Obsidian Wings

An paper microscope open thread

by liberal japonicus

A little early, but what the heck, the doctor is going into double time. A paper microscope, you say? 

Manu Prakash, a professor at Stanford University and his students have developed a microscope out of a flat sheet of paper, a watch battery, LED, and optical units that when folded together, much like origami, creates a functional instrument with the resolution of 800 nanometers – basically magnifying an object up to 2,000 times.

Called Foldscope, the microscope is extremely inexpensive to manufacture, costing between fifty-cents and a dollar per instrument. And because the microscope is assembled primarily from paper and optical components the size of a grain of sand, it is virtually indestructible.

Foldscope also differs from the microscopes typically found in science labs because it’s not only portable, but it also has the ability to project an image on any surface, allowing a larger group of people the ability to look at an image simultaneously.

The Yahoo video wasn't available here, but below the fold is another video of Manu Prakash, a professor at Stanford University who, along with his students developed this slick puppy. TCFW 

The truly astonishing revelation in Gabriel Sherman's bio of Roger Ailes

by Doctor Science

I've just finished reading (well, partly reading -- dipping into for the bits that interested me) Gabriel Sherman's biography of Roger Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News -- and Divided a Country. It's interesting, but very little of it is *surprising*. I mean, I already knew Ailes' politics and the rough trajectory of his career, from The Mike Douglas Show to Nixon to Fox News. And it was hard to miss learning about his personality, which is loud, in every way.

But there was one revelation that really surprised me. Writing about the situation at News Corp in 2013:

When one sales executive pointed out in a meeting that Fox's audience demographics skewed older than those of its cable news rivals, Ailes did not believe him. "Our demos suck," the executive siad. "No they don't!" Ailes barked. When Ailes was shown the numbers, he seemed genuinely surprised. "Why didn't I know about this?" he asked. The truth was, over the years, executives, fearing Ailes's wrath, had shielded him from bad news.

Roger Ailes has many flaws, but he *really* knows television. For him to have lost track of his demos -- normally the core of the TV business -- is astonishing, even though FoxNews gets almost all its profits from subscriber fees, not ads.

Reading the book, I can definitely understand why Ailes's underlings didn't tell him anything he didn't want to hear: he's a big believer in screaming, cursing, and threats as interpersonal skills. I was really taken aback by how much enraged yelling Sherman reports going on in various corporate or political offices. In Ailes's case, he *was* raised by wolves -- or rather, a violently abusive father (wolves deeply resent the comparison). What I don't understand is why this sort of rageaholic behavior seems to be widely tolerated in business.

Ailes created Fox News, and he made it in his own image: easily angered, paranoid, simplistic, and fond of blonde women. He gets his own information only from people who work for him, who are flattering and/or fearful, and *they* get their information from each other. This is epistemic closure, and Ailes is both its chief architect and one of its victims. He thought Romney was going to win, too, which as far as I'm concerned is clear proof that he was too caught in his own hall of mirrors to see his way out. It's got many of the ingredients of tragedy, except that I cannot pity Ailes, he's too unaffected by the damage he does to the country.

China and the future

by liberal japonicus

I'm back from an interesting trip to Siem Reap and Yangon. Thought not a huge force in Siem Reap, Yangon was overflowing with Chinese: workers, businessmen, tourists. In fact, as we were leaving Aung San Suu Kyi's house, a busload of Chinese tourists pulled up. 

At least for me, it's hard not to draw a parallel between the conquest of the US frontier, where we basically funneled immigrants out to take over the rest of the country and the way China is sending people everywhere to build, though I don't know who the Chinese equivalents of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Judge Roy Bean are.

This New Yorker article looks at the MH370 disappearance and sees another way they are growing to be just like us.

Your sickbed reading list open thread

by Doctor Science

It's been a mucous-laden day at Lake Wobegon, so I've spent most of my few waking hours reading an old favorite, Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Tailors. When I was a teenager, every time I was sick in bed for a few days -- three or four times a year, I guess -- I would re-read The Lord of The Rings. Later, Dorothy Sayers became one of my standard comfort re-reads. I haven't re-read much of anything in the past couple of decades, so going back to Lord Peter for this sickness gave me the ideal combination of comforting familiarity with a breath of fresh air, the sense of being in a different place.

Talk about your favorite sickbed reading, or whatever.

The angel roof of St Wendreda's Church, in March, Cambridgeshire, a glorious example of an angel roof. Looking at pictures of such roofs, I don't quite see how the characters got up to the angels, as required by the plot of the Nine Tailors. I shall have to see if some fan has put together a picture of what Fenchurch St. Paul looked like.

Photo by Martin Sutton.

Who made torture respectable?

by Doctor Science

I'm on the second day of a medium-bad head cold, so I'm going to do something I don't generally approve of: posting with very few links. Let me know if there's a point you REALLY need a source for, and I'll see if I can dig something up.

Ever since news about US "enhanced interrogation" policies came out (2003, maybe? before the 2004 election, I'm pretty sure) I've been both horrified and confused. The horrified part is obvious, because I grew up believing that every American truly agreed with this WWII poster:

This WII US propaganda poster uses an image by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-American (Issei) artist.

Not only did I think everyone agreed that torture was reprehensible and beyond the pale, I thought we all agreed that it doesn't work. At least, it doesn't work if you want *information*. What it gives you is *confirmation* of what you, the torturer, already know or want to be true. Torture is how you get people to confess to witchcraft or capitalist plots against Stalin. I seem to remember an incident in the 90s when some (US?) pilots were shot down over Iraq, and were displayed on Iraqi TV a couple days later confessing to all sort of things (around the bruises and lacerations). Everyone basically laughed at Saddam, saying "it was obviously torture! none of this *counts*!" and moved on.

But then, almost immediately after 9/11, that all went out the window, wheee! As far as I can tell, the move to approve and rely on torture was considered a "no-brainer": so reliable that any moral qualms could be dismissed.

Where did this confidence come from? What gave the people who planned and authorized torture the idea that this was a reliable way to gather information?

My brain is extremely muddy (snotty) right now, so I can't work my way through all the logical possibilities. The two that spring to mind are:

a) They were snowed by the CIA, which never believed that tortured didn't work.

b) The images of torture that come to mind -- that have the most "salience", as psychologists say -- are likely to be from movies and television. After 9/11, 24 did a lot of the pro-torture work, but maybe there was enough beforehand to give everyone involved the impression that it works. At least when the "good guys" do it -- where the good guys are not, as the WWII poster suggests, *defined* by not torturing people.

So what do those of you whose heads aren't full of mucous think?

prison

<i>by russell</i>

the issue of prisons in the US came up in another thread.  it was discussed briefly, and I thought it might deserve a more thorough discussion.

so, here it is.

what strikes me about the prison system in the US:

• the sheer number of people in the system.  somewhere between 2.2 and 2.4 million people are incarcerated, and almost another 5 million are on probation or parole.  that's almost 7 million people, almost 3% of the entire adult population.  that is EXTRAORDINARY.
• the number of people in the system whose most serious offense is some kind of drug offense.  about half of the federal prisoners, and about 20% of state prisoners, are in this category.
• the frequently bizarre and inconsistent sentencing practices that end up putting people in prison for decades for trivial offenses, and that impose different sentences for, for example, powder cocaine vs rock.
• the use of solitary confinement for extended periods, which demonstrably makes people psychotic.
• the sheer brutality and violence that prevails in prisons.  physical violence and sexual abuse and predation are an assumed part of prison life, for both men and women.
• private, for-profit prison operators, who spend millions of dollars lobbying federal and state governments to encourage and maintain incarceration programs and lengthy sentencing regimes.

IMO all of this points to a broken and dysfunctional corrections system.  It seems, to me, to desparately need reform, but I have no idea where to even begin.

Sorry for the no-links no-cites post, that stuff is time-consuming, and I just wanted to get this up so folks could discuss.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Threat of the Golden Rule

by Doctor Science

Legal and social barriers to same-sex marriage equality in the US are crumbling with startling speed, faster than anyone predicted 20 years ago, or even 5. Catholics Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, and Eastern Orthodox (former Baptist, former Catholic) Rod Dreher have been having a conversation about how the losing side should act, and how they should expect to be treated. Dreher, in particular, feels that conservatives (or "trads") in certain professions (law, the media, entertainment) face significant social stigma for their religiously-motivated attitudes, and that in time there may be legal constraints on them for their beliefs.

What Dreher is afraid of is the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule looks like really simple, even milquetoasty, kindergarten-level morality: "Do as you would be done by". But it is also a threat, especially to people who have been in positions of power or privilege and then lose them.

If you've treated people badly, if you've scorned, despised, and harassed them, then you've laid down a precedent about how you "would be done by". If the tables turn, why should expect anything other than your own medicine?

All the participants in this conversation admit that religious groups have, in the past, treated non-straight people really badly, to a degree that it is right to call "persecution". Dreher says:

Losing privilege is not the same as persecution, of course, but neither is gaining privilege a guarantee that you will be fair to the losers. And though it is right that those on the losing side of a culture war should try to be proportionate in their response to defeat, it is unfair and unrealistic to expect them to accept without protest whatever terms that the victors may impose on them.

What he doesn't want to notice is that active persecution would be "fair", in the sense of the Golden Rule.

The trouble with this sort of eye-for-an-eye fairness, of course, is that you end up with the whole world blind. The victors have to be merciful, to treat the losers better than they themselves were treated when they were on the downside -- to set up a situation where the Golden Rule means we all learn to respect each other, whether we deserve it or not.

But just because we respect each other doesn't mean we need to respect every *behavior*. As Henry Farrell points out,

Bigotry derived from religious principles is still bigotry.

Indeed, John Holbo pointed out in the comments there that the word "bigot" originally meant a religious hypocrite, so you might say that religious bigotry is the most authentic kind.

Your Pi Day open thread

It's Pi Day! We're going to make a sour-cherry pie, from the cherries we picked last Cherry Season Day. Around here cherry season lasts, literally, about 3 hours, on the morning of the Saturday after the summer solstice. We show up at the orchard and pick 6-10 pounds of sour cherries. Then we pit them and freeze them, one pie's worth at a time, to last the rest of the year.

Talk about your Pi Day plans, or whatever.

Milk-first versus tea-first

by Doctor Science

One of the traditional British class markers is whether you put milk in your cup before you add tea, or vice versa. For the past 150 years at least, tea-first has been upper-class, milk-first middle class (or lower). I have a theory about this, which is mine.

Victoria Moore says:

In the 18th century it is thought that aristocrats would pour the milk first, perhaps so as not to stain or crack their fine china. By the early 20th century this social habit had reversed: putting your milk in first had come to be seen as an irredeemably middle-class affliction. In Noblesse Oblige, published in 1956, Nancy Mitford refers scathingly to 'MIFs' (Milk in Firsts), whom she defines as being 'non-U' (non-upper class).

On the other hand, in Tea Culture Beverly Dubrin says:

According to speculation, the lower classes could not afford high quality porcelain cups, and pouring the milk in first prevented lesser quality earthenware cups from cracking.

If Moore is correct that MIF started out as "U", why did the custom switch?

Here's my theory: MIL (milk-in-last) is a better way to get your chosen balance of tea & milk, because if the tea is being poured into a cup from a teapot you don't know exactly how strong or weak it is until it's in your cup. So, as porcelain manufacture improved into the 19th century, the upper classes would naturally move to MIL, to get their ideal cup of tea.

I think the non-U classes stayed (or became) MIF not because of problems with their cups, but because of problems with their milk.

My experience is that if your milk is in any way "off", it will curdle when you put it straight into hot tea, and then you have to dump the whole cup. If you put the milk in first, by itself, you can tell if it's off before you waste any tea. In addition, adding the tea to the milk warms the milk up more gradually than just hitting the cool milk with hot tea, so if your milk is borderline fresh it’s much less likely to curdle when it’s MIF.

Because the Industrial Revolution started in Britain, by 1800 most of the middle classes (who were non-U but could afford tea) no longer were in close contact with farms. Only the Upper classes could move to MIL -- to get an ideal cup of tea, and to demonstrate that they didn't have to settle for milk that wasn't perfectly fresh.

Conversations with Britfriends these days indicate that MIL is more popular with all classes than it used to be, because many Brits now make tea by the cup with teabags. MIF doesn't work with this system because it cools the water too much before the tea is done steeping.

This is my theory, which is mine. I don't know how much MIF/MIL persists as a class marker in the UK, nor do I know how much it was ever one in Scotland. In the US, tea is more often drunk cold than hot, and hot tea is more often served with lemon than with milk. Except for chai, which IIRC only really hit the US in the 90s, and which gets around the whole MIF/MIL distinction by brewing the tea in (diluted) milk.

The Tea, by Mary Cassatt. It's easy to find 19th-century paintings of well-to-do women drinking tea, but difficult to find pictures of middle-class families or workers sharing a tea meal or taking a tea-break.

Your downhill pothole slalom open thread

by Doctor Science

LJ is just passing through, on the way to Myanmar, so I'll just stick this up.

In a normal year, the NJ Dept. of Transportation says it fills 160,000 potholes. In the past five months alone, it's filled 100,000 -- and there've got to be another 100,000 out there. Quite a few of them are on one of the roads approaching my house, to which my post title refers -- getting here now resembles training for one of those new Winter Olympics sports.

Talk about road conditions where you are, or whatever.