Malaria and flowers

How malaria makes its hosts more inviting to mosquitoes when it's time to jump ship:

Plasmodium's ancestors lost the ability to photosynthesize a long time ago. But they still hold onto some of the ancestral enzymes from the bacteria that their forebears swallowed 1.3 billion years ago. As a result, Plasmodium is weirdly similar to flowers and trees. Some scientists have even taken advantage of this evolutionary kinship by looking at weed-killers as potential drugs for malaria.

This ancient heritage also explains why Plasmodium can smell like lemons. Odom and her colleagues found that the parasite make pinene and limonene using enzymes that are related to the ones that plants use to make these chemicals.

There are reasons to think that the parasite are using these chemicals to lure mosquitoes. While we're painfully aware of the appetite mosquitoes have for blood, the fact is that mosquitoes also feed on flower nectar. They depend on the nectar for sugar they need to fuel their flights. Many insects are keenly sensitive to certain colors and odors that flowers produce, which guide them reliably to their next meal of nectar. Odom and her colleagues found that the antenna of malaria-carrying species of mosquitoes are exquisitely sensitive to pinene and limonene. If you want to attract mosquitoes, it makes sense to make those chemicals.

Yes, Let's Do That

"Let's hop into a time machine and go back to the England of yore!"

A small selection of readings in the original accent from a few important periods of English literary history. Well, and actually a bit earlier: all the way to Arthurian Britain, as well as we can guess at it.

But take heart: if you couldn't ask for the beer in Old Brythonic, ask for it in something like Latin. Pretty much any Romance language you know will have preserved a word for beer that Arthur's kindred would have learned to understand.

Surprise!

Obamacare is proving to be a drag on small business growth. Close to two thirds predict compliance costs of the ACA will "increase costs a lot" this year.

That's Some Tight Security

From American Public Broadcasting:

Nearly nine years after Brett first saw combat here, this Detroit native returned to Iraq to defend the Christian faith he holds so dear.... Brett asked us to not to us his last name for security reasons. In 2006 he served in the U.S. army’s 14th mountain division for 15 months in Iraq. Brett was wounded by a roadside bomb and is a veteran on disability.

Good luck looking up his service records from the 14th Mountain Division, ISIS.

V S Naipaul on Daesh

Naipaul once wrote a book called A Turn in the South, which treated the racial problems of thirty years ago with a compassionate eye for all sides. His outright condemnation of the so-called Islamic State is the more powerful given his demonstrated ability to imagine different perspectives sympathetically. Sometimes, it's just because you can accurately imagine someone's inner life that you find them disgusting.

Update on Women in the Combat Arms

As the military drives on with President Obama's orders to integrate women into every military job, the Washington Times reports that evidence suggesting this may be unwise is being suppressed.

In particular they mention a British study that just came out late last year, which you can read here. In terms of combat effectivness -- which one would think ought to be the only consideration -- the British identified 21 factors they thought could plausibly be said to contribute to combat effectiveness. Women studied had negative results in 11 of these 21 areas.

"In three of the 11 negative factors, mitigation would be a significant challenge," the report says. "These are survivability, morbidity and deployability, much of which are predicated by physiology."

Those are some pretty important areas. Will they survive in combat? Will they suffer injuries that will hamper their teams? Can they be deployed at all?

The problems turn out to be related. Women suffer combat stress injuries much quicker than men, which reduces their ability to maneuver -- and also makes them less dangerous to their enemies, not just less likely to survive.

These studies suggest that the relative strength of women, compared to men, when carrying the combat load are likely to result in the early onset of fatigue. This is likely to result in a distinct cohort with lower survivability in combat. Similar research points to a reduced lethality rate; in that combat marksmanship degrades as a result of fatigue when the combat load increases in proportion to body weight and strength. The risks regarding survivability are therefore relative; these are about biology rather than character.

UPDATE: I think this concerns me for two basic reasons.

1. We're doing all these assessments on what amount to closed courses. The whole reason to establish a closed course is to limit the risks: you can drive at speeds that would be ridiculously unsafe in traffic, or practice combat-driving maneuvers in a relatively safe environment before you have to go out and do them for real. The problem is that the armed forces will have to go out and do this for real at some point. If we discover in a three-month survey on a closed course that we're encountering morbidity and survivability problems that also impact the ability to effectively kill the enemy, we need to understand that the effect of this on a unit deployed at war for a year or more is going to be magnified substantially. For want of a nail, the shoe... the horse... the troop... the regiment... the battle.. the war.

2. That Congress and the military are glad-handing their way through this suggests that we're not listening to negative findings if they conflict with the great goal of 'gender equality.' Will negative findings from the battlefield be enough to correct us here? Or will we refuse to see it even then? 'Their command should have trained them harder'; 'their leadership didn't provide adequate support'; 'the environment is toxic for women'; 'who dares question that she got pregnant at deployment time?'

The danger is accepting a permanently higher number of American dead and injured to further our chase for this will-o'-wisp.

Practicing without a license

I'm in favor of it, obviously.  The Washington Post reports in alarm over the high cost of legal services, even approving in its own backhanded way of high hourly rates charged by lawyers in light of the poor things' unfair student debt (that being, obviously, the only excuse for a market rate in a just society).  Here and there, however, people are trying out the legal equivalent of a nurse practitioner.

For years I ran my firm's pro bono legal clinic for homeless kids, 99% of whom had the same recurring problems, typically involving outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets.  My neighbors come to me with the middle-class equivalent, which is wills and divorces, with the occasional business contract.  Only in the case of the business contracts am I likely to add much value to what is available online to anybody with a modicum of instruction and experience.  Cheap over-the-counter legal assistance for routine problems would cut way down on the cost of a lot of ordinary problems.  If at the same time it makes some dull and lazy lawyers feel the cold breath of competition on their necks, well, maybe they'll get better at returning their phone calls timely.

Do I worry that people will get into trouble when a cut-rate semi-professional doesn't diagnose the zebra conditions?  Not very much.  The realistic alternative for most people is no legal advice at all.  There are many, many controversies that can't be solved by a lawyer for less than the amount in dispute.  Like a nurse practitioner, a legal practitioner who finds himself in over his head can refer people to an expert for anything really hairy.  That's what I do when people approach me for consumer jobs outside my expertise:  I try to do the bone-headed part up front--all the time-consuming process of extracting the facts and documents from the client, and roughing out an approach--then refer them to an expert with a situation that should now be cheaper to handle.  Long experience tells me that the expensive part of a lot of legal work stems from using the lawyer as a secretary.  Nearly all the cost of administering an estate, for instance, is monkey work consisting of endless repetitive letters to holders of various sorts of accounts and titles, finding out what documents they need filled out and sent in before they'll transfer title to heirs.  Anyone with a bit of training can do that for himself and save a ton of money.  Cassandra, with her paralegal experience and natural advantages, could do all of it standing on her head.

We sometimes couch licensing restrictions as a public protection, but there's usually a big old hunk of anti-competitive merchant protectionism built right in there.

Melville on battle

From Sheridan at Cedar Creek, by Herman Melville:

Shoe the steed with silver
  That bore him to the fray,
When he heard the guns at dawning
  Miles away;
When he heard them calling, calling--
  Mount! nor stay.

Maybe Because She's Done So Much To Earn It?

Poll: Democrats think the media is harder on Clinton than other politicians.

Never Take A "Data-Driven" Road Trip

My late father-in-law was an aerospace engineer, and his adult children still gripe about the trauma of family road trips he planned. We must hit the next sight-to-be-seen! No time for dinner! No, we can't just stop here and enjoy ourselves!

NPR found someone even less likely to plan a good time.

Randy Olson, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University and a self-proclaimed "data tinkerer," believes he's devised a route that could allow a family to hit a landmark in each of the Lower 48 states, from Grand Canyon in Arizona to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Statue of Liberty in New York, in just nine days of driving.

"About 9.33 days, if you drove non-stop," Olson clarifies.

That means no time sleeping or using the restroom — and no bad traffic.

Allow me to suggest: no.

Sexual Identity

A brave soldier comes out.

(It's a parody of the genre, so expect the usual language.)

UPDATE: RangerUP finds a date for our soldier.

Barriers to entry

Adam Smith warned us that merchants are forever looking for ways to protect themselves from competition.  Thirty-five states have a "certificate of need" process that drives up medical costs.

The Bible and science

From "The Lost World of Adam and Eve":

Isn't the claim that readers cannot properly understand Genesis without knowing Hebrew and the ancient Near Eastern culture just a form of scholarly elitism?

It’s no more scholarly elitism than recognizing someone has to translate the Bible into English. Bringing the ancient text to us is not just a matter of word rendering; it’s a matter of understanding the culture in which it was written. We have to translate not only language but also culture. We all are dependent on the expertise of others. I’m never inclined to think that the exercise of one’s spiritual gifts or talents is elitism. I’m a hand, not an eye. And someone else is an eye and not a hand. That’s how the body of Christ works.

British tribes

I'd love to see the same analysis done in the U.S., to see whether it would corroborate the findings in David Fischer's excellent book, "Albion's Seed."  With so much frontier to settle, the U.S. findings presumably would be more smeared out towards the west.

Le Sacre du Printemps

Springtime.



We got through with half a rank of wood left, which can form the first part of next winter's firewood.

St. Chesterton

Apparently there's a movement. If it's proper, though, there will be miracles. Although possibly he is a case like Aquinas: the writings are the miracles.

What's It Like To Live Like A Viking?

Ingrid Galadriel Aune Nilsen, Master of Arts, explains how becoming a full-time Viking re-enactor has changed her views on modern society. Her English is labored, so you'll have to be patient. It's still interesting what she thinks.



The ideal of a 'functioning democracy' in the Viking Age isn't so far fetched. The Icelandic sagas suggest that it worked more often than not.

"A Fantastic Opportunity For You To Assert Your Dominance On Everyone Around You..."

"...which improves your life."

Content warning for those of you who don't share Tex's sense of humor.

"Kant is a Moron"

That's the headline of all the articles about this act of graffiti.

The Russian word used is a relatively mild term of abuse for a slow-witted or foolish person, and could also be translated as "loser," "dumb-ass," or "chump". The vandals did not, however, leave any accompanying critique of Kant's thinking to justify the smear on his intellectual powers.

I asked a Russian-speaking comrade about this, and he tells me that the actual word needs context. It's apparently a term that is of particular origin in the criminal community in Russia, which thinks of itself as pursuing a life worthy of a man because it isn't subordinate or groveling. This term refers to someone who deserves to be robbed, because they are the kind of person who slaves away to pay taxes and be lived-off by others.

Thus, the proper translation is more like "Kant is a sucker," which is much more defensible than him being a moron -- or even "Kant is a square," which is actually true. Kant is the squarest of squares.

What we meant to say . . . .

Does the DOJ actually answer to anyone?  It seems possible it may.