming from that fire causing people to evacuate-

    https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/16/us/texas-pipeline-fire/index.html

    Reply ↓
  6. Jeff W

    “Durian is supposed to be delish.”

    It is actually—sweet and custardy. (Rambutan and mangosteen, which are kind of like lychee, are delish, too.)

    Reply ↓
    1. SocalJimObjects

      I am part of the durian choir and I approve of this message. My family back at home grow our own durian trees, so we are never lacking for the so called “tropical fruit king”, although in all fairness ours can’t be considered top grade durians. In Singapore, you can visit durian cafes for a tasting of various types from the region from the most expensive to the “economical”, and the fruit has been incorporated by locals into various sweets including cakes and pastries, anyone interested in the later should pay a visit to Goodwood Park Hotel in the vicinity of Singapore’s premier shopping district.

      Referring back to the article, why not both? In Malaysia, you can buy durian flavored instant coffee packs and the MyCafe brand is especially delicious.

      Reply ↓
    1. The Rev Kev

      Just now had a thought. Insurance companies are pulling out of places like California because they have to keep on paying out for houses burned down in more frequent fires, right? If the weather starts going all over the place in farming regions, what happens if some major insurance companies decide to pull out of insuring farmer’s crops. I’m not a farmer but I am going to assume that farmers have to insure their crops due to there being so many variables in that profession. Or is insurance only a minor consideration?

      Reply ↓
      1. ajc

        I’m not an expert, but I think all crop insurance is backstopped by the feds via the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Basically they’ve created a public-private ‘partnership’ so our politicians’ donors can wet their beaks being brokers for what was initially a federal program. There may be true independent insurers but no one in my rural zone uses them. Most of the farms round here were using the FCIC back in the day before being ‘migrated’ to ‘more efficient’ – and more expensive – private insurance.

        If the losses become untenable for insurers my guess is that it would revert to being a pure government scheme, much like flood insurance has for many areas where private insurance dare not tread.

        Reply ↓
      2. JTMcPhee

        Rings a bell about something Michael Hudson and David Graeber illuminated, on how early “civilizations” covered the social risks of crop failures. No financialized “insurance products” that have administration overhead and profit built in, rather a least-cost sharing of risk via the various social mechanisms including Jubilees that these gentlemen elucidate.

        I’m not smart enough to offer a path to a homeostatic “genteel sufficiency” that might persist over time in the face of constant anti-social pressures of greedy, glory and dominion/domination. Kind of doubt that anything of the sort would face any other fate than being strangled in its crib…

        Reply ↓
      3. farmboy

        the FCIC subsidizes up to 70% of a producers crop insurance premium with up to 2x the price coverage for organic. I couldn’t farm without it and most grain farmers are the same, even in high production corn areas like Iowa because there is price protection too.
        At the end of the 1 hr long vide, they detail how the disaster playing out in Brazil now, with deforestation affecting monsoonal rains, corn, soybeans, coffee, sugar, orange supplies will be adversely affected FOR YEARS.

        Reply ↓
  8. The Rev Kev

    “Dresden bridge collapse symbolises German decay”

    Just goes to show you that it is not only America that has to worry about bridges collapsing. But like in America, you find the same root causes. Not only under-investing in infrastructure and trying to live off the accomplishments of earlier generations but cutting back on maintenance and ignoring problems. In short, Neoliberalism. It is only luck that that bridge collapsed at 3 in the morning and not when it had a full load of traffic in the daytime. As it is when that bridge went down, it not only cut water pipelines but also ‘In addition, due to the bursting of two large district heating pipes, we have the problem that the supply of hot water has come to a complete standstill in the entire state capital of Dresden.’

    https://www.rt.com/news/603881-dresden-bridge-collapse-videos/

    But hey, look at all the money that they saved on maintenance over the years. /sarc

    Reply ↓
    1. Terry Flynn

      Anecdotally, former German colleagues were telling me up to 10 years ago that they knew which autobahns they could *actually* do 100+ MPH speeds and which they couldn’t (due to bad maintenance and hence potholes).

      Plus I think I’ve already referred to the case of my Dutch collaborators around that time who made jokes about the poor state/reliability of the trains that originated in Germany compared to the ones that were part of “entirely intra-Netherlands routes/operators”.

      Reply ↓
    2. PlutoniumKun

      The Dresden bridge was commissioned in 1971 – communist era. Its a stressed concrete structure and while generally very strong, a known problem with these bridges is that the steel cores are hidden from direct examination and so its very difficult to identify problems until… well, until the bridge collapses. Unlike steel bridges precast concrete rarely give any warning before failure. Very often the causes of damage are complex interactions between the chemical composition of the concrete and the steel cores. Given how ubiquitous concrete is as a material its surprising how little we really know about its chemistry. I was recently pouring over the surveyors report for a family members new house and fell down the rabbit hole of mica and pyrite issues with concrete – some rare interactions in the specific source of sand for the region caused endless problems 15-20 years after the houses were built in the north-west of Ireland. Despite years of work they still haven’t quite worked out the precise chemistry of what went wrong, all they know is that a lot of houses are falling down. This is one reason why 20 years old houses in Donegal are very cheap….

      My completely uninformed guess of what happened to that bridge is that there was no clear transfer of technical information after German re-unification, so there was a certain degree of guesswork involved in assuming that all was well beneath the concrete surface. The photos of the bridge don’t reveal any obvious indicators of concrete decay, so it looks like it was a failure of the stressed steel core – the failure seems to have been a clean snap of one of the cantilever structures. Steel cores can rot away completely out of sight.

      Bridge failures are surprisingly common – they usually don’t hit the news as there are usually pre-indicators, so fatalities are relatively rare. Usually the main result is years of litigation between the various parties, always more complicated when construction was decades past. The recent terrible weather has led to a number of major failures in Europe, Vietnam and China. At least 38 died in a failure in China in July. China loses bridges at a rate of around 1 a month historically (excluding earthquakes). Statistically, the long span ones are the most likely to fail. Years back I worked for a company that did extensive railway and bridge work in China – the engineers I talked to said the chief problem (they were, to put it mildly, not very happy with the results) was poor quality control of concrete, but the outcomes were not likely to be seen for many years.

      Reply ↓
    1. GramSci

      I couldn’t access the New Scientist article, but I surmise that Sam Altman did not receive an igNobel.

      The degeneration of the Nobel Prizes was bad enough, but my loss of faith in the igNobels is not funny.

      Reply ↓
    2. Terry Flynn

      Yet again I knew exactly what SP scene you’d be directing us to before clicking. I should get out more!

      But more seriously, recently I found myself saying on social media something like “We should retire the Simpsons did it first meme. Because in all the issues that matter to society, South Park tended to have done it first.” I stand by that. Maybe it is because I’m so close in age to Matt and Trey, but I have never ever not loved SP, from their ridiculous humour of early seasons, through their clever middle seasons “peak” which really skewered Walmart etc before any so-called expert academics did so, through to their recent “slightly inconsistent but with huge on-the-money critiques” of the current social order.

      Reply ↓
  11. GramSci

    Adam Levitin’s piece on Elon in Brasil was cute, but I’m especially intrigued by his link to Samson’s Toupee .

    Apparently U.S. Bank Holding Companies have neither regulatory responsibility nor liability for the crimes of their subsidiaries.

    We should have known, but Who Knew?

    Reply ↓
  12. Zagonostra

    >Seventy-two minutes to end the world George Galloway

    I listened/watched Scott Ritter on various programs giving his animated 72 minute doomsday scenario. I tried some self reflection on its impact on me. Panic, not so much for myself but family, outrage directed to misleadership/oligarchs, anger over insouciant public…etc. Settled on “just carry on.”

    What to do when an nebulous, generalized threat looms and you have no ability to make any actionable difference to the probability of the thereat destroying you and everyone else? Read articles on tuning a piano (fasinating article, I tried tuning a used piano, it’s still somewhat out of tune), or browse the internet for a used book, what to do when someone tells you just avoided the end of humanity? Just carry on your wayward soul [are bands disappearing because their lyrics are vacuous?]

    I close my eyes
    Only for a moment, and the moment’s gone
    All my dreams

    Pass before my eyes, a curiosity
    Dust in the wind
    All they are is dust in the wind

    Same old song
    Just a drop of water in an endless sea
    All we do
    Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

    Dust in the wind
    All we are is dust in the wind
    Oh

    Now, don’t hang on
    Nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky
    It slips away
    And all your money won’t another minute buy

    Dust in the wind
    All we are is dust in the wind
    (All we are is dust in the wind)
    Dust in the wind
    (Everything is dust in the wind)
    Everything is dust in the wind
    The wind

    [Kansas]

    Reply ↓
    1. ilsm

      Ritter’s source is pretty accurate in terms of horrific possibilities.

      I lived and worked on (several) “ground zero” in late 1970’s early 1980’s.

      Our consolation was: “the living will envy the dead”. The few that might be!

      Only progressive democrats could put the US back to the darkest days of the cold war!

      I am voting for the candidate who talked “no nukes” in the debate and they are trying to kill!

      Go on youtube and watch the closing minutes of Dr Strangelove..

      Reply ↓
  13. funemployed

    34.8 million C-dollars seems awfully steep for sleeping bags for the Canadian military, even really nice ones. I would personally be happy to place the next order for only a couple million of personal graft, thereby solving this pressing problem of national defense.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Rev Kev

      I still find it hard to believe that those sleeping bags passed testing before being issued to their troops. They’re lucky that half those troops did not end up on sick call as being too frozen to perform their duties. Yeah, like you said it has to be graft going on somewhere along the line. Maybe the Canadians can recoup some of their money by selling those sleeping bags to the Mexican military. They should be OK there.

      Reply ↓
  15. eg

    “The Crumbling Nuclear Order” — in which we are treated to a visit from “the norms fairy.” A predictable heap of dreck which descends into unintentional comedy near the end when, having engaged in the usual mendacity in describing the problem, it calls for The Empire of Lies to “enter into honest dialogue.”

    Blech …

    Reply ↓
  16. Ignacio

    NATO Secretary General drops bomblets on way out​ the door Responsible Statecraft (Kevin W)

    I guess Stoltenberg is still NATO Secretary General (SG). All those “bomblets” on the FP interview, are the consensus of the NATO members on Foreign Affairs or are these Stoltenberg personal opinions? Or a mixture of both? If there are no qualms from any NATO member about these words one might interpret this is an agreed consensus of NATO countries that Stoltenberg is explaining in his capacity as SG to the FP interviewer. On the other hand if these are not consensus guidelines by NATO he should be lectured as having gone too far. Am I being, once again, naive?

    Reply ↓
  17. The Rev Kev

    ‘Middle East Observer
    @ME_Observer_
    ⚡️ ⭕️ #Lebanon, Hezbollah: Summary of 12 operations against the positions and deployment of the #Israeli enemy army on the Lebanese-Palestinian border on Sunday 09-15-2024, according to the following:’

    Likud in Israel has already declared Russia to be an enemy of Israel and they are in the driving seat right now. Why they did so I have no idea considering the number of people that emigrated from Russia to Israel over the decades. So you wonder if the Russians are giving satellite info on targets in northern Israel to Hezbollah in the same way that NATO does for the Ukraine.

    Reply ↓

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