UK closes last coal power plant

Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, around 1780, and a major reason was that coal was plentiful and accessible. On September 30 2024, its last coal-powered electrical generating plant closed, replaced by natural gas, nuclear, and renewables:

This was a country powered by coal — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.

The first coal-fired electric plant in the world was built in England in 1882. The term “smog” was coined here, too.

Now Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources.

We’re moving into the future. Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/29/uk-last-coal-power-plant/ (about 1,400 words). Also see https://xkcd.com/2992/ (remember to hover over the pic for an extra joke).

And just one good news item from this week’s Fix the News:

A lead-free future
Lead poisoning kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. Now the first-ever global public-private partnership has committed $150 million to end lead poisoning in children in developing countries once and for all. Over the past few years Bangladesh, Malawi and Madagascar have all achieved outsized impact in fighting lead expose with low-cost and effective approaches.

Font follies

So some fonts get together to chat: Times New Roman, Garamond, Futura, Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Papyrus, Comic Sans.

Times New Roman: “Do I miss being default font? No. Like I told Calibri back in 2007, I’ve done my time.”

Garamond: “Yes, you were made for newspapers darling. You should not be languishing in double-spaced essays written by eighth-graders.”

Futura: “Serifs. I get a headache just looking at them.”

Courier: “Back in my day, we didn’t have none of this variable width hanky-panky, see?”

1 minute 16 seconds: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3QVZHDx8A6/?igsh=MWVvanczdWZua2RmMA%3D%3D. Remember to click the speaker icon at the lower right if you’re not hearing it. Also see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KnIZFlHI3-I for a Star Trek item, or https://www.youtube.com/@ElleCordova/featured for yet more of Elle’s quick videos!

And just two of many good news items from this week’s Fix the News:

Towards the elimination of a Biblical scourge
A new WHO update on Hansen’s disease—more commonly known as leprosy—shows that from 2014 through 2023 ((just ten years!)), the number of new cases globally decreased by 14.6%, from 214,001 to 182,815. New leprosy cases among children also significantly dropped during this time, from 18,862 cases in 2014 to 10,322 in 2023, representing a decrease of 45.3%. WHO

Domestic violence in America down by two-thirds in 30 years
In September 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act, the country’s first federal law criminalising domestic violence and providing support for community-based efforts against sexual assault. According to the FBI, between 1993 and 2022, domestic violence rates dropped by 67%. President Biden, who authored and championed VAWA as a senator, has announced that future renewals will include over $690 million in grants to support survivors. PBS

“Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice”

I was just stopped in my (reading) tracks by this headline. And I knew I hadn’t been smoking anything.

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/09/05/see-through-transparent-mice-food-dye/. If you can’t access that, try https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/scientists-use-food-dye-found-in-doritos-to-make-see-through-mice/.

How does bright yellow food coloring turn tissue transparent? To understand why, it’s essential to consider the reason things look opaque in the first place. The bits of our body — cell membranes, proteins, fluids — all cause light to refract, or bend.

If light bends just once — think of a beam of sunlight hitting a sheet of glass — the image it carries is still mostly clear. But as light refracts over and over, off fluids, proteins and other cellular miscellany, it scatters in lots of directions. All that scattered light, Rowlands said, makes it hard to see through — “like watching TV through a glass of milk.”

…By applying textbook physics principles, the researchers were able to screen for molecules that they predicted would, when absorbed by the body, change how biological tissues refract light. They hit on tartrazine, dissolved in water. But the proof was in the experiment. They soaked a slice of raw chicken in a tartrazine solution and found that the chicken turned clear as they increased the amount of tartrazine. When they rubbed that solution onto the skin of mice, they saw internal organs come into view. The tartrazine reduced the amount of refraction, the light scattered less and the tissue appeared clear.

When the dye was washed off, the tissue returned to normal and the scientists reported “minimal systemic toxicity” in the mice.

Other news sites had less dramatic headlines (eg The Guardian: “Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent”; CNN: “Scientific discovery that turns mouse skin transparent echoes plot of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’”.)

And just two of many good news items from this week’s Fix the News:

Cigarette smoking in the United States is at an 80-year low
When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. In the most recent Consumption Habits poll, 11% of U.S. adults say they have smoked cigarettes in the past week, matching the historical low of 2022. A major reason for the decline is that cigarette smoking has plunged among young adults, previously the most likely age group to smoke. Gallup

Ozempic and Wegovy’s final frontier could be ageing
When people lose weight, it has a whole lot of further health benefits: lower chances of heart failure, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, amongst others. A new study that tracked more than 17,600 overweight or obese people who took semaglutide for three years has found that they died at a lower rate from all causes. “It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process.” BBC

Scamming the scammers

Apate’s aim is to defeat global phone scams with conversational AI, taking advantage of systems already in place where telecommunications companies divert calls they can identify as coming from scammers.

Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a “dad’s joke” on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. “The kids had a very good laugh,” he says. “And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don’t talk to others.

“Scamming the scammers, if you like.”

So AI bots are wasting the scammer’s time, and (I like this bit particularly) they are learning what is most effective at doing that. Link (1,100 words): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/07/ai-chatbots-phone-scams.

Scammers are trying to make a “sale.” If you waste their time, they can’t be scamming someone else. My own experience is that a phone scammer usually asks for the expiration date on my credit card early in the conversation, so I just say, “Oh, the card’s in the other room, hold on a second.” Then I put the phone on the desk and go on with other stuff for ten minutes.

Some things to watch for:

Scammers can use a fake Caller ID. The number that is displayed is not trustworthy.
Government agencies don’t contact you via phone. I got a very realistic-sounding scammer pretending to need my Medicare number in order to send me a new card. She even knew the first two and last two letters/numbers… which in fact are the same for everyone, or something. (I told her I’d check with the Social Security website.)
“Windows” doesn’t call you either. It’s a scam.
If you think a caller is a scammer, don’t even pick up. That tells them that at least they found a real person, and you’ll get more calls. (Unless you want to chat and waste their time.) A real person will leave voicemail.
Never use the word “Yes” with a phone scammer. Supposedly this can be recorded as proof that you agreed to sign up for something.
Email: No real site will email you asking you to enter a password. Hover your mouse over the link. That will show you the actual link, which can be entirely different from the displayed link.

And just two of many good news items from Fix the News:

A ‘liberal, democratic, non-discriminatory, non-sectarian Bangladesh’
Following the ‘people’s victory‘ after student protests in July, the country’s new caretaker leader, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, has called for a ‘new Bangladesh‘, promising free, fair, and participatory elections and emphasising the role of citizens in deciding the government’s fate. It’s still early days—but if even half those promises are met, it will be a huge victory for democracy. Time

US cancer death rates have fallen by a third since 1999
A new CDC report has found that cancer death rates dropped from 200.7 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 142 per 100,000 in 2022. This equates to roughly three million additional Americans alive today due to reduced cancer death rates over the past two decades. The decrease is credited to advances in treatment, technological innovations, and lower smoking rates. Baltimore Sun

Polling problems

This does not bode well for pre-election polls…

These are strange times for survey science. Traditional polling, which relies on responses from a randomly selected group that represents the entire population, remains the gold standard for gauging public opinion, said Stanford political scientist Jon Krosnick. But as it’s become harder to reach people on the phone, response rates have plummeted, and those surveys have grown exponentially more expensive to run. Meanwhile, cheaper, less-accurate online polls have proliferated.

“Unfortunately, the world is seeing much more of the nonscientific methods that are put forth as if they’re scientific,” said Krosnick.

…In one test of opt-in polling, 12 percent of US adults younger than 30 claimed that they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine. The true figure, of course, is approximately 0 percent.

Full article (approx 2,800 words): https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/the-job-of-pollsters-has-become-much-harder-heres-how-theyre-responding/.

And more good news from Fix the News:

Medicare negotiates prescription drug prices in US for first time
The White House has secured new, lower Medicare prices for ten of the most costly drugs, potentially saving billions of dollars a year for taxpayers and beneficiaries. The reductions, which range from 38% for the blood cancer drug Imbruvica to 79% for the diabetes drug Januvia, take effect in 2026. ‘No one should be forced to choose between filling their prescriptions or filling their grocery carts.’ NPR

Kids these days

So I was tired of “Things are so terrible! Kids these days! The world is coming to an end!” when people suffered a stolen bike or a dog owner not cleaning up after their dog. I noticed these markings on my walk, took a couple pics, and tried to be funny on NextDoor:

Comments generally fell into three categories:

(a) They got the humor and added to it: “I see them doing it sometimes. They’re bold. They wear yellow safety vests and act like they’re some kind of construction crew!”

(b) Literal: “It’s construction markings.” Got it in one try.

Here’s the whole thread:

This was long enough. Good News next week.

Breakthroughs giving new hope in treating cancer

At the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference, doctors, scientists and researchers shared new findings on ways to tackle the disease.
The event in Chicago, attended by about 44,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions…

The world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results doctors described as “extremely impressive”… Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years, data presented at the conference showed.

Delegates were briefed about two new tests aimed at providing an early warning sign for two of the world’s most common cancers.

The first, for prostate cancer, involves a DNA sample collected with a simple spit test. Trial results suggest it is more accurate than standard tests. It works by looking for genetic signals in the saliva that are linked to prostate cancer. The second, a blood test, predicts the risk of breast cancer returning three years before tumours show up on scans. The breakthrough could help more women beat the disease permanently.

60% of patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took lorlatinib were still alive five years later with no progression in their disease, data presented at the conference showed. The rate was 8% in patients treated with a standard drug, the trial found.

Doctors hailed the trial results as “off the chart”.

Full article (950 words with lots o links): https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/07/what-are-off-the-charts-breakthroughs-cancer-treatments.

And more good news from Fix the News:

Fewer children are dying from air pollution: The State of Global Air (SoGA) 2024 report has recorded a 53% drop in air pollution deaths between 2000 and 2021 for the world’s population of children under five. Deaths from household air pollution have decreased by 36%… 14.7 million fewer people go hungry in Brazil: A new UN report shows that severe food insecurity has fallen by a colossal 85% in just one year, from 8% in 2022 to 1.2% in 2023… China’s carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024, the first quarterly fall since COVID-19, and the first ever structural decline due to growth in renewables. Electricity generation from wind and solar grew by 171 TWh in the first half of the year, and the increase in the number of EVs on China’s roads cut demand for transport fuels by approximately 4%.

Flight safety video

The Hobbit was filmed in New Zealand. Air New Zealand takes advantage… (4 min 38 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOw44VFNk8Y. This one is based on the third movie, others include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):

The proportion of the world’s adults with a net worth of less than $10,000 has plunged from 75% in 2000 to less than 40% in 2023. The percentage of American workers earning under $15 an hour has dropped from 32% to 13% in just two years. The US Internal Revenue Service just collected a record $1 billion in past-due taxes from millionaires. Gavi’s Big Catch-Up begins, allocating 200 million vaccine doses to children missed during COVID-19. Saudi Arabia announces an unprecedented pension reform package, addressing critical issues such as retirement age and maternity leave. Johnson & Johnson agrees not to enforce its patent on critical TB medication in South Africa.

Why no Roman industrial revolution?

Why did the industrial revolution happen in Great Britain in the 1700s and not during the Roman Empire (or anywhere else) in, say, 200 AD? It turns out to be complicated, and modern historians took a while to fully unravel this.

The simple answer is, no one else had the multiple prerequisites. Great Britain was running out of wood for fuel, did have coal easily available up to a point, had practice (with all of Europe) producing precision metal cylinders (admittedly for cannon, but the knowledge was adaptable to steam engines), and had a use for the power from the steam engines. Two uses, in fact: pumping water out of the coal mines as they got deeper (and what luck! right there is the fuel for the engines!), and textile manufacturing on scales that had not previously existed. Neither the Romans nor any other economy had all these features in one place.

A long story (5,800 words) but fascinating to see how the modern world was created: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):

22 years after The Wire, Baltimore reports 36% decline in homicides
According to the Baltimore Police Department, these numbers for the first half of 2024 are on top of a 20% reduction in homicides in 2023. The new figures also show that non-fatal shootings declined by approximately 30% in H1 2024. City leaders have attributed this to community outreach and long-term efforts to regain public trust as well as ‘the collective efforts of [the] entire public safety apparatus.’ Hoodline

From the internet 2015 (part 1)

More stuff I saved because it was funny or useful or otherwise worth saving:

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(Still Drinking, http://www.stilldrinking.org/god-s-not-dead-a-film-student-s-review)

“Don’t try to be clever. Just tell the truth.” I am absolutely behind this extremely reusable piece of advice that works in any context outside of politics, job interviews, and first dates.

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Article in ArsTechnica: New neural implant reads a person’s intentions to control robotic arm

Erik Sorto, 34, has been paralysed from the neck down for the past 13 years. However, thanks to a ground-breaking clinical trial, he has been able to smoothly drink a bottle of beer using a robotic arm controlled with a brain implant.

To which one commenter replied:

I admire this man’s priorities.

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A Grand Master was talking to another GM at the chess club.

“I played an anonymous opponent online last night. He was good, I think it was God.”

The other GM replied, “God? Really? You think God plays anonymous chess online?”

“Yes, He was really good.”

“Maybe it was Carlsen, he’s played anonymously before.”

“No, He wasn’t that good.”

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QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.

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It’s gibberish all the way down.

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Article title in The Register, 9/2015 (this headline made me get a subscription):

MAMMOTH MAMMOTH fossil find with BONUS BISON BONE BONANZA

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Karen Ravn (via Ad Astra):

Only as high as I reach can I grow,
only as far as I seek can I go.
Only as deep as I look can I see,
only as much as I dream can I be.

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I just got a message from USA Today that Xerox split into two companies. I bet they both look exactly alike…

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Infinity4011:

I have been trying to find a Toyota dealership that will even take a custom order for a new Tacoma. They all try to sell me last year’s model with similar options, or this year’s new model with different options but the same color. I don’t want a red crew cab automatic with a short bed. I want a red access cab with a long bed and a manual transmission, and a specific set of options. I don’t want a 2015 model, even if it’s close. I want a NEW model Tacoma, but the dealerships where I live just look at me like I’m trying to buy a car and pay with bags of Ebola virus or something. They want absolutely nothing to do with someone who wants to custom order a vehicle.

(Yes, this was pre-COVID.)

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Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes. – Patrick Hayden.

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I’m not a lawyer, but my lawyer is.

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My dad was a pastor in northern Wisconsin. As such, he couldn’t tell Finnish jokes because that area has a strong Finnish population. To make up for it, he would tell jokes about an extinct civilization – the Hittites. That way no one could be offended.

“So these two Hittites, Eino and Toivo…”

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General Peter Pace, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, once told me, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

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Give a man a fish and he’ll come back tomorrow for another one. Teach a man to fish and he’ll start looking for someone who will just give him a fish instead…

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That’s the nice thing about kleptomania: you can always take something for it.

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My favorite Latin words to live by: Carpe Deim. 10 cents a fish.

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Veni, vidi, visa.

I came, I saw, I charged it.

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Not my circus, not my monkey.

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And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):

Good news for the planet

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. . . . It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy.
Bill McKibben in The New Yorker