Rage

This is Diamond Reynolds speaking out after the murder of Philando Castile.

The Roseville police held her in custody at the precinct after one of their own murdered her boyfriend. They kept her at the police, and separated her from her daughter, when she should have been at the hospital with her dying boyfriend.

This is appalling. The Roseville police are apparently incompetent bumblefucks — whey else would you treat this woman like a criminal?

Motherfuckers. Remember this. The American police force no longer deserves any respect at all. You have to obey them because they’ve got guns, but they have earned no honor.

All problems will be solved in #Rationalia

I am so happy. Most days I wake up to a world of pain and chaos, and don’t know what to do…but now Neil deGrasse Tyson has fixed everything with a single tweet.


Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

Why has no one thought of this before? It’s brilliant!

Let’s try it with a simple test case and see if it works. There’s currently a bit of a tussle between competing interests in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota, which, if you’ve never heard of it, is a gorgeous pristine wilderness in the northern part of my state. On the one hand, you have the fact that it’s beautiful and wild…but that doesn’t seem very logical, especially when, on the other hand, a Chilean company wants to excavate a giant open pit copper mine there.

So, rational reasonable residents of Rationalia, please use your reason and rationality to deliver an evidence-based verdict to this problem. And don’t you try to sneak in human values into your solution, that would be cheating.

I’ll wait on that rational answer, preferably delivered in the form of a mathematical equation with clearly defined, confirmable parameters, before moving on to a slightly more difficult problem.

Aww, OK, I know you’re going to tear through the easy problem fast, so I’ll just give you a hint of what’s next: are justice and equality rational?

I’d recommend you avoid reading any philosophy on that kind of thing — it’ll just muddy the waters of your cold clear solutions — but I suspect it would be a superfluous warning, since all the philosophers in Rationalia are hanging from the lampposts, anyway.

Disarm the police

This is not a radical proposal — it’s actually simple common sense.

This week, Alton Sterling was shot by the police — his “crime” was either having a gun (which, as the NRA frequently tells us, is perfectly legal) or selling CDs, which may have been illegal, but did not to be dealt with with violence. It’s telling that no one can even say what he did wrong to justify his execution.

Yesterday, Philando Castile was killed for having a broken brake light, right here in my state, in Roseville.

Both murders were caught on video. I expect none of the police officers will face any serious penalties for murdering black men.

But I have a serious question about these incidents. Why are the police armed? Do you need a gun to issue traffic citations? I remember when the police would send a representative to my public school — that “Officer Friendly” crap — and they always had a great big scary handgun strapped to their hip. Why? Were they concerned that a firefight might break out in the fifth grade?

All those policemen patrolling the streets, looking for parking infractions or speeders or jaywalkers…they don’t need guns to do their job. Given that many of them are turning out to be bullying cowards, having a gun is even a detriment to their role of defending the law and the public peace.

So disarm them. Keep a few weapons back in the police station that can be issued to deal with specific situations in which they are necessary, but for the most part, guns are totally inappropriate for the job at hand. This would have a number of beneficial effects. For one, the swaggering assholes who need their firearm to be tough would quit, and good riddance to them. For another, the police would actually have to take non-violent approaches to confrontations seriously. Maybe they’d live up to the title of “peace officer”.

I know what the arguments against this proposal will be: but then civilians will be more heavily armed than the police! After all, Philando Castile had a handgun — which he openly declared, and had a permit for — so what is the policeman to do?

That’s easy. If he were scared, the appropriate response would have been to run away, and call for assistance. But in this case, there was no sign that the man in the car was a threat. All escalation was caused by the armed policeman. Except for the fact that the policeman drew a gun and shot the man, this whole incident should have ended with a warning or ticket given to the driver, and everyone would have gone on their way.

You know what else tells me that the police don’t deserve to be armed? What they did with the murdered man’s girlfriend. They had just shot the man, she was weeping and worried about her daughter, and they handcuffed her and took her to the police station, when they should have been helping her get to her boyfriend’s side at the hospital. That made no sense. She was not a threat. She had done nothing wrong, other than maybe having a car with a broken taillight. Yet they treated her like the criminal, after murdering her boyfriend in front of her.

I’m white, and I don’t trust the police. They’re out of control everywhere. It’s time to change.

Meanwhile, in Kentucky…

This week, Nature has an article on the reconstruction of global tectonics during the past 200 million years.

a–c, Maps are separated by 10 Myr. The shapes of the large plates do not change much, whereas the adjustment of the small plates evolves quickly. d, 90 Myr after the first snapshot (a), the distribution of the large plates and smaller plates has evolved substantially. In a–d, the top panels show the viscosity of the mantle (colour scale); the bottom panels show the different boundary types (coloured lines) and plate sizes (shading) within the boxed regions in the top panels (which focus on longitudes between −30° and 90° and latitudes between −30° and 30°). The arrows indicate the direction and magnitude (represented by arrow length) of the mantle flow.

a–c, Maps are separated by 10 Myr. The shapes of the large plates do not change much, whereas the adjustment of the small plates evolves quickly. d, 90 Myr after the first snapshot (a), the distribution of the large plates and smaller plates has evolved substantially. In a–d, the top panels show the viscosity of the mantle (colour scale); the bottom panels show the different boundary types (coloured lines) and plate sizes (shading) within the boxed regions in the top panels (which focus on longitudes between −30° and 90° and latitudes between −30° and 30°). The arrows indicate the direction and magnitude (represented by arrow length) of the mantle flow.

In Science, we can read about a thorough analysis of a site where a mastodon was butchered by North American hunter-gatherers 14,550 years ago.

(A) Location of Page-Ladson in northwestern Florida. (B) Map of the Page-Ladson underwater excavations, showing the entire sinkhole and previous excavation areas, as well as excavation areas and sediment cores reported in this paper. Core 4A is marked with a blue star. Other cores are marked with blue circles. Previous excavations are marked with yellow. Our excavations are marked with red. Contours are in meters below datum. (C) Detailed map displaying the location of bones (gray), drawn to scale, and artifacts (black) recovered from geological Units 3a to 3c and 4a to 4b

(A) Location of Page-Ladson in northwestern Florida. (B) Map of the Page-Ladson underwater excavations, showing the entire sinkhole and previous excavation areas, as well as excavation areas and sediment cores reported in this paper. Core 4A is marked with a blue star. Other cores are marked with blue circles. Previous excavations are marked with yellow. Our excavations are marked with red. Contours are in meters below datum. (C) Detailed map displaying the location of bones (gray), drawn to scale, and artifacts (black) recovered from geological Units 3a to 3c and 4a to 4b

.

And of course, the big news, scientists have put a probe in orbit around Jupiter.

junoart

Meanwhile, in Kentucky…

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Taylor Swift’s vulva and the worst Christian ever?

Holy crap. You think you’ve plumbed the depths of the Internet, and then you find a Christian making sandwich sculptures of her daughters’ crotches and sneering at Taylor Swift’s labia.

Taylor Swift hasn’t had any nude photos published, has she, so how does she know? And what’s wrong with the sandwich on the left? This is weird, ignorant body shaming and using anatomy as a proxy for piety.

She sucked me in. I had to look at this woman’s web site: An Elegant Life by Jennifer: Spreading Positivity through Jesus Christ. You may be thinking that her sandwich art is neither elegant nor positive, and this is pretty repellent stuff. But that’s because you haven’t read the other stuff she writes.

It’s worse.

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Not even terrible people deserve to be sexually harassed

I cannot abide Gretchen Carlson, the awful co-host on the dumbest news show on Fox News, Fox & Friends, so I should be pleased that she has left her job…except that the reason takes all the joy out of it.

Carlson, who just announced that she was no longer working for Fox News on her Facebook page, alleges that she was fired because she rebuffed Ailes’s sexual advances. Carlson, who had spent 11 years at Fox News, alleges that her firing from Fox was a retaliatory move after she not only refused to have sex with Ailes, but also tried to challenge what she claims was unfair treatment from her male colleagues.

Among other things, Carlson alleges that Ailes told her last September that “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.” Carlson also claims that Ailes instructed her to turn around on multiple occasions so he could ogle her posterior, while also requesting that she wear outfits that showed off her figure.

You know, this is the kind of behavior I expected of Fox News, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

Carlson also accuses Steve Doocy, the guy who has been vying with Brian Kilmeade for the title of the dumbest guy on the dumbest show on Fox News, of also harassing her. Who knew Fox News could get even uglier?

Carlson’s full complaint is available online (pdf).

Blown away

cnv

One of the reasons I like attending SF conventions is that there are always smart literate people who will tell you about the books they’re enjoying. At Convergence, I attended a couple of panels that featured Amal El-Mohtar, and she kept raving about this one book that wasn’t even science fiction or fantasy — but she brought it up a couple of times as an excellent example of a story of friendship, and so I opened up my iPad, and looked on Amazon, and there it was for only $1.99, so I thought, “what the heck…” and bought it, and then I read it, and…holy crap, now I’m going to have to read everything El-Mohtar ever recommends. There goes my life.

And really, the rest of you need to go read Code Name Verity like, right now. Or you can tell me you already read it ages ago, and what took me so long? It’s just amazing.

It’s a World War II story about a pilot and a spy aiding the French Resistance, when the spy is captured by the Gestapo and the pilot is stranded behind enemy lines. It’s all about heroism and tragedy, and it’s a love story at the same time, and I swear there were multiple moments when I felt like breaking down and blubbing over it (but as a manly man, of course, I choked it all back and stared stoically at a wall until I’d composed myself). Although I’m still at risk of breaking down if anyone says “KISS ME HARDY” to me.

And all the central characters are women — fiercely courageous women. You’ll come away from it with a different idea of what it means to be brave.

Now I learn that there’s also another novel by the same author, Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire. I may have to wait a while before cracking that one, though, I don’t know how well my fragile masculine veneer can hold up under another blast.

Maybe they should think about the radiation coming out of their televisions…

I’ve heard you can get eyeball cancer from watching bad televison programming.

No, I lied…but apparently they are people making bank off the idea that cell phones cause ear cancer, which is about as ludicrous. An Australian science show has had to retract another episode after it was exposed as credulous bunk. This show accepted without question the fear-mongering nonsense of Devra Davis, who has written a book claiming that cell phones cause cancer.

I mean, really, the show had some of the most obvious examples of bad methodology I’ve seen in a long time. For example, it purports to show that cell phone radiation is penetrating right into people’s heads with pseudocolored imaging: how horrifying, they show a picture of a child holding a cell phone with a bright red tint over the side of her face with the phone, shading into yellows and greens and blues on the far side of her head. But I’m looking at it and wondering what kind of camera they were using to measure that, and I realize it was no camera…these were stock photos that someone had painted over.

Then Davis makes this claim:

The reality is that every single well-designed study ever conducted finds an increased risk of brain cancer with the heaviest use of cell phones, and the range of the risk is between 50% and eight-fold.

Apparently, her definition of “well-designed study” is one that gives her the results she wants, because that is simply not true. Only a few studies have found a very weak correlation between cell phone use and cancer, and those have tended to be case control studies, in which people with those cancers are asked to retrospectively report on how much they’d used cell phones in the past…and they’re clearly over-reporting their frequency. So quite contrary to what Davis is saying, the studies that find an effect tend to be methodologically flawed.

Here’s a believable analysis of Devra Davis’ work.

Disconnect [Davis’ book] is a good example of the kind of material used by the EMF alarmist movement. Virtually all the alarmist studies that Davis cites used a poor methodology and/or have not been replicated in follow up studies. In fact, most have been refuted by far more comprehensive and rigorous studies. In many cases, serious flaws have been found with studies that show harm. It is at odds with the conclusions of mainstream expert groups such as the SCENHIR (* 5 P 8): It is concluded from three independent lines of evidence (epidemiological, animal and in vitro studies) that exposure to RF fields is unlikely to lead to an increase in cancer in humans. Disconnect is designed to bamboozle and scare the lay reader, not to inform.

But the creators of that science show shouldn’t have needed to read that — they should have been able to see the hokey ‘evidence’ Davis was throwing at them and seen that there was something fishy going on.

If Australians want to be afraid of something, they ought to step outside and look at that giant ball of plasma in the sky that is showering them with intense radiation all the time. Does anyone seriously think that cell phone emissions are at all comparable?