Month: October 2009

It’s called Asperatus. Here’s the Wiki entry:

The clouds are most closely related to undulatus clouds. Although they appear dark and storm-like, they tend to dissipate without a storm forming. The ominous-looking clouds have been particularly common in the Plains states of the United States, often during the morning or midday hours following convective thunderstorm activity. As of June, 2009 the Royal Meteorological Society is gathering evidence of the type of weather patterns in which undulus asperatus clouds appear, so as to study how they form and decide whether they are distinct from other undulatus clouds.

One more pic after the jump:

Matt Steinglass on the ways of the internet:

I make mistakes of tone all the time, and I say things I don’t have adequate support for. And I’m not going to claim that I will try to eliminate all of them; sometimes a mistake of tone is the price you pay for trying to say something sharp and original, and enough of those bets pay off that it would be unwise to forswear all stylistic adventurism. And on the factual-support count, I think if I really made a commitment to only make claims I had adequate footnoted evidentiary support for, it would be a form of dishonesty. Part of the function of a blog is to air our snap reactions and our generalized rough convictions about the universe, and a lot of that is stuff we couldn’t produce solid support for on the spur of the moment even though it’s clearly true.

Suzy Khimm believes that having "clinched the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, [Rio’s new mayor Eduardo Paes] will likely have carte blanche to do what he wants on the security front." Some context:

Security crackdowns in Rio de Janeiro have often amounted to police raids on the sprawling shantytowns, home to a third of the city’s population, where  drug traffickers have ensconced themselves. The resulting gun battles have killed scores of innocent bystanders–predominately poor and working-class residents of the favelas–thus contributing to the stunning 2,069 murders that happened in Rio last year.

Yes, the traffickers themselves are ruthless, exerting a mafia-like control over the shantytowns they occupy and burning buses full of civilians to retaliate against police pushback. But Brazilian police have fed the cycle of violence by acting outside the law, committing extrajudicial killings and massacres that human rights groups and the U.N. itself have denounced. (Off-duty police officers have even taken to forming their own gang-like militias, which now control some 15 percent of Rio’s slums.) It’s a legacy of Brazil’s oft-forgotten military dictatorship, whose worst atrocities were often carried out by the country’s division of “military police” and who were never held accountable for their crimes. As a result, certain divisions of the military police have continued to act with impunity in an otherwise burgeoning democracy–and the favela crackdowns bring out their worst instincts.

Radley Balko wonders why the police presence at the G20 in Pittsburgh looked more like Tehran in June than America in September. Me too.

A reader writes:

HRC is useless because there is nothing good that can be achieved at the federal level and they and the Democrats know it. You can be as repulsed as you want by them but it won't change the facts. At the federal level the right wing culture warriors own the issue just like they own gun rights. The Democrats won't do anything because they have been trained to passivity by the high voltage shock they get when they go there. 

The only way through that fence is to ignore the Democrats and the culture warriors patrolling the perimeter and get out of

Washington all together.

The whole town is a well rigged deathtrap for gay rights or, frankly, pretty much any civil rights. It will only change when the climate outside of Washington has changed to the degree that resistance to change is more dangerous than the reverse. That day is coming faster than people realize.

What is repulsive really is that the HRC keeps playing important and getting black tie dinners when they simply have no really useful function other than, perhaps, treading water until they can have a function and trying to look like there is progress federally to make you happy. But obviously that's not working either. It time they simply said that there is nothing useful that can be done in Washington right now and asked people to put their money to better use.

Wired reports:

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence. In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief.

People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.

The best book I've read on the new neuroscience of faith is "Fingerprints of God." Accessible, moving, and sober, it's a model of scientific-religious discourse.

The Ig Nobel prizes were announced last week. The prizes are a parody of the Nobel prize and are given for research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Here's the public health prize winner:

Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.

Veterinary medicine:

Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

And the peace prize:

Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

(Hat tip: Sager)

New evidence of the efficacy and lack of side-effects of marijuana in the treatment of several diseases. On the treatment of chronic pain:

“Cannabinoids may augment the analgesic effects of opioids, allowing longer treatment at lower doses with fewer side effects.”

This is an empirical and scientific question, not a social or moral one. And what many do not seem to understand is that marijuana is often most effective in enabling patients to tolerate medication regimens that would otherwise be impossible to maintain: chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis meds, AIDS therapy, etc. And yet it is still close to impossible to do real research on it … because it may give people pleasure. One day, people are going to look back on this small period of prohibition and wonder what on earth were people thinking of.

(By the way, Fortune's recent cover-story on the de facto legalization of pot in California is one of the most thorough and informative I've read. Yes, it's the cover of Fortune. The times they are a-changing.)

Andrea Nill spots a plausible meme:

Michael Froomkin, Professor at the University of Miami School of Law, is convinced that “the same stupid anti-visitor policy that is destroying American higher education” also sunk Chicago’s Olympic bid. Chicago was eliminated during the first round and received the fewest votes. A New York Times article points out:

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience."

Nill notes:

Brazil, which will host the 2016 Olympic summer games in Rio de Janeiro, has a reciprocal visa policy with all countries. US tourists are required to have a $130 advance visa before entry into the country and are fingerprinted and photographed upon arrival — matching US requirements for Brazilians.

Fallows shares his thoughts:

I love Chicago, but Rio is the best choice overall. Probably better for most people in Chicago (I speak from having lived through the ramp-up to the Beijing Olympics these past few years), although some of them may not feel that way right now. Certainly better for the whole spirit of the Games. The US has had a lot of Olympics; no country in South America has had any. I think that these events feel more special, and get a better all-out push from the host country, when they represent some kind of inclusive "first ever" achievement.