Interesting Links for 26-08-2018

[andrewducker]

Drive-in 'sex boxes' for prostitution are a wild success in Switzerland

(tags: Switzerland prostitution )

The risks of alcohol (again) (with actual details of how dangerous, and a useful graph)

(tags: ViaDrCross alcohol health )

No-deal Brexit will be blocked by at least 40 Tory MPs, former Conservative minister says

(tags: UK Europe Conservatives )

The case for abolishing private schools

(tags: school Education inequality )

It is actually fine to feed bread to swans (and presumably ducks, etc)

(tags: myths birds health food bread )

What happens to British manufacturers using the CE mark after "Brexit day"?

(tags: UK Europe manufacturing electronics safety trade )

The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming

(tags: opera programming systems teams history )

Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that after Brexit, people crossing the Irish border should be subject to 'inspections, just like during The Troubles'

(tags: OhForFucksSake conservatives Ireland NorthernIreland )

The Guardian view on science fiction: The Broken Earth deserves its Hugo (totally. Read them)

(tags: books Hugo scifi race awards )

Skim reading is the new normal (waffles on a lot, I found it hard not to skim read, and I'd like to see some detail on the studies and the effect sizes)

(tags: reading technology )

Muslim Journalist Forced To Show TSA Her Bloody Pad During Search

(tags: Islam security_theatre usa OhForFucksSake )

The State of the Bestiary is Stable: 25 years of Magic the Gathering. (Fascinating, mathematical, personal, and analytical)

(tags: games magic history )

Friends, gather round for the tale of the worst bride in the world.

(tags: wedding money OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[conuly]

Swans will kill you and dance on your grave. Don't feed them anything.

[cmcmck]

But the bread pollutes the water- that's the real issue!

[alithea]

Yeah, this is what I was going to say - there might be bigger issues with oil etc in rivers and canals but the ponds in one of my local parks are really badly impacted by how much bread gets thrown in.

[cmcmck]

Our local nature reserves had a project to stop the bread feeding and the ponds and pools have improved massively as a result.

long comment about feeding waterfowl

[redbird]

When I was living in New York, the "don't feed the ducks and geese in the park bread" argument was about the low nutritional value of a lot of commercial white or Italian bread (people were buying those a block away, for the ducks) and about just tossing large amounts of brad on the water, where some of it sank and was eaten by rats. Also about the young birds getting too used to being fed by humans, instead of foraging—a lot fewer people want to take their kids to feed the birds when it's below freezing, even if the river isn't frozen.

I stopped buying whole loaves of bread specifically for the birds, but continued to sometime bring them half or a third of a loaf that was getting hard.

It also turned out that "let's feed the ducks" is less appealing when it becomes "let's feed the Canada geese" which turns into "the lawns and paths near the water are all covered in goose droppings." Given the opportunity, Canada geese spend a lot more time on land, eating grass, than mallards do.

I lived in that corner of Manhattan long enough to learn a bit about the local ecology, and see some changes, like the increased goose population (not just in Inwood, this was while the population was still recovering from the effects of DDT). We only got the occasional mute swans, which chased geese off during breeding season. Swans are attractive, and in North America they're an invasive species. But feeding any of the waterfowl also meant feeding the herring gulls and, sometimes, the rats. The rats in turn are preyed on by the black-crowned night herons, attractive birds which fewer people notice because they're not very active during the day. (I also suspect that even people who would like the Parks Department to Do Something about the rats don't want to see a heron catch and eat one.)

[momentsmusicaux]

That article on alcohol consumption is very reassuring, after having seen the scary NO SAFE LEVEL stuff recently. I do rely on my glass of wine with dinner to chill the fuck out.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, good to have a reminder that "not safe" doesn't mean "actually worth worrying about".

Sorry things are so stressful though.

[momentsmusicaux]

Ah, it's not that things are particularly stressful at the moment -- I mean, they are, with the holiday coming up, with the kids being really super difficult at the moment and H misbehaving all the time.
I am generally quite highly strung. I'm a bag of stress and anxiety, have been all my life. I'm now at the point where a pathetically small quantity of alcohol sends my brain a signal that says 'You can stop fretting now and relax', and I mean small. So most nights I have a glass of wine with dinner and that's fine. It's a crutch, but it's a manageable one and my consumption hasn't gone up in over ten years. If I could get away with it, I might have it at lunchtime instead and be chilled more of my awake time, but I might not get much done at work.

[birguslatro]

The article's meant to be reassuring (and confusing), for whatever reason! The skeptic in me was triggered by it talking about the risk for one year's consumption. So I clicked through to the paper on it...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2818%2931310-2/fulltext

"Among the population aged 15–49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally in 2016, with 3·8% (95% UI 3·2–4·3) of female deaths and 12·2% (10·8–13·6) of male deaths attributable to alcohol use."

That seemed plain enough to me, so you have to question why it needed reinterpreting.

On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[dewline]

Yeah, this guy is clearly seeking ambitions of evil here. But that suspicion was satisfied on other matters over the past couple of years, wasn't it?

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[autopope]

In case you lack specific knowledge of him, J R-M manages a hedge fund. And as I understand it he's shorting the London stock market shamelessly in anticipation of a no-deal Brexit, while having moved his own investments out of the UK.

He's basically a traitorious disaster capitalist—there's no point in mincing words here: he actively wants to damage his own country for profit. Ideology is secondary (although he's got plenty of it, all totally barking mad in a manner that's probably familiar to anyone who monitors the spread of extreme authoritarian conservativism in the US republican party).

It says something about his lack of political interest that he's never been offered so much as a junior minister's portfolio. To put it bluntly: his own Conservative Party superiors distrust him.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[mountainkiss]

It's particularly odd because he and his wife between them are already worth about £150m.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[danieldwilliam]

I think the kind of people who amass a fortune of £150 million are the sort of people for whom £150 million is not enough.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[mountainkiss]

I do sort of get that at an abstract level, but it's very hard to get my head around. I'm also troubled by the depth of his espoused Roman Catholicism and very curious about what that means to him.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[danieldwilliam]

I suspect that one of the reasons why it's hard to get your head around is that you are not the sort of person who makes having £150 million a key part of your personality.

I know I'm not. I'd certainly gratefully accept £150 million in cash. And if I were offered work in my current profession that came with a chance of earning a £150 million (share options in a tech start up) then I might be tempted by that in preference to doing the same work but with no chance of £150 million. I'd even write 50 Shades of Grey and sell the film options. However, I'm not going to go around doing any thing substantially different in order to get a £150 million. Nor would I see myself as a different or better person if I had £150 million.

I think that's the difference. The money is used to keep score. There can never be enough winning in the world and if you are using money to keep score, never enough money.

In what way does his Roman Catholisism sit uneasily with you.

I confess I have my own reservations about strong faith motivations in politics and I am not convinced that JRM believes in the same God that you do, or that I would wish to believe in were I to believe in God.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[mountainkiss]

I struggle to reconcile his espoused faith with his voting record.

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[danieldwilliam]

A thing I find hard to get my head around with regard to Roman Catholisism is the breadth of political opinion is supports as part of its theology. I think more so that Methodism or Quakerism or Russian Orthodoxy (as I understand it, which isn't hugely at all). I suppose the clue is in the title, being catholic. The scope of political philosophy open to those of the Catholic faith seems to range from strong, state authoritariansim to some fairly radical socialist positions.


Whilst looking for some examples of Catholic clergy of the radical and progressive type I found this

https://www.reddit.com/r/RadicalChristianity/comments/8ba20w/what_are_some_radical_catholic_saints/

Re: On Rees-Mogg and the UK-Ireland Border

[dewline]

I've been keeping an eye on reports about him by way of BBC News and the Guardian (mostly), so this characterization of him doesn't come as a surprise. It still terrifies me, but it's definitely not a surprise.

[redbird]

I am extremely dubious about any theory of how the brain works that slips in the assumption that human thinking changed that significantly with literacy, and that this happened six thousand years ago. The article doesn't exactly say that "internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight" all require literacy, but it strongly implies it—which in turn implies that almost nobody outside the upper classes and priesthood was capable of empathy, analogical reasoning, inference, or the generation of insight until very recently.

That's nonsense, but it's pernicious, racist and classist nonsense: if "they" lack empathy and aren't capable of those sorts of reasoning, that gets used as an argument against democracy and against letting people make decisions about their own lives.

Also, the author is casually equating "reading and writing have been invented" with "narratives are being written down" (accounting documents, however useful, don't seem likely to produce more empathy than listening to a story) and with "most people can read comfortably."

(Excuse me, I think I have to figure out how to leave a comment at the Grauniad.)

[doug]

David Spiegelhalter (wrote on the alcohol stuff) is an underappreciated national treasure. He's also a friend-of-a-friend which makes me feel extremely cool and statsy.

[calimac]

3) I don't see how the 40 MPs can block Brexit. They can try. But they can't force May to continue to negotiate, and they can't require the EU to accept whatever hair-brained compromise May comes up with next. If neither of these happens, and I don't see that they will, there is Brexit.

7) Origins of opera: The clustering-of-genius phenomenon discussed here was of great interest to Alfred Kroeber (the anthropologist, Ursula Le Guin's father), who wrote a whole book cataloging such clusters historically and trying to find patterns in them.

8) So Rees-Mogg wants to set up a hard border. That's one of the options that isn't going to work. Neither are any of the other options.

10) I agree. If authors write articles written like the one on skim-reading, then readers are going to skim them. It has nothing to do with being online.

13) There's one flaw in the ointment of the "worst bride" story. The maid of honor had already agreed to contribute $5K. It's not clear why she pulled out. Otherwise, though, yes, the sense of entitlement here even surpasses that of fan-fiction writers, and that's a lot.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the only method I can see of blocking Brexit would be to attempt to rescind Article 50, or to bring down the government and hope that the next one is willing to do that. Totally agreed that they can't force her to negotiate in a way she doesn't want to.

[errolwi]

The maid of honor had already agreed to contribute $5K. It's not clear why she pulled out.

How about the bride bullied her/took non-committal behaviour as a promise, and when it came to actually paying it, refused (having hoped the bride could be talked out of it in the meantime)

[agoodwinsmith]

Thank you for the alcohol article. I am always grateful when someone with more stats training than I have shows me proof of my hunch. :)