tingilinde

handy ai

Finding ways nature hadn't intended.

 

native americans and water

It turns out Native Americans hold significant water rights in the West.

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In the United States, water law is founded on the principle of “first in time, first in right”—whoever first put water to “beneficial use” can claim the right to use it now and in the future. In the 1922 compact, though, tribal nations are mentioned only in passing. “The Colorado River Compact basically just assumed that tribes were going to go away, the United States was going to figure it out, nobody had to care,” Jay Weiner, a tribal attorney from Montana, told me. Instead, in recent years, as the worst drought in more than a thousand years has seized the Southwest, the region’s tribal nations have been asserting their legal rights to the contentious, increasingly scarce commodity of water. In 2004, gric signed an agreement with the federal government that gave them the right to more than six hundred and fifty thousand acre-feet of water, much of it from the Colorado River. The settlement made gric one of the largest rights holders of Colorado River water in Arizona; the community controls more of the river’s water than the state of Nevada. Tribal nations could soon hold the legal right to about twenty per cent of the Colorado River’s flow, including unresolved claims. (Some Southwestern tribes have yet to come to an official agreement over their water entitlements.)

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how phones are tracked

The techniques of one company explained in a video.

a tip of the hat to Steven

 

short story challenge

 

 

visual zork

Neat - but I think the original, where you have to use your mind to build the maps and images, is better.

evidence for population III stars

Quanta recently published a piece on a group finding evidence for Population III stars - the first, and now long-gone, stars in the Universe. Quanta normally has high standards, but this one had what appeared to be typos - referring to He-2 rather than He[2] for example that were curious.  Of course finding these stars would be an important step, so skepticism is warranted.  

I finally got around to reading the paper.  There are a lot of holes - plus it's pre-peer review.  I doubt it will make it through the process as written.  So if you see something about Population III stars...

 

 

A 1964 interview of Georges Lemaître has been found and posted.  He's one of the originators of the notion of an expanding universe from something very small..  a mathematician, astronomer, and priest.  Here's a link to the interview and an English translation.  Great history of science material.

 

 

look over there - your enemy!

How the right wing controls the minds of its voters.

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"A few things happen if we deploy this idea that our opponents are out to sexually harm children, to sexually molest and violently assault them," Dr. Gillian Frank, who studies religion, sexuality and gender at Princeton University, told Salon. For one thing, it associates one's opponents with the worst evil that humans are capable of committing, and by rendering them in this way as monsters, obviates the usual responsibility to treat them with basic respect. It also triggers a primal instinct in every parent to protect their child, one that can then be channeled against political opponents if the parents aren't discerning enough to realize they're being manipulated. Finally (and, from a strategic standpoint, most significantly), the tactic creates a psychological dynamic which forever deflects focus away from legitimate questions about social justice.

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separate from the artificial culture war

What do gas stoves do to indoor air?   YLE comments

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The foundation of the gas stoves study was a 2013 publication in which researchers analyzed more than 40 studies. They concluded that children living in households with gas stoves were 42% more likely to experience asthma symptoms and 24% more likely to ever get diagnosed.

Just like other public health problems, the industry is fighting back. This was highlighted over the weekend when the New York Times uncovered that lobbyists were hired by gas companies to sow public doubt in the health dangers of gas stoves. Their main argument: the health studies like the ones in the meta-analysis don’t establish causality. In other words, we don’t know if gas stoves directly lead to asthma, or if some other factor explains the findings.

Of course not every study is perfect. But the studies of gas stoves and asthma are built on a foundation of 40+ years of studies linking gas stoves to nitrogen dioxide exposures and nitrogen dioxide exposures to respiratory health. The case for causality is strong.

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ventilation

It's too bad there isn't a greater focus on something relativity easy that would make a difference.

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We are all playing Covid roulette. The next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. I’ve been hit three times so far, and feel lucky still to be active. But I’ve lost a little every time: stamina, lung capacity, sleep, general fitness, however diligently I’ve exercised since. In all three cases, it seems, the infection has come from school. For families with school-age children, the chamber turns more often than for those without. Yet, three years after the pandemic began, the government still does almost nothing to make schools safe.

There’s a powerful argument that just as cholera was stopped by cleaning the water, Covid will be stopped by cleaning the air. The virus thrives in badly ventilated, shared spaces – especially classrooms, where students sit together for long periods. One study found that mechanical ventilation systems in classrooms reduce the infection risk by 74%.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie