The Dow Jones industrial average soared more than 260 points on the news that the U.S. economy is creating fewer jobs than expected... But bad news can be good news in the upside-down world of Federal Reserve interest-rate manipulations and presidential interventions to keep the good times rolling...
“The world economy is slowing, inflation is below target, and now the slowing U.S. economy with today’s no-jobs report is the final straw to break the camel’s back for the Federal Reserve sitting on the sidelines,” said Chris Rupkey, managing director at MUFG Union Bank. “Rate cuts are coming. Bet on it.”
Job creation had been the one holdout against a slowing economy. Unemployment is still crouching at a 50-year low of 3.6 percent. But the Labor Department showed that the economy created far fewer jobs last month than experts had forecast, adding the latest piece to a string of disappointing reports that shows a 10-year boom gasping — for an interest-rate cut.”This looks like the first shot across the bow,” DePalma said. “One of the economy’s only bright spots is finally weakening. The labor reports have been so consistently good that this is a slap across the face. It gives the Fed license to cut rates.”
The odds of a rate cut rose immediately on the news, with futures placing the chance of a Fed interest-rate cut at 79 percent. The chance of a second rate cut by September rose to 95 percent. “The market is happy because the punch bowl is still there,” DePalma said...
”The jobs report is bad news for Main Street and good news for Wall Street,” said Jared Bernstein, who served as the economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. “It’s a microcosm of our inequality problem. You have wage gains that appear to have stalled, and Wall Street loves that because it means fatter profit margins.”
08 June 2019
On Wall Street bad = good
Explained at the Washington Post:
07 June 2019
"Perpetual diamond" optical illusion
The diamond in the video IS NOT MOVING.
The key to the illusion is the thin perimeter of the diamond -
The Perpetual Diamond produces motion continuously and unambiguously in one direction despite never physically changing location. The phenomenon consists of a steady, mid-luminance diamond bordered by four thin edge strips and a surrounding background field. The direction of motion is determined by the relative phases of the luminance modulation between the edge strips and the background. Because the motion is generated entirely by changing contrast signals between the edge strips and background, the stimulus is a valuable tool for tests of spatial contrast, temporal contrast, contrast gain, and color contrast. We demonstrate that observers see motion even when the edge strips subtend only seconds of arc on the retina (which is less than the frequently reported 10 minutes of arc) and that perceived motion is due entirely to changes in the difference in contrast phase modulation, independent from the luminance phase.For a full explanation, go to Neatorama and follow the links there - one of which is an interactive demo.
Trigger warning: animal abuse
I couldn't watch all the way through.
Summary from The Guardian:
Undercover footage showing young dairy calves being kicked, violently thrown, having their heads stamped into the ground and suffering from heat exposure at a US farm known as the “Disneyland of agricultural tourism” was published this week.Primary source material here, with an extensive photo gallery.
Every year, more than 600,000 tourists visit the Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventure, a working dairy farm of 15,000 cows a few hours south of Chicago, Illinois. The farm, with its museum, restaurant and hotel – deemed the “Disneyland of agricultural tourism” this year by Food & Wine – sells a vision of quaint rural life: “It’s where families can view pastures dotted with dairy cattle” and “watch as a piglet is born” before they “top off this idyllic country day with a scoop of ice cream or a pork chop from Fair Oaks Farms’ restaurant”.
The farm is independently owned by veterinarian Mike McCloskey, but it is an affiliate of the Coca-Cola company, with which it produces a nutrient-dense milk product called “Fairlife” and other popular dairy products including Core Power Protein shakes. McCloskey, who co-founded the business with his wife, Sue, has stated that their farm provides in-depth training on humane care of animals.
ARM’s undercover investigator got a job at Fair Oaks as a calf care employee in 2018. The investigator reported that they received no training other than where to put the calves’ dead bodies. Furthermore, violence towards the animals appeared to be commonplace, typically stemming from frustration over the calves’ unwillingness to feed from artificial nipples.
Video footage captured between August and November of 2018 appears to show workers beating, kicking, and throwing the bloodied and emaciated baby animals as their mothers go hoarse calling to them from separated barns.
Sort of related:
"I AM NOT A COW. I AM PROFESSOR DUNBAR.
PLEASE DO NOT KILL ME."
The title is one of the penultimate lines from The Court of Tartary, a fantasy by T.P. Caravan first published in 1963. In the story, a professor of English literature "awakens" to find his mind is entrapped in the body of a cow, and the herd seems to be destined to the slaughterhouse.
"Edward Harrison Dunbar, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D., member of the Modern Language Association and authority on eighteenth century literature, was not prepared for the situation in which he found himself: it had never been mentioned by any of the writers of the Age of Reason....He decides to use his hoof to draw a triangle in the dust. Then... if I've piqued your curiosity, you can read the full story in ten minutes fulltext online at Scribd.
And even as he ran he wondered if he couldn't prove that Edward Young was the true author of the third book of Gulliver's Travels, because he knew that if he stopped thinking scholarly thoughts about the eighteenth century he would have to admit that he had turned into an animal. So as he ran he considered the evidence turned up by the publication of the Tickell papers and the discovery of Swift's old laundry lists and Night Thoughts and the graveyard poets and Gray's Elegy and the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and he had to admit that he was an animal....
There was no point in approaching his difficulty through the scientific method: he knew no science. There was no help for him in metaphysics: he had cleared his mind of Kant. Nor could the classics aid him: he had read Ovid, of course, and the Golden Ass, but he didn't see how they bore on his problem. And — he hated to admit it — nobody in the eighteenth century seemed to have wondered what would happen to a scholar who woke up and found himself a cow. All right. That left only his own experience to fall back on. But, being a professor, he had never had any experiences..."
Industrial methane emissions underestimated by a factor of 100
From the Cornell [University] Chronicle:
Tangentially related: You can "tap" a living tree with a metal pipe and set fire to the methane that is emitted.
Using a Google Street View car equipped with a high-precision methane sensor, the researchers discovered that methane emissions from ammonia fertilizer plants were 100 times higher than the fertilizer industry’s self-reported estimate...More at the link.
“We took one small industry that most people have never heard of and found that its methane emissions were three times higher than the EPA assumed was emitted by all industrial production in the United States...”
...natural gas is largely methane, which molecule-per-molecule has a stronger global warming potential than carbon dioxide...
Tangentially related: You can "tap" a living tree with a metal pipe and set fire to the methane that is emitted.
"The wood in this particular species naturally has this condition called wetwood, where it's saturated within the trunk of the tree" ... This wetwood makes for a welcoming home for all sorts of microorganisms.Video at the link. Via Neatorama.
Some of those organisms turned out to be species of archaea that are known methane producers. So it's not the trees themselves that are making the methane, it's the microbes living in the trees.
06 June 2019
05 June 2019
Carnival Cruise Lines vs. the environment
The cruise line giant Carnival Corporation and its Princess subsidiary have agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $20 million for environmental violations such as dumping plastic waste into the ocean. Princess Cruise Lines has already paid $40 million over other deliberate acts of pollution...Million-dollar fines are just a cost of doing business for major corporations. More details at NPR.
Miami-based Carnival pleaded guilty Monday to six probation violations, including the dumping of plastic mixed with food waste in Bahamian waters. The company also admitted sending teams to visit ships before the inspections to fix any environmental compliance violations, falsifying training records...
Carnival has had a long history of dumping plastic trash and oily discharge from its ships, with violations dating back to 1993... In 2013, a whistleblowing engineer exposed the illegal dumping of contaminated waste and oil from the company's Caribbean Princess ship. He told authorities that engineers were using a special device called the "magic pipe" to bypass the ship's water treatment system and dump oil waste straight into the ocean...
At the time, Princess told NPR that it chalked up the violations to "the inexcusable actions of our employees."
Related:
Labeled "Liverpool Champions League parade" via.
04 June 2019
"I Contain Multitudes" - Ed Yong
A tip of the hat to the TYWKIWDBI reader who recommended this book in a comment. Ed Yong is a multi-award-winning science journalist currently on staff at The Atlantic. In this book he expands upon a number of his previous essays related to the microbial world and presents a ton of information which I only had time to quickly browse. Herewith some excerpts:
"To allow our first microbes to colonise our newborn bodies, a special class of immune cells suppresses the rest of the body’s defensive ensemble, which is why babies are vulnerable to infections for their first six months of life. It’s not because their immune system is immature, as is commonly believed: it’s because it is deliberately stifled to give microbes a free-for-all window during which they can establish themselves...And this:
Milk is a mammalian innovation, common to platypuses and pangolins, humans and hippos, its ingredients varying according to what each species needs. Human milk is a particular marvel. Every mammal mother produces complex sugars called oligosaccharides, but human mothers, for some reason, churn out an exceptional variety: so far, scientists have identified more than two hundred human milk oligosaccharides, or H.M.O.s. They are the third-most plentiful ingredient in human milk, after lactose and fats, and their structure ought to make them a rich source of energy for growing babies—but babies cannot digest them.Or this:
When German first learned this, he was gobsmacked. Why would a mother expend so much energy manufacturing these complicated chemicals if they were apparently useless to her child? Why hasn’t natural selection put its foot down on such a wasteful practice? Here’s a clue: H.M.O.s pass through the stomach and the small intestine unharmed, landing in the large intestine, where most of our bacteria live. What if they aren’t food for babies at all? What if they are food for microbes?...
Human milk has evolved to nourish the microbe, and it, in turn, has evolved into a consummate H.M.O.vore. Unsurprisingly, it is often the dominant microbe in the guts of breast-fed infants.
Akkermansia muciniphila, one of the more common species of gut bacteria, is over 3,000 times more common in lean mice than in those genetically predisposed to obesity. If obese mice eat it, they lose weight and show fewer signs of type 2 diabetes.All of which makes this more ominous:
Gut microbes also partly explain the remarkable success of gastric bypass surgery – a radical operation that reduces the stomach to an egg-sized pouch and connects it directly to the small intestine. After this procedure, people tend to lose dozens of kilograms, a fact typically accredited to their shrunken stomachs. But as a side-effect, the operation also restructures the gut microbiome, increasing the numbers of various species, including Akkermansia. And if you transplant these restructured communities into germ-free mice, those rodents will also lose weight.
"[Antibiotics] are so wantonly used that, on a given day, between one and three per cent of the developed world takes an antibiotic of some kind... even short courses of antibiotics can change the human microbiome..."
Cat hair and dryer lint
Based on something I read somewhere, I decided to repurpose an empty suet feeder by stuffing it with wads of dryer lint and cat fur (harvested humanely with a comb).
Yesterday I was rewarded by seeing a hummingbird hovering at the dangling feeder, pulling some fibers out, dropping them, then selecting some others that she flew away with.
I don't know which she chose; the contents of the feeder are poked in at random (I should probably arrange it with one offering on the left, the other on the right). Does anyone know from experience which she preferred?
Addendum: A tip of the blogging hat to reader Wild Birds Unlimited Mid-Michigan for commenting that dryer lint is not recommended as material to offer birds for nesting.
Word for the day: reticule
I've encountered this word a number of times during my reading, have looked it up on multiple occasions. Finally decided to look into it further and found a definitive discussion at JSTOR Daily.
There's more information at JSTOR Daily, and additional photos. "Satirists dubbed the new must-have accessory the “ridicule,” because it was so small and insubstantial as to be virtually useless."The dramatic change in women’s fashion in the late 1780s—accelerated by the French Revolution of 1789—put an end to the pocket. Bulky underpinnings would have ruined the slim line of the columnar white gowns of the Directoire and Empire, which emulated the diaphanous draperies of classical statuary. Small, handheld purses called “reticules”—often decorated with tassels, fringe, or embroidery— became essential accessories. Women wore “a more or less ornamental bag with each gown, some being fastened to the waist, others suspended by long ribbons from the arm.” In addition to providing much-needed storage, reticules enlivened the simple, high-waisted silhouette while calling attention to newly bared arms and graceful hands. At the same time, women began to wear drawers or underpants, because their gowns were so body-conscious and transparent, and cashmere shawls, for warmth.
The term “reticule” comes from reticulum, the Latin word for “net.” Many of these early reticules were netted, and netting purses became a popular female pastime, as Mr. Bingley noted in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Reticules might also be made of fabric, embroidered or ornamented according to the latest trends, providing a conspicuous and relatively affordable way for women to follow fashion. During Napoleon’s campaigns, reticules mimicked flat military sabretaches, or sported sphinxes, or portraits of Bonaparte himself. In December 1801, the nomenclature was so new that Catherine Wilmot, an English tourist in Paris, felt it necessary to define it in a letter, making reference to the earlier and more familiar form of handbag, the workbag:
We have not seen Bonaparte yet, except adorning ‘Reticules’ (which are a species of little Workbag worn by the Ladies, containing snuff-boxes, Billet-doux, Purses, Handkerchiefs, Fans, Prayer-Books, Bon-bons, Visiting tickets, and all the machinery of existence).Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, was instrumental in popularizing the new style of dress, with all its attendant accessories.
Exonerated after being falsely imprisoned for 27 years.
"He's the third Ohio man exonerated after being wrongly accused of the 1975 murder. Imprisoned after the testimony of a 13 year old witness who recanted his testimony last year, saying he was coerced by detectives at the time.""Kwame Ajamu, 56, was the last of three men exonerated in the 1975 robbery and murder of a Cleveland-area money order salesman. Ajamu was originally sentenced to death, but it was vacated because of a paperwork error. He later earned parole in 2003." Only now being exonerated of all charges."The two other accused, Ajamu's brother, Wiley Bridgeman, 60, and Ricky Jackson, 57, were released from prison last month after 39 years.""Defense attorney Terry Gilbert said that Cuyahoga County prosecutors took a courageous stand not to fight the dismissal of charges against the men. Prosecutors also said they won't stop the trio from seeking more than $4.1 million in compensation from their wrongful imprisonments, reported Cleveland.com. ""“We were robbed,” Ajamu said. “There will be no offspring when I die. When my brother passes away, that is it. We don’t have children. There will never be another Ronnie Bridgeman."
Photo, and text via (emphasis added). Photo Tony Dejak/AP. More information at Wikipedia and Witness to Innocence.
A cat with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome
I didn't know this condition occurred in animals. You learn something every day.
Via the aww subreddit, were a link led me to the Ehlers Danlos Syndrome subreddit (for humans).
More on Ehler-Danlos syndromes.
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