Interesting Links for 08-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Support for Independence hits 56%, 51% of people to vote SNP (53% if it's a defacto referendum)

(tags:scotland independence polls )

2. Transphobes are now attacking...The Samaritans.

(tags:lgbt transgender bigotry OhForFucksSake suicide )

3. BBC plans to switch off broadcast TV and move to internet-only programmes

(tags:bbc thefuture streaming broadcasting )

4. Discovery of world's oldest DNA breaks record by one million years

(tags:genetics dna prehistory )

5. The Art Game and the Money Game and how the ending of Minecraft was set free

(tags:games art money copyright Microsoft contracts )

6. Sats: MPs and peers fail tests for 11-year-olds as campaign groups call for overhaul of 'high-stakes' exams

(tags:exams children politics )

7. First UK coal mine in decades approved

(tags:UK coal environment globalwarming )

8. Europe First: Brussels gets ready to dump its free trade ideals (because the USA and China both already have)

(tags:Europe China USA trade )

9. Two inhaled covid vaccines have been approved. Here's what you need to know.

(tags:vaccines pandemic )

10. AI learns to precisely manipulate individual atoms

(tags:ai atom physics research )

11. How Many Fundamental Constants Does It Take To Explain The Universe? (26, at the moment)

(tags:physics )

12. People expect identical twins to be *really* identical

(tags:twins genetics statistics )

13. Humans are surprisingly poor at picking up cues of aggression in dogs

(tags:dogs behaviour psychology )

Comments

[simont]

#3 requires registration to get past the first paragraph, so I didn't read the whole thing. But what does this imply for the licence fee?

If TV is delivered over the Internet instead of via broadcast, then presumably the simple thing is to turn the licence fee into an online subscription that unlocks your credentials to connect to the streaming server. Pro: enormous amount of effort saved on TV licence enforcement, and no further need for special legal support from the government.

If that happened, the BBC would presumably become just another streaming service alongside all the existing ones, competing with them on an equal basis. One wonders if they'd have any remaining reason to not pursue profit at the expense of public-service considerations, e.g. any impartiality they might have left!

[andrewducker]

https://archive.ph/ is your friend when it comes to paywalls.

And yeah, I'm not sure what's going to happen with the license fee.

[bens_dad]

If the licence fee becomes optional but required for viewing the BBC will be no different from other streaming services and will lose a lot of subscribers - O(half the population).

Who is going to invest in the bandwidth for wireless internet throughout every A road, never mind every country lane ?
Bye-bye in car radio.

Though if someone *is* prepared to put 5G *with multicast IP* (so that the bandwidth on motorways isn't all taken up with 10K copies of the same radio channel) and/or a national wifi service (like Slovenia) with >95% coverage by area, great.

[mellowtigger]

The best "money" (/capitalist corruption) question for this change is, "Who's getting paid for the newly available spectrum, and what is the buyer doing with it?" The many social downsides are totally irrelevant to whoever is leveraging their own wealth from the change.

[cmcmck]

2. These people are so sick in the head I just can't........... :o(

[hairyears]

And the follow-on question...

Are we actually capable,, as a society and a country, of expressing a reaction of mass revulsion?

This demands something even stronger than the 'RNLI moment', when the criminalisation of lifeboatmen by psychopathic racists in the Cabinet triggered a moderately-sized public backlash, and resulted in a surge of donations to the Royal National Lifeboats Institution.

But... There's no liberal media outlet who will support this backlash, here, even for the Samaritans.

[cmcmck]

There might have once been the Guardian, but they chose to believe that being transphobic sells papers, so.............

[hairyears]

I think you know my views on the Guardian.

If you're ever on Twitter, you will have seen the view that I expressed on that, retweeted and copied and repeatedly quoted-by-reflex by people who see it the same way I do.

I was astonished to see that it was circulating on Mastodon before I went there a month ago.

And...

It's not about selling papers, it's worse than that: it's the patient and pathological 'capture' of a culture, and people choosing not to care that they were knowingly being subverted and corrupted; and The Guardian are the way they are now, because that's the people that they want to be.

Coal Mines

[danieldwilliam]

One of the most interesting comments I read as part of the debate on the new coal mine was this:

In the UK we use steel. In the UK we make steel. Not all the steel we use. We also buy steel from abroad. If we did not make steel we would buy it from abroad in greater numbers.

There is currently no good alternative to coking coal for making steel. Coking coal is how you get very high heat *and* controlled injection of carbon in to the iron to make the steel alloy. So for the next period of time any steel used in the UK will use coking coal dug up somewhere and burned somewhere.

It is hypocritical of us to ban coalmine in our country and then import CO2 emitted in some other country in the form of steel we use. It is hypocritical to import coking coal from abroad to use in our steelmills. Also, it is dumb to miss out on the coal mining and steel milling jobs that our demand for steel creates.

I'm not convinced but by the argument but it has given me some pause for thought.

Re: Coal Mines

[mtbc]

Thank you, interesting, and inconvenient given steel's wide utility.

Re: Coal Mines

[andrewducker]

See https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/4227632.html?thread=29527344#cmt29527344

Re: Coal Mines

[andrewducker]

I would agree with that, except for these snippets from the article:

1) The government's advisory Climate Change Committee (UKCCC) pointed out that 85% of the coal produced by the mine would be exported.
...
2) But the two companies that still make steel using coal in the UK - British Steel and Tata - say they plan to move to lower carbon production methods.

Steel industry expert Chris McDonald estimates that, at best, they will use less than 10% of the output of the mine and, by the mid-2030s, none at all.

That means the new mine will export virtually all the coal it produces.

If we were going to use, say, more than 2/3 of a coal mine to make steel, then it would make sense to open one up. But to open one up so that we can use 10% of it, and then sell the rest abroad, seems like a massive reach.

Re: Coal Mines

[danieldwilliam]

Which is all fair comment.

However
Re 1) We don't actually make a lot of steel ourselves. UK steel production tends to be small batch, high quality specialist steel. So, whilst we might be exporting most of the coal we are re-importing the steel it makes - we are still responsible for using the steel and the emissions they create.
Re 2) But when are they moving? I think at some point in the future everyone is going to move to low carbon emmission steel production but when?

I'm not advocating opening the mine but we also have to think about our moral obligations for creating the demand for the emissions linked to our use of steel in a way that is more nuanced than "it's made abroad, it's a foreign problem."

Re: Coal Mines

[andrewducker]

I'm not saying that any emissions made abroad aren't our problem - I *am* saying that moving production of everything we use that produces emissions onshore is remarkably silly. Playstations use CO2 in their manufacture, but that doesn't mean we should onshore all PS5 manufacturing.

If we want to measure embodied CO2 and charge for it when we import then *that* would drive reasonable behaviours. But "We buy in materials/products which produce negative externalities in their manufacture" isn't a bad thing automatically, and shifting manufacture doesn't feel like a great answer to me.

[nancylebov]

5. The story about the ending of Minecraft, and the ending itself, is spectacular.

[andrewducker]

I thought he did a great job of explaining himself, where he'd gone wrong, and understanding others.

[calimac]

3) If that happened in the US, it would render my tv set useless. In theory we could connect it up to our internet, but it seems far too complicated a job to undertake. So we just watch internet-only video on our computers.

6) I agree with Flick Drummond: it's the grammatical terminology that's puzzling; I was never taught using those terms. However, in the displayed question, "Which option is punctuated correctly?" the answer is NONE: it needs an Oxford comma! (Aside from that, it's the first one.)

11) What the heck is a dimensionless constant? How do you measure mass, for instance, without a unit?

12) I've known two pairs of identical twins (all male). Physically, once I saw both twins in the same place at the same time, I never afterwards had any trouble telling them apart. Personality-wise, they were alike, but I've known other pairs of brothers, even father & son, who were just as much so.

13) I don't think I apply here, because I read everything from a dog as a sign of aggression. I literally cannot tell the difference between a dog bounding towards me in joy and one bearing down to tear my head off. It always looks like the latter. This is why dogs terrify me.

[andrewducker]

3) I think there are a fair number of people in the same situation as you. And right now you can watch things on your TV by simply plugging it into an aerial, and tuning in to free content. If we also require people to have broadband then I worry there will be some people who will simply be excluded. If nothing else, broadband goes wrong a hell of a lot more often than a TV aerial does!

11) Usually it's when you're scaling something against other things. But seeing as they're saying "by scaling these mass parameters to be relative to the gravitational constant, G" - surely it's then at least notionally in the same units as G? I now have questions!

13) Unpleasant though that sounds, it's definitely safer than reading everything as joy and getting bitten by the occasional badly behaved one.

[calimac]

3) Oh, it's more pathetic than that. We don't have an aerial. We have cable, from the same firm that provides our internet service (they're covered by one billing). And I still have no idea how to connect the internet up to the tv monitor.

11) But if you measure something against other things, you're using the other things as the unit. I've seen lots of discussion of sub-atomic particles measuring their masses against the proton (the best-known one, I guess). "The neutron has a mass slightly greater than a proton," e.g. In that case, your unit = 1 proton.

13) Yes, but it does mean I flee the room in terror on encountering any dog that's not lying placid in the corner. It's worse when the owner says, "He doesn't bite." Yeah, that's what they all say, and I'm not waiting around to find out. Fortunately I don't know many people with dogs any more, and those who do know to keep them away from me. When I was a child, almost everyone had a dog (no cats, literally: I never met a cat till I went to university), and it was agony.

[jducoeur]

And I still have no idea how to connect the internet up to the tv monitor.

It depends enormously on how old the TV is. If it's old, then it probably requires adapters and fiddling and stuff. This issue gets treated lightly mostly because newer TVs increasingly have all of that built-in -- you just connect to the wifi and go.

(Which still doesn't mean it's trivial. It took me a minute or two to set up my mother's TV, but I wouldn't want her to try to do it herself.)

[wildeabandon]

11. I don't think it means that they're in the same units as G. The mass ratios are in kg/kg, hence dimensionless, and G is in Nm^2/kg^2. But obviously kg is an arbitrary mass, so what it means when it says you can scale the mass parameters to G is that whatever number of particles makes up that arbitrary mass, the ratio between the masses of that number of particles of two types will remain constant.

[channelpenguin]

My parents do not have broadband. They don't want broadband. They have no use for broadband.

[andrewducker]

Exactly the demographic I am worried about.

I don't know how much it costs to broadcast TV, but it surely can't be *that* much compared to the number of people who still watch TV that way.

[movingfinger]

The Minecraft story is bizarre. It's very self-justifying. The writer knows he screwed up and that he screwed people, not just himself, in this.

I think Julian Gough does not realize how badly he comes off in his own narrative. I pity his agent, and those are not words I ever thought I could string together in my brain. I pity his ex, his kids, and his current spouse, too. This kind of self-important, toxically passive-aggressive behavior is exhausting to deal with.

[channelpenguin]

He is trying to sell *to himself* that he is poor because art is more important to him than money, rather than that he's made a series of monumentally stupid decisions. Despite even that the 2nd chance to get a good contract and literally have enough money to support his family while making whatever art he pleased for the rest of his life."understanding" of the rest of it is useless if it doesn't lead him to make to better decisions.

I have made serial fuckups in my life, and blown 2nd (and 3rd) chances, but I have never tried to deceive myself quite this hard. chuckle

[agoodwinsmith]

#9

I haven't read about the inhalable vaccines yet, but immediately upon reading the title I had a wicked thought: the way to get COVID deniers to wear masks is to tell them that there is a conspiracy to use inhalable vaccines in all public indoor spaces.

I am entirely too entertained by my own wicked willingness to lie for lols.

:)

Regarding Point Nine:

[dewline]

The name "CanSinoBio" rings familiar and unwelcome bells for many Canadians, particularly from early on in the Pandemic and there are connections to the story of the Two Michaels.

[alithea]

As someone who owns a dog who is moderately reactive to a small subset of other dogs (male, his size or bigger, generally black) I have become both very aware of his aggression warning signs and also how oblivious many other owners are to such signs (no, do not say "oh it's fine" to me while allowing your bristling dog to stalk up to my also bristling dog that I have put on a lead for a reason!!)