Peter Watts’ lucid, grim take on the IPCC report is a must-read.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC reportcame out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.^[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.

We have twelve years to show results.

If we don’t pull all these things off— if, for example, we only succeed in meeting the flaccid 2°C aspirations of the Paris Accords— then we lose all the coral. We lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Shelf (not that it isn’t already circling the bowl, of course). Twice as many people suffer “aggravated water scarcity” than at 1.5°C; 170% more of the population deals with fluvial flooding. The increase in global wildfire frequency passes 60% and keeps going. Marine fisheries crash pole to pole. The number of species that loses at least half their traditional habitat is 2-3 times higher than would have been the case at 1.5°C. It goes on.

There’s no real point in worrying about a measly 2° increase, though, because on our current trajectory we’ll blow past 3° by century’s end (the Trump administration is predicting 4°, which is why they’re so busy dismantling whatever pitiful carbon-emission standards the US had already put into place; what’s the point of reducing profit margins if we’re headed straight for perdition no matter what we do?). We don’t really know what happens then. Methane clathrates released from a melting Arctic could turn the place into Venus, for all I know.

You probably know all this. You’ve had two weeks to internalize it; time to recoil, to internalize the numbers, to face facts.

To shrug, from what I can see.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

When herd immunity drops 🙁

Fewer than 4 out of 10 adults in the United States got flu shots last winter, the lowest rate in seven seasons and one likely reason that the 2017-2018 season was the deadliest in decades.

Reports released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide new details outlining the severity of the past flu season, during which more people were killed by seasonal influenza than in any other since the 1970s.

Flu vaccination is the main way to prevent sickness and death caused by flu. But last season, vaccination coverage among adults was 37.1 percent, a decrease of 6.2 percentage points from the previous season. That’s the lowest rate for adults 18 and older since 2010-2011. For many years, overall vaccination coverage has remained flat, with less than half of the U.S. population getting vaccinated. But the most recent drop has caused concern among experts.

Drop in adult flu vaccinations may be factor in last season’s record-breaking deaths, illnesses

Via Celene 💜

Tom Waits was born in the back of a boxcar in 1890, the son of a feral dog and a haunted phonograph. He has survived for over a century by splitting fragments of his vagabond spirit into horcruxes, enchanted objects that will keep him immortal unless they are destroyed beyond repair. These are the 5 horcruxes we know of, and here’s their definitive ranking.

https://thehardtimes.net/hardstyle/the-definitive-ranking-of-tom-waits-5-horcruxes/

Good info from a source I respect. Worth reading especially the sections on any of those myths that you believe. You may not ultimately agree on any given topic, but they certainly raise good points.

https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/

This really is just the weirdest damn thing. It’s not the least bit clear to me why this would be true.

This morning I was reading Terry Tao’s overview of the work of Yves Meyer and ran across this line:

The powers φ, φ², φ³, … of the golden ratio lie unexpectedly close to integers: for instance, φ¹¹ = 199.005… is unusually close to 199.

I’d never heard that before, so I wrote a little code to see just how close golden powers are to integers.

Here’s a plot of the difference between φⁿ and the nearest integer:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/03/22/golden-powers-are-nearly-integers/

Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. “Pickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book Triumph of the City, deals at length with urban crime trends. “I think these skills have been tragically lost. You’ve got to respect the skill of some pickpocket relative to some thug coming up to you with a knife. A knife takes no skill whatsoever. But to lift someone’s wallet without them knowing …”

Marcus Felson, a criminologist at Texas State University who has spent decades studying low-level crime, calls pickpocketing a “lost art.” Last year, a New York City subway detective told the Daily News that the only pickpockets left working the trains anymore were middle-aged or older, and even those are few and far between. “You don’t find young picks anymore,” the cop told the paper. “It’s going to die out.” A transit detective in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates the Boston area’s bus, commuter rail, and subway system, concurred via e-mail. “Pickpockets are a dying breed,” he wrote. “The only known pickpockets we encounter are older, middle-aged men; however, they are rarely seen on the system anymore.”

The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons—organized pickpocket gangs—at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ‘80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money—a quarter here, a buck there—from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.” Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and ‘90s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro’s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was “out of control” at that time. “I made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.”

That was then. In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing…

https://slate.com/culture/2011/02/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states.html

Replication and standardization are so hard-wired into our world that we forget how the unstandardized world functioned. A Massachusetts inventor named Thomas Blanchard in 1817 created a lathe that made wooden lasts for shoes. Cobblers still made the shoes, but now the sizes could be systematized. “Prior to that,” says Winchester, “shoes were offered up in barrels, at random. A customer shuffled through the barrel until finding a shoe that fit, more or less comfortably.” Before long, Blanchard’s lathe was making standardized gun stocks at the Springfield Armory and then at its successor, the Harpers Ferry Armory, which began turning out muskets and rifles by the thousands on machines powered by water turbines at the convergence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. “These were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere,” Winchester writes. “They were machine-made in their entirety, ‘lock, stock, and barrel.’” It is perhaps no surprise that the military played from the first, and continues to play, a leading and deadly part in the development of precision-based technologies and methods.

The same methods that enabled mass production of guns led to sewing machines, combine harvesters, and bicycles. By the time of the American Civil War, precision engineers in England had learned to machine metal to a tolerance of a millionth of an inch. High-velocity rifles followed, and precision timepieces. A new century, a few more orders of magnitude, and then automobiles. On one side of the Atlantic, Winchester admires the Silver Ghost of Henry Royce and Charles Rolls, “the nonpareil, the exemplar of all that is right about engineering accomplished to the very highest of standards, and with the highest level of precision.” On the other side, though, Henry Ford was advertising his Model A—“made of few parts, and every part does something”—followed by the Models B, C, F, K, N, and, finally, T, the Tin Lizzie. During the same period that the Rolls-Royce factory turned out almost eight thousand Silver Ghosts, Ford made more than 16 million of his motorcars.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/precision-accuracy-perfectionism/

On William James and the relationship between religion, drugs, and the law:

From a Jamesian perspective, religious toleration represents not just a commitment to individual freedom, not simply a hands-off policy on the part of the government toward questions of ultimate truth, but rather an affirmative decision to shelter certain useful though potentially false beliefs. Drug use, from this perspective, represents a similar sort of decision, but on the level of the individual rather than of the society. Just as a society might choose to nurture or tolerate certain sorts of illusions, pluralistically embracing both atheistic and religious subcultures, so, too, might an individual decide–as did James–to divide his or her life into periods of sober rationality and ecstatic religious intoxication. Drugs can allow even the most skeptical people, those who by constitution or upbringing are not susceptible to religious insights, to experience temporary periods of pleasing falsehood. Indeed, this is the real religious significance of drug use, from the Jamesian point of view–that it lets us choose, if only vaguely and temporarily, what to believe.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/

‘From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

‘Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—?’

http://buttersafe.com/2018/10/11/ah-zombies/