Science

Scientists have discovered that adding a layer of magnesium improves the properties of tantalum, a superconducting material that shows great promise for building qubits, the basis of quantum computers. The scientists show that a thin layer of magnesium keeps tantalum from oxidizing, improves its purity, and raises the temperature at which it operates as a superconductor. All three may increase tantalum's ability to hold onto quantum information in qubits.

For decades we thought the Irish elk’s body size alone explained why it had enormous antlers, but the truth may be more complicated

What’s the most important thing you need to live and work on the Moon? Power. For NASA’s upcoming Artemis program, getting power to lunar bases is a top priority. That’s why the agency created its Fission Surface Power Project. The idea is to develop concepts for a small nuclear fission reactor to generate electricity on the lunar surface.

The project just finished its initial phase (which began in 2022), which consisted of three $5 million contracts to commercial partners to develop fission reactor designs. NASA selected Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, MD, Westinghouse of Cranberry, PA, and IX of Houston, TX each for a 12-month Phase 1 award to further develop preliminary designs. Each partner was tasked to offer a design of the reactor and systems for power conversion, heat rejection, and power management and distribution. Of course, the partners needed to provide estimated costs for their systems and development plans. The ultimate goal was to create a system that could support lunar bases for a decade. The designs would also serve as pathways to plan and build similar systems on Mars.

Power systems spell the difference between success and failure in any mission. For the Moon and Mars, it’s the difference between life and death. Nuclear power is the most likely route to service long-term power needs. “A demonstration of a nuclear power source on the Moon is required to show that it is a safe, clean, reliable option,” said Trudy Kortes, program director, Technology Demonstration Missions within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The lunar night is challenging from a technical perspective, so having a source of power such as this nuclear reactor, which operates independent of the Sun, is an enabling option for long-term exploration and science efforts on the Moon.”

Why Fission Reactors?

Let’s face it—living and working on the Moon presents a lot of challenges. Safe, clean power helps overcome many of the dangers that lunar explorers will face. Solar power provides a dependable source of power to keep things going. But, at least half of the time, solar power grids will be in darkness during the lunar night. That’s not to say solar power won’t be used. But, another power source is important to have. That’s where fission reactors come in handy.

Nuclear fission power plants like these could enable long-term exploration of the Moon for both humans and robotic probes. Credit: NASA

NASA and other agencies could put nuclear reactors in places that spend their time in partial or full shadow. In many cases, in situ reservoirs of ice exist in the same regions. The advantage of nuclear reactors is that they can operate full-time, regardless of whether there’s sunlight or not. That’s a big plus for power needs during the 14-night-long lunar night.

Note that NASA isn’t saying that ONLY nuclear fission generators will be used on the Moon. A combination of solar and nuclear installations will likely supply the electricity needs of habitats and science labs.

Reactor Specs for the Moon and Beyond

In its solicitation for further work on the designs, NASA wanted to see plans for reactors that would last at least a decade without human intervention. This reduces any threats from accidental radiation exposure and allows lunar explorers to focus on their primary science and exploration tasks.

The specs for the reactor design specify that it be under six metric tons and produce 40 kilowatts of power. That is enough to demonstrate the capability of the system and provide power for habitats, grids, and science experiments. If you put the same reactor on Earth in a typical neighborhood, it would be enough to power 33 homes.

The agency designed the requirements to be open and flexible so that each company could feel free to explore new directions when it came to the designs they submitted. “There was a healthy variety of approaches; they were all very unique from each other,” said Lindsay Kaldon, Fission Surface Power project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “We didn’t give them a lot of requirements on purpose because we wanted them to think outside the box.”

Now with feedback from the commercial partners, NASA begins working on a Phase 2 solicitation for 2025. After that, the agency expects delivery of a system for use on the Moon in the early 2030s. In the distant future, after the systems have gone through their “baptism by fire” on the Moon, NASA will likely redesign a nuclear fission reactor specifically for use on Mars.

For More Information

NASA’s Fission Surface Power Project Energizes Lunar Exploration
NASA Fission Surface Power Project

The post NASA is One Step Closer to Deploying Fission Reactors on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

Astronomers working with the JWST found a dwarf galaxy they weren’t looking for. It’s about 98 million years away, has no neighbours, and was in the background of an image of other galaxies. This isolated galaxy shows a lack of star-formation activity, which is very unusual for an isolated dwarf.

Most isolated dwarf galaxies form stars, according to a wealth of observations. What’s different about this one?

The JWST’s PEARLS (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science) observing program is aimed at understanding the epoch of galaxy assembly, active galactic nucleus (AGN) growth, and First Light. As part of its work, it observed a galaxy cluster called CLG1212. The isolated dwarf galaxy, named PEARLSDG, was found serendipitously.

The discovery is in new research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Its title is “PEARLS: A Potentially Isolated Quiescent Dwarf Galaxy with a Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distance of 30 Mpc.” The lead author is Tim Carleton, an Assistant Research Scientist at the Arizona State University.

Dwarf galaxies contain far fewer stars than galaxies like our Milky Way. Nobody’s certain how many stars are in the Milky Way exactly. But well-reasoned estimates point to an upper number of about 400 billion. In contrast, dwarf galaxies like PEARLSDG contain up to about 100 million stars.

Besides its lack of star formation, PEARLSDG is unusual for another reason. The JWST is able to discern individual red giant branch (RGB) stars in the dwarf galaxy because the stars are bright in JWST’s observed wavelengths. It’s almost too far away for the JWST to see the stars, so PEARLSDG is one of the most distant galaxies in which we can see individual stars.

The JWST was able to discern individual stars in the dwarf galaxy, as shown in this image from the research. Image Credit: Carleton et al. 2024

Being able to see individual red giant branch (RGB) stars makes studying the dwarf galaxy much easier. RGB stars have a specific intrinsic brightness, and that means that the astronomers behind the discovery can measure the galaxy’s distance: about 98 million light-years away. They can also measure the stars’ ages, showing that the PEARLSDG stellar population is older. If it were still forming stars, some of the stars would be much younger.

The researchers write that the dwarf galaxy hasn’t formed a star in at least one billion years. Part of the evidence is in the lack of UV energy from the galaxy. Young stars emit powerful UV, yet PEARLSDG displays only low levels of UV radiation. “Consistent with its low level of UV emission and the lack of emission lines in its spectrum, we find a very low sSFR, suggesting that its star formation shut off over 1 Gyr ago,” the researchers explain.

When a galaxy ceases to form stars, it’s called a quiescent galaxy. In a quiescent galaxy, the supply of gas used in star formation has been quenched. It’s usually caused by another neighbouring galaxy that has interacted with the quiescent galaxy to halt star formation. Somehow, the interaction has stripped gas from the quiescent galaxy or disrupted the flow of gas.

But PEARLSDG has no close neighbours.

The JWST’s NIRCam instrument was imaging the regions in the green boxes when it also spotted PEARLSDG, the dwarf galaxy in the cyan box. Image Credit: Carleton et al. 2024

“These types of isolated quiescent dwarf galaxies haven’t really been seen before except for relatively few cases. They are not really expected to exist given our current understanding of galaxy evolution, so the fact that we see this object helps us improve our theories for galaxy formation,” said lead author Carleton. “Generally, dwarf galaxies that are out there by themselves are continuing to form new stars.”

Interactions with other galaxies can cause quenching through tidal stripping. So can other environmental effects like ram pressure stripping and strangulation. But there are other causes, too, though astronomers are still working to understand them. “However, recent observations of large numbers of ultra-diffuse galaxies have prompted the development of internal quenching mechanisms, such as strong feedback,” the researchers state. In strong feedback, powerful energy from the biggest and brightest stars can blow away gas needed for new stars to form.

Despite the fact that PEARLSDG has no close neighbours, the authors are cautious in their conclusions. “Regardless, we cannot completely rule out past interactions with other galaxies that may have affected its formation history,” they write. “However, the recessional velocity and luminosity distance of PEARLSDG are consistent with it being in the Hubble Flow, and there are no visible signatures of tidal interactions.”

The Hubble Flow is what makes galaxies recede from one another as the Universe expands. Some galaxies interact and even merge despite the expansion because other forces have acted on them. But there’s no indication that anything has interacted with the dwarf galaxy that could’ve quenched its star formation.

When galaxies interact with one another, the tidal forces distort their shapes and can create tails and streams of stretched-out gas, dust, and stars. But PEARLSDG shows none of these symptoms. It’s a fairly non-descript, normal-shaped dwarf galaxy.

A pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Discoveries like this make astronomers pause and reconsider their models of galaxy evolution. But it’s likely that the JWST will find more isolated and quiescent dwarf galaxies. As more are observed, things will become clearer, and eventually, there’ll be an explanation.

“More detailed analysis of the star formation history of PEARLSDG and the dynamics of PEARLSDG with respect to its surroundings are needed to further understand its formation history, but this discovery suggests the possibility that many isolated quiescent galaxies are waiting to be identified and that JWST has the tools to do so,” the researchers write.

But for now, it’s just one more mystery in the cosmos.

“This was absolutely against people’s expectations for a dwarf galaxy like this,” Carleton said.

The post The JWST Discovers a Galaxy That Shouldn’t Exist appeared first on Universe Today.

Lightning strikes during volcanic eruptions could have provided nitrogen in a form that was needed by early life forms

Five storms in the past decade had wind speeds that belong in a hypothetical category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale

As you know, many colleges have dropped the mandatory SAT, a standardized test that has two parts: verbal comprehension and mathematics. Each part is scored from 200-800, so the lowest possible score is 400 and the highest 1600.

At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

The University of California commissioned a study to test this, and, sure enough, SAT scores were found to be better predictors of “success” than were high-school grades. Nevertheless, the whole UC system eliminated standardized test scores and still won’t consider them.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did  the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.  Not only will that facilitate the admission of students who will do well, but they found that making tests option had actually reduced diversity, because lower-income and disadvantaged students withheld scores that would have helped them get in.

Click screenshot below to access, or, if it’s paywalled, I found the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. [JAC: Four-part ACTs are alternatives to SATs.] With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

Why?

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

The article gives the range of test scores between 1300 and about 1550 (remember, 1600 is the highest), and the chances of students getting into Dartmouth that have a given score; this is divided into “advantaged” students and “disadvantaged” students, not really defined but implied as having come from “poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools.”  Those are surely correlated with race, but “disadvantaged” is not equated to “black or brown”.  The data aren’t biased because, after an admission offer is made or not made, colleges are entitled to look at the SATs of all students who took them, as they’re a matter of record in this way.  Below is the graph that the NYT gives:

One thing that strikes me about this is how damn selective Dartmouth is. I did pretty well on my SATs taken in 1965 (a total of 1512: 800 in math and 712 in English), but that would put me in the “advantaged” class having only about an 8% chance of being admitted. However, with scores in the 1400 range, disadvantaged students would have doubled their chances of being admitted.  Apparently disadvantaged students didn’t know that, and so withheld those scores, which are still in the upper 5% of students taking the SAT!

Dartmouth’s results also dispelled two common criticisms of the SATs:

For instance, many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock said the evidence didn’t support those claims. “The research suggests this tool is helpful in finding students we might otherwise miss,” she said.

I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.

Note that they’re not using race to increase students’ chances of admission, but “disadvantage,” and that is legal, even if race is associated with “disadvantage”. The evidence is, however, that had scores been mandatory, and the gap above maintained, Dartmouth would have increased its diversity.

In the end, a school has three choices: not use SAT scores or consider them for admission; make their submission optional so that they are considered as one factor for admission; or make them mandatory, and they’re considered for admission. The first choice eliminates a very important predictor of college success; the second, which was what Dartmouth used until now, partly eliminates the predictors but also may reduce diversity itself, since students don’t know what the graphs like the one above look like, ergo how their scores could affect their admissions; and the third is what Dartmouth decided to do.

I think they made the right choice.  I have no beef with separating “disadvantaged” from “advantaged” students, so long as “disadvantaged” means truly disadvantaged (I’m not sure that “first generation students whose parents didn’t go to college” can be seen as a “disadvantaged” class). “Disadvantaged” should not be automatically assigned to racial minorities, though.

Dartmouth is a rigorous and highly regarded institution, so I suspect other schools who eliminated SAT requirements or made them optional may reconsider their decisions.

 

h/t: Greg

The US National Ignition Facility has achieved even higher energy yields since breaking even for the first time in 2022, but a practical fusion reactor is still a long way off

Earth’s air temperature passed the agreed 1.5°C warming limit around 2010, according to measurements from the skeletons of sea sponges in the Caribbean, but some climate scientists aren't convinced

DNA sampling is revealing fungi thriving throughout the oceans, from hydrothermal vents to the open seas. They might even help tackle antibiotic resistance and clear up plastic pollution

Nineteen undergraduates at Brown University are fasting to help Palestine, but, as noted in the tweet below, the school’s President, Christina Paxson, refuses to meet their demands. (The tweet includes an inevitable chant, but it’s a new one). Because the students say their hunger strike is “indefinite,” and because the President won’t pass on their demands to the relevant investing body, this looks to me like a standoff, ergo a “fast unto death.”

The difference between this fast and the famous fasts of Gandhi is that these students will not come close to death (I’ll make anybody a bet), and in that way are different from Gandhi’s hunger strikes, which laid him low (he once fasted for 21 days) and often worked when the British saw that Gandhi was (pardon the pun) dead serious, and they’d better give in lest India riot. However, even Gandhi’s fasts failed more often than they succeeded.

And here we have a President with a spine, who’s simply not going to give in to the student demands, which of course require that she abandon institutional neutrality in favor of a political position.

UPDATE: Brown President Christina Paxson has informed the hunger strikers that she will not meet their demands.

At the end of her email to the students, she “highlighted University mental health and well-being resources.” https://t.co/XewA9Tf0aQ pic.twitter.com/d0B7CilAEU

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 3, 2024

An earlier report from the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, gives the reason for the hunger strike, which involves 19 students:

The Students announced the hunger strike during a Friday afternoon “rally for divestment” organized by the Palestine Solidarity Caucus and Jews for Ceasefire Now on the Main Green, at which approximately 350 were in attendance. Rally attendees flooded the campus center shortly after the announcement. Protestors also called on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

The divestment resolution, the strikers say, should mirror the 2020 report released by the University’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices that recommended divestment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” The committee has since been renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management.

. . .The hunger strike — led by “students from several allied affinity and organizing (campus) groups” — is set to be the United States’ largest since Oct. 7, according to the strikers. Upon review of previous hunger strikes related to the Israel-Palestine war, The Herald corroborated this claim.

Students are also calling for the University to promote an “immediate ceasefire in Gaza” and fully divest its endowment “from specified companies enabling and profiting from Israel’s genocide.” But they will only refuse to accept food until the Corporation hears their resolution.

And from the latest Daily Herald, (click to read):

The President’s refusal:

On Sunday, 19 student protestors entered the third day of their hunger strike, despite the refusal of President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 to meet their demand that the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, “hears and considers a divestment resolution,” during its meetings that begin this week.

The protestors demand that any divestment resolution be consistent with the 2020 report compiled by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which recommended the University divest its endowment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.”

This advisory committee comprised faculty, staff, alumni, and both undergraduate and graduate students.

Paxson previously refused to adhere to the report, saying that “the recommendation did not adequately address the requirements for rigorous analysis and research as laid out in ACCRIP’s charge, nor was there the requisite level of specificity in regard to divestment.”

In her recent letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management” — the successor to ACCRIP.

Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”

This the corportation will not hear the students’ demands, ergo they have to keep fasting. But it’s weird, because they could submit a proposal but refuse to do so. It’s confusing, but perhaps the protestors are demanding not just that the proposal be seen but be voted on.

The strikers have not submitted a proposal to ACURM, nor do they plan to do so, according to strike spokesperson Sam Stewart ’24.

The protesting students also wrote that they “will continue (the) hunger strike as long as President Paxson refuses to engage with our demands.”

In response to the students’ continuation of the strike, University Spokesperson Brian Clark reiterated that the 2020 proposal will not be brought forward for a vote, but that student protesters can submit a divestment proposal through ACURM.

One issue is if the students really continue fasting until their lives are in danger, the university, to avoid liability, will disenroll them (see my bolding below), or perhaps arrest them. This has happened before:

In a December sit-in, Paxson refused to revisit her decision not to adhere to a 2020 report compiled by ACCRIP. During this demonstration, 41 students demanded full divestment from “Israeli military occupation” and were subsequently arrested on trespassing charges and referred to ACURM.

In Friday’s letter, Paxson encouraged the protestors to look after their mental and physical well-being throughout the duration of the strike and shared University health resources available to students. She added that “protest is also unacceptable if it creates a substantial threat to personal safety of any member of the community.”

The University previously disenrolled four students participating in a hunger strike protesting the University’s partial divestment policy of South African apartheid in the 1980s. The then-administration cited health and liability concerns for the disenrollment, according to a 1986 article by The Herald.

I suspect nobody died in this one.

Two questions. First, does the University really invest in companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine”?  That itself is a slippery notion; does it mean any Israeli companies? The article says this:

The University is not directly invested in any weapons manufacturing companies, but a substantial portion of its endowment is invested through manager portfolios, The Herald previously reported. The University is contractually obligated not to disclose the companies in these portfolios, but told students that none have a focus in the defense industry.

“We are confident that our external managers have the highest level of ethics and share the values of the Brown community,” Clark wrote in a Sunday email to The Herald, “including the rejection of violence.”

The University of Chicago wouldn’t even go that far, but would simply say that the contents of its portfolio are confidential.  I’m not sure whether the statement above will satisfy the students, but it apparently has not, for it’s not specific enough for the students.

Second, are the students really determined to fast unto death? I doubt it, for they’d be disenrolled (and that would be soon), and that would go on their record. Also, do they really want to die on this hill? Readers can speculate how long they’ll go without food before they give up.

At any rate, it’s good news that the Brown President will not accede to the students’ demands. If she did, there would be no limit to what students could demand in the future.

h/t: Luana

Today we have the second part of a two-part post on Australian trees, the eucalypts, contributed by Reader Dean Graetz. (Part 1 is here.) Dean’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The Trees that identify Australia

Australia is one of many countries that include plants as part of their identity.  The national floral emblem is the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha), one of more than 1000 Acacia species found on the continent.  The two colours of the plant represent the essence of the continent.  The golden flowers represent its beaches, mineral wealth, grain, and wool harvests.  The green of the (leathery) leaves imitates the continent’s forests and productive landscapes.

Sparsely located in the arid heart of the continent is this visually striking tree.  Commonly known as the Ghost Gum, it was recently renamed with an appropriate Aboriginal Australian species word (Corymbia aparrerinja).  A much more impressive image is here.

Similarly, sparsely located in the drier areas of the continent is this tree.  Evocatively named Bloodwood (Corymbia opaca), there appears no external colouring which supports that name.\

However, if you manage to find a seeping wound, then the reason for its name will be obvious, the colour of the exuding sap (Kino) is a vivid.

When sedentary farmers and graziers were added to Australia’s population, substantial areas of eucalypt woodland, about 13% of the continent, were transformed.  Trees were either clear-felled and burnt for cropping, or just thinned for pastures.  This satellite image shows a large area of mallee, a eucalypt woodland type (dark), cleared in part for growing (wheat) on the bright sandy soil.  The sharp boundary on the LHS is a state border.  Multiple millions of eucalypt trees have been removed here and elsewhere for the reality of it is ‘Either Them or Us’.

Snow Gum woodlands lie on the snow line and are episodically burnt by lightning-induced bushfires, as here.  The many tall stems of each tree have been killed and have bleached white in the high UV environment.  However, the trees are not dead.  Each tree had developed a lignotuber, and from this a ring of new shoots have sprouted and will replace the tree’s burned canopy in about 5 years, or so.  Even so, the sea of bone white, dead stems is eye catching.

An ephemeral dry-country watercourse with three tall River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), the most wide spread Eucalypt, from lining the banks of permanent rivers to tapping the subsurface water of this small dry creek.  Never visually elegant or symmetrical, these trees, with their scrabbling roots and scarred stems, suggest one word: Survivor.

As does this extraordinarily large River Red Gum, possibly the largest and oldest known.  Residing in a cleared paddock, it is still healthily growing and supporting a large canopy.  Eucalypts do not annual ring, so its age cannot be measured, just guessed at 300+ years.  The gap in the trunk was likely generated centuries ago by a small fire lit close to it sheltering from the wind.  Repeated often enough to burn through the sapwood and into the heartwood, thereafter the weather and dry rot eventually hollowed the stem but left the sapwood continuing to thrive today.

All Eucalypts produce very hard, dense wood, which when dried after death, is difficult to saw or cut.  A few species are known ‘branch droppers’: large living branches just drop off, for no obvious reason.  Such species are also known as ‘Widow Makers’ for the fatalities of sleepers and sitters under the canopy.  The River Red Gum – see above – is well-known Widow Maker’.  However, branch shedding usually leaves large openings into the stem to be eventually hollowed out and occupied by parrots, such as this Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita).  Because all Australian parrot species are hollow nesters, dead and holed Eucalypts are much sought after trees.

For an Australian away from the built environment, the visual presence of familiar gum trees reinforces your identity: you are home.  There is another personal experience that builds on this.  And that is the smell of burning gum leaves.  In the past, and still today, whenever a small fire was lit ‘to boil the billy’, the fragrance of the fire was associated with friendship, convivial tea-drinking, and conversation.  Dried gum leaves were the perfect one-match fire starter.  The smell of burning gum leaves is pleasant, readily recognised, and soon becomes a deeply held memory.

“The families back home heard and understood this and sent gum leaves with their letters to those at the front.  Nurses wore gum leaves pinned to their capes.  Soldiers sometimes burned the leaves in small piles at the front line so the smell would drift along the trenches and others could be reminded of their country’s distinctive smell.

The smell of Eucalyptus is the smell of home.”

There were 69 unprovoked shark attacks on people and 10 fatalities in 2023 worldwide, with four of the deaths occurring in Australia

A year ago, I noticed that COVID-19 quacks were touting the "repurposing" of ivermectin to treat cancer. Now, familiar COVID-19 antivaxxers—cough, cough, FLCCC—have turbocharged this quackery.

The post COVID-19 antivax quacks are now “repurposing” ivermectin for cancer first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

It’s a long way to the nearest star, which means conventional rockets won’t get us there. The fuel requirements would make our ship prohibitively heavy. So an alternative is to travel light. Literally. Rather than carrying your fuel with you, simply attach your tiny starship to a large reflective sail, and shine a powerful laser at it. The impulse of photons would push the starship to a fraction of light speed. Riding a beam of light, a lightsail mission could reach Proxima Centauri in a couple of decades. But while the idea is simple, the engineering challenges are significant, because, across decades and light-years, even the smallest problem can be difficult to solve.

One example of this can be seen in a recent arXiv paper. It looks at the problem of how to balance a lightsail on a laser beam. Although the laser could be aimed directly toward a star, or where it will be in a couple of decades, the lightsail would only follow the beam if it is perfectly balanced. If a sail is slightly tilted relative to the beam, the reflected laser light would give the lightsail a slight transverse push. No matter how small this deviation is, it would grow over time, causing its path to drift ever away from its target. We will never align a lightsail perfectly, so we need some way to correct small deviations.

How a small deviation can send a lightsail off course. Credit: Mackintosh, et al

For traditional rockets, this can be done with internal gyroscopes to stabilize the rocket, and engines that can dynamically adjust their thrust to restore balance. But a gyro system would be too heavy for an interstellar lightsail, and adjustments of the beam would take months or years to reach the lightsail, making quick changes impossible. So the authors suggest using a radiative trick known as the Poynting–Robertson effect.

The effect was first studied in the early 1900s and is caused by the relative motion between an object and a light source. For example, a dust grain orbiting the Sun sees light coming at a slight forward angle due to its motion through sunlight. That little forward component of light can slow down the asteroid ever so slightly. This effect causes dust to drift toward the inner solar system over time.

In this paper, the authors consider a two-dimensional model to see how the Poynting–Robertson effect might be used to keep our lightsail probe on course. To keep things simple, they assumed the light beam to be a simple monochromatic plane wave. Real lasers are more complex, but the assumption is reasonable for a proof of concept. They then showed how a simple two-sail system can use the effects of relative motion to keep the craft in balance. As the sails tilt off course slightly, a restorative force from the beam counters it. Thus proving the concept could work.

However, the authors noticed that over time the effects of relativity come into play. Earlier studies have taken the Doppler effect of relative motion into effect, but this study shows the relativistic version of chromatic aberration would also come into play. The full relativistic effects would need to be accounted for in a realistic design, which would require sophisticated modeling and optics.

So a lightsail still seems like a possible way to reach the stars. We just have to be careful not to make light of the engineering challenges.

Reference: Mackintosh, Rhys, et al. “Poynting-Robertson damping of laser beam driven lightsails.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16924 (2024).

The post How Could Laser-Driven Lightsails Remain Stable? appeared first on Universe Today.

I mentioned this article this morning, but wanted to give a bit more detail because it’s important in two ways. First, it’s a good and objective assessment of gender transitioning in America, giving both the upsides and downsides. Second, it’s in the New York Times, which has, until recently, taken the “affirmative treatment” side of gender transitioning, staying away from the topics of harmful puberty blockers and those who reverse transitioning (“detransitioners”) or those who avoid medical transitioning after thinking about it (“desisters”). Recently, however, the paper has become more objective on transitioning (this started with Emily Bazelon’s 2022 article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy“, for which Bazelon got a lot of pushback from her colleagues). Pamela Paul’s article takes that even farther. It’s well worth reading. For more plaudits, read Eliza Mondegreen’s short UnHerd piece about Paul’s article, “The New York Times Gets Braver With Gender Coverage“. An except from Mondegreen:

This is a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before. There are, however, also curiosities surrounding Pamela Paul’s piece, like the editorial decision to relegate her reporting to the opinion pages, and to run an apologia of sorts by Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, in which she suggests, in the mildest possible terms, that more conversation is a good thing for “humanity, nuance and empathy,” and that gender medicine is full of “complexities.”

If you read that apologia, by the editorial page editor, it’s pretty worthless, trying not to denigrate what Paul said but simply urging “more discussion.” Yes, of course, but all of us have said that all along. But more important, we need more research!

To read Paul’s piece, you can click below, or find it archived for free here if you’re not a subscriber.  This is definitely not an op-ed, however it’s labeled. At nearly 5,000 words, it qualifies at least as “news analysis”.

In short, Paul’s thesis is that America is dealing poorly with adolescents who wish to transition (nobody seems to have any issue with those over 25 who want to change gender), forcing them into an “affirmative treatment” program that affirms their “wrong body” feelings without question, gives them hormones to halt puberty, and then goes on to prescribe hormones that change your secondary sex characteristics, as well as surgery. Rarely do children with gender dysphoria get longer-term, objective care that explores their feelings rather than hustling them on to adopt another gender presentation.  Further, Paul makes three claims—all supported by evidence—that gender activists hate (this is my summary):

1. There is indeed evidence for a form of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), in which children, without prior indication, suddenly claim they’re in the wrong body and want to change gender.  Gender activists have long claimed that ROGD is a fictional syndrome, one wrongly supported by Abigail Shrier in her readable but much-criticized (by gender activists) book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. This book is still causing controversy, but it seems that, in the main, Shrier’s claims were correct. ROGD does seem to be a real syndrome.
2. It appears that ROGD may be promoted by social media and the urging of peers, who, perhaps having transitioned themselves, urge others to do so. Gender activists have long denied that social pressure plays a significant role in the transitioning of children and adolescents. Given social media and what I’ve read from those who have transitioned, I think social pressure is important.
3. The majority (80%) of gender dysphoric children, if they don’t transition, resolve their identities by the time they reach puberty, often coming out as gay—a much less intrusive result. Further, about a third of people who take hormone therapy stop the procedure within four years, though by then permanent physiological damage, including infertility, might have been done.

Paul will undoubtedly be demonized for this, but I give her many encomiums. She’s a brave woman, who, like John McWhorter, isn’t afraid to tackle “antiwoke” topics in the NYT op-ed section. (Paul used to be the Sunday book-review editor.) She is a woman who is doing good, and I sugggest subscribi9ng to her columns if you take the NYT.

I’ll give a few quotes from Paul (indented) under each topic.

Improper treatment of gender dysphoria:

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

. . .In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

Gender activists and their drive for “affirmative care”:

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

Activists’ resistance to objective care:

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Rapid onset gender dysphoria:

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

. . . . In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Social pressure:

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

The suicide trope (the tactic of warning parents that their kids will commit suicide if not allowed to transition, often expressed as “do you want a dead daughter or a live son?”, or vice versa):

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Leave our kids alone: All kids who have serious problems about their sexuality or gender deserve therapy. But they should get good, objective therapy, not “affirmative therapy”.

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed

And I find this statistic, which is stable, to be pretty telling:

. . . Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

I could go on with Paul’s stories of “detransitioners” and “desisters,” but you can read the article yourself, especially since it’s archived. But for writing this story, and especially for calling attention to the problems of “affirmative therapy” and for telling stories of those who de-transition, Paul will be called a “transphobe”. She is not, nor are any of us who simply want gender-dysphoric kids to be treated properly.

And good for the NYT  for publishing this. Now we’ll know they’re really serious when they start questioning whether trans women should be competing against natal women in sports, or put in women’s prisons.

This is absolutely unbelievable, but I suppose if you realize that the “Woke Kindergarten” program was implemented in the Bay Area of California, you can sort of believe it. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (article archived here), this is real, because the Chronicle story links to the woke website below.

“Woke Kindergarten” is just what it sounds like: a “progressive” program (hired by the school) that politically indoctrinates elementary-school students into dismantling nearly everything about America (in this way it comports with Douglas Murray’s thesis in his recent and recommended book, The War on the West.).  The program was implemented because the students, 80% of which are Hispanic, were performing below par in math and English.  But not only did this teacher training program not improve math and English scores, but they also dropped even more.  The school officials, however, claim that it’s a success because attendance rose and suspension rates dropped marginally. But what good is that if student performance dropped?

But read the article below (the headline links to the archived site), and then go to the Woke Kindergarten site and have a look around. Unless you’re Bernie Sanders or Rashida Tlaib, you’ll be absolutely appalled:

First, a summary from the Chronicle.

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement.

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.

Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Click below to go to the site and browse.  I’ll interpolate some of the “woke wonderings” and “teach palestine” (yes, it’s political!) in the Chronicle text, which I’ve indented.

Here are the links (don’t click below); just go to the site and browse:

Woke Wonderings from the program (pictures) with excerpts from the Chronicle interpolated:

Some anti-Israeli propaganda:

Defund the police!

From the paper:

The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children.

The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them.

At the same time, some education experts say struggling schools need research-based literacy and math interventions that ensure all students have the basic skills to succeed. Examples of success include San Francisco’s John Muir Elementary, which has piloted a math intervention program that has led to a more than 50% proficiency rate, up from 15% prior to adopting the coaching and student-led coursework.

That, of course, is the way to go: educationally rather than politically. As for which education programs actually work, well, that’s above my pay grade.

It is surprising that proficiency and math didn’t improve? The students are too busy being politically indoctrinated. From the paper:

Woke Kindergarten, aimed at elementary-age students, is founded on the relatively new concept of abolitionist education, which advocates for abolition, or “a kind of starting over,” said Zeus Leonardo, UC Berkeley education professor. The idea is that certain things can’t be reformed, tweaked or shifted, because they are inherently problematic or oppressive. It’s not about indoctrinating or imposing politics, “but making politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo said.

But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.

This tension is reflective of the nation’s ongoing culture wars, where the right and the left battle to influence what happens in classrooms.

The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”

In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”

Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

If you look at the program, it appears to be aimed almost entirely at black people, so I’m wondering how it’s used in a school that’s 80% Hispanic.  Do the educators assume that both groups are equivalent in both how they identify with the curriculum and how they learn?

On to Woke Words of the Day:

You know what this next one is about:

From the paper:

Hayward Superintendent Jason Reimann said the decision to hire Woke Kindergarten, which was approved by the school board, was made by the school community, including parents and teachers, as part of a federal improvement plan to boost student achievement by improving attendance.

The school community, including parents, teachers and staff, identified a provider to help them do that, Reimann said. He noted a subsequent improvement in student attendance, with 44% of students considered chronically absent last year, down from 61% the year prior. A similar improvement  was seen districtwide.

Well, they boosted attendance a bit, but “student achievement” dropped. Is that a surprise?  And there are books in the curriculum, like the one below! (Never mind if it teaches the kids to dislike Jews). I’d like to see this one:

A video to introduce children to pronouns. Presumably the teacher explains this. Remember, these children are five years old and up (I gather this is for elementary schools, not just kindergartens.)

From the paper:

The superintendent said Woke Kindergarten wasn’t hired to improve literacy and math scores, but that “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement.” He added, “I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”

Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them and describes themselves as “an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”

Here is Gross, the sole identified person under the “who we are” link:

And the Chronicle‘s money quote:

Julie Marsh, a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, cautioned that it can be “problematic when teaching strays too far into the political ideology realm. It’s just a big distraction from some of the bigger purposes of education and what we should be focusing on.”

Well, the school and Ms. Gross have obviously decided that what we should be focusing on instead is progressive ideology, including pro-Palestinian politics as well as abolition of the police, landlords, money and the military. Truly, the purpose of this program is to inculcate kids with a mindset to destroy much of America as it is and replace it with. . . . what?  Perhaps the “Capitol Hill Occupied Zone” (CHAZ) of Seattle, an area taken over by the woke in 2020 after the death of George Floyd? It adopted many of the precepts of Woke Kindergarten.  Since cops were prohibited, crime rose and there were several shootings. CHAZ lasted a month.

Woke Kindergarten shouldn’t last more than it’s already lasted. It’s a travesty and an embarrassment for Hayward, California.

All power to the little people!

Answer: Barter, I guess. h/t: Luana

It’s Sunday, and today we continue with John Avise‘s series on African birds. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it:

South Africa Birds, Part 6 

This week’s post is Part 6 of a 9-part mini-series on birds I photographed in South Africa during an extended seminar trip in 2007.  It shows another batch of species from that avian-rich part of the world.

Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta):

Hartlaub’s Gull (Chroicocephalus hartlaubii):

Helmeted Guineafowl (Numida meleagris):

White-browed Robin-chat (Cossypha heuglini):

Kurrichane Thrush (Turdus libonyana):

Laughing Dove flying (Spilopelia senegalensis):

Southern Double-collared Sunbird (Cinnyris chalybeus), male:

Levaillant’s Cisticola (Cisticola tinniens):

Lilac-breaster Roller (Coracias caudatus):

Little Egret (Egretta garzetta):

Malachite Sunbird (Nectarinia famosa):

Marabou stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer):

Mosque Swallow flying (Cecropis senegalensis):

Namaqua Dove (Oena capensis):

A man who experienced the pandemic entirely from his laptop, explains what he would have done had he actually done anything.

The post Science Based Satire: What I Would Have Done first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Good Lord! I had no idea that there were so many songs about money these days. In this eight-minute segment from Bill Maher’s new show, he decries what the desire for goods and dosh has done to the younger generation and their music. He quotes a lot of old rock lyrics about being poor (I remember ’em all!), and compares them to modern ones extolling Gucci, Givency, Rolex, and so on..  Let’s just say that if I wrote this, I’d be called a “get off my lawn” geezer. But Maher is right, and as funny as usual.

Money quote: “Vomiting an inventory of your possessions doesn’t make you a poet.”

h/t: Enrico