What if we want to stay? Can we stay at his house? Will he at least invite us to dinner one night?
Amazing and unique!
Short video account by the President of Finland of his visit to the White House— LaetitiavandenAssum (@lvandenassum) October 5, 2019
He says nice things about us, but I suspect he’s had about enough Americans for now.
Here’s a list of words that mean the opposite of “diplomacy”. It’s amazing how every single one of them applies to Donald Trump.
He’s not. These are just the facts, ma’am.
Another great scientist is gone. Inoué wrote my Bible that I relied on greatly in the 80s and 90s, Video Microscopy: The Fundamentals (which now costs $129? Wow), a very thorough overview of television and closed-circuit TV, as well as microscope optics. It’s now rather dated — it’s quaint to imagine there was a time we relied on RS-170 and NTSC to do video microscopy, and the extensive discussion of tape formats and antique gadgetry isn’t of much use any more, unless you’re planning to pick up an OMDR on eBay. Once upon a time, though, it was an indispensable guide to the thicket of rapidly emerging imaging technologies.
I never met Inoué, but I’d also heard he was a great teacher, and I can believe it. The book is dense but extremely well written and thorough. I’ve still got my copy in an honored position on my bookshelf, even if I probably haven’t cracked it open in 10 or 20 years. But in its time…I even taught a course a couple of times that was built around it as a reference text. It would still be useful if I were splicing together antique devices now and then for use in the lab.
Never mind the ideological clashes, it’s a really good, thoughtful SF novel. The Sparrow e-book is currently on sale for $1.99. It belongs in every atheist’s library.
I added a new female Parasteatoda to the laboratory colony — I hope she’s happy to have been brought in from the cold, especially since we have snow predicted for the end of the week.
She’s pretty.
Matt Baish is a terrible person.
He’s “angry” about Greta Thunberg visiting his area, so he “jokes” about not having a sniper rifle. Funny. Hilarious. Except that it’s sad how going right-wing causes atrophy of one’s sense of humor.
Fortunately, he’s been placed on administrative leave, so he won’t be poisoning students’ minds. This still disturbs me:
Baish, who is listed as a science teacher on the Waterloo West High School’s website, was placed on administrative leave after responding to a Facebook post about Thunberg visiting Iowa City this week, a local ABC affiliate reported.
Thunberg’s reputation rests on her fierce support for taking action against climate change; she spoke to congress and told them to listen to the scientists. This bozo so strongly hates that message that he’d make veiled threats against her? How can he be teaching good science?
My colleague, Chris Atkinson, told me yesterday that he’d been seeing a lot of spiders in his compost heap. “Interesting,” I thought. Then he sent me this photo:
WHOA. Look at all those spiders.
So I stopped by this morning (how could I not?), and the photo doesn’t do it justice. It is spider paradise. It’s a spider commune. There are all kinds of bugs living in the compost, and all over above them is a dense communal spider web, packed with spiders. I’d suspected it from the first picture, but I stuck my face down there and confirmed it — Steatoda borealis, the Northern Combfoot, which I’ve occasionally found while prowling about town, but this was the Mother Lode. I got a few closeups of one of their number in their web.
I often get brought up short when someone tells me that intelligence, for instance, is 80% determined by your genetics. I’m held up because that someone clearly doesn’t understand the magic word “heritability”, which every geneticist understands but every layman seems to consciously misunderstand, preferring to play games with folk etymology than actually understand the math, or the concept. So here’s a nice video that explains the background clearly, and as a bonus, show that Sam Harris doesn’t know diddly squat about the science behind the racism he endorses.
The Women of Color Beyond Belief conference has begun in Chicago, and I’m not there — work obligations keep me in Morris for a while, so I’m going to have to follow it vicariously through the #WOCBeyondBelief hashtag (or is it #WOCBB? Not clear. Guess I’ll follow both.)
Don’t we have enough bad news? There’s always something slipping its way into our nightmares, and this one is the African Swine Fever sweeping across Asia.
It is being described as the biggest animal disease outbreak the world has ever seen. Its impacts are already profound in Asia and beyond, with increased export demand certain to support pork prices for the foreseeable future. There will be longer-term implications of Asia’s African swine fever (ASF) outbreak, too, concerning the production and consumption of pork, some of which are already becoming apparent.
Nice to know pork prices will be propped up by the ongoing devastation. But read the rest: a quarter of the world’s pig population faces imminent death. And it’s spreading!
Official figures from China show the national pig herd had declined by 32% year-on-year by July, with an estimated 100 million pigs lost already. While some of the losses will be directly or indirectly linked to the disease itself, the reduction is also being heavily driven by vast numbers of producers choosing to slaughter their herds and get out of pigs before the virus gets to them.
Rabobank is forecasting that, by the end of the year, China’s pig herd will have halved. Given that it numbered 700 million and accounted for half the world’s pigs before ASF struck in August 2018, the damage the virus is causing is plain for all to see.
And that is just China. ASF is continuing to spread across Asia at a worrying rate, confirmed in September for the first time in South Korea, where six cases were confirmed within two weeks, and the Philippines, where 12 cases were recorded in one area in a short time.
In Vietnam, infected soon after China, the virus has reached all 63 provinces and around 5 million pigs have been killed. Rabobank forecasts a 15-20% reduction in pork production in Vietnam this year.
An industry comprising millions of, often remote, ‘backyard’ farmers, with little concept of biosecurity was always going to be easy prey for a virus that can travel and survive in tiny quantities for a long time on animals, people, clothes, vehicles and equipment. It also became clear at an early stage that the virus had become embedded in the pig feed chain and was being spread via swill feeding. It is also in the human pork supply chain, helping its spread around the continent.
It hasn’t yet affected the American midwest (Hello, Iowa! I hear you’re a major pork producer?) or Europe, but oh boy, imagine the chaos if it did. I hope our understanding of biosecurity is more robust than that of Chinese farmers, but I have my suspicions that no, our local swine farms are not at all constrained by science. Capitalism, baby!
