Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Putting this here partly so I can find them again:

Cricket frogs crossing water: The motion has previously been called "skittering" along the water surface. Video shows that it's similar to what porpoises do. The frogs repeatedly leap out of the water and submerging again, moving forward with each leap (via conuly)


Dragonfly acrobatics: some dragonflies dunk themselves in the water to cool off. They submerge briefly, then fly vertically upwards, and do rapid loop-the-loops to dry off (via andrewducker; paywalled)

Hominins in Ethiopia had a workshop making hand-axes out of obsidian 1.2 million years ago. This is more than twice as long ago as previous evidence of this kind of focused activity.

The article in Nature goes into a lot more detail, with color illustrations:

The standardized obsidian handaxes provide ample evidence of the repetitive use of fully mastered skills. This must have required a foundation of already developed knowledge and skills.

---

Present-day humans have some understanding of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures.

This study builds on earlier work showing that at least some gestures are consistent across ape species, and other gestures are consistent only within a species:but a gesture that means "give me that food" in chimp is "groom me" or "carry me" in bonobo.

The difficulty in carrying the research over to humans has been that we use a wider variety of gestures, combined with (spoken or signed) language: there isn't a single gesture for "come closer" or "give me that food." What these researchers did is ask humans to interpret chimpanzee and bonobo gestures, on video, edited to show only the ape gesturing, not what it was responding to, or how another ape responded to it. Humans consistently did better than random chance at identifying the meaning of the gestures.

On the other hand, the best accuracy was about 80%; it goes down for gestures that have more than one within-species meaning, and for gestures that have different meanings to chimps than to bonobos.

On the Science-Based Medicine blog, David Gorski asks whether we can still trust the CDC and FDA and concludes "I don't know."

For me, this is more evidence that no, we can't: Gorski (aka Orac) has been a voice for "trust the science, don't listen to anecdata" and pointing at CDC recommendations for things like vaccination for a long time. But that was before Trump, when we could trust the CDC to look at the science, not edit the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report to make the president look better.

Or, as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up:

In these unprecedented times -- times in which the very phrase "unprecedented times" is becoming much more common -- the New York City Department of Health seems to have quietly endorsed the use of glory holes. This is part of a three-page guide to safer sex and COVID-19, along with advice that masturbation is good and kissing is risky.

When asked if the above passage was a tacit endorsement of glory holes, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control and Incident Commander for the Health Department’s COVID-19 response, told Gizmodo (emphasis, again, ours):

We trust our audience and New Yorkers are creative enough to know what this means.

(via ambyr)

I got this fine hoodie from an online acquaintance. Also, I just re-colored my hair.



I'd been idly wanting a new hoodie for months, and then I saw these. Liz has an Etsy store with this and a wide variety of other embroidered clothing, bags, and such. A lot of it is fantasy or sf-themed:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/UnusualFrequency <https://www.etsy.com/shop/unusualfrequency>

The World Health Organization is issuing daily coronavirus situation reports, addressed to researchers, doctors, and the general public. The first page is an executive summary: updated numbers of cases, risk assessments, and four short paragraphs about what's in the rest of the report.

Today's report includes a page on clinical management of patients with COVID-19, more detailed surveillance data, an article on preparedness for healthcare professionals, and recommendations and advice for the public. As of 1 March 2020, they're saying "If you are not in an area where COVID-19 is spreading, or have not travelled from an area where COVID-19 is spreading, or have not been in contact with an infected patient, your risk of infection is low."

An interesting article on the difficulties of de-biasing language difficulties of de-biasing language, from a machine learning viewpoint. The author notes that simple approaches can hide bias in automated systems without removing it, e.g., if an algorithm is trained on a biased dataset in which "programmer" clusters with words that are more often found on men's resumes, words that might be irrelevant to job qualification. At the same time, the effort is worth making; even if a completely unbiased algorithm isn't possible with current methods in a society with baked-in prejudices, a less-biased one will get better results if the goal is (say) to hire qualified programmers, or make loan decisions based on ability to repay, not on race or gender.

The problem we’re facing in natural language processing (as in any application of machine learning) is that fairness is aspirational and forward looking; data can only be historical, and therefore necessarily reflects the biases and prejudices of the past. Learning how to de-bias our applications is progress, but the only real solution is to become better people.

(via Richard Mateosian, on Copyediting-L.)

The Supreme Court just ruled, 7-2, that the states cannot be required to enforce federal law. The case in front of them was about sports betting. That AP story quotes Justice Alito's decision, someone from the ACLU, and someone from the Cato Institute:

“The court ruled definitively that the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law. In the immigration context, this means it can’t require state or local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

siderea posted about MassHealth changes a few days ago. The post title is hers, and she notes that she spent quite a bit of time trying to find out what the new rules will be, especially for mental health care. (Do read the comments here.)

(I'm linking because the Davis Square community is pretty local, and this is of interest to people outside Somerville, or who just don't read that journal.)

The city of Boston has put up a climate change website that republishes EPA and other federal government stuff that the current administration has scrubbed:

http://climatechangedata.boston.gov/

The top of the home page identifies it as a City of Boston site, and says
The City of Boston wishes to acknowledge and attribute this information to the United States Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies for the decades of work that they have done to advance the fight against climate change. While this information may not be readily available on the agency’s webpage right now, here in Boston we know climate change is real and we will continue to take action to fight it.

I haven't explored very much yet, but there's a lot there.

[cross-posted here and to the thisfinecrew community]