In November 2009 a net full of gigantic jellyfish, the largest of which weighed over 450 pounds, capsized a Japanese trawler, throwing the three-man crew into the ocean. But even mightier vessels have been vanquished by jellyfish.
On July 27, 2006, the USS Ronald Reagan, then the most modern aircraft carrier in existence, was docked in the port of Brisbane, Australia. New Zealand had earlier banned the entry of nuclear-powered ships, and many Australians felt it might be prudent to follow their lead. So when the commander of US Naval Air Forces announced that an “acute case of fouling” had afflicted the giant vessel, people took notice. Thousands of jellyfish had been sucked into the cooling system of the ship’s nuclear power plant, forcing the closure of full onboard capabilities. Newspapers ran the headline “Jellyfish Take on US Warship.” Local fire crews were placed on standby, and the citizens of Brisbane held their collective breaths as the battle between the navy and the jellyfish raged. In the end, they proved too formidable, and the ship was forced out of port.
Even nations can be affected by the power of the jellies. On the night of December 10, 1999, 40 million Filipinos suffered a sudden power blackout. President Joseph Estrada was unpopular, and many assumed that a coup was underway. Indeed, news reports around the world carried stories of Estrada’s fall. It was twenty-four hours before the real enemy was recognized: jellyfish. Fifty truckloads of the creatures had been sucked into the cooling system of a major coal-fired power plant, forcing an abrupt shutdown.
Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just one power plant. Nor has India been immune. At a nuclear power plant near Madras, workers removed and individually counted over four million jellyfish that had become trapped on screens placed over the entrances to cooling pipes between February and April 1989. That’s around eighty tons of jellyfish.
As Gershwin says, “Jellyfish have an uncanny knack for getting stuck…. Imagine a piece of thin, flexible plastic wrapper in a pool, where it can drift almost forever without sinking, until it gets sucked against the outflow mesh.” Chemical repellents don’t work, nor do electric shocks, or bubble curtains, or acoustic deterrents. In fact even killing the jellyfish won’t work as, dead or alive, they still tend to be sucked in. And everyone from concerned admirals to the owners of power plants that lose millions of dollars with each shutdown have tried very hard to deter them.
Salmon swimming in pens can create a vortex that sucks jellyfish in. Tens of thousands of salmon can be stung to death in minutes, and repeated attacks can kill hundreds of thousands of the valuable fish. But those losses are small compared with the financial devastation jellyfish have inflicted elsewhere. Would you believe, Gershwin asks, that “a mucosy little jellyfish, barely bigger than a chicken egg, with no brain, no backbone, and no eyes, could cripple three national economies and wipe out an entire ecosystem”? That’s just what happened when the Mnemiopsis jellyfish (a kind of comb jelly) invaded the Black Sea. The creatures arrived from the east coast of the US in seawater ballast (seawater a ship takes into its hold once it has discharged its cargo to retain its stability), and by the 1980s they were taking over. Prior to their arrival, Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia had robust fisheries, with anchovies and sturgeon being important resources. As the jellyfish increased, the anchovies and other valuable fish vanished, and along with them went the sturgeon, the long-beloved source of blini toppings.
By 2002 the total weight of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified. Nobody knows precisely how or why the jellyfish replaced the valuable fish species, but four hypotheses have been put forward.
The Jellies Are Taking Over
Monday, September 16th, 2013Social Consequences
Monday, September 16th, 2013Most of what we call “McCarthyism” was a matter of “social consequences,” Moldbug notes:
Besides, the social consequences work for one and only one reason: there’s an iron fist in the velvet glove. Being sued for disrespecting a privileged class — excuse me, a protected class — is not in any way a social consequence, but rather a political one.
[...]
Of course, ain’t nothin’ new here. For quite some time in America it’s been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that’s what freedom means.
Put Down That Highlighter!
Monday, September 16th, 2013The scientific literature evaluating learning techniques stretches back decades and across thousands of articles and shows that the most popular techniques, like rereading and highlighting, are some of the least effective:
Highlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies. Although they are common practices, studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning; because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences. Nearly as bad is the practice of rereading, a common exercise that is much less effective than some of the better techniques you can use. Lastly, summarizing, or writing down the main points contained in a text, can be helpful for those who are skilled at it, but again, there are far better ways to spend your study time. Highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarizing were all rated by the authors as being of “low utility.”
The best practices aren’t well known outside the psych lab:
Take distributed practice, for example. This tactic involves spreading out your study sessions, rather than engaging in one marathon. Cramming information at the last minute may allow you to get through that test or meeting, but the material will quickly disappear from memory. It’s much more effective to dip into the material at intervals over time. And the longer you want to remember the information, whether it’s two weeks or two years, the longer the intervals should be.
The second learning strategy that is highly recommended by the report’s authors is practice testing. Yes, more tests — but these are not for a grade. Research shows that the mere act of calling information to mind strengthens that knowledge and aids in future retrieval. While practice testing is not a common strategy — despite the robust evidence supporting it—there is one familiar approach that captures its benefits: using flash cards. And now flash cards can be presented in digital form, via apps like Quizlet, StudyBlue and FlashCardMachine. Both spaced-out learning, or distributed practice, and practice tests were rated as having “high utility” by the authors.
Calvin & Muad’Dib
Sunday, September 15th, 2013Calvin & Muad’Dib combines Calvin & Hobbes comic strip art with wisdom from Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic, Dune:
Crow Foods
Sunday, September 15th, 2013This Chipotle ad is — well, take a gander:
In a dystopian fantasy world, all food production is controlled by fictional industrial giant Crow Foods. Scarecrows have been displaced from their traditional role of protecting food, and are now servants to the crows and their evil plans to dominate the food system. Dreaming of something better, a lone scarecrow sets out to provide an alternative to the unsustainable processed food from the factory.
Red Channels
Sunday, September 15th, 2013Mencius Moldbug shares this passage from Red Channels, the canonical Red Scare publication listing 151 “Red Fascists and their sympathizers”:
There was also a pretty dogged pitch for his film, which will get all kinds of warm huzzahs from the intersection of atheists, pacifists, communists and Jews. I was pretty amazed that he went for it. He flat out said that he wants his film to be funded and wasn’t sure if it’d be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn’t going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn’t inclined to give some producer the nod on this.
On reflection, I’ll be explicit: If you’re a producer, and you invest in Dalton Trumbo’s film without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Dalton beforehand, you’re complicit in extending the film industry’s awful track record of communism, and it’s unacceptable.
Only the passage isn’t from Red Channels. It’s from Anil Dash’s writeup of his meeting with Pax Dickinson — with a few key terms replaced.
The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire
Sunday, September 15th, 2013The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy, Annalee Newitz claims:
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all.
Centered in Peru, Inca territory stretched across the Andes’ mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today’s Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru – all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. How did they do it?
[...]
The secret of the Inca’s great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.
Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. In another quirk of the Incan economy, nobles who died could still own property and their families or estate managers could continue to amass wealth for the dead nobles. Indeed, the temple at Pachacamac was basically a well-managed estate that “belonged” to a dead Incan noble. It’s as if the Inca managed to invent the idea of corporations-as-people despite having almost no market economy whatsoever.
Let’s see, large estates worked by laborers who weren’t paid, but were fed and housed… Just imagine what the Romans could have done with a system like that!
The Brown Scare
Saturday, September 14th, 2013The Brown Scare (#BrownScare) has hit hackerdom, Mencius Moldbug declares, but “America’s ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed” is nothing new:
At the height of the lame, doomed “Red Scare,” the Brown Scare was ten times bigger. You may think it was difficult making a living as a communist screenwriter in 1954. It was a lot easier than being a fascist screenwriter. Or even an anticommunist screenwriter. (Same thing, right?) And as any pathetic last shreds of real opposition shrink and die off, the Scare only grows. That’s how winners play it. That’s just how the permanent revolution rolls.
Does Soda Rot Your Brains?
Saturday, September 14th, 2013Emily Deans discusses a horrifying study tracking soda consumption in 5 year-olds:
The study was part of a Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing cohort of about 3000 urban US children and their mothers from 20 different cities. The sample is 51% African American, 28% Hispanic, and unmarried mothers outnumber the married ones 3:1. In this cohort, 43% of the 5 year old children consumed at least one soda per day, and 8.2% drank three or more servings a day. Those who did drink 4 or more sodas daily were over twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people, and violence across the cohort linearly correlated with the amount of soda consumed. We’ve seen a similar pattern in a previous study of adolescents. No one has measured it in young children before.
Covariates included violence in the home, fruit juice and candy consumption, obesity, maternal education, and hours of TV watching, and when the statisticians took these confounders out, the correlations between violence and soda consumption still held. Perhaps the most interesting bit of the study is that fruit juice consumption was correlated with less aggression and candy with mildly increased aggression, so sugar itself is clearly not the whole story here.
I think we have a question of causality here.
James Cameron likes the new Captain Harlock movie
Friday, September 13th, 2013Migaloo the White Humpback Whale
Friday, September 13th, 2013Migaloo the white humpback whale was first spotted in 1991 along the Queensland coast in Australia and has since gained a following:
Instant Diagnosis
Friday, September 13th, 2013Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos looks to provide instant diagnosis:
Ms. Holmes, a 29-year-old chemical and electrical engineer and entrepreneur, dropped out of Stanford as an undergraduate after founding a life sciences company called Theranos in 2003. Her inventions, which she is discussing in detail here for the first time, could upend the industry of laboratory testing and might change the way we detect and treat disease.
Ten years ago, Ms. Holmes was working out of the basement of a group college house, a world away from her current headquarters at a rambling industrial building in a research park just off campus. The company’s real estate was one of the few Theranos facts known to Silicon Valley, but one suggestive of the closely held business’s potential: The space was once home to Facebook, and before that Hewlett-Packard.
The secret that hundreds of employees are now refining involves devices that automate and miniaturize more than 1,000 laboratory tests, from routine blood work to advanced genetic analyses. Theranos’s processes are faster, cheaper and more accurate than the conventional methods and require only microscopic blood volumes, not vial after vial of the stuff. The experience will be revelatory to anyone familiar with current practices, which often seem like medicine by Bram Stoker.
The Fighter That Shot Itself Down
Friday, September 13th, 2013The F11F Tiger single-seat, supersonic fighter had some gun trouble:
Part of the flight test program to get the Tiger operational involved clearing the performance envelope for the firing of its four 20-millimeter Colt cannons which were mounted under and aft of the air intakes. As the Tiger was designed to be as light as possible so to attain the highest performance with its J65 engine, the expended cases and links from the Colt cannons were ejected overboard rather than be retained onboard the aircraft. During the cannon firing portion of the flight test program, it was immediately found that the airflow patterns around the aircraft allowed the spent cases and links to hug the fuselage, causing multiple dents and scratches. At one point in the program the Tiger test aircraft had to be fitted with an armored leading edge to the horizontal stabilizer as the damage from the links in particular could be significant.
The solution was to change the ejection mechnism and associated chutes so that the shells were forcibly ejected out longer chutes that projected out into the airstream and away from the turbulent air along the sides of the Tiger. A complex internal mechanism recycled the links to a special compartment just ahead of the cannon ammunition boxes as the links tended to cause more surface damage than the spent casings.
On 21 September 1956, Grumman test pilot Tom Attridge sortied out of the company airfield at Calverton, Long Island in aircraft BuNo 138620 to conduct high speed firing tests of the cannons. It was the 41st flight for this particular F11F-1 Tiger and it was Attridge’s second test flight of the day. His flight profile for this test was to start out at 22,000 feet and accelerate in afterburner at a 20 degree angle past Mach 1. Passing through 13,000 feet he would fire a four second burst of the cannon, wait three seconds to allow the guns to cool, and then fire a second burst, ending the profile at 7,000 feet when the ammunition load would be expended.
Attridge flew the prescribed profile and upon expending the ammunition, was suddenly confronted by the shattering of the forward armored windscreen caused by some sort of object. He immediately throttle back and pulled up to reduce speed to prevent the windscreen from caving in and at 13,000 and 200 KIAS he turned back towards Calverton. The only damage he could ascertain was a gash to the right intake lip and that everytime he took the engine up above 78% power, it began to run rough. Two miles from the end of the Calverton runway and at 1,200 feet with his wheels down and flaps lowered, Attridge found that 78% engine power was insufficient to maintain his glide path as the sink rate began to increase. He advanced to full throttle only to be greeted by what he described as “the engine sounded as if it was tearing up” and he immediately lost power. Three-quarters of a mile short of the runway, the Tiger settled into the trees and the aircraft traveled for 300 feet before coming to a stop. Though the aircraft was on fire, Attridge managed to escape quickly without injury and the Grumman crash crew and rescue helicopter were on scene in less than three minutes. Eleven minutes after landing, the company helicopter landed a local hospital to have Attridge evaluated.
Examination of the aircraft showed it had been hit by at least three 20-millimeter rounds — one in the windshield, one in the right intake lip and one in the nose cone. In addition, projectile fragments were found in the first compressor stage of the engine along with fan blade damage — engineers suspected that perhaps the round that hit the right intake ricocheted into the engine. It was determined that Attridge had inadvertently shot himself down. At the first cannon burst, he was in 0.5G supersonic descent and had actually flown underneath the trajectory of the cannon projectiles from the first cannon burst. Eleven second later, as he began to pull out of the descent, he flew into the stream of projectiles from the first burst.
Subsequent examination of the aircraft showed that Attridge had flown the same test profile earlier that day and what was thought to be large ding from an ejected casing on the vertical fin actually turned out to be a projectile hit — apparently Attridge had grazed himself on the first test flight of the day and gotten away with not shooting himself down!
Thought Crime and Public Shaming in the Internet Age
Thursday, September 12th, 2013Clark “Danger” Bianco discusses thought crime and public shaming in the Internet Age:
Shaming works well (to the ends that it works, at least) in small bands of hunter gatherers. It causes people to adjust their actions to social norms, it leaves no physical scars, it doesn’t incarcerate anyone or destroy the value of their labor…and it’s got a built-in time horizon. A guy reaches for the last slice of pizza, one of his friends says “Hey, don’t be a pig; you’ve already had your share”. The guy’s face flushes because he was called out. He pulls back his hand and lets someone else eat the last slice. Perhaps over the next few days his friends make pig-snorting noises at him to remind him that he was greedy, and he’s annoyed, ashamed…and chastised. He takes extra pains to eat his share or less at future shared meals over the next week or two. The shaming joke never spread beyond 148 or so people, and within a few weeks the entire incident is forgotten.
Social mechanisms evolved in small groups without any form of information persistence other than fallible human memory. I constantly find it amazing that they work at all in our much changed world and society (I also find it amazing that primate minds that evolved to hunt small game on the savanna can do differential equations and put probes into orbit around distant planets).
[...]
I’d suggest that shaming people in very large, very modern social settings is a superstimulus. In the ancestral small-tribe environment it feels good to be the dealer of a joke and not the brunt. It feels good to be the social arbiter and not the social pariah. It feels good to be the cool kid and not the nerd. …and, in the iterated version of the game, where a given person is on the shaming end every now and then and on the shamed end every now and then, everything works out.
We’ve got the social process wired into our heads, and it works well when we’re in small groups, but it can be destructive when we’re in larger groups. Calling out the hunter in a pack of 150 who took more than his fare share of meat is one thing. Calling out the miller who took more than his fare share of flour in a village of 1,000 is another.
…and calling out the Jewish moneylenders as taking “more than their fair share” in interest in a modern nation of 50 million, in an age of newspapers, radio, and movies (or calling out the Tutsi merchants as taking “more than their fair share” of the economy) is another.
[...]
When we combine modern communications technologies with large crowds (far in excess of Dunbar’s number) and then add in persistence and searchability, the social environment of 2013 is radically different from that of even 1990.
Sinister Statistics
Thursday, September 12th, 2013Alex Tabarrok examines some sinister statistics:
Over the 20th century, left handers have increased as a fraction of the population. Left handedness may be relatively fixed as a genetic matter but in the earlier decades of the 20th century children were strongly discouraged from exhibiting left-handedness. As a result, many “natural” lefties learned right-handed behavior and identified as right-handed adults. Over time, however, the cultural suppression of left-handedness declined and the proportion of adults exhibiting left-handedness increased, as the figure, at left, indicates.
Now suppose you take a random sample of people who died in 1990. In this sample, some people will have died old and some young. Among those those who died old, however, fewer people will be identified as left-handed because the old grew up in a time when left-handedness was suppressed. As a result, the old deaths in your sample will tend to be have more right-handed people and the young deaths will tend to have more left-handed people causing you to incorrectly conclude that left-handed people die younger. Studies show that this statistical artifact can easily explain a 9 year difference in apparent mortality rates.
To make this crystal clear consider the following thought experiment (offered by Chris McManus). Imagine you take a sample of people who died recently and asked their surviving family members, Did the deceased ever read the Harry Potter novels? One would clearly find in such a sample that those who died tragically young (at age 12 let’s say) would have been much more likely to have read Harry Potter than those who died in their 90s. Despite what some might argue, however, we should not conclude that Harry Potter kills.