"one way out of an unhappy marriage in cultures where divorce was unavailable to wives"

I didn't realize that in a former life the great sci-fi novelist Charless Stross was a pharmacist, ahem, aher, a chemist since he's British.  And he took the time to write a really nifty piece on literary poisoning:

"Poisoning somebody is a violent assault, but a stealthy one: unlike shooting, stabbing, or punching it may not be obvious who's responsible, or even that an attack has taken place until much later. Historically it's often been a tool used by the weak against the overbearingly strong: one way out of an unhappy marriage in cultures where divorce was unavailable to wives. But, despite being stealthy, poisoning is also risky. Many legal systems punish poisoners more harshly than other murderers, either because it's the preferred tool of the oppressed against their privileged oppressor, or because it levels the playing field of violence between the weak and the well-armed and the latter don't like the taste of their own medicine.

So, before using poison in fiction, you need to be very clear about the motivation and expectancy of survival of the poisoner."

Absolutely do read the whole thing. 

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is really two movies -- one about building the atomic bomb, the other about the political fallout from building it.  At three hours, it's still way too long and both the beginning and ending drag.

That middle sweet-spot is something though.

Nolan also really stumbles by using a "black and white" effect.  Problem is, he uses it for both flash-backs and, very liberally, for flash-forwards.  It's weird.

Cillian Murphy is great, but Robert Downey Jr. as the bad guy is really given a lot more to do which is also surprising.

It's not quite a failure, but definitely not a success either.

Where We Are

Trying to explain to a Korean friend why so many Americans are refusing free, safe vaccines.

It's because for some people the vaccine represents, basically, government and science working. Working really well, actually.

They would (literally!) rather die than admit that.

— James (@wetcasements) September 19, 2021

Perpetual Forehead Slap

Americans are the biggest fucking babies in the world.#scientifictweet #objectivetweet#accuratetweet

— James (@wetcasements) August 5, 2021

"technosignatures"

The Galileo Project is looking for intelligent life in our universe, but not through radio or light signals, but rather physical objects:

"Rather than searching for electromagnetic signals, the Galileo Project will search for physical objects associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment, also known as technosignatures.

The project will follow three major avenues of research: obtain high-resolution images of UAP through multi-detector sensors to discover their nature, search and conduct in-depth research on 'Oumuamua-like' interstellar objects, and search for potential ETC satellites.

'It is very important that we keep in mind that the Galileo Project is not for everything, and it is not for everyone,' said Laukien. 'It has a defined scope, and it has limitations,' he added, referring to the project’s aim of only exploring known physics explanations rather than speculating on prior UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena], alleged observations and informal reports."

It's becoming clearer by the day that the Earth would be better off without humans.  And I love the phrase "technosignature," even though it's klunky as hell.

Are We The Baddies?

No, the Republicans haven't "turned" on vaccination.  They still hate things like science and expertise and empiricism in general.  What's happned is that more folks are (rightfully) willing to say what needs to be said -- if you aren't immunocompromised and haven't gotten the (free, easy to get) shot/s yet, you're the fucking asshole, not us.

Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and the rest of Red America writ large is going to be awash in preventable deaths this coming fall and winter.  No tears will be shed over in this part of rural-ass Bellingham.

"something of narcissism in this"

"It's clear, then, that always our real interest has been not in any particular place, but rather in our ability to get to that place.  It's the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore.  There is perhaps something of narcissism in this.  So, these days we hear all about the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the clouds of Venus, and so on.  These places are the new focus of our interest, of our primal urge to walk over the next ridge and see what's there.  There are the next hardest place to reach, and said to be supremely fascinating, but what will happen when we reach them?

Anyway, now here I am, on the moon.  After the Americans got to it in the twentieth century, they left, and for a long time it rolled in our sky, empty as it had always been.  A bone-white ball of rubble.  Airless, freeze-dried, unlivable, without extractable resources.  Why go back, having been there already?"

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon

"more spiteful than charitable"

"Like many intelligent men, Stone took a rather suspicious attitude toward his own brain, which he saw as a precise and skilled but temperamental machine.  He was never surprised when the machine failed to perform, though he feared those moments, and hated them.  In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence.  There were times when he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple.  Certainly they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar in invention of man.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth.  It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable."

-- Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

Shot! Shot! Shot!

I got my first Pfizer shot yesterday at a local pharmacy.  They had a good set-up, and were very friendly.  The nurse who actually gave the shot was excellent, and obviously a pro.

That's it.  My sister is visiting right now, and that's part of the reason I scheduled my shot for now, a bit later than the rest of the civilized world I take it.  I woke up this morning and while my shoulder is stiff, I didn't have any fever or chills or anything like that.

I guess it's a good thing that this horrible, 100-year virus might go out with a whimper rather than a bang.  Then again, I don't live in India or Brazil.

"the whole biosphere is in trouble"

Are there too many people on Earth?  Probably!

Can we feed them all?  Yes, but with great damage to the planet itself:

"Even if another 4 billion people were added to the planet, as was being predicted at the time, Lam felt confident they could be fed. At last month’s webinar, he pointed out that population growth had slowed since 2011, with the addition of about 850 million people since then, while poverty had continued to decline and per capita food production had continued to increase. This was true even in sub-Saharan Africa, where food production lagged behind population growth until the last decade.

Becker, of Johns Hopkins University, objected both in 2011 and a decade on, not that it was impossible to feed 11 billion people, but that this prospect ignored the collateral damage to other species and to the planet for which humans would eventually pay. He pointed to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics showing that nearly 70% of fisheries are already fully or over-exploited. Others mentioned the shrinking stock of fresh water and the erosion of biodiversity. 'The whole biosphere is in trouble,' Becker said."

Humans are very good at adapting, but not so good at recognizing larger, long-term threats.  There's plenty of room for more innovation, but innovation will always have limits. 

"the smarts in cities are always going to remain human"

Kim Stanley Robinson on what cities need to do to fight climate catastrophe:

"Talk of 'smart cities' is a little bit overblown, part of the AI craze, because the smarts in cities are always going to remain human. But a highly systematized, quantified, and automated coordination of city functions, not just transport but also inputs and outputs of all kinds of supplies and wastes, will help cities achieve the good efficiencies necessary to make them superior in carbon-burn terms.

Even after we transition to carbon neutrality or turn carbon-negative, the multiple levels of coordination necessary for cities to work will benefit from conscious study and design, extensive recording systems, quantification, and, yes, computers. The city will not become a computer, or even much like a computer, but it will use computers. The climate gains from this effort in system coordination will include a reduction in wasted resources, unnecessary transport, and recycling failures."

I love the fact that while Robinson never hesitates to tell us how bad things are, he's also never short of ideas to mitigate and hopefully solve the problem of our Earth becoming too damn hot. 

How It's Done

My former home of Daegu, South Korea, was the first city outside of China to be hit by the coronavirus.  It all went down February of last year, 2020.

On the one hand, that sucks.

On the other hand, South Korea is arguably the one country you'd want to be in during a public health emergency:

"South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.

It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.

As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States."

This is what happens when you have an excellent public health system, leadership that is interested in keeping the infection rate low, not personal ego, and a public that is usually willing to go along with mask and distance protocols if it means the greater good of ending the outbreak is served.

South Korea had all of this, plus a very technology-friendly culture.  Within days everyone, including dumb foreigners like me, were getting multiple text messages a day telling us the specific locations of stores, restaurants, or subway stations where an infected person had been present.

The only Americans who think our health system is the best in the world are the ones who have never left the country.

"the useful residue of the work of past laborers"

"Yes yes.  Don't interrupt me.  Management is a real thing, a technical matter.  But it can be controlled by labor just as by capital.  Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.  There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them.  There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest we produce.  No!  The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all.  That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism every stronger.  In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth.  History has shown which values were real in that system.  And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

"continuous conceptual drunkenness"

"But no.  That was analogy rather than homology.  What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy.  And analogies were mostly meaningless -- a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).  Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell.  They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them.  A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say.  Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not?  If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality?  It was absurd."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

"Games don't mean anything."

"It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open.  So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice.  They played chess and Frank won.  John laughed.  How stupid, he said.

What do you mean?

Games don't mean anything.

Are you sure?  Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.

John shook his head.  In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.  You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could leap down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook.  And you're fucked.

Frank nodded.  He had taught these things to John."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

Chicken LabNuggets

Has the future of lab-grown, "no kill" meat finally arrived?  Maybe!

"The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. Initial availability would be limited, the company said, and the bites would be sold in a restaurant in Singapore. The product would be significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper.

The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. The nutrients supplied to the growing cells were all from plants.

The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago."

I'd be happy to try it.  I think I've done pretty well with upping my veggie and fruit intake recently, but I still struggle to avoid meat.  Then again, I do live in Korea. 

The Moon and Antarctica

Life aboard the International Space Station ain't easy, but how about wintering at a science station at the South Pole for a sunless six months?  Challenge accepted:

"From April to September, the station plunges into total darkness, and temperatures regularly hover around minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn’t stop White, who has been at the station since January, from getting out for his daily walk or run, always solo. In almost three years on the job, he’s never passed a day without venturing outside. White records every session, and so far has logged more than four thousand miles on the ice. 'I go in any kind of weather,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how bad it is.'

Before he heads out the door, he signs a dry-erase board (which features the handy notation 'If no return, look for frozen pile when sun returns in September') to let his crew know he’s out exercising. When getting dressed to go out, he chooses from utilitarian gear used by the military in extreme cold, a heavy canvas anorak like the one explorer Roald Amundsen wore when he was at the South Pole in 1911, or, on the most miserable days, an Inuit jacket made of Siberian wolf fur. He knows how to read the wind, stars, and snow to find his way back, even in utter darkness or whiteout conditions. 'One of the worst things you face here is the wind,' White says. 'The wind works its way in, and you get frostbite on your nose and face.'”

I think I could last about a week without sunlight and, even worse, no internet. 

To The Stars!

Life aboard the International Space Station must be a futuristic dream!  Actually, no -- it's noisy, stinky, and kind of gross, but vital nonetheless --

"The ISS is smelly, noisy, messy, and awash in shed skin cells and crumbs. It’s like a terrible share house, except you can’t leave, you have to work all the time and no one gets a good night’s sleep.

There are some perks, however. The Cupola module offers perhaps the best view available to humans anywhere: a 180-degree panorama of Earth passing by below."

Sure, but still beats Earth ca. 2020. 

"genuinely afraid of where this could lead"

With a new, non-surgical, treatment for dwarfism advancing rapidly, who's to say whether or not it's a "disease" in the first place?  The Guardian takes a look at the medical, ethical, and social issues involved:

"There are, says Gillian Martin, a tutor and chair of the Restricted Growth Association, the British charity that supports people with dwarfism, 'people who are genuinely afraid of where this could lead'. Because about 80% of children with achondroplasia are born to parents without it, some 'adults with dwarfism in the community feel that average-height parents are being an advocate for a disability that doesn’t directly affect them. There is a fear – irrational in my view – that this research is leading the way to eradicate dwarfism.'

This view tends to be stronger in the US, where there is, says Joe Stramondo, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University and a disability rights activist, 'a more robust dwarf culture and identity. With that kind of cultural context, you’re going to get a very different response to something like this than other areas of the world where people with dwarfism don’t associate with each other as often. We recognise our situation as being one of oppression, and of being subjected to stigma as being the main source of our difficulty in the world. When you have that community, that sounding board, you’re going to have more pushback to a drug like this.' But it’s far from the only view, he says. 'We have people who are very much against the use of the drug, and you have folks who are enthusiastic about it, and say: "Maybe it’s stigma, but it still makes my life harder. I don’t want that for my children." You have a lot of people who are somewhere in between, who are saying: "Let’s wait and see what the drug actually does. Let’s see if it has the capability of dealing with some of these co-morbidities such as sleep apnoea, or spinal stenosis." I think if it were shown to do some of that, there would be lots of people who would be pretty enthusiastic about it.'”

As medical science advances, it's interesting to think about "diseases" that really don't need to be cured.  (Autism as a sign of potential genius rather than an inability to function socially, for example.)  And of course, more conservative societies might even mandate these types of treatment rather than allowing parents and their children to decide if they want to be "fixed."

The future, if we make it past Trump, is going to be complicated as hell.

I'm Not Rooting For The Apocalypse, I'm Just Plague-Curious

Professor Kate Soper writes in The Guardian about how COVID-19 might teach us (the hard way) about better possible futures once (if) the pandemic dies down:

"Covid-19 may have caused us to re-examine this status quo. According to the ONS [Office for National Statistics], household spending decreased by a fifth during lockdown. For decades, economic liberalism has affirmed the idea of the self-interested consumer as an almost natural human state. But during the pandemic, a more public-oriented spirit seemed to emerge. People signed up to volunteer for the NHS in droves and mutual aid groups flourished. As commuting dropped off, people had more time to spend at home and in their communities.

Lockdown momentarily benefited our physical environments, too. Cities became less air-polluted and congested, and seasoned walkers and cyclists enjoyed the utopian experience of moving unmolested on roads usually dense with cars, while others took up cycling for the first time. For a brief period, wildlife reclaimed some of its former territory and roadkill fell dramatically. Many reported hearing more birdsong. Those living under flightpaths savoured the experience of plane-free silent skies. As people flocked to parks, it became clearer than ever why we need to defend our green public spaces."

I'm all for it, but we also can't take our eyes off of the folks who have no industry, or hollowed out ones at best, to return to -- restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc.

But by all means, let's stop pretending that anyone but the most fevered of capitalists enjoys living a life of stress and greed and mindless consumption of bullshit things and services.