Entertainment stuff from the week 1-7/2/16

Buzz buzz, insectoid reactors,


So... is now the time to declare support for the Trumping Presidential campaign?

'Watch Stephen Colbert Savor Donald Trump's Iowa Caucus Defeat'
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/watch-stephen-colbert-savor-donald-trumps-iowa-caucus-defeat-20160203

Once again, Republicans have selected a white man as their favourite, to put forward for the Presidency.

Instead of an orange one.

Oh, those poor oppressed orange people. Or as they're also (not) known: 'people of colour'

They're certainly more coloured than the black people. Black, of course, is not a colour.

So, oh those poor oppressed coloured billionaires.

An irony of racist terminology, is that black is a complete absence of colour (no wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum) whereas white is a full bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Well, at least the 'visible' bit, that our eyes can pick up.

This means that 'white' is infinitely more colourful than black, and that if the racists' cartoon Whites and Blacks were real, then it would be the Whites who were the 'people of colour' :-D

As it is, there is no-one in the world, who is not a colourful person. Even those of us who are albino, have some colour to us.

If you feel like trolling some racists, then maybe point that out to them, LOL


YouTube shitstorm of the week: The Fine Bros, and their declaration that they've copyrighted the word "react".

Well, kind of.

'Reacting to React World by the Fine Bros'
https://youtu.be/YN-vhZoO7wM

First of all, i'd like to point out that i know very little about the Fine Bros, except that they make money out of showing other people's videos to people who aren't them.

Second, is that i'm now very glad not to have known very much about the Fine Bros.

Third, is how amazingly pretentious their salespitch is! The idea that their reaction videos are somehow "timecapsules" of our culture, and that you can be part of their 'family'.

Well, videos of cats playing pianos are also timecapsules of our culture. And you know who else calls disposable supporters 'family'? The Mafia.

What they really 'offered' was the opportunity to work 'with' them, under their branding, to produce content for them, so that they could claim more content, without having to do the proportionate amount of work.

So it's not really about copyrighting the word 'react' or the idea of a Reaction Video itself, but it is a business model designed to screw other people for their creativity. And not necessarily 'reactive' creativity.

That's what Linear TV does, when it requests viewers to send in their videos and pictures and 'stories' relating to events and experiences - they want the unpaid viewership to do their work for them!

Fine Bros, in this one video, declared that they were rejecting the very thing that they were embracing - the oligopoly of the past - by licencing brands, and thereby forbidding competition, by forbidding creators to have similar branding to extant wealth-possessors.

The thing about YouTube, is that it has been a home to so much creativity in the past, because power is relatively uncentralised there. Anyone can get themselves a channel, and start doing their thing, without worrying that it might be similar to someone else's thing.

Increasingly, however, there has been an expected decrease in entropy of power and wealth, in YouTube's market, as commercial, corporate channels, heavily backed by advertising campaigns and the accrued wealth of past success, have come to dominate viewers' awarenesses.

I've lost count of the many, many, many times that YouTube has tried to get me to subscribe to Zoella.

The Home page of YouTube has a permanent 'Popular Right Now - [your IP address' country]' section, crammed with Film company channels, TV show channels, and corporate advertising channels. A couple that i see as i write this: T-Mobile and Bud Light.

I hate beer. It makes me puke. And not through the usual way - overconsumption. I couldn't be less interested in it.

How can i tell YouTube not to push beer and 'Muslim Singles' at me?

The trouble is, that this 'content purification' - a kind of brand-racist memetic cleansing - results in minor channels that i might actually be interested in (or you might be interested in) becoming submerged beneath the oceans of bland, drab, corporate lifelessness that we all find so opiatingly familiar.

Fine Bros offered to give us more of this, not less, by presenting itself as an alternative oligarch - not as an alternative to oligopolisation!

And as if to convince you that they're cutting through the crap, they tell you that you have to fatalistically subjugate yourself to them, because "this is the future of entertainment".

Yeah, sure it is. Unless your own viewers persuade you otherwise. Like they apparently already have.

Please, Fine Bros, and everyone else, don't try this again.


'UK regulators give go-ahead for 'embryo editing''
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/02February/Pages/UK-regulators-give-go-ahead-for-embryo-editing.aspx

The UK body that regulates research into embryos – the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) - has given its first licence for research involving human embryos.

Due to peculiar, superstition-augmented legislation, genome editing in embryos is only allowed in the research of causes of infertility and miscarriages, and the only embryos allowed to be used are those that would have been destroyed within 14 days anyway, as unused products of in-vitro fertilisation.

Due to the way IVF is performed, there are always embryos that are not used, and so are simply wasted. From an economic point of view, this is an efficiency, but from a research point of view, it is a silliness that people aren't allowed to donate embryos that were never intended for reproductive use at all. Why not? No reason.

The UK is the first country in the world, however, in which this type of research has been made legal, but it remains illegal to implant the modified embryos into women. The cases in China, by the way, depended on the use of unviable embryos - a restriction not imposed in the UK, anymore.

I wonder whether an intersex researcher, officially classified as male, would be permitted to implant such embryos into themself, in the grand history of scientific self-experimentation?

As i have said on this blog before, genetic engineering is a method of genetic modification that promises much greater accuracy, productivity, and cost-aversion than the historical method of genetic modification by artificial selection.

I think there is a moral obligation, to permit germline editing, so that genetic diseases, first and foremost, can be erased from the species - Huntington's, for example.

I see rejection of human genetic engineering as parallel to rejection of euthenasia - a basic cowardice to acknowledge the cost-benefit analysis that stands before us.

The ignorant mewlings of pro-suffering pseudo-charities like LIFE, and Human Genetics Alert, should be roundly ignored and derided for what they are - the ramblings of ignorant paranoia merchants.

This permission is a small step on a long road toward specietic self-improvement, and i don't know whether it will even be maintained, but i hope that the forward momentum is. There is so much to be gained from genetic engineering, and so much to be lost by rejecting it.


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

The 5th of February :-P
https://youtu.be/WJBrAIVrK-4


In other news:

Physics' midwife has something to say: it's, it's... it's a new form of matter. You must be so proud. Polar vortices can be observed on a wide variety of scales - from spiral galaxies, to storms, to plant sepals, to fingerprints, to bunches of atoms just tens across. And the last of those is the scale at which these vortices have been seen. Hypothesised more than a decade ago, the 'rotating topologies of electrical polarization' have been seen for the first time, in a ferroelectric material. That material is made of layers of lead titranate and strontium titranate. If further research shows the ferroelectric vortices to be equivalent to 'skyrmions' which are phenomena in magnetic fields, then the knowledge gleaned could give Moore's Law a new lease of life, in giving computer miniaturisation a new, and much lower, size limit.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-state-ultracompact-storage.html

A study into voting patterns, in this case in Brazil, has found new methods of corrupting democratic elections. Modern technology and vote-collection methods prohibit the use of factitious voting entities, imagined out of thin air, so instead the technique used, is voter importation - where voters and their votes are illegally re-addressed, so that they're counted in different ballots. This is essentially candidates buying votes from other people's constituencies - the voters don't have to migrate for this to happen. The phenomenon is also known as 'electoral tourism'. This study has found, in accord with EU investigations into corruption, that it's the smaller settlements that suffer more corruption than larger places, where there are greater resources and labour hours available to antagonise corruptive forces. Due to the expense involved with each vote bought, it's also more economic to sway elections involving fewer votes overall, as fewer votes have to be bought, to turn an election loss into a win.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-cleaner-ballot.html

Swiss local governments in Lausanne, have banned 'silnt discos' for being too noisy. The name 'silent disco' is actually a misnomer - although the music is not broadcast directly into the environment, the people listening to it through the headphones behave exactly as if it were. This means shouting over the music, as per usual, and raucously singing along! There's no accounting for lack of sound insulation, it seems.
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/authorities-ban-silent-discos-over.html

Anyone's corruptible. But this corruption required a tight squeeze. Aggravating environmentalists, the European Parliament recently voted to approve legislation, permitting motor industry companies to manufacture cars that breach pollution restrictions by 100% (until 2020) and by 50% after then. Corruption by the motor industry got the loopholes put into the legislation in the fisrt place, and only six votes passed the bill - 323 for, 317 against. There were sixty abstentions! That means ten times as many MEPs didn't vote, as determined the difference in result. I wonder how many petulant nationalists were amongst them? "It is intolerable to learn that after the Volkswagen scandal, the member states and the commission conceded to the sirens of the auto industry in allowing it to exceed European anti-pollution limits," said MEP Karima Delli of the Greens group.
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-eu-lawmakers-diesel-loopholes-vw.html

Roll up, roll up, get your genuine Western airs here. Just £80 a can; it's a bargain! Except it's obviously not. The best defence of this product - aimed at rich people in smog-addled cities - appears to be that it's no worse than bottle water. Um, yeah... it's no worse than the bottled water scam. It's not even like they bear the cost of extracting water from the municipal (public) supply - air is entirely free to harvest! I wonder what the cost of pollution is, in order to transport this unpolluted air, into polluted areas.
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/businessman-sells-fresh-british-air-to.html

Is that goat gay, or does he just admire my policies? Apparently, the homophobes' bid to equivocate homosexuality with bestiality (cross-species bonking) extends as far as xeno-bestiality. A lawyer in Novosibirsk has apparently appealed for 'action' to mitigate the harm that might be done to children, by a goat and a tiger being friends. “I think the positive coverage of this topic is nothing less than interference in the personal lives of minors, which is what hidden propaganda is, and public, active imposition of homosexuality”. It should be pointed out that the animals don't even shag each other - they just haven't killed each other yet. That is enough for the paranoid anti-sexuality campaigners, it seems, to adopt their hanging judge guise, and declare sentence.
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/russian-lawyer-accuses-unlikely-animal.html

A systematic analysis of observational studies on the effects of passive tobacco smoking, has found that the imposition of the public smoking ban, in the UK, in 2007, has reduced the incidence of heart attacks, angina, strokes, heart disease, and other smoking-related diseases. The evidence is conflicted on COPD and asthma, but some studies have shown premature births and low birth weights have fallen, as numbers of women smoking during pregnancy have fallen. Pretty much the only disappointment, is that attempts to kick the nicotine addiction, were just a punctuation in the data - efforts quickly subsided.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/02February/Pages/smoking-ban-prevents-heart-attacks-stroke.aspx

Dark Fly returns. It sounds like a Batman sequel, but it's actually a kind of fly, deliberately brought up in dark conditions, so that over 1500 generations, it evolved to outcompete 'light' flies in the dark. The experiment began in 1954, using ordinary, sighted fruit flies, that were kept in permanent darkness, except for a dim red light that the flies couldn't see. The red light was for the experimenters, of course. Now, after more than 1500 generations, which would be an equivalent in humans of 30,000 years, Dark Fly has evolved heightened sensitivity to light, and certain smells, and have much longer head bristles, which serve the same function as cats' whiskers - physical navigation of the world around them. By sequencing 'light' fly genomes, as well as Dark Fly genomes, and then introducing the 'light' flies into the darkness, with the Dark Flies, researchers have found 28 genomic regions, containing 84 genes, that might be responsible for the Dark Fly's enhanced success. These genes would become more abundant in the successful reproductive products of Dark-light hybrids, you see. These genes are known to be involved in smell, pheromones, and circadian rhythm - the last of which being an important adaptation, for a population that can never adjust its rhythm to the Sun. Evolution-deniers like to rhetort that evolution has never been directly observed. Well, this is one of the increasingly abundant direct refutations!
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-evolution-dark-fly.html

A Primary School (5-11 year olds) Headteacher in the UK has gone on public record (through twitter) stating just such one anti-scientific sentiment, by claiming that evolution should be doubted, because there is “more evidence that the Bible is true”. Quite rightfully, she was mocked for it. Her professional twitter feed has been taken down, but it's not yet clear whether she's lost her job from the Church of England school that she was in charge of. The (Anglican) Church of England has a reputation for being very 'lovely lovely' but there's no essential difference between any two factions of religion. I maintain my mantra: "schools are teaching, not for preaching". Not even if it's limp-wristed fuxxy-wuzzy Anglican Young Earth Creationism!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/headteacher-mocked-twitter-claim-evolution-not-fact

Over the last 125 million years, diversity in insect species has changed little - with every lost species, a new one has made up the numbers. That's according to this study, which has used a different method of estimation than past studies, which chronically understate past numbers of species. That's because fossilisation is rare, and so we rarely find enough data to be precise to species level. The names of dinosaurs that you know are probably all genus names, not species names - brontosaurus, for example - because of this. So by embracing a little more imprecision, and performing an assay of more than 39,000 fossil insect records, these researchers have concluded that insect diversity has changed little in the last 125 million years; but that there was a big rise at around 325 mya when their abundance also increased hugely. Insects first appeared in the fossil record, about 400 mya. Inevitably, with the fragility of fossils, and the difficulty of discovering the earliest laid down, all models will have greater uncertainty for further into the past.
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-unbiased-statistical-analysis-insect-fossil.html

Why do female red flour beetles keep on bonking the males, even when the eggs inside them are as fertilised as can be? According to this research, the answer lies in their environment. Females benefit greatly from post-sex sex, but males experience a great cost, with reduced survival. Red flour beetles live in a low-moisture environment, and so for the sake of the eggs, and thereby the perpetuation of the species, any moisture helps. The moisture from the males' semen helps keep the females healthy, at the expense of the males from which it cums. And so the species has evolved a hyper-active sex life, that leaves the males physically drained. Excuse the pun :-P
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-journal-publishes-doctoral-candidate-beetle.html

A Penis In Amber. No, that's not the title of a video on xvideos. Although it might be. But it is the risque title of this press release, regarding the unusual discovery of a 99 million year old harvestman with an extended penis. Now, when i say "harvestman" i don't mean the sense that "plumber" might mean, in a video title - i mean the order of arachnids, commonly known as 'daddy long legs'. And no, daddy isn't a tripod - he's an octopod. A lot can be got out of an insect's penis - they come in myriad forms, and are often used to distinguish between species, with greater clarity than other body morphology can provide. In this new family and species of harvestmans - Halitherses grimaldii - the penis is spatula-shaped at the tip, and is heart-shaped in outline, with a small tube extending from the very end. No living harvestman has a penis with exactly this shape. So now you know :-P
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-penis-amber.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Mystery of the Red Sprites'
https://youtu.be/brh--gYjZts

'China's Moon: Journey of the Jade Rabbit'
https://youtu.be/h5y1JlgCCwg

'Yellow Street Lights - Sixty Symbols'
https://youtu.be/O7mEBpJVJbA

'How to become invisible to Infrared Cameras'
https://youtu.be/fpx7hsoYEt4

'Liquid Play-Doh can be sliced like a solid'
https://youtu.be/9MHWyjXalKE

'Quinine and Fluorescence'
https://youtu.be/eI24BSHYmdk

'Super Expensive Photos - Objectivity #55'
https://youtu.be/9Xt55LyX5pU

'Oprah Winfrey, a Hungry Syrian Boy and a World Divided'
https://youtu.be/vEH7ICiCfaU

'All Around You (I Have A Weird Sense of Humor lol)'
https://youtu.be/epsnNyCA56E

'"WHAT I'VE BEEN WORRYING ABOUT" Tales Of Mere Existence'
https://youtu.be/yP5c0Rmwnis

'Is There Really Airplane De-icing Liquid in Beer?'
https://youtu.be/4ciNSX_TQzE

'Growing Skeptical of Hair Restoration'
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4504

'Image: Pluto's blue atmosphere in the infrared'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-image-pluto-blue-atmosphere-infrared.html

'Image: Pluto's widespread water ice'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-image-pluto-widespread-ice.html

'NASA image: Oil fires in Libya continue'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-nasa-image-oil-libya.html

'ESA image: London nightlife'
Look at all that sodium ;-)
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-esa-image-london-nightlife.html

'ESA image: Mercury orbiter test'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-esa-image-mercury-orbiter.html

'Inside Rosetta's comet'
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-rosetta-comet.html

'ESA image: Martian labyrinth'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-esa-image-martian-labyrinth.html

'Sandy selfie sent from NASA Mars rover'
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-sandy-selfie-nasa-mars-rover.html

'"NFL 2016: Part One" — A Bad Lip Reading of the NFL'
If it weren't for these guys, i wouldn't know anything about American Rugby ;-)
https://youtu.be/W-kGosnzvjU

'"NFL 2016: PART TWO" — A Bad Lip Reading of the NFL'
https://youtu.be/YtIPmVN6zdc

'This is what happens when you reply to spam email'
This is pretty much all TED's been good for, the past few years :-D
https://youtu.be/_QdPW8JrYzQ

'Classical Music Mashup'
https://youtu.be/7OYkWSW7u4k

'Over the Heads of Dinosaurs-Pterosaurs'
https://youtu.be/mO1nDehTSnc

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: opiate (noun) -- a drug, hormone or other substance derived from or related to opium; something that dulls the senses and induces a false and unrealistic sense of contentment

Hoax Of The Week: Helium Beer -- or is it?

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'The Goodies: Good Ole Country Music'
https://youtu.be/oMoJlCeIcAY?list=PLAFFF8081B657D161
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 25-31/1/16

Hi nitrogen importers,


Oh well, i suppose it couldn't last. Weeks since feminism roughly seized the centre of the stage, and made a bigoted arse of itself: 9

Nine weeks, and now it's time to feel dirty again. The tidal wave approaches...

{Don't worry. It gets better. Beyond the wreckage, lies hope}


'Richard Dawkins No-Platformed by Atheism+'
https://youtu.be/W1bI7S0LCos

That's right, folks. It's those anti-ageist, pro-sexuality, anti-racist, and anti-sexist 'social justice' warriors, isolating and berating an old, Straight, White male, for daring to tangentially imply that maybe feminism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

All he did was tweet a video, that was not of his creation, featuring caricatures of a famous feminist (the Fuckface Feminist, as you might know her) and a famous Islamist (Dawah Man - not that the feminists recognised him - they called him an outrageous stereotype!) singing a duet, in which they shared their loves and principles.

{Dawah Man, by the way, got into the 'papers, for being filmed at a religious fake charity event (for the Global Aid Trust) held on a boat, on The Thames. See his link for an undercover video}

Of course, when the Fuckface Feminist claimed to have been subjected to violent threats (i have no idea whether she supplied any evidence, but feminism being a superstitious ideology, i suspect she thought evidence to be beneath her) feminists decided that The Dawkster must be bullied into redacting his tweet.

Incidentally, he had already done so, because he's not the demon they try to depict him as, and because he underestimated the rabidness of feminist hatemongers - if they smell weakness, they bite ever more vigorously. And that's exactly what they did.

The result of their offense on an old, Straight, White man -- that specific demographic is a minority, by the way, just like all demographics are -- NECSS decided to rescind his invitation to speak at one of their events.

NECSS (pronounced 'nexus') is the 'Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism' and despite being a generally well-respected event, has apparently been infiltrated by feminism (the Center for Inquiry alike - both Northeast USA-based organisations) resulting in some 'interesting' knotting of their principles.

"We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views." - NECSS statement (emphasis added by me)

"...except when feminism's threatened" - the unspoken extra clause.

Any ideology that compels people to forego rational thought, is deemed to be unacceptable on this blog, and so i am compelled to treat feminism in the same way as religion, quackery, newage, and all kinds of rank conspiracy theories are treated. All but one of these sets of ideologies is considered fair game, at NECSS. Guess which one's left out.


In case you were wondering, feminism and Islam find themselves marching hand-in-hand in real life - not just in cheap satirical videos.

'Muslim students try to disrupt ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie’s talk on blasphemy at Goldsmiths University'
http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-students-try-to-disrupt-ex-muslim-maryam-namazies-talk-on-blasphemy-at-goldsmiths-university

"Reza Moradi, a lecturer present at the talk, said that one Muslim protester "looked right into my eyes and with his finger, shaping hand like a handgun, touched his forehead" in what Moradi described as a "death threat"."

I warn you - when i first read the following paragraph, my only phraseable reaction was "fuck!"

"Incredibly, the Goldsmiths Feminist Society sided with the Islamist protesters. They released a statement on 2 December expressing their "solidarity with Goldsmiths Islamic Society". They said: "We support them in condemning the actions of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and agree that hosting known islamophobes [sic] at our university creates a climate of hatred.""

That's right. The feminists sided with the Islamists, because a woman who is an apostate from Islam, and who is therefore permanently on the run, because freedom for her comes with the death sentence attached, is deemed an "islamophobe" for daring to be free! And more pertinently, for daring to imply that the ideology that condemns her to death, and motivates young men to threaten her with death in a public place, might be a slightly unsavoury ideology!

Eurrrgh :-/

And yes, that is the same Goldsmiths University made famous by feminist Bahar Mustafa in October last year, when she called for the killing of 'white men' on Twitter.


I'm not even going to bother to go into the genuine parallels between religion and feminism. I don't have the time, nor space in this post.

I know the artefactually-historic application of the word 'Entertainment' in the titles of these weekly posts sometimes seems tenuously maintained, but if i inserted a concise list of the parallels between religon and feminism in this post, you'd conclude that it had been rendered entirely extraneous!

Suffice to say: feminists are whining about a cartoon... guess who else does that.


If Dicky Dawkins made any mistake, it was to develop a sense of humour that didn't comply with other people's. And that's no crime at all. Cue a Rickardian ribbing:

"Jesus de-platformed. Heaven Gazette reports that the Second Coming is disinvited. Jesus had not a single woman or minority among 12 Apostles"

Like with the fictional Jesus, feminists are looking for any excuse to crucify the real Dawkins.

The Dawkster, by the way, is responsible for the weirdest, and most amazing thing i have seen this week. And it's this:

'Richard Dawkins on stage with Nightwish'
https://youtu.be/BxtZqfeEmaQ

Wow :-D


From that horribly macabre tradedy, this bullshit seems like a lighthearted comedy...


Pseudoscience of the week: transgender brains aren't male or female, ergo anything is true.

So stated (Un)scientific American earlier this month, in an article that opened with this hilarious hyperbole:

"Some children insist, from the moment they can speak, that they are not the gender indicated by their biological sex".

LMAO. Yes, some kids' first words are "mama", "dada", or maybe even "no", but if their first words are "Mother dearest, i appear to be an individual with a different brain gender to the sex you've imposed on me, by anatomical assessment - do please acquaint yourself with the genderbread diagram!" then your little nippers are probably rhetorical plot constructs in the arguments of a pseudoscientific bullshitter. I'm sorry to break it to you so brusquely.

The egregiousness of this article is emphasised by a recent affirmation that 'brain sex' is not a thing - something i'd written on this blog, two years ago. If there's no such thing as 'male' and 'female' brains, then of course 'transgender' brains aren't going to be 'male' or 'female'! Whatever 'transgender' means.

The content of the rest of the article is so weirdly garbled that i'd be surprised if the author understood what she meant, herself. Do i have to explain this again? I suppose i shall.

Sex is a biological phenomenon - the product of sexual dimorphism, into two or more sexes - gender is a grammatical phenomenon - the attribution of different words to different nouns, such as with pronouns. So the gender of the word 'butterfly' in French (le papillon) is 'male', but in English, butterflies have no gender, because English has managed to lose that silliness. This doesn't mean all butterflies in England are asexual, and all butterflies in France are male, or all bees in Arabic-speaking Quran-humping areas are female. Gender has nothing to do with either body or mind - it's a linguistic thing only.

{It should be noted that the genderists obfuscate between people who are born intersex i.e. neither male nor female, according to the generic conditions of a sexually dimorphic species; and those who have changed their sex, during life. It's inevitable that all transexual people will be intersex, because their genome will contradict their body. There is no reason to force them into sex categories}

On to the other part of the word 'transgender' then - the 'trans' bit. The prefix 'trans-' is from Greek, meaning 'to the other side' and is the antonym to 'cis-' meaning 'on this side'. The name of the Trans-Pennine Railway, therefore, implies that it will take you to the other side of the Pennine mountain range. It does not imply that the railway has a 'gender identity' that conflicts with its body!

In the context of sex, it's the word 'transexual' that actually means something. It means 'has changed their sex' / 'has crossed to the other sex'. That kind of thing. It suggests that some actual change has actually happened - that some actual experience of effort and personal cost has been undergone.

Why would anyone bother to do this? Because of bodily dysmorphia. (Not dimorphia - dysmorphia). Transexuality is motivated by body dysmorphia, which compels people to change their body into something they are happy with. The most common body dysmorphias are anorexia (in female humans) and muscular dysmorphia (in male humans) whereby anorexia is predicated on a desire to be thinner, and muscular dysmorphia is predicated on a desire to be to be more muscular. You'll be unsurprised to hear that a high proportion of models have the former, and body builders have the latter.

I say all of this, because i wish to stress that body dysmorphia is a serious condition, that should be taken seriously. Someone who feels compelled to change their body so drastically should be treated with sympathy. I don't know how pandering to body dysmorphia in the case of soon-to-be-transexuals works, or even whether it genuinely does, but if it does, then it's an important thing to do.

But it is not the same as saying "i like women and Women's Rights, so you're all going to call me Susan now, and use feminine pronouns too" and then not going through any attempt to change your body at all. That does not indicate dysmorphia; it does not warrant the prefix 'trans-'; and it does not deserve respect from anyone, especially those who genuinely respect transexual and pre-transexually dysmorphic people. Sex and sexuality are not ideological.

The term 'transgender' is a nonsense term that applies only to sexist ideologues who think that pretending to be an oppressed caste grants them critical impunity. It doesn't.

'Transexual' means something, 'transgender' does not.


And from that comedy, to this gallery of accidental comedians...

'RE: 36 Questions Women Have For Men'
https://youtu.be/leKXqZkfEY4

I have a selection of rhetorical comebacks. Maybe i should title this segment '36 Questions Tapejaras Have For Women':

1) Why do you have to wear those chest encapsulation devices?

2) I get that you mammals have mammaries, but i don't stand around with my wings wide open, to make room for all the fish!?

3) Why are women perceived as the more caring sex, when so many of your female humans abuse the children they're left alone with, all day long?

4) How does it feel to be the same sex as Rose West, Myra Hindley, Sarah Palin, Sylvia Browne, Margaret Thatcher, and the woman who created Donald Trump - his mother??

5) Why are sexist women (WRAs) seen as heroic, whereas sexist men (MRAs) are seen as the devil's spawn?

6) Why do you automatically decide that any Film or TV programme with lots of men in it, is misogynistic propaganda?

7) Why are you surprised when men are empathic, good with kids, or good at cooking? I'm probably better at cooking fish than you.

8) Why is it that when i have sex with humans, i'm seen as some kind of bestial pervert, but when women do it, and get pregnant, they're congratulated?

9) Why do you think that just because you're a human, i owe you fossils of my body?

10) How does it feel to interrupt me, when i'm in the middle of catching a fish?

11) Why are you always trying to prove your femininity to the male humans, that your sexuality compels you to do the 'sideways shuffle' with?

12) How is it your first instinct to berate other humans, for adhering to the scientific method - your species' crowning achievement?

13) Why isn't it weird that there's a bunch of adolescent women in a Buzzfeed studio, questioning men, and what men can and can't do with their bodies?

14) Do you ever get tired of trying to maintain your 'X' chromosomes, all the time? And why don't you use the superior Zs and Ws, like i do?

15) Why are you so afraid of the word 'sex' in the phrase 'equality of the sexes' and use the wrong word 'gender' instead? Is it because your mamma told you 'sex' is a naughty word?

16) Why do i deserve to be paid nothing, just because i'm a Tapejara? It can't be because blogging is free, can it!? CAN IT!?!

17) In what world does feminism equal egalitarianism? How is that fair on humans who genuinely care about equality?

18) Why are you so afraid of recognising your anthropic privilege? It doesn't mean you're a bad human - just recognise it, and then do something about it - give it away, to a Tapejara.

19) And on and on and on and on and on......


'Zika virus: your questions answered'
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/01January/Pages/Zika-virus-your-questions-answered.aspx


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

The 30th anniversary of humanity's only fly-by of the planet Uranus, by Voyager 2
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-voyager-mission-celebrates-years-uranus.html


In other news:

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The niceness follows on...

Humanities feminists have seen opportunities to berate yet more 'old White men' with Clint Eastwood taking flack for suggesting that lots of people must be crying, for not having won an Oscar. Well, what's wrong with that? Because lots of those lots of people are Black, that's why. And the oh-so-not-racists only care when Blacks don't win things. Because treating races differently isn't racist. According to the racists. Michael Caine (another old White man) has also been offended, by the same people, for suggesting that Oscars should be awarded on grounds of merit! Bah, humbug, Mikey - they must be given to Blacks - whether they want them or earn them, or neither! <s> He also said how good he thought Idris Elba was (who doesn't?) and that people should be patient (who shouldn't?) but he can just go drink his milk, and eat his mayonnaise sandwiches, somewhere else, can't he (like White people do) because what really matters in the world, what REALLY matters in the world, is a bunch of big-screen posers receiving awards from other posers, for having been paid millions to pretend to be people they're not, to the adulation of millions of other people, including thousands of web-based sycophants who think that writing articles about big-screen posers for a living means they're living a worthy life. Yes, folks, screw feeding the poor - it's The Oscars that get narcissistic Humanities (Master of Arts, in this case) graduates' limbic systems pulsating :-D
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/oscars-2016-clint-eastwood-latest-to-give-controversial-take-on-oscarssowhite-a6832746.html

Staying on the theme of narcissistic airheads who don't cow when they're thucking a bing, here's a comedian who doesn't like jokes. Amy Schumer is a comedian who built her career on puellile jokes about genitals, and how much she's used them in the past, but has since grown and matured into... well, she hasn't, she's just turned into a feminist. When someone Tweeted a joke at her, implying the same thing that she'd said hundreds of times before, she immediately clambered onto her high horse, and screeched condemnation. How very silly. You see, the thing about making jokes about yourself - the utility of making jokes about yourself - is that doing so innoculates you from being abused by others, by using the same joke. If you have a speech impediment, for example, and you make jokes about it, then someone who might want to mock you for it, would now just be repeating the same gags that you just said. Stand-up comedians deliberately write this kind of thing into their sets - fat guys make jokes about being fat, guys with tiny eyes make jokes about having tiny eyes, and guys who've lost their voices... make jokes about their shoes. The point of making jokes about yourself, is not to deny the premise of the joke, but to acknowledge the premise, so that you can berate people for stealing your jokes. Stealing jokes is generally seen as a bad thing, whereas making humour is not. People who condemn humour do not get popular, Amy. That's your lesson for the day.
https://youtu.be/-32sRffV_mg

Sexist pseudo-research of the week comes from BUSPH (Boston University School of Public Health) with their publication in 'Violence and Gender'. Apparently, guns with male names kill more people than guns with female names. Um, no - it has nothing to do with gender. And that's hurricanes, anyway. It's do with women, and how they're more worth caring about than men. This press release bangs on about homicides of women (or 'femicide' as they call it) and how it's proportional to gun availability; and then right at the end, it mentions that the frequency at which men are murdered, is approximately five times as high as the rate at which women are murdered! Their highest figures for femicide were in Wyoming, with 3.3 per 100,000 women; and for mascicide(?) were in Louisiana, with 18 per 100,000. Still think sexism's a sex war? Because it looks like the men are losing.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-link-state-gun-ownership-women.html

A couple of adolescents have died in mysterious circumstances, involving Mountain Dew and racing fuel. What's the chances copious quantities of alcohol were also involved? When absinthe was banned in Europe, the ban-clinching case was that of a man who drank absinthe, then murdered his wife, kids, and tried to kill himself. The only problem with blaming the 'green fairy' of absinthe, was that he'd also consumed a sandwich, two coffees laced with brandy, two two crème de menthes, six glasses of cognac, and seven glasses of wine. It wasn't thought worth mentioning those other poisonous potables! I wonder whether they were neglected in this case too. A second point about this story, regards the statement "Police are concerned it could be a growing, deadly trend and are asking parents to be on high alert". Someone needs a lecture about 'alarming new trends' from The Hamster Wheel, LOL.
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/deaths-of-two-teenagers-attributed-to.html

Tutankhamun also died in suspicious circumstances, but for a change, this isn't about his death - it's about his burial mask's restoration. Egyptian prosecutors have reportedly ordered eight museum workers to a disciplinary court for "gross negligence" after corrective works took place last month, to work around their clumsy use of epoxy to stick King Tut's beard back on. It was roughly a year ago that epoxy was used to stick the broken beard back on, and a spatula-like instrument was used to scratch away the residue, simultaneously scratching the burial mask. I suppose this course of events stems from the Haveatit School of archaeological restoration :-D
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-egypt-king-tut-mask-trial.html

Greenpeace has released a report stating that 'toxic' chemicals such as PFCs are "still widely present in [outdoor] products by brands such as Jack Wolfskin, The North Face, Patagonia, Mammut, Norrona and Salewa, especially in the production of footwear, trousers, sleeping bags and some jackets" out of the 40 that they tested. My advice to them: don't suck on your camping equipment. Sure, PFCs can be dangerous, and they're also potent greenhouse gases, but they don't slough off in the rain - they're emitted as part of the manufacturing process. This can be solved using water filtration, for people living near the plants, though admittedly the wildlife won't benefit from this. PFCs are used to make textiles of many kinds - in carpets, as well as clothes - to make them more water-resistant, which means improved hygiene (especially with carpets) and thereby lower usage of hazardous cleaning chemicals, when they do get dirty. This is part of the cost-benefit assessment of whether PFCs are good or bad: is the greenhouse gas effect substantial against that of CO2 or CH4? I don't think so. Is the threat of chemicals used for cleaning, less than the threat of PFCs? I don't think so. And is the personal hazard of cleaning chemicals less than PFCs? Again, i would argue no. Many household cleaning chemicals are distinctly dangerous - the fewer there are around, the better. So as far as i've thought this through, it looks like PFCs are actually safer than their alternative. Banning PFCs, therefore, would be far from a "detox" then, Greenpeace. Still, this campaign has got to be better than demonizing food, right?
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-toxic-chemicals-outdoor-gear-greenpeace.html

Pulling in a different way to Greenpeace, with it's chemophobia, are researchers like this woman, who's dedicated more than 15 years of her life to developing water filters. According to this press release, which seems bent more toward desalination than anything else, she's been working on graphene and graphene-oxide filters, that are much more efficient and effective at removing solutes "including pharmaceuticals, pathogens and endocrine disruptors" from water than alternatives. Graphene sheets being almost pure carbon, they're also expected to be very economic, in comparison to currently-available alternatives. It's going to be more work, yet, before they're tested for efficacy on large scales, and in the real world, but hopes are high.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-graphene-filter.html

The grand mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia slapped a fatwa on chess, earlier this month, condemning it as 'gambling' in a Live TV interview. He also said it is a "waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players". Sorry, Sheikh, but that's religion, you're thinking of. The Saudi government wasted £200 billion accommodating the Hajj - an Islamic ritual that's cost at least 700 mortalities, and 850 morbidities, in 2015 alone. Chess, in stark contrast, is a harmless pastime. This has been pointed out by the Saudi Chess Association, who have been part of a campaign to have chess included in the Olympic Games, in accord with the Saudi Olympic Committee itself. The Saudi Chess Association is in the final stages of introducing a chess-in-schools programme, so as long as the undeservedly-respected god-botherer gets ignored, they might even get their way, and maybe a Saudi medal in chess, in a future Olympic Games. Now that would be something to see!
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-chess-good-young-brains.html

Islam in Pakistan has continued its never-ending vendetta against human sexuality, by ordering 400,000 websites to be blocked, for pornographic content. Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the ban, earlier this month, of online material deemed to be blasphemous or objectionable. So, i suppose proxy servers are going to get even more popular in Pakistan, than they were before. Either that, or large numbers of frustrated people will have to put their libidos into something else - such as an unwilling sexual 'partner'. Wait a minute, demonization of human sexuality... isn't there a feminism for that? Oh yeah. And a god-bothering one too.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-pakistan-porn-sites-blocked.html

Private sector chemical research giant DuPont has announced huge layoffs, following its merger with Dow, last December. At one point, in the '50s-'80s of the 20th century, DuPont even vied with American Universities, for research output. But since those glory days of low-hanging fruit, private research has tailed off, and increasingly been relegated to Pharma repeating old drugs, with new names. The shrinkage of DuPont symbolises this tidal change, with humanity becoming increasingly dependent on publicly and charitably funded research for progress. It's a good thing that their research is more reliable, as well as more innovative, eh.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-dupont-deep-science.html

The first ever global nitrogen footprint assay, encompassing 188 countries, has found that the USA, China, India, and Brazil are responsible for 46% of the world's nitrogen emissions. The study measured NOx as well as NH3 (ammonia) and Nwp (nitrogen potentially exportable to water bodies) so it doesn't seem to cover nitrogen in the form of food. Unsurprisingly, however, it's the 'more developed' nations that import most nitrogen, including large chunks in the form of ammonia. Presumably, for agricultural purposes. The report says the vast bulk of emissions came from industries such as agriculture, transport and energy generation. Emissions from consumers' use, were mostly from sewage. Of the 189 teragrams of nitrogen emitted worldwide in 2010, 161 Tg was emitted from industries and agriculture, and only 28 Tg was emitted by consumers. For more details, follow the link.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-global-nitrogen-footprint.html

"Stop blaming SAD for your bad mood - it doesn't exist! Seasonal changes have 'NO effect on depression'" shrieks the Daily Fail. The Old Times, Sun, Torygraph, and Diana joined them a week-and-a-bit ago, to tell depressed people not to be so silly. "Just keep reading our pages, and revel in our morbidly depressive sado-masochism" they were probably thinking. Well, has SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) really been proved to not exist, the way Gluten Sensitivity was, two years ago? No. No, it hasn't. The study was conducted over the phone (which is never a great sign) and so it could easily have missed SAD sufferers, who would be unwilling to engage in discussion about the very thing about them, that they dislike the most - their persistently low mood. Medical advice for SAD sufferers is the generic anti-depression advice: keep active, especially outdoors, socialise; those kinds of things, plus keeping in light circumstances, maybe using a lightbox, or some full spectrum lamps, that are quite easily available. Whatever you do, don't read the newspapers :-P
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/01January/Pages/Seasonal-affective-disorder-may-be-a-myth-study-argues.aspx

Compensation, though, goes to the Fail and the Torygraph, for getting this story kind-of alright. But not to the BBC, for not being able to tell the differene between the numbers '26' and '50'. Five points from Gryffindor. It's genuinely true that paint around and near playgrounds in the UK, contains quantities of lead deemed unsafe to anyone, let alone children, who are more susceptible to mineral poisoning. Measured lead concentrations ranged from 116 mcg/g (micrograms per gram) to 115,000 mcg/g around playgrounds, and to 389,000 mcg/g on old bridges and phone boxes. The key there is the word 'old' as they have old paint on them, often left as un undercoat to the younger, safer paint on top. But when the younger paint starts to flake, the old paint is exposed, and that's exactly what these researchers found. It should be noted that the thresholds between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' concentrations are generally set at 100 times lower than the concentrations at which harmful effects are seen, for the sake of caution. This means that lead being at "40 times recommended levels" (which makes lead sound like a nutritional requirement) doesn't actually mean you should stay away. Having said that, letting your kids lick paint is not generally a good idea, wherever you are!
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/01January/Pages/Playground-equipment-contains-toxic-levels-of-lead-paint.aspx

LISA is in position. The LISA Pathfinder mission has arrived at Lagrange Point 1, to study the cosmos, in fact spacetime itself, for the existence, or lack thereof, of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are a big prediction of the General Theory of Relativity. So far, General Relativity has always been right in its predictions of what should be seen in the universe, but gravitational waves are hard to spot across the relatively-small scales that humans live in. This means, it might take a long time to spot them, if they're real. Fingers crossed until then, that Einstein's grown-up baby continues to deliver the metaphorical goods.
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/LISA_Pathfinder_arrives_at_its_worksite

From the hugeness of the cosmos, to the tinyness of the guppies of Trinidad. They are fascinating, but not because they're pretty. They're fascinating because they live in the oil-polluted waters of southern Trinidad, as well as the clean waters of the north. So how have the guppies that live in the south, adapted to living in a hydrocarbon oil-polluted environment? Well, they haven't. So how have they thrived? Simply by being less disadvantaged by the oil, than their competitors, their predators, and their parasites, which have all sharply reduced in number, in the oil-polluted waters.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-video-fish-oil-polluted.html

Ovens! Not for baking fish, necessarily, but baking in general. An EU-funded research project, into developing high-efficiency ovens for the smaller companies that have a 60% share of the European baking industry. The ovens bake using less energy (well, duh!) and also in a shorter period of time. The LEO (Low Energy Ovens) project partners say they intend to continue developing the ovens, as they are released to the market. Energy efficiency is a pressing concern for the growing populations of the world, Europe included, where higher energy usage necessitates increased fuel consumption. This means CO2eq emissions increases, from power plants, or an increased spread of renewables farms. Either way, the increase of energy consumption as economies grow, means increased economic and/or environmental cost.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-oven-technology-european-industry.html

The Pink-headed Duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllacea) was last seen alive, in India, in 1949, but no-one knew, back then, what produced the pinkness of the duck's head. The obvious assumption is that the pinkness comes from the same source as flamingoes' and this in fact is true - carotenoid pigments to provide the pink colour. The only place such pinkness has been seen in a duck, before, is in the tiny "ear" spots of Australia's Pink-eared Duck (Malacorhynchus membranaceus). The ducks and flamingoes are actually distantly related, evolutionarily, so it's thought that these pigment productions evolved independently, but it's not yet known which of the 40-something carotenoid pigments are present in this particular species. This discovery could not have been made without spectroscopy, nor the Smithsonian's carefully preserved collections.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-extinct-pink-headed-duck-derived-unique.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Fixing Cultured Meat - Fungal ECM'
https://youtu.be/Up4V3_8DhAg

'Objects of Danger - Objectivity #54'
https://youtu.be/JU9eCtuxyZw

'Octopuses use bizarre body language to resolve conflict'
https://youtu.be/EAwumH_XdBE

'Hubble spies a rebel galaxy'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-hubble-spies-rebel.html

'Comet landscape: Exploring Imhotep'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-comet-landscape-exploring-imhotep.html

'Image: A half-Enceladus'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-image-half-enceladus.html

'An Airglow Fan from Lake to Sky'
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160127.html

'NASA image: Space station flyover of the Mediterranean'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-nasa-image-space-station-flyover.html

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: contempt -- the feeling that a person or a thing is worthless or beneath consideration; arrogant disdain; the offence of being disobedient to or disrespectful of a court of law and its officers

Expression Of The Week: 'have at it' -- explicitly, 'give it a go'; implicitly, attempt something with clumsiness, incompetence, or frustration; for a more concise definition, follow the link to my own detail

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'Mesmerizing map showing migration patterns of 118 bird species'
https://twitter.com/galka_max/status/691607473938038784


'Hugh Laurie - Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair (Live On The Queen Mary)'
https://youtu.be/lxpFkGrkopo


'Fifty Shades of Grey featuring Mr Bean - Rowan Atkinson blu ray:dvd trailer'
https://youtu.be/9ttfL7-BB7M

'Rowan Atkinson gives Pixie Lott a full body examination'
https://youtu.be/r8C2Tm-r0V8

'Rowan Atkinson Live - Dirty Names'
https://youtu.be/R7OxTxAvvLw
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 18-24/1/16

Hi nonaplanetist primes,


Does the Solar System have nine planets, after all?

The pop 'science' story of the week has to be the claimed discovery of a ninth planet, orbiting Sol (the Sun) way out beyond Neptune.

Well, in reality, this is only a hypothesised planet - its claimed existence is supported only by computational modelling of the Solar System, intended to account for inconsistencies in the orbits of KBOs - Kuiper Belt Objects, orbiting the Sun far out, beyond Neptune.

Other computational models of the development of the Solar System have long been extrapolated to postdict the presence of a now-long-gone massive planet, in order to explain the observed distribution of planets and dwarf planets in this stellar system.

Without one, or some other mechanism, models consistently render our stellar system as infeasible. Either a ninth planet had to go, or the inner planets did.

That hypothesis of a ninth planet explains how Earth & Co are distributed the way they are, but it is a different hypothetical ninth to this hypothetical ninth planet.

While the planet-arranging hypothesis means a planet slingshotted off into interstellar space, by the kinetic energy imparted to it, this claimed ninth planet is very much predicted to be orbiting Sol, with a period of 10-20,000 years, and at a distance of ~20 times further out than Neptune.

It should be stressed that this supposed ninth planet has never been seen, and so the claim that a ninth planet has been 'observed' or 'discovered' is quite untrue.

If it were found to exist, however, it would tell us a lot more about the Solar System's orbits, but not necessarily its origins.

'SFN #150: Ninth Planet?; Brightest Galaxy Found Ripping Itself Apart; Brightest Eruption Ever Seen'
https://youtu.be/Hug04QjjeSU

Rather unsurprisingly, the misreporting of the 'discovery' of a ninth planet, on the edges of the Solar System, has been used as a plot construct in conspiracy theorists' wet dreams, already.

Maybe it's even more unsurprising, when the research paper is titled 'EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM' but it's still a figment of their imagination, that it might be crashing to Earth in 2016!

The picklebrain who came up with the Nibiru nonsense - Zecharia Sitchin - now thinks that this ice giant is the planet he 'discovered' a long time ago.

Well, let's first point out that neither groups have discovered anything - but modelling the Solar System and finding a hole, is a lot closer than reading some Sumerian texts and concluding that there's a ninth planet out there.

Like they would have known.

Oh, sorry, did i say "ninth"? I meant to say "twelfth". Sitchin also states that his claimed 'discovery' has a 3600-year orbit, which is far too small, by about 10,000 years.

Oh yeah, and then there's the fact that the word 'Nibiru' in Sumerian, is their word for 'Jupiter' so um... yeah. The existence of Jupiter is not a mystery - it's not even a hypothetical planet in a model - it's evidenced directly.


Mimicry. We all do it. An inate propensity for it is exhibited by classes of vertebrate and invertebrate alike - mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, etc - and and it's in the news again.

'Study reveals how birds learn through imitation'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-reveals-birds-imitation.html

Birds and mammals are both noted for their propensity for learning to behave similarly to others, by being around their sights and sounds - they unconsciously copy behavioural patterns.

This is how peer pressure works - when you see someone else behaving in a particular way, your mimicry instinct encourages you to do the same as them... and they the same as you. Some people feel this stronger than others, and some are better than others at resisting it, but it's always there.

{Aside the 'mirror neurons' thing is a specifically delegated kind of neuron that has not been shown to exist in humans. So don't band on about mirror neurons and mimicry, in conversation ;-) }

This is also how stop-smoking and lose-weight groups work, as well - the beneficial application of peer pressure. The term is usually only used in negative circumstances.

So through this mechanism, both humans and monkeys conform to social norms. Even to the extent that physical defects can result in strained replications of an individual's limp, in an attempt to 'fit in'.

Some people call this 'fashion' or 'culture' but this is really just arbitrary mimicry of behavioural fluctuations.

It should be no surprise to hear, then, that humans' behavioural habits are slowly erased and rewritten, under exposure to different behavoural patterns.

'Migrant values adapt over just one generation'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-migrant-values.html

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do" - an idiom modified from a 4th century source

The point of adaptation, here, is not necessarily reasonable, or even utilitarian - there might not even be a point at all.

People who get used to eating sitting down, or standing up, or eating different things, or at different times of day, have adapted to the culture they find themselves in, by mimicking it.

The problem of cultural difference is a transitory one - as two populations spend time near each other, they will share memes, as part of this biological tendency toward mimicry, and so their differences will wane over time.

When cultures adopt staunchly held arbitrary traits, such as widespread superstitious beliefs in gods, races, etc, then they are rendered less willing to partake in the exchange of 'values'.

The people involved start to resent their own drives to mimic others, and are divided into: those who wish to secure themselves away from the 'others'; those who wish to change the 'others' so that they aren't there to be mimicked; and those who weren't that enthusiastic about the arbitrary memes in the first place, and so don't see what the problem is.

Mimicking diets, and clothing styles, and things like that, happens in a relatively stress free way, because people are generally open to 'tasting the other dishes' but when it's contra-reasonable memetics that's on the table, coercion is bound to follow, and obliging people to eat tends to turn people's stomachs over!

I'm not bothered too much by migration. I see it as inevitable. It has been inevitable, it is inevitable, and it will continue to be inevitable, as the increasingly changing climate obliges people to leave their familiar homes, and go to live somewhere else.

I live where i do because of migration, and so does everyone else. And as we meet new cultural traits, we'll pick up new and arbitrary behaviours. Where those behaviours are destructive, they must be met as any other - their being exhibited by migrants makes not one jot of difference.


'How To Drink Your Own Urine – 2015 CHRISTMAS LECTURES'
https://youtu.be/TTcZBu5xGQk

Don't. And if you're found drinking it, you might need to protect your ass with a strategic covering device...

'Anita Sarkeesian and the BUTTS!'
https://youtu.be/ex-YkONJLOE


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

The 21st of January marks the 120th anniversary of French scientist Henri Becquerel's accidental discovery of radiation, for which he received a Nobel prize
http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/4.html
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Nuclear_Chemistry/Radioactivity/Discovery_of_Radioactivity


In other news:

Musician Adele's song 'Hello' has reached 1 billion views on YouTube, beating Psy's record for time taken to reach that number of views - 87 days instead of 158.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-adele-fastest-billion-views-youtube.html

Google has promised to pay £130 million of tax, in lieu of the backlog that it really owes to the UK - more than £200m. Like with Apple Italia, mentioned a few weeks ago, this figure is way below the total sum, but is presumably intended to put R&C off further investigation. The company doesn't want to pay, and the Revenue doesn't want to work; so the shortfall is simply dismissed. Unitary Tax, anyone?
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-google-mln-britain-taxes.html

Google might be putting plenty of effort into tax evasion, but it seems to be putting even more into advert evasion. There seems to be an endless pit of serpents, willing to writhe their way up the corporation's legs. Inevitable, some ads will have been incorrectly dismissed, but according to this statement, last year, Google sidelined 780 million ads, on various grounds. More than 10,000 websites and 18,000 accounts were suspended for hawking counterfeit goods, 7000 phishing websites were taken down, 12.5 million quack and off-label ads were removed, and 17 million fake system warning ads were rejected. They might have more than 1000 people working on it, but that's still 780,000 ads per person.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-google-sidelined-million-ads.html

So some students in the Netherlands have 'invented' a solution to urban air pollution, that can replace gas masks. Or have they? What they've done, is they've put a plant in a backpack, and hosed it up so that the air the user breathes is filtered through the roots, supposedly removing microparticles. This isn't a smog-solver - this is a sketch by The Chaser, back in 2007! It's not going to work better than a gas mask though, is it. And what if you want to carry a backpack, while you're carrying the plantpack? Risible.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-students-backpack-combat-air-pollution.html

So Buckingham Palace is now available for an internet tour, thanks to Google Expeditions. But it is still not consistently open to the public, despite being funded by public money, with other 'royal' palaces alike. The monarchistic squatting in all of these palaces (they're not necessarily even in them) is estimated to be worth ~£2 billion per year, by comparison to France's equivalents - a huge amount of money that UK residents miss out on, for the sake of having one of those spongers depicted on the money. If the civil list were scrapped, and publicly funded properties transferred to English Heritage and the National Trust, people could actually visit all of them, in all of their splendour, rather than having to make do with videos on their RoyoulTube channel.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-google-unveils-virtual-buckingham-palace.html

Researchers of The University of Western Australia's Centre for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER) have found that male honey bee semen contains proteins that cause the Nosema apis fungus' spores to germinate prematurely, causing them to die, because they can't survive outside of their host's cells. In this way, males protect females from harm... thereby infantilising them, through their toxic masculinity. Fuck the Apiatriarchy! #malekindnessisevil <s> Sorry, i came over all sexist :-P
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-male-bees-female-sexually-transmitted.html

Don't throw dogs for sticks for dogs, say veterinarians. Throw dogs for sticks instead. No, don't - just throw a ball or something. Apparently, injuries when chomping on, or catching sticks, cause serious injury, that's sometimes life-threatening, with a mensery frequency (monthly) so stick to unswallowable balls in their place.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-british-vets-dogs.html

Whales, it seems, do not care about sirens. At least, not the ones employed by marinologists in an attempt to deter them from hazards along their migratory route, off the Sydney coast of Australia. Both simple and complex sounds failed to deter the migrating humpback whales, but might just be that to them, all the signal seemed to be saying was "bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, blurrrrh" which wouldn't really say anything to me, either!
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-humpback-highway-hell-whales-unfazed.html

Yet another study into artificial selection, finding genetic modification... of wild species. Bighorn sheep are famous for their big horns (well, duh!) but they're genuinely not as big as they used to be, due to evolutionary selection pressure, imposed upon them by human hunters. By selecting against reproductive sheep with bigger horns, they're removing the genetic traits for large horn growrth from the population, and increasing the abundance of less-horny sheep in the population. Over the last 43 years, the size of the horns on sheep at Ram Mountain has reduced by more than a fifth. By the same size-selective hunting method, fishing practices have caused fish species to whither in size, over the generations. It's the same mechanism that's employed in livestock modification, and so it's very esy to impose it accidentally.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-intense-trophy-artificial-evolution-horn.html

Another thing that evolves to adapt to humans, is pathogenic disease. In this case, the influenza that's broken out in Indiana, leading to the deaths of more than 400,000 turkeys and chickens on 10 farms there. As mentioned on this blog two weeks ago, for a virus to transfer from birds to mammals, it has to evolve a method of using the ANP32A protein to replicate itself. So avian flu, including this case, doesn't pose much of a threat to humans, except through its primary victims - the birds. Human businesses are threatened, and future disease resistance through biodiversity. Environmental organisations have found hundreds of wild birds to have been affected by this outbreak of avain flu alone.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-qa-latest-bird-flu.html

Darwin missed many species of bird, living on the Atlantic islands, when he visited there in 1826, but that was not his fault. There have been many thousands of species of rail living in the Pacific, but today there are only 13 rallids living on the Macaronesian islands of the Atlantic. The reason is thought to be extinction, caused by humans, and the other mammals that they took with them, centuries before Darwin went there, in the 15th century. This study identifies five of those extinct species, that might have caused Darwin to list rails alongside starlings, wagtails, finches and blackbirds.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-bird-species-darwin-couldnt-madeira.html

This newly-discovered bird species, however, is very much alive. It lives in the Indo-Chinese border region, west of Burma and north of Bangladesh, up in the mountains. It's been called the Himalayan Forest Thrush, and properly named Zoothera salimalii in tribute to Salim Ali, who apparently contributed greatly to ornithological pursuits in India. You can see some very high-quality pictures, if you follow the link:
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-species-bird-india-china-international.html

And from an avian dinosaur to a non-avian dinosaur; and from the decidedly small to the very very big. Was Notocolossus the biggest land animal ever? Well, that wouldn't be a justified statement, because there might have been another whose fossils humans haven't found, or were never preserved; but more than that, the size-judgements of fossilised dinosaurs are often made on the basis of very few bones. This means that there's high uncertainty in size estimates, for species like the recently announced Notocolossus. This renders specific statements like "122 feet long" untrustworthy. David Attenborough actually got himself in trouble with paelontologists recently, for daring to extrapolate the dino's weight from the circumference of its femur, with too much certainty. While there is certainly a correlation between the two, as the result of a causal relationship, there is high uncertainty in the projection from one variable to the other. So Notocolossus was certainly a colossus, but longest, or heaviest ever found? That question simply can't be answered yet. Other sauropods have had their dimensions reevaluated in the last year - Dreadnoughtus for example - so we should expect the same to be possible, here.
http://svpow.com/2016/01/20/notocolossus-is-a-beast/

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'ScienceCasts: Historic Vegetable Moment on the Space Station'
https://youtu.be/y9aR2-7sOjg

'New World's Biggest Prime Number (PRINTED FULLY ON PAPER) - Numberphile'
https://youtu.be/tlpYjrbujG0

'How they found the World's Biggest Prime Number - Numberphile'
https://youtu.be/lEvXcTYqtKU

You can hear an interview with Curtis Cooper on Matt Parker's own channel:
https://youtu.be/q5ozBnrd5Zc

'First video of patients being treated for Parkinson's symptoms'
https://youtu.be/-U5RnDo4GWc
{The three main symptoms of Parkinson's are called Parkinsonism, whether they're caused by Parkinson's itself or not, so this video doesn't necessarily show Parkinson's Disease treatment}

'Worthington Ball Boost'
https://youtu.be/XdIOAHVEsnE

'Atomic Trampoline (HD reshoot)'
https://youtu.be/EzFjZJEAt18

'BLUE CHEESE AND ICECREAM'
Well, this is a new one on me!
https://youtu.be/yLPT5E8N4MI

'Buddhist monk upset after treading on an insect jailed for resulting 162-car tyre-slashing spree'
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/buddhist-monk-upset-after-treading-on.html

'NASA image: Pluto's haze in bands of blue'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-nasa-image-pluto-haze-bands.html

'Hubble image: Dazzling diamonds'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-hubble-image-dazzling-diamonds.html

'Star Cluster R136 Bursts Out'
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160124.html

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: eggcorn -- a misuse/misspelling of a word, due to mishearing, that still makes partial sense, as in "they woofed down their food" which should be "wolfed" but it kinda makes sense because domesticated dogs woof and eat rapidly like wolves do; the term eggcorn itself comes from a mishearing of 'acorn' which eggs look similar to, and so pose as a partially-effective replacement

Quote Of The Week: "You don't need a parachute to skydive. You need a parachute to skydive twice" - Anon

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

'Lip Service Love'
http://micro.cibermitanios.com.ar/post/137418688131

Translation:

Woman: "Love is alive, in all its glory. Love is all you need to be happy, because everything can love"
Man: "Make love?"
Woman: "Unsubbed!"
.
.
.

Entertainment stuff from the week 11-17/1/16

Robot ears stand by,


"If you've ever wondered whether machines are taking over the world, then wonder no more, because Robot Wars is back" - Craig Charles

'Roboteers, stand by...'
http://www.ganymede.tv/2016/01/roboteers-stand-by/

Has anyone else wondered why the robots' non-existent ears were being called into question? I have this nagging feeling that i am the only entitity ever to have misheard :-D

The new series of Robot Wars is intended to be broadcast later in 2016, on the BBC (because they really love original programming) and it's not yet known who might be presenting it.

For now, we'll just have to be content with Nerd³ v. Dad³, LOL

'Nerd³ Battles...'
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Sz7_l-PtwDpkfiOuCLtRliQFqZUMe8V


How not to write about how not to write about Science.

'How not to write about science'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-science.html
(Written by Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University, for The Conversation)

Here's one of those pop articles that come around periodically, admonishing scientists for not being able to communicate with 'normal' people.

I say "go screw yourself with a rusty trowel!"

Mr Brown's suggestions are not only unhelpful to scientists working in research, they are also corruptive to researchers' application of the scientific method.

There is, of course, a requirement for people like myself to read articles (if only i could afford the journal subscriptions) and then relate the points to be remembered, and the points to not be mis-remembered, to people who don't understand the lingo.

But, i do not think that that requirement should be imposed on the researchers themselves, who write the study papers. The two processes of paper writing and science communication should be regarded as different activities, subject to different advice.

Notice that Mr Brown, writing with his journalist hat on, manages to absolve himself (or at least his hat) of responsibility for poor communication of science, to the public, as we go through his points:

1) Avoid objective empiricism, and instead debase your writing with personalised narratives, of the deeply visceral experience, and the intense spiritual journey you've been on, while researching... whatever it was. Remember: this is all about you, not your findings - the readers want you to be as narcissistic as possible, to make a thrilling 'story' - not as impartial and dispassionate as possible, to receive high quality reports of evidence. And the reader's always right - that's why you're telling them things that they're not yet right about.

2) Be put off by the difficulty that some people have with reading graphs. You might even want to deliberately dumb them down, so that people can 'understand' them. In fact, while you're dumbing your knuckles to the floor, why not remove the axes labels too - then it might even get put on the TV! The less data a graph contains, the better, and don't even think of putting error bars on it - the readers have a deep loathing for uncertainty.

3) Don't use words what people don't get. Especially on the internet. Using big words might prompt them to use a WKSE, to find out what they mean, thereby increasing their lexicon, so that they are more able to communicate with each other, in the future. Try not to be specific in your writing, by using words that actually mean what you're thinking of - use short, commonplace words that kinda do but kinda don't, and so don't really communicate what you've found at all.

4) Don't get too bogged down in communicating your findings, and how you found them. This is boring, and not what science is about at all. Science isn't a process - it's a PR puff piece designed to terrify or inspire. Tell us about your motivations, too. The spiritual journey. Periods of ennui. Clinical trials and tribulations. The deep, deep, visceral experience... luvvy.

And the take home message?

Engaging with the audience is much more important than being scientific near them. Apparently. Don't do science, when you could be advertising yourself for the novel you're bringing out, next year. Be florid with your prose, and entertaining with your claims and ridiculous futuristic extrapolations. Don't whatever you do, be good at communicating science. <s>

If you dumb it down too far, to make it zesty and exciting, then it won't be science that you're communicating, and so the whole activity will be a waste of time. Researchers should be good at presenting the whole wodge of method, data and analysis, and other people should be the ones to communicate it to everyone else.

And that's my florin on that subject ;-D


Marine life seems to be giving up on life, all around the world. Why?

'Dead fish blight Rio Olympic bay, again'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-dead-fish-blight-rio-olympic.html

'Mass squid mortality in Chile leaves lingering stench'
http://doubtfulnews.com/2016/01/mass-squid-mortality-in-chile-leaves-lingering-stench/

'81 pilot whales wash up in mass stranding in southern India'
http://www.earthtouchnews.com/oceans/whales-and-dolphins/81-pilot-whales-wash-up-in-mass-stranding-in-southern-india-video

Well, first it should be pointed out that these events are not new - whales have been beaching themselves since there've been whales and beaches, and fishy organisms do get beached against their will by storms.

But there are multiple possibilities for each individual event that we see.

For example, the beached pilot whales probably got disoriented and peer pressured each other into heading for the dangerously shallow waters around a beach, with a lowering tide. It's known that cetaceans follow each other like this, and it's known that noise pollution from the shipping industry confuses animals like whales, resulting in discombobulation and dangerous behaviour.

But what about the squid and the fish?

Well, when the Southern Oscilattion oscillates from La Nina to El Nino, and the currents in the pacific switch from westward to eastward, heating the surface waters and malnourishing marine life around South America, the sight (and smell) of thousands of rotting fishy corpses along west coast beaches, is not an unfamiliar one to locals.

The squid mortality occurred in Chile, which was quite southerly for such a fish die-off, but it might be the cause. The SO (Southern Oscillation) has been in El Nino since 2014, after all.

Maybe more likely, is the nature of many squid species' reproductive cycles. Unlike humans, who butter the body sandwich anytime, anywhere, and seemingly with anyone, squid synchronise their sexualities, so that they all get down and groovy simultaneously, one wet weekend. And when the spawning is done, the pooped adults die off, en masse.

So if the ocean currents are (in)convenient, the cadavers of all those exhausted sex maniacs get washed up on the beach, and if they're not, you don't hear anything about it.

Neither of these two explanations work well in regards to the Rio fish blight, however.

Rio de Janeiro is on the Atlantic, and so is not affected by the SO's periodic ravages on fish populations; and the fishy fish kind of fish that have been washing up there are not known to reproduce the way squids do.

So maybe the proposition that they've all been dying due to marine poisoning is true? It could be a combination of factors - warming waters, anutriented waters, chronic stress from industry noise pollution, starvation from ballooning populations, and maybe poisoned waters too.

As far as i'm concerned, i'm going to rubber stamp this: 'CASE PENDING'

All mechanisms are known, but which ones are salient, in this case?


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

This week is the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia's launch, and to celebrate, the Wikimedia Foundation is launching an endowment (investment fund) to help ease its money needs. If you've got US$99 million lying around, then you can fill it up for them :-D
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-wikipedia-source-cash-15th-birthday.html


In other news:

In celebration of its birthday, Wikipedia published a ranking of its pages, according to the number of revisions (edits) it has had, in all time, ever. The page with the most edits is currently, as i write this, George W Bush, whose page has been edited 45,866 times. But the page about him is actually nowhere near the top of the list, as you'll see if you click the link, as the most-edited articles are 'background' pages used by Wikipedia contributors to contribute to Wikipedia. The most edited page, therefore, is actually 'Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism' which catalogues cases of abusers of Wikipedia, and has been edited 1,125,039 times as i write this!
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-george-bush-page-wikipedia.html

What caused teeth to grow out of the top of this cougar's head? Journalists are baffled. But scientists expect that it's either a teratoma, which is a kind of tumour where multiple cell types grow together to produce an erroneous structure like an eye, hand, limb, or teeth; or it's a failed conjoined twin, where the rest has shrivelled away. Idaho Fish and Game wants the hunter who shot the animal to have it analysed, and who knows, a third explanation might even be true. So scientists aren't baffled, Torygraph - you are. Scientists are probably genuinely baffled, however, by the Torygraph's sending 1.5 million emails to people on their database, telling them to "Vote Tory". A consent-breaching spamming of political propaganda that has caused the Information Commissioner to fine them £30,000 (Re: Private Eye 1409 p.4) which i don't really regard as enough. Scientists might be even more baffled by your incompetent reading of a study comparing CBT+drugs to drugs alone, in which you made conclusions about the drugs' lack of effectiveness, even though they were used in both successful groups! (Re: me, in December) But then, they might have been most baffled (in the last month alone) by your incredible ability to conclude that potatoes cure cancer, on the basis of a study that doesn't even specifically mention potatoes! (Re: me, earlier in December) You would have thought that some kind of reading comprehension were necessary, for working in journalism, for a national newspaper, wouldn't you!? Well, now you know better. "He who can does; he who can't teaches; he who can't even communicate a point they don't really understand to a group of others without horribly mangling it, becomes a journalist" - not George Bernard Shaw
http://doubtfulnews.com/2016/01/what-was-the-cause-of-this-deformity-in-an-idaho-mountain-lion/

It was a month and a half ago, when i wrote about the Torygraph, Dependent, and Daily Diana, all claiming that potatoes can cure stomach cancer and, well, this week the Torygraph has claimed that potatoes, far from being a medical marvel, are actually giving pregnant women Type II diabetes! Grrr, those temperamental tubers. Even though this study did look at potatoes specifically (unlike the previous one) it did not find Type II diabetes - it found gestational diabetes, which is a usually-asymptomatic form of diabetes that comes in during the third trimester, and clears on its own, after birth. As expected, considering potatoes are all carbs and starch, the higher the consumption of potato in someone's diet, the more diabetic they will become, meaning they have higher blood sugar after eating. This is a highly plausible mechanism, but the study doesn't actually have the power to render this evident, due to the way it was conducted. And it certainly doesn't mean potatoes cause Type II diabetes, which is a different medical condition.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/01January/Pages/A-potato-rich-diet-prior-to-pregnancy-could-up-diabetes-risk.aspx

Nothing interesting happens in Canberra. Apart from UFO wormhole hoaxes that get soaked up by hacks like camels soak up water. You can see how the video was made, embedded in the article. And in case you're wondering, this hoax was reported as an observation by the Telegraph... but it was the Australian Telegraph - a different 'paper entirely. So the Torygraph slag-off-athon ends here :-D
http://doubtfulnews.com/2016/01/nothing-interesting-happens-in-canberra-eh-ufo-hoax-revealed-and-its-deemed-not-interesting/

You know that thing about diehard probably-psychotic conspiracy theorists paranoiically donning tinfoil hats to protect themselves from the evil illuminati's electromagnetic rays? That's a cartoon - a caricature, right? Um... no. These guys have raised more than £13,000 through Kickstarter, to fund their selling-superstitious-people-overexpensive-hats company! Apparently "everybody has the right not to believe" (sic) which is commonly applied lip service rhetoric from supersitionists. But i wonder how litigious they will be, when they realise their fraudulent business has been correctly described as such?
http://doubtfulnews.com/2016/01/thanks-to-kickstarter-those-who-promote-silly-hats-got-a-pile-of-free-money/

Why would a Chinese Gaming company want a controlling stake in an American dating app owner? I don't know, but Beijing Kunlun Tech's spent US$93 million for a 60% stake in Grindr - the homo-male-specialising hookup app. Grindr is not very popular in China, where it competes with more popular alternatives, including locally-grown versions. Maybe the board of directors are just really, really horny :-D
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-chinese-firm-major-stake-gay.html

According to a rumour Tweeted by Lawrence Krauss, LIGO researchers are writing a paper on the existence of gravitational waves, which hints at their discovery. But it doesn't necessarily mean they have been found because negative resutls are results too, and because, as Lawrence has said himself, he doesn't work at LIGO, so he's only relaying rumours from those who do. Watch this space!
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-gravitational-rumors-ripple-science-world.html

NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter has become history's most distant anthropogenic solar-powered object ever. Juno reached 793 million kilometres from the Sun on the 13th of January, beating ESA's Rosetta, which reached 792 million kilometres in October of 2012. Both these missions have to be the solar panel industry's greatest advertising coup, as they are subject to damage from swirling dust particles that can rip holes in them, passing at a frequent rate, with no maintenance available whatsoever.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-juno-spacecraft-solar-power-distance.html

Not to be outdone, Rosetta is also in the news for an achievement of its own, this week - the discovery of water ice on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The existence of water ice on comet surfaces had previously been assumed, on the basis that comets' tails (comas) are full of water molecules, and the cores of comets are full of ice water; but water ice had never been directly observed on the surface of a comet before. Any surface water is expected to be solid, but sublimation (phase change directly into gas) removes this water from the comet's surface, leaving behind an anhydrous rocky surface, bearing a very dark colour. Rosetta's observations show that that dehydrated layer is actually no more than a metre thick, with the ice showing through in regions where the black surface layer has crumbled to the side.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-ice-surface-comet-67p.html

NASA gets a 2-1 scoreline this week, though, with Dawn sending back the closest photographs ever taken, of Ceres, from its nearest position yet - just 385 kilometres from the dwarf planet's surface. Dawn is intended to stay at this altitude for the rest of its mission. To see four pictures sent back, follow the link.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-ceres-dawn-images.html

With investigations and recriminations against VW proceeding, for its industrial deception involving emissions-cheating software, regulatory bodies have loaded up a bandwagon and gone on to investigate other companies too. Renault was recently spot-checked by French anti-fraud investigators, and despite no such software having been found so far, their share price dropped 22% before recovering 12 percentage points, as the news hit the stock markets. And that, folks, is an example of the delusory nature of the free market - undulations happen not because something's genuinely real, but because some people in a room believe they're real, rightly or wrongly.
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-renault-see-saw-anti-fraud-raids-emissions.html

From the potatoes-of-the-sky-of-the-ground, to the sky itself. Thanks to 37,000 citizen scientists, sorting through 430,000 digital images, over an 8-month period, the Space Warps project has discovered 29 new gravitational lenses, that computational programs have failed to spot. The productiveness of projects like these, stems from the fact that these are basic low-skill jobs, that programs are worse at, and that enthuse many people to work at. They don't require decades of learning, but they still provide useful evidence, and fascinating insights. So to every citizen scientist out there, you can count yourself amongst the huge pile of dwarves, in the metaphor that allows humanity to see so far. Well done :o)
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-space-warps-citizen-science-reap.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'How to Build a Titanosaur'
https://youtu.be/qNVqekz_SCk
Plus: https://youtu.be/nTIJc4j5F9c
Print: http://phys.org/news/2016-01-mammoth-dinosaur-ny.html

'Science Bulletins: Super Corals—For the Future (1 of 3)'
https://youtu.be/lHHNCviohFw

'Science Bulletins: Super Corals—A Closer Look (2 of 3)'
https://youtu.be/RzmP-ucnCdY

'Science Bulletins: Super Corals—Understanding the Science (3 of 3)'
https://youtu.be/Yy--l-P4c8A

'Science Bulletins: Phobos—A Groovy Moon'
https://youtu.be/S4HIOiM5tqE

'Make Thermite from Chromium Oxide'
https://youtu.be/nEzH_499mTo

'SFN #149: WFIRST is GO!; Most Distant Galaxy Cluster Found; Black Hole Telescope First Light'
https://youtu.be/3l-kH7FIPXQ

'Did Hitler worship God or Evolution?'
Always put thy god before thyself... and which comes first in your video, Eric? :-D
https://youtu.be/c4tCQA7tPN8

'The Vanishing'
https://youtu.be/OMLBfBppOGY

'La Vie En Rose meets Stravinsky in Charles de Gaul'
https://youtu.be/IBkNXnyxVVw

'All By Myself in Barcelona'
https://youtu.be/l9akzcgzRaw

'Image: Tethys dwarfed by Saturn'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-image-tethys-dwarfed-saturn.html

''X' marks a curious corner on Pluto's icy plains'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-curious-corner-pluto-icy-plains.html

'NASA image: Pluto's Wright Mons in color'
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-nasa-image-pluto-wright-mons.html

'Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast - with David Mitchell #94'
https://youtu.be/e06CLqDjHX0

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Fact Of The Week: In Anglopohone countries, companies in which the shareholders are not held civilly or criminally responsible for their actions through their company, are called 'Public Limited Companies'; but in most languages, in most countries, they are referred to as 'Anonymous Societies' due to the secret nature of their shareholders' identities. These companies are rife with corruption - money laundering, tax evasion, and concealed business transactions in general - so laws have been passed to force their owners to be onymous. Even so, PLCs/ASs to this day, find ways to be corrupt, for example by using holding companies to conceal the origins and destinations of funds.

Skeptical Mantra Of The Week: Nickell's Doctrine -- The person who thinks he can't be fooled, has just fooled himself

Headline Of The Week: 'Australian Wild Pig Drinks 18 Beers, Gets in Fight with Cow'

Nominative Determinism Of The Week: a TED video entitled 'What Happens When a City Runs Out of Room for Its Dead', presented by someone called 'Alison Killing'

------------------------------------------------------ non-contemporary stuff

There's no non-contemporary stuff to be blogged this week. Suffice to say:

Cease.

:-P
.
.
.