Michael Bates: March 2019 Archives
Plastic bag bans can backfire if consumers just use other plastics instead
Rebecca Taylor, economics lecturer at the University of Sydney, writes: "A U.K. government study calculated that a shopper would need to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to reduce its global warming potential - its expected total contribution to climate change - below that of plastic carryout bags used once to carry newly purchased goods. To have less impact on the climate than plastic carryout bags also reused as trash bags, consumers would need to use the cotton bag 327 times....
"...My results showed that bag bans may not reduce total plastic usage if people begin purchasing trash bags to replace the carryout bags they were previously reusing for their garbage. As this finding shows, well-intended product bans can have unintended consequences....
"In particular, my results showed that bag bans caused sales of small (4 gallon), medium (8 gallon) and large (13 gallon) trash bags to increase by 120 percent, 64 percent and 6 percent respectively. "
Campus Intolerance of Free Speech Roots Revealed in Recent Study | National Review
"At first, I objected to the question. We are not 'forced to choose' between inclusivity and free speech. But on reflection, I realized the question's worth. That's exactly how free-speech debates are framed on campus. Advocates of free speech are often cast as enemies of diversity and opponents of inclusion. Students are told time and again that if they value historically marginalized communities, then they should endeavor to protect them from problematic or offensive speech.
"Yet that line of thinking posits a false conflict. No one is more empowered by free speech than the historically marginalized and dispossessed. Writing in 1860, Frederick Douglass rightly declared free speech to be the 'great moral renovator of society and government.' He argued that 'slavery cannot tolerate free speech' and that 'five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.'
"Federal court rulings defeating state efforts to suppress the civil-rights movement were indispensable to the cause of equality. I remember asking the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an early member of the Congressional Black Caucus, why he believed the movement for African-American equality made such rapid legal gains once it was able to fully mobilize.
'Almighty God and the First Amendment,' he responded. The First Amendment gave the most visible marginalized group in American history a voice, and God softened men's hearts to hear the message that spread as a result."
The Why (and Where) of U.S. Radio's K and W Call Signs - Big Think
"Quite early, the border between K Country and W Land had to be fixed geographically. But that dividing line lay further to the west than it does now: it followed the border between New Mexico in the west with Texas and Oklahoma in the east, then north along Colorado's eastern border with Kansas and Nebraska, Wyoming's eastern limits with Nebraska and South Dakota and finally Montana's with the Dakotas....
"A decade into the first federal regulation of station call signs, the K/W line was moved to the Mississippi, turning Texas and 10 other 'eastern' (W) states into 'western' (K) ones [8].
"After January 1923, new radio stations in the switchover states would be assigned a K call initial rather than a W one. But a grandfather clause provided that those radio stations in those states which already had a W call sign could keep it. This explains some of the anomalous call signs still in existence today, if not quite all of them."
WKY in Oklahoma City, WBAP in Fort Worth, and WOAI in San Antonio are three of the stations licensed before the line moved east.
Mountains Are There to Be Climbed: The Next United Methodism - Juicy Ecumenism
"Our critics have effectively framed the debate in terms of inclusion and exclusion. This is a godsend because it allows them to run a narrative about slavery and women in ministry that puts us on the defensive. It allows them to exploit the natural opposition to any idea of exclusion, for the default position will always initially be in favor of inclusion. It also allows a virtuous narrative about the moral arc of history which requires that we be identified as obsolete and out of step with the times....
"This whole way of thinking needs initially to be seen for what it is, namely, a toxic combination of persuasive definition, virtue-signaling story-telling, and fallacious reasoning. The ultimate issue for the conservative is none of these moves, much less a combination of them. The crucial issue at the end of the day is one of faithfulness to our Lord and to the tested tradition of the church. The failure to recognize this is an egregious error. It is the old game of Sein and Schein, much practiced by the mode of thought beloved of the Frankfurt School of philosophy, so that what seems to be true is not true....
"...Witness the aggressive repudiation of any distinction at this stage between one's person and one's behavior. Failure to accept the behavior, in this case, gay marriage, is interpreted and experienced as a rejection of one's gender expression and one's moral identity and thus as a deep act of hostility to the deep identity of the persons involved. Unless one fully accepts the gender expression represented by gay marriage (and ordination), then one is in effect rejecting the personhood of gays and lesbians. One is automatically pronounced guilty of causing harm....
"Psychologically, we are dealing in some instances with an adult form of adolescence. Of course, there is pain when we run into folk who disagree with us at the various levels of identity that I have just charted; yet in the current debate, all this is forgotten. The only way conservatives can avoid causing pain is to agree with the moral and ecclesial agenda of our critics. However, to insist on this is intellectual madness; it is a case of cooking the books by means of moral and emotional blackmail. Frankly, we have had enough of this verbal bullying; it is time to confront this form of intellectual malpractice and refuse its assumptions."
NOAA Historical Declination Viewer
An interactive map showing historical magnetic variation (the angle between true north and the direction a magnetic compass will point) since 1590. The movement of the north magnetic pole has accelerated in recent years. Since 1963, magnetic north has moved from 75 degrees north in the northern islands of Canada, to 86 degrees north in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
This Forbes story explains the impact of the magnetic pole shift on navigation.
Ken LaCorte: I Stopped the Stormy Daniels Story at Fox News. Here's Why.
"It lacked: any mention of payments, a hush money contract or any corroborating evidence beyond the two secondhand accounts.
"On top of that, Stormy Daniels herself had publicly denied the whole thing, a denial she would maintain for another year.
"The story wasn't close to being publishable, and my decision to hold it was a no-brainer. I didn't do it to help Trump and never said nor implied otherwise. It was such an easy call that I never even informed my direct boss or anyone in management about it....
"In her 11,635 word piece, [Jane Meyer] didn't find room to mention the paucity of evidence we had, the conflicting statements nor the other outlets which responded exactly as we did.
"The New Yorker piece couldn't have been more successful for them. In a media world where criticizing Fox News is an industry staple, the piece was picked up by almost every major outlet and Jane Mayer was feted throughout journalism.
"My non-quote quote and wrong story appeared everywhere from cable news to Jimmy Kimmel to the news outlets that re-wrote the story, including The Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, The Hill, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and at least 70 others.
"I say 're-wrote' instead of 'reported' because not a single reporter reached out to me. None.
"I'm an easy guy to find, especially since I'm in the process of launching a startup news site intent on bringing fairness back to journalism. This whole episode is an example of why the media has a credibility crisis.
"The ultimate irony is that in its zeal to hang Fox News for journalistic malfeasance, the media tossed journalistic standards in the trash can and gave readers the 100% wrong impression of Fox and the Stormy Daniels story.
"Journalists: these are the reasons why half of America believes Donald Trump when he calls us 'fake.'"
A few noisy students at the dorm Sullivan oversees have protested his involvement in the case, and the Harvard administration has focused on placating them rather than backing the faculty member and the legal traditions of presumption of innocence and the right to counsel.
"[Q.] Is this on the dean of Harvard College, who launched this survey, or is this in response to student pressure? Do you blame the administration, or do you think that the students forced his hand?"
"No, students have every right to protest. It's in the nature of students to protest. The adults in the room, however, do not have to react in the way that they have."
....
"[Q.]" There's been a lot written about political correctness running amok on campus the last few years. Do you consider this an example of it? Has this incident changed the way you think about that larger issue?"
"To the first part of your question, the term political correctness has so much freight that I'm going to choose my own term and say that this situation is a particular instantiation of a larger threat to both academic freedom and the norm of open and robust exchanges of ideas that have typically characterized universities. It has not changed my thinking, because I have long been concerned with forms of silencing that go on in the university space with respect to people who have different ideas. I have gotten scores of notes from students who very quietly give strong support to me, and I appreciate those notes. But one constant is that they say that they feel as though they cannot say anything publicly because they will be tarred and feathered as 'rape sympathizers' and that they're disinclined to step out publicly. This sort of thing has no space in the university. People have to be able to exchange ideas, even ideas with which they disagree, freely and openly. That's that."
How to check BIOS version in Windows 10
"wmic bios get biosversion" or msinfo32
How does TfL's Oyster card work? | Alphr
Transport for London's travel card: "The new Oyster cards still have no battery or power source, so are only powered when they're near an RFID reader, but they contain their own operating system, have a file structure for storing files and data, and their processing functions allow them to perform encryption to the far more resilient AES 128-bit standard. Pretty clever stuff for something that looks like a credit card."
Michigan Daily Digital Archives - October 27, 1977 (vol. 88, iss. 43) - Dirty Old Man
A wire service story about Walter Bell, 87-year-old owner of the Capri Theater in Dewey, Oklahoma, which had gained a reputation as the "Dewey Dirties." Bell had been showing "art films" and what he called "semi-art" films since 1964, claiming it was the only way he could make a living from the theater, which was barred from showing first-run films while they were running four miles down the road in Bartlesville. Bell was charged with obscenity the year before but had been acquitted.
Colorado Springs wrestler refuses to wrestle girl, knocks self out of tournament
High school wrestler Brendan Johnston, a modern-day Eric Liddell.
'"I'm not really comfortable with a couple of things with wrestling a girl," Johnston explained. "The physical contact, there's a lot of it in wrestling.
'"And I guess the physical aggression, too. I don't want to treat a young lady like that on the mat. Or off the mat. And not to disrespect the heart or the effort that she's put in. That's not what I want to do, either."
'Johnston is forever a part of Colorado state tournament lore now. He's cool with that. His decision to forfeit twice at the 2019 state tourney -- effectively eliminating himself from a competition he had a solid shot at winning -- on personal and religious grounds rather than wrestle two girl competitors, may divide your inner circle right down the middle. He's cool with that, too.
'"Wrestling is something we do, it's not who we are," Johnston told The Denver Post before forfeiting to Rios on Saturday in his final match as a high-school wrestler. "And there are more important things to me than my wrestling. And I'm willing to have those priorities."'
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge
"The fourth source [of guidance for moderation decisions] is perhaps the most problematic: Facebook's own internal tools for distributing information. While official policy changes typically arrive every other Wednesday, incremental guidance about developing issues is distributed on a near-daily basis. Often, this guidance is posted to Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook that the company introduced in 2016. Like Facebook itself, Workplace has an algorithmic News Feed that displays posts based on engagement. During a breaking news event, such as a mass shooting, managers will often post conflicting information about how to moderate individual pieces of content, which then appear out of chronological order on Workplace. Six current and former employees told me that they had made moderation mistakes based on seeing an outdated post at the top of their feed. At times, it feels as if Facebook's own product is working against them. The irony is not lost on the moderators."
