D Gary Grady

Kiss Cam save

Posted on 2015-01-16 by GaryJanuary 14, 2015

If you watch any sports, you know that one way broadcasters and arenas fill time during the boring bits is to aim a camera at an apparent couple in the stands (boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, Luke and Leia, whatever) and put the image on a giant screen with the words “Kiss Cam” superimposed. On seeing themselves so honored, the man and woman are expected to kiss passionately for the entertainment and edification of all.

In some countries this practice must seem a shocking demonstration of Western decadence. Indian movies, for example, long avoided showing romantic kisses at all, and even now only a very limited amount of it is tolerated. One popular Bollywood actress was widely denounced, and even received death threats, when some audience members judged an on-screen kiss too passionate. (On the other hand, it’s fairly common for a song-and-dance number to take place in a heavy rain, under a waterfall, or the like in order to get the lead actress soaking wet. The excellent film 3 Idiots (see my review at this link) has fun with that convention by showing the male lead Aamir Khan in a shirt that’s been wet down to the point of transparency. (The scene is on YouTube here.)

Some other cultures, of course, are even more sensitive, judging a woman’s hair, or even anything at all about a woman, to be to exciting for public exhibition, hence the almost complete concealment of women required in some Muslim countries. Another example came up just a few days ago in connection with a widely published photograph of world leaders in Paris, their arms linked together to take part in a huge demonstration against the Charlie Weekly murders. An ultra-Orthodox newspaper in Israel (HaMevaser) published the photograph on its front page, but Photoshopped to remove all the women, making it look as if only men had been present. (See the original and edited photos here.) Editor Binyamin Lipkin explained that including women in the picture could “desecrate the memory of the martyrs” and that he worried what children might think. Apparently Angela Merkel is considered just dang too sexy for young lads to see. (It should be noted that other ultra-Orthodox leaders called the photo doctoring ridiculous.)

Anyway, what I’m leading up to is an example of a Kiss Cam gone wrong, but with a last-minute save. The male half of the couple appears not to notice what’s going on, being too occupied with his smart phone, but fortunately someone else comes to the rescue. This illustrates that we Americans still have the same sort of volunteerism and mutual aid praised by Alexis de Toqueville in De la démocratie en Amérique.

Link: http://youtu.be/Qh0BwuxHRAg

Getting back to the ground from a broadcast tower

Posted on 2015-01-15 by GaryJanuary 14, 2015

The fastest way to get back to where you were after climbing a tall broadcast tower as in the previous post:

Link: http://youtu.be/r3q3ZC5fcnY

Climbing a broadcast tower

Posted on 2015-01-14 by GaryJanuary 13, 2015

Broadcast towers have lights on them so aircraft can see them at night, and from time to time the lamps in them burn out and need to be replaced, which means someone has to climb the tower. This isn’t the scariest example I’ve seen, but it’s interesting to watch, and the view from up there must be nice. I suspect this video was shot with a drone.

Link: http://youtu.be/f1BgzIZRfT8

Two years ago I posted another tower-climbing video, this one from the climber’s viewpoint. See this link. There are others on YouTube for those of you not yet dizzy enough.

Phil Plait on science in Congress

Posted on 2015-01-13 by GaryJanuary 13, 2015

For years astronomer Phil Plait has written a popular blog called “Bad Astronomy” (link). He started it to correct popular misconceptions and bogus rumors about astronomy and related branches of science, such as the mistaken notion that eggs are easier to balance on end at the equinoxes and the perennial Internet story that on some particular date Mars is going to be close enough to look as big as the Moon. Nowadays it’s more of a Good Astronomy blog, highlighting interesting news or pointing out beautiful astronomical images, but he still occasionally goes after bad astronomy and bad science in general.

This morning’s post (link) is one of those, and what concerns him this time isn’t so much the misconceptions themselves as the positions of the people holding them.

Now that the Republican Party controls the senate, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will be taking over chairmanship of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, and as Plait points out, that committee oversees the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. While Cruz has said some things favorable to NASA (it helps that the Johnson Space Center is based in Texas), he’s not exactly a champion of science. In particular, he rejects the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming and has said things on that subject that are simply nonsense. NASA, of course, has been a major source of research demonstrating that global warming is happening.

(Plait doesn’t mention it, but Senator Cruz is so extreme in his political views and actions that many of his fellow Republicans reportedly can’t stand him, not least because his grandstanding shenanigans are seen as damaging his own party with almost everybody outside the extreme right. His chief congressional allies aren’t in the Senate but in the House Tea Party Caucus, for which he has served as a self-appointed leader.)

Meanwhile Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) is the new head of the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works (a post he held during most of the Bush administration). Inhofe claims that global warming is a deliberate hoax perpetrated by scientists and has bizarrely likened the Environmental Protection Agency — an agency overseen by that committee — to the Nazi Gestapo. The Washington Post published an article worth reading about Inhofe and the committee in November (link).

Another of the Senate’s most extreme members, Marco Rubio (R-Florida), is now in charge of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, which has responsibility for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Rubio is yet another denier of climate change who has expressed doubts about other areas of science.

There’s reason to think Republican control of the Senate won’t last beyond then end of next year, mainly based on the fact that many more vulnerable Republicans than Democrats will be up for reelection then, a reverse of the situation last year. On the other hand, the GOP did even better than predicted in the last election (which had the lowest turnout in 72 years), so it’s not certain they won’t retain a majority.

Psychology psong

Posted on 2015-01-10 by GaryJanuary 9, 2015

Neither Gary nor Grady is a rare name, so it’s not at all surprising that I occasionally hear of another Gary Grady. Many years ago, for example, I got a telephone call from someone wanting me to help him get out of a speeding ticket. Apparently he’d heard high praise for a lawyer named Gary Grady, and when I admitted to being Gary Grady but not an attorney, he seemed to have trouble believing me. He even asked me if I was sure, as if I might have momentarily forgotten, like the brain specialist in the Monty Python sketch.

Well, quite by accident I’ve just run across another Gary Grady, one who happens to be a psychology professor and a songwriter, and I particularly like this one, which I shall shortly inflict on the psychologists I know: “Psychology Begins with a P (The Psychology Psong)”:

Link: http://youtu.be/x167YhVq0oQ

The song summarizes everything you need to know about psychology, or at least the key points of its history and spelling.

Beneath the video, someone named Caspar Addyman offers one of the better comments I’ve ever seen under a something on YouTube (admittedly not a high hurdle): “The p isn’t silent. It is just <.05." As a bonus, here's another song on the same subject: [weaver_youtube http://youtu.be/B9y_IyQt0NU] Link: http://youtu.be/B9y_IyQt0NU

Health care around the world

Posted on 2015-01-09 by GaryMay 18, 2015

I just re-read an article by T.R. Reid (link) that ran in The Washington Post back in 2009 August 23, but it’s worth a look, because we Americans still have many misconceptions about how health insurance and healthcare work in other countries.

Many on the left, for example, are convinced that all other developed countries have single-payer insurance, and that’s just not true. Some are indeed single payer (Canada, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Italy, for example), but many other countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel, and Japan, give people a choice of private insurance companies.

What distinguishes other countries is that everybody or almost everybody is insured, and the government does a much better job of regulation, producing a system that is generally less complicated than ours and with lower overhead. Even in the U.S., Medicare and Medicaid spend a lower higher percentage of their budgets on overhead than private insurance companies. I once heard an executive of a U.S. health insurer complain that the comparison was unfair, because Medicare and Medicaid don’t have to make a profit for shareholders or spend money on sales and marketing. To which one might reasonably reply, “Exactly.”

Many conservatives believe that healthcare is worse outside the U.S., with long waits and severe rationing. Delays are indeed a problem some places, but in others seeing a doctor or getting elective surgery is typically faster than here, and most places you have a freer choice of doctors, with no worrying about whether the person treating you is “in-network.”

Japan: 2014 hottest year on record

Posted on 2015-01-08 by GaryJanuary 8, 2015

It’s been horribly cold in the United States the past several days. Here in North Carolina temperatures overnight fell to about 10 Fahrenheit (-12 Celsius), which is quite cold enough for me if you were about to ask, though a lot of more northerly states have lately had temps well below zero Fahrenheit. And as usual, some people take this as evidence against global warming.

Of course, global warming doesn’t mean the weather never gets scary cold anywhere or that climates don’t continue to vary locally and globally. It means that the overall trend for global average temperature is upward.

Last winter, you may recall, we had a similar bitter cold spell in the U.S. (and learned the expression “polar vortex”), but globally 2014 was a warm year. In fact, the Japan Meteorological Agency has completed a preliminary analysis (link) indicating that the world’s overall average temperature last year was the hottest ever recorded. Separate data (link) indicate that greenhouse gas emissions also hit a record in 2014. In fact, eastern North America and central Asia were the only regions with below-average temperatures last year.

That said, a single year record year doesn’t by itself prove anything one way or the other. But we’ve had a whole series of record-breaking or near-record-breaking hot years during my lifetime. The hottest 10 years in our temperature data all occurred in the period 1998-present.

But we have not broken a record for coldest year since 1909, more than a century ago.

To see this graphically, take a look at this silent one-minute video released by NASA last November. It shows record-breaking hot and cold years going back to the 1880s.

Link: http://youtu.be/UEiq2ro23Xc

It’s also worth noting that 1998 was an anomalously hot year, much warmer than the years immediately before or after, very probably because of an extremely strong El Niño. There was barely any El Niño in 2014, but it still seems to have surpassed even 1998.

Taken together with research published in the journal Science (link) in March of 2013, 2014 may not only be the hottest year in well over a century of large-scale direct meaurements but also very possibly the hottest in 4000 years. A New York Times article (link) provides a good non-technical summary of that earlier research.

For more about the Japan Meteorological Agency’s analysis, see reports in Slate (link) and Scientific American (link), the latter a reprint from Climate Central, a good source to check for ongoing coverage (link).

What is Charlie Hebdo?

Posted on 2015-01-07 by GaryJanuary 9, 2015

[Updated to correct some typographical errors and to add more information.]

Major news today is that terrorist gunmen shot at least 12 people dead at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly), which had come under criticism for publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Catherine Thompson at Talking Points Memo has a reasonably brief background report on the newspaper that’s worth a quick read (link).

In brief, the paper is known for attacking and ridiculing everybody, and a number of its cartoons about Muhammad have provoked diplomatic problems between France and Islamic countries and threats against the newspaper, whose previous offices were fire-bombed. A particularly offensive cartoon, showing Muhammad bending over with his genitals exposed, was widely criticized around the world, including by the French and U.S. governments, though both governments also defended the newspaper’s right to print things even when doing so seems tasteless and stupid.

The paper also publishes things that offend Christians and especially Catholics, but this has apparently not led to any notable threats or violence.

Update: As you almost certainly know, the French authorities believe they have identified the attackers, and the reaction from around the world, including in Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world, has been strongly in support of press freedoms and the victims. The BBC website has a report on the suspects (link), on public demonstrations of mourning and solidarity (link), and on the responses of cartoonists in France and abroad (link). The two main symbols of defiance against the terrorist attack are pens (symbolizing writing and drawing) and signs reading “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”).

McConnell tries to take credit for last year’s improved economy

Posted on 2015-01-07 by GaryJanuary 8, 2015

(Update: See also Steve Benen’s post on this subject (link) in which he points out that Senator McConnell spent most of last year claiming the economy was terrible.)

New Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) — and thanks to all of you who sat out the last election for making that possible — has just done something predictable but no less comical: He issued a news release today (link) that reads in part:

After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama Administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress.

To review, the economy was in a nosedive when Obama took office in 2009, with the rate of job losses accelerating every month. When the economic stimulus was passed — a smaller one than the administration had wanted, thanks to conservative opponents in Congress, but still a stimulus — the private sector job situation started improving immediately, with rapidly declining rates of loss followed by regular increases. Public sector employment was another matter. Except for temporary census jobs in 2010, federal and especially state and local government employment plummeted and acted as a drag on the economic recovery, and Republicans in Congress managed to shut down the government in 2013 for reasons they were never able to articulate clearly, costing the economy billions.

But the recovery continues, and today the unemployment rate is already more than a percentage point below what Mitt Romney optimistically promised he’d be able to achieve in 2016. Another piece of good news is that under Obama the federal budget deficit has been falling at the fastest rate since the end of World War 2. Stock market growth has been robust (but as most investors know, for at least the last 85 years, the market has done substantially better with Democrats in office).

The U.S. economy grew at an excellent rate in the second and third quarters of last year, that is, April-September. (The fourth quarter numbers aren’t available yet, but news will likely be good there as well.)

It’s unsurprising that McConnell would want to claim credit for the good news, but attributing it to the mere “expectation” that Republicans would take over the Congress is a reach. In fact, now that Congress actually is in Republican hands, the bull market seems to have ended.

McConnell’s claim has been disputed and outright mocked all over the place, including by Philip Bump at The Washington Post (link), who provides a number of useful graphs that make it clear that economic growth and the acceleration of that growth have been broadly continuous under Obama’s term of office (with bumps here and there, as during the GOP’s shutdown).

Other pundits mocking McConnell include Brian Beutler at The New Republic (link), Vikas Bijaj at The New York Times (link), and a lot of other places you can easily find with your favorite search engine.

And since I quoted from McConnell’s press release, it’s only fair to quote the Democratic National Committee’s reaction to it, the first sentence of which reads, in its entirety, “Hahahahahahahahahahaha.”

Here’s the full statement, from DNC communications director Mo Elleithee:

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. That Mitch McConnell is one funny guy. He likes to remind people all the time that he’s not a scientist. Now we know he’s not a mathematician or an economist either. The fact is, under President Obama we’ve had 57 straight months of private sector job growth leading to nearly 11 million jobs added. All Republicans have given us is a government shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. I get why he wants to take credit for the economic recovery. But maybe he should first do something to help contribute to it.

By the way, one of the first actions undertaken by the newly seated (and even more Republican) House of Representatives is a move to complicate a routine transfer of funds inside the Social Security Trust Fund, a change apparently intended to engineer a crisis and force a cut in benefits if it actually becomes law. (See this link.) I’m sure we’ll hear more on that later, but for now Talking Points Memo has a succinct report (link) on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s take, which as you’d expect isn’t exactly favorable.

More from Japan: 10,000 voices sing the Ode to Joy

Posted on 2015-01-07 by GaryMarch 2, 2018

I don’t recall where I first heard about this, but it’s now traditional in Japan to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at New Year. According to Mental Floss (link), the tradition dates back to World War I, and it’s become so popular that in Japan the symphony is referred to simply as daiku, “Number Nine.”

In Osaka, a group of mostly amateur singers called the Number Nine Chorus get together every year to give a performance involving 10,000 voices. (That’s not a typo. With that many people they might have to take the speed of sound into account to keep them in sync.)

On 2011 March 11 a tsunami devastated parts of the city of Sendai, about 600 kilometers northeast of Osaka. At the end of the year a chorus in Sendai was invited to join the Number Nine Chorus in performing daiku by means of a remote television link, and in the video below you see both groups singing together. I believe the conductor is Yutaka Sado, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa, based on this blog post from Scott Brown. The same post identifies the soloists as Toshiko Abo, soprano; Masako Tejima, mezzo; Makoto Tananka, tenor; and Hiroshi Kuroda, baritone. I don’t know whether the orchestra is an established one or one formed expressly for the performance. If someone knows, please pass it on in the comments and I’ll update this post.

It’s amazing to see. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, at the very least skip ahead to about 6 minutes 30 seconds, and after a minute or two skip ahead again to 15:35. (Note the emotion visible on the face of the conductor when the performance ends.)

Link: https://youtu.be/V-XpO04Cw8g

You might also want to take a look at an earlier post (link) involving a flash mob performance of an abbreviated Ode to Joy in the city Sabadell in Spain’s Catalonia region.

(Update 2017 August 9 to note the conductor’s name.)

(Update 2018 March 2: The audio on this clip has been missing for some time, possibly the result of a copyright complaint. The video is still a remarkable sight.)