yes, media bias exists

I didn’t really believe in media bias until the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was just so blatantly obvious it couldn’t be ignored. But this article explains how Bernie Sanders can be right that subtler but still insidious forms of bias and censorship exist. I recently listened to a podcast (which I can’t find again…) on how relevant Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent remains today, and I am as sold now as when I originally read it. Here’s a summary of his “five filters” along with my personal take.

The five points are a direct quote by the way. Shame on this awful version of WordPress that I can’t figure out how to make a block quote.

1. Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”

  • My take: this is what Bernie Sanders is talking about. Employees of any orgnanization are unlikely to challenge the interests of their owners and managers. They have to feed their families and pay their bills. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

2. Advertising—Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”

  • A business does not want to lose its advertisers. No mystery here. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

3. Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

  • I believe part of this is laziness and penny pinching. Publishing government and corporate press releases with minimal editing is just easy and cheap. But government and corporations can lean on the press when they want to, as we saw most clearly during the Iraq invasion.

4. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”

  • Trump has made this more obvious and ugly, but it was there before.

5. The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

  • Don’t forget Muslims and Mexicans.

bacteria, viruses, and fungi, oh my!

In the category of new diseases to worry about, and just in case you have not yet perused the latest issue of the Journal of Fungi, Candida auris is a really dangerous yeast fungus making the rounds in hospitals.

On the Origins of a Species: What Might Explain the Rise of Candida auris?

Candida auris is an emerging multidrug-resistant yeast first described in 2009 that has since caused healthcare-associated outbreaks of severe human infections around the world. In some hospitals, it has become a leading cause of invasive candidiasis. C. auris is markedly different from most other pathogenic Candida species in its genetics, antifungal resistance, and ability to spread between patients. The reasons why this fungus began spreading widely in the last decade remain a mystery. We examine available data on C. auris and related species, including genomic epidemiology, phenotypic characteristics, and sites of detection, to put forth hypotheses on its possible origins. C. auris has not been detected in the natural environment; related species have been detected in in plants, insects, and aquatic environments, as well as from human body sites. It can tolerate hypersaline environments and higher temperatures than most Candida species. We explore hypotheses about the pre-emergence niche of C. auris, whether in the environmental or human microbiome, and speculate on factors that might have led to its spread, including the possible roles of healthcare, antifungal use, and environmental changes, including human activities that might have expanded its presence in the environment or caused increased human contact.

augmented reality on Google Street View

Google is rolling out some augmented reality features intended to assist pedestrians in Street View.

The feature overlays a live video feed on the map. Directional arrows and street names appear on the video feed to provide more intuitive navigation and give the user a sense of exactly where they are and where they need to go.

the Mekong

Similar to the situation in India, the Mekong depends on a mix of snow/glacial melt from the Himalayas, and on seasonal monsoon rains. Both are becoming less reliable, and countries in the headwaters, including China and Laos, are going on massive dam-building binges. (Disclaimer: This website looks like a reputable source of journalism, but I am not familiar with it.)

The crisis began when critical monsoon rains, which usually start in late May in the Mekong region, failed to arrive. Dry conditions, driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon and exacerbated by climate change, persisted well into July. At that time, observers say, the situation was made worse by hydropower dam operators upstream, in China and Laos,withholding water for their own purposes...

Originating in the Tibetan highlands, the Mekong River flows through six Asian countries, including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before emptying into the South China Sea. The river basin is home to the largest inland fishery in the world and more than 60 million people depend on it for their livelihoods.

the role of drought in migration from Central America

The Guardian has an article on the role that drought and climate change play in migration of people from Central American countries such as Guatemala to the U.S.

Central America remains one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee their homes and head north in search of security.

But amid a deepening global climate crisis, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.

hydrogen as a jet fuel

I was curious if aircraft could be fueled feasibly by hydrogen in the future. Okay, I know this has been tried in the past – “Oh, the humanity!” – but, there must be advances in technology since then. 10 minutes of research reveals that battery-powered aircraft are now a going concern, although they tend to be unmanned or at least small. Current fuel cell technology sounds like it has pretty similar limits to batteries. On a larger scale, there is serious research on the potential of liquid hydrogen as a commercial aviation fuel. It sounds feasible but would require major changes in long-lived infrastructure systems around the world. But let’s say you happened to have lots of electricity and water in abundance. Maybe you are in a coastal location and have invested in nuclear power, or you just happen to have lots of geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever kind of power. You have also invested in desalination and you have created a major transportation hub. You might then be in a position to create liquid hydrogen and/or fuel cells at a cost-effective price. This could be climate friendly as burning hydrogen, in theory at least, creates only water vapor as a product, and fusing hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen creates the same – liquid water or water vapor. Hydrogen is dangerous, but so is jet fuel and so are the materials in modern batteries, so hopefully technology will eventually come to our aid and get the risk and environmental impact down to a similar or lower level than these other options.

July 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

the singularity is…boring?

I’ve read a couple near- to mid-term future books this summer that you could describe as being about the singularity. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson takes place in…well, that’s not too hard to figure out. Humanity has populated most of the solar system, and people are still people but they have various augmentations to their bodies. Artificial intelligence is around although it is not clear just how intelligent it really is. The last book I read by Robinson was Red Mars, and like that book, I find that the world (really, the entire solar system) of his imagination is breathtaking and he describes it very vividly. The passages where he describes what the world is like and how it got that way are fascinating. His actual characters and plots…less fascinating. I just couldn’t get into them or care about them.

Accelerando by Charles Stross is kind of similar. He is pretty explicit that events in his story take place in the near future, say 2030-2100. Things are far more advanced and weird in Stross’s 2050 than Robinson’s 2312. Humanity spreads out to most of the solar system during the course of the book. People have radical augmentations to their minds, and artificial intelligence is a major factor. The world building is fascinating, the passages that describe how the world is changing are fascinating, and…the characters are forgettable, and the actual plot all but incomprehensible. It’s just beyond weird. I think his purpose was just to show what it could be like if things get really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Stross. He is an excellent story teller when he wants to be, and I think he has just purposely written a very different kind of book here. Maybe he is just showing off his imagination, which is astonishing. Actually, he writes several different kinds of books, and if I had to randomly read passages from them without prior knowledge of Charles Stross, I would never guess they could be the same author. I’m not sorry I’ve read Accelerando but I’m not sure I would recommend it as light reading.

Let’s digress briefly and talk about dudes named Kim. According to Wikipedia, Kim was a popular boys’ name in the U.S. as recently as the 1960s. I don’t know any men named Kim and I had no idea. And no less a journalistic powerhouse than the Omaha World-Herald has published an exhaustive article on the subject.

One strange common thread between 2012 and Accelerando is the idea of dismantling entire planets and using them as raw materials for enormous computers.

I also read Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan this summer. I didn’t love this book either. And I love Richard K. Morgan. He’s another author that likes to experiment with completely different writing styles and even genres.

One strange common thread between Accelerando and Market Forces is the idea of bringing back some form of dueling or trial by combat to settle disputes between corporations. It’s a strange coincidence – then again, it’s entirely possible these authors talk and occasionally bounce bizarre ideas off each other. Corporations are not people, they exist to compete with each other and only the strong and nimble survive. They don’t need to be treated the same as people.

Strangely enough, after not thinking about dueling for more than five seconds for several decades, I just listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on dueling. It occurred to me that maybe dueling did serve one purpose in societies where people do not trust the authorities to administer justice fairly – perhaps it breaks the cycle of revenge. Normally in human societies, if someone wrongs you, a close family member or friend, and there are no civil authorities you trust to administer justice, you are honor bound to seek vengeance. The people you seek vengeance upon will then seek vengeance in return, in an escalating cycle of violence that leads to a lot of suffering and death. Maybe dueling, violent as it was, served a purpose because if your friend or family member was killed fair and square in the duel, justice was served and you were not duty bound to do anything more about it. I’m not saying this is good – the trustworthy civil authorities are the way to go. But one dead body is better than many.

I’m also reading some Agatha Christie, just because I never have. I am liking it but not loving it.

So…hooray for podcasts and boo for books I have picked so far this summer. Oh well, some summer reading binges are more fun than others.

I am actually half-seriously trying to write a novel this year. It’s hard. I just want to get my 80,000 words written down to prove to myself that I can do it. More likely, it will renew my appreciation for the people who do it all the time and are actually good at it.