The curious psychology of getting free stuff

As some of you may have noticed, posting has been light recently. This is because I am fond of the card game bridge and there has been a big annual bridge tournament right here in Monterey where a lot of people come from all over to play. It is held in a large hotel and I have been playing in it all day for several days, which is not just time consuming but mentally exhausting, since you have to concentrate for about six hours.

The tournament is organized and run by the national bridge body but as the local club, we are assigned the hospitality desk, where volunteers from our club sit and tell people about things to do and places to eat in the region, and generally be as helpful and as welcoming as we can. One feature of our desk is that there is a large bowl where we keep a mix of various types of candy. The candy was purchased by our club and passersby are welcome to take one or two for free.
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Why is urine yellow?

I must admit that this is not a question that I had been wondering about, mainly because I assumed that the reasons would have been known some time ago, given our current ability to do microanalysis of pretty much anything.

So I was surprised to learn that researchers have only just found the reason, that it is due to a particular microbial enzyme.

The enzyme is called bilirubin reductase, and it’s a result of the degradation of red blood cells. Once they break down, a bright orange pigment called bilirubin is produced. Typically, bilirubin is secreted into the gut where it has to be discharged. It can also be reabsorbed, which in excess can cause jaundice, which is when a person’s skin and eyes become yellow.

“Gut microbes encode the enzyme bilirubin reductase that converts bilirubin into a colorless byproduct called urobilinogen,” lead author Brantley Hall, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, said in a media statement. “Urobilinogen then spontaneously degrades into a molecule called urobilin, which is responsible for the yellow color we are all familiar with.”

Now at any parties social gatherings, whenever the conversation turns to the topic of urine, you can impress your friends this little factoid.

You can read the paper that was published in Nature Microbiology here.

John Pilger (1939-2023)

The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.
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Looking forward to the end of lists

The end of an old year and the beginning of a new one is the occasion for the generation of lists of all manner of things and I for one find most of them unenlightening and tend to give them a miss. Fortunately these kinds of lists disappear after the first few days of the new year.

The most useless lists are those that try to predict what will happen in the coming year. They are just guesses based on the whims of the list creator. Retrospective tabulations of the major events of the past year are also not particularly enlightening, since I most likely knew about them anyway.

The only lists that I look at factual ones like those of people who died during the year, to see if there are some familiar names whose demise did not make big news when it happened.

The only non-factual lists that I look at are those of film critics whose views I respect that give the best films of the year, just in case I missed reading about some less-publicized but good film. If I find one, I add it to my ‘must see’ list.

Recycling wastewater for drinking

The state of California in which I live has had many years of drought leading to water shortages. While conserving water is one way of addressing the problem, another is to increase the supply. One option is to use desalination plants but those are expensive to build and operate. Another is to reclaim wastewater for use in things like irrigation. But recently the state has gone one step further and approved reclaiming wastewater for human consumption.

When a toilet is flushed in California, the water can end up in a lot of places: an ice-skating rink in Ontario, ski slopes around Lake Tahoe, farmland in the central valley.

And – coming soon – kitchen faucets.

California regulators on Tuesday approved rules to let water agencies recycle wastewater and put it into the pipes that carry drinking water to homes, schools and businesses.
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Beware of electronic cards, invitations, links, and attachments

It is the season where we get electronic cards and invitations that sometimes consist of just a link or an attachment. I also get emails from friends that contain just a link or attachment. I never click on any of them, not only at this time of year, but always. This is because malicious people use those as vehicles to send malware. If somebody hacks into the computer of someone you know, they can then send virus-embedded stuff to everyone in their address book. People think it is safe to click the link or open the attachment because it appears to come from someone they know.

A person I know got an electronic invitation from a neighbor for a party but when she clicked the link, it turned out to be fake and instead was a vehicle for a ransomware attack. It shut down her computer and demanded that she pay a ransom in cryptocurrency if she wanted to get the key to unlock her computer. She had a hell of a time trying to fix all the damage that it caused, needing to enlist the help of computer professionals to fix her computer as well as change all her banking, credit card, and other information.

In general, I never open any links or attachments that arrive without an accompanying message by the sender that could not have been generated by a spam bot but instead has some content that tells me definitely that the sender is real. I always look for a message in the text that requires some specialized knowledge that a bot would not know. If it has no message or is just generic like, “Hi, I thought this would interest you”, I ignore it. If I am not sure, I email the sender to confirm that they sent it and also warn them not to click on such links.

This is tedious and does not completely eliminate all threats but I think it is worth the effort.

What surprises me is that even after I warn people of the dangers and tell people not to send me unsupported links and attachments, after some time some of them revert to the practice. It is as if my warning never registered. I suspect that they continue to click on those things. People tend to ignore danger signs until something bad happens to them.

Annoying article headers

I spends quite a bit of time on the internet, frequenting many news and opinion sites. Most of these are in a magazine format where the home page has a whole lot of headlines that contain links to articles. Since these sites depend upon traffic to get advertising revenues, they necessarily try to use headers to get readers curious and thus lure readers to click on the link and read the article. That is fine, as long as the header provides some information that gives me a reasonable expectation of what the article contains. But not all of them do. Over time, I have developed a kind of filtering reflex that tells me whether I should click or not.
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