Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this link about how the UK has become the first country in the EU to approve the use of lab grown meat as pet food.
Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.
The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.
It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.
Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.
The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.
If you are like me and enjoy watching murder mystery thrillers, and recently there have been a spate of limited-series TV shows in this genre, you can be excused for thinking that most murders occur in the homes and families of the well-to-do, either upper middle class or very wealthy. In most of them, people live in fancy homes, some even in massive quasi-castles with servants and large landscaped gardens, and drive expensive cars. Even if not that elaborate, the homes that the characters live in seem to be quite expensive and their interiors all spotless and the product of interior designers. These shows seem to be a form of real-estate porn.
[Read more…]
I try to be conscientious about recycling. I carefully separate out plastics according to the number embossed on the bottom, putting only those numbers that are wanted by the recycler in the appropriate receptacle. I also recycle aluminum and other metal cans. My building also recently started accepting organic waste for composting, so now food waste goes into a separate container that is periodically emptied into a common bin outside that is collected by the waster disposal company to be composted.
At least I hope it is.
While I do all these things in an effort to contribute in some small away to protecting the planet and reducing greenhouse gases, I sometimes wonder if all this is mere theater, to divert our attention from the real menace to the planet, and that is the manufacturers who churn out plastics and other forms of packaging in massive amounts without thought for the consequences, and to the fossil fuel industries that are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases.
[Read more…]
There is no question that the shooting at the Trump rally is big news. But it is also a good rule of thumb that in the immediate aftermath of unexpected events like a shooting, the amount of actual factual information available is very small and yet the media feel the need to spend vast amounts of time on it. The inevitable result is that you get huge amounts of mindless blathering as news media try to fill the time without having anything to say.
So you will get reactions from politicians who were nowhere near the scene, from people who were at the scene but did not really see anything, and also the inevitable discussion about what this means for the election, again accompanied by speculations from politicians, political pundits, and ordinary people, none of whom really know anything.
Much of the chatter will be about the possible motives of the shooter, whom the FBI identified as a 20-year old man Thomas Matthew Crooks. They have released his name so people have immediately scoured the internet to find out information using that name, in order to seek a motive that will bolster their preferred narrative. But this is dangerous because few names are unique, though in this case having three names narrows things down, assuming that it is correct. I have often been surprised when searching for someone on the internet to find out how many people have the same name. In addition, inferring motive from biographical data is a practice that has dubious value.
I find it helpful at these times to just tune out the news and occasionally check the headlines to see if anything new has been discovered. It is best to wait until firm information is unearthed before forming any conclusions. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
There is nothing much that I want to add about the shooting at the Trump rally. As is often the case in the immediate aftermath of such an event, there is a lot of confusion and we just have to wait until there is more information and greater clarity.
But it is just another sign of how out of control guns are in the US.
Back in the day when there was only broadcast television in the US, writers tended to be confined to just one episode to tell a story, similar to a feature film. Limited series, where the writers could spread the story over many hours were relatively rare, because they disrupted the weekly TV schedule, not to mention being more expensive to produce. Yet, the examples of blockbuster hits like Roots, Shogun, and The Thorn Birds showed that there was a market for them, because the extended time enabled the telling of complex stories and better character development.
The arrival of streaming services has seen the flourishing of the limited series since there are no scheduling issues. One downside is that freed from some time constraints, some of the writing is a little bloated but on the whole, the limited series fills an important niche between feature films that tell one story and a normal weekly TV show in which each episode had to be largely self-contained within a short time and thus cannot accommodate complex and lengthy storylines.
There is one problem with the current limited-series model and that is how to end it. If the story is planned as a one-off from the very beginning, then there is no problem. You just end the story at the end and that is it. But some producers want to have the option, if the series is a hit, to bring it back a sequel with many of the same characters. But you do not know in advance when making the first series if it will be a hit so you want to end the series in such a way that viewers will look forward to a sequel series if there is one.
[Read more…]
The horrendous behavior by the Israeli government and military in Gaza, where the Palestinian people have been subjected to bombing on a massive scale as well as being attacked by ground troops, and are the targets of an embargo on aid that has resulted widespread famine and starvation, has led to a spate of protests on university campuses. In some of those campuses, university authorities have responded harshly, with presidents calling in riot police, breaking up encampments, and attacking and arresting protestors, even though in almost all cases the protests were peaceful. As a result, there have been a flurry of no-confidence votes brought by faculty against university presidents.
Ostensibly, university presidents are supposed to represent the interests of members of the university community, namely. faculty, students, and staff. If significant segments of those populations are opposed to them and their actions, whom do they represent?
[Read more…]
In yesterday’s post about the 1973 film The Three Musketeers, I mentioned that the director Richard Lester had once had the idea of casting the Beatles in the role of the four Musketeers.
Ever since then, I have been idly thinking about which Beatle would be best to play each role and this is what I ended up with:
Paul – D’Artagnan
John – Athos
Ringo – Porthos
George – Aramis
One can extend this silly speculation even further and ask about casting the Marx brothers in the four roles. One would have to add one of the lesser known brothers such as Zeppo or another serious actor to serve as the foil for the antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in order to make up the quartet.
My choice would be for the serious brother to play D’Artagnan, with Groucho playing the cynical Athos, Harpo playing the somewhat spiritual Porthos, and Chico playing the Lothario Aramis. And of course the long-suffering Margaret Dumont would play Milady.
I actually think that this idea might have worked for the Marx brothers back in the day.
When I read the sprawling novel The Three Musketeers written in 1844 by Alexander Dumas, I was puzzled by two things, both arising from the title. The main character is D’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country who journeys to Paris in search of adventure. He is not a Musketeer himself but dreams of joining that elite squad of warriors who protect the king. He wants to prove his mettle and challenges everyone to duels over the merest slights. He first challenges Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three Musketeers of the book title, but the four of them become friends and go on various adventures. D’Artagnan only becomes a Musketeer towards the end of the book, in recognition of his services. I am not sure why Dumas did not call the book The Four Musketeers or D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, which would have been more accurate.
The other puzzle is that the Musketeers never seem to carry any actual muskets. This was addressed by Simon Kemp, Oxford University Fellow and Tutor in French.
“One of the odder things about Dumas’ novel for the modern reader is its singular lack of muskets.
“In the mid-1620s, when the story is set, the Mousquetaires are the household guard of the French king, Louis XIII, an elite force trained for the battlefield as well as for the protection of the monarch and his family in peacetime. They are named for their specialist training in the use of the musket (mousquet), an early firearm originally developed in Spain at the end of the previous century under the name moschetto or ‘sparrow-hawk’. Muskets were long-barrelled guns, quite unlike the pistols shown in the trailer, and fired by a ‘matchlock’ mechanism of holding a match or burning cord to a small hole leading to the powder chamber. By the 1620s they were not quite as cumbersome as the Spanish originals, which needed to have their barrels supported on a forked stick, but they were still pretty unwieldy devices.
“There are lots of weapons in the opening chapters of Les Trois Mousquetaires, where D’Artagnan travels to the barracks and challenges almost everyone he meets along the way to a duel (including all three of the musketeers). Lots of sword-fighting, but no muskets in sight. One of the musketeers has nicknamed his manservant mousequeton, or ‘little musket’, and that is as near as we get to a gun until page 429 of the Folio edition, when an actual mousqueton makes its first appearance. A mousqueton is not quite a musket, though, and in any case it’s not one of the musketeers who is holding it.
…Their absence from the novel up to this point is simply for the historical reason that the heavy and dangerous weapons were appropriate for the battlefield, not for the duties and skirmishes of peace-time Paris. Even when his heroes are mobilized, Dumas remains reluctant to give his musketeers their muskets.