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!

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.

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?

[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.

[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. :)