126 thoughts on “Open Thread For April”

    1. My guess: she has non-trivial North African ancestry (which would be really old, but could be as high as 11%), or maybe Gitano. Or maybe a bit of both.

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  4. The Guardian has an article about the concept “fictosexual”.
    Meh, I fell in love with Seven of Nine long ago.
    Also, William Gibson’s Idoru took the concept two steps further; in the novel, a fictional pop character is uploaded to an AI, which then hacks futuristic 3D printers all over the world to create flesh-and-blood versions of herself.

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  7. Marjorie Taylor Greene “Satan controls the Catholic Church”.
    This is the current Republican party?

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  8. *Spectator sport warning.*

    In the history of women’s tennis, only two have won total prize money of more than US$40 million, and they are both named Williams. One of them, Venus, achieved it while suffering from a nasty autoimmune disease that was not correctly diagnosed until quite late in her career (she is still playing professionally aged 41, and she obviously doesn’t need the money). The other one, Serena, is in my opinion the greatest female tennis player who has ever lived. (But I’m a Venus fan, not a Serena fan.)

    That alone is probably a good enough reason to watch King Richard (2021), a film about their strange and remarkable (and frankly not very likeable) father Richard Williams, although I have to concede that he did have some admirable qualities, in the way he respected and cared for his daughters, the way he guided their careers and protected them.

    If it was an inaccurate portrait of Richard Williams, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I know a fair bit about him, having been a Venus Williams fan right from when she first played at Wimbledon aged 16, and I would say it is actually pretty accurate.

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  10. To give Eske Willerslev his due, he was able to get Aboriginal groups to buy in to being genetically tested, when they had always previously been very resistant and suspicious. That was a great achievement. He made them want to know, and they were very happy with what he and his research colleagues found and were able to tell them.

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      1. Not meant to be true. She’s a comedian, and she’s not Scottish, but does a good job on the accent and sounding drunk. She has loads of 2 minute videos on Youtube on any subject you can think of, and they are all hilarious. I think she’s brilliant. The lesbian vampire one is good.

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  14. About GM: as I have mentioned, other species -including one big cetacean- have evolved the genetic tools to suppress cancer and suppress the genetic damage that leads to ageing, achieving life spans of two centuries. There are also many other cases of genetic variants that lead to good health.
    The easiest way to profit from genetic breakthroughs in understanding DNA would be germ-line GM.
    .
    But -if you are in a science fiction state of mind- how would a genetic “retrofit” of an adult human go about? I assume upgrading mitochondrial DNA would be much easier than nuclear DNA, but both would be conceptually very difficult. Nanorobots in their billions swimming around carrying the whole genome with them and entering cell after cell? Not even William Gibson has tried to work it out. The changes brought about by the organism in the “Expanse” narrative universe is described in a hand-waving manner.

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  15. Former tennis player Boris Becker -contemporary with Björn Borg- has been sentenced to two years in prison for economic crimes.

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      2. All up, that little effort cost him US$27 million, reportedly. His wife was pregnant at the time, and his broom closet exploit triggered a very costly divorce. Plus he impregnated the Russian model/waitress he shared the broom closet with and then tried unsuccessfully to deny paternity; that cost him as well.

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      3. I suppose the lesson in that is to be careful who you share broom cupboards with. Or maybe just reserve them for, like, keeping brooms in.

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      1. Borg retired early immediately after a shock loss to McEnroe in New York. He also subsequently went bankrupt due to a series of poor business/investment decisions, but he’s not alone in that, but few have crashed and burned as spectacularly as Broom Cupboard Becker, and as far as I know he is the only one to wind up being imprisoned for fraud.

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  16. On early Sunday morning May 1st before sunrise, Venus and Jupiter will be very close to each other in the sky.

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      1. That seems to have worked. When all else fails, resort to shouting abuse at your computer.

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  23. There is a sunni muslim ritual called zikr or dhikr. Some sunnis consider this heretical, so they send suicide bombers to murder as many fellow sunnis as possible. This is what happened in Afghanistan recently.

    As David Wood says, we really need to convince muslims to give this jihad BS a miss.

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    1. I get tired of that bloke. After all, he’s a religious loonie himself. No Muslim is going to be convinced by someone like him. Leave it to the Muslim apostates who really know what they are talking about.

      It really is not very long ago that Christian sects were slaughtering each other, e.g. Croats genociding Serbs during WWII. Not that I have any love of Serbs, who are equally repugnant.

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      1. Ex-muslims on Youtube -Ridvan aka The Apostate Prophet and a couple from Pakistan I keep forgetting the names of. One of them has a channel for Urdu speakers to reach more people.
        I learned that among the sunni in Pakistan there is a lot of division into sects. Sorta like …Christians.

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  24. I am fat enough to impersonate a British tourist. But nowhere near pink enough.
    .
    During May Day, a lot of French people demonstrated against Macron;s planned changes to the pension system.

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      1. There’s going to be a massive bloody one-man riot in HK if anyone tries to tell me I’m too old to work.

        The French are always revolting about something; really revolting.

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  25. Karin Bojs writes an article in Dagens Nyheter may 1st;
    The first known case of yersina pestis in Europe is from 5300 years ago, in Latvia.
    There is another case in Southwest Sweden, ca 5000 y ago.
    A group think this was part of an outbreak that decimated the neolithic population, devastated the polities and opened the door for the Yamnaya people.
    This version of yersina pestis died out, a version that was adapted to be spread by lice was first detected in remains from Spain dated 3800 y ago.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’d be surprised if they were on speaking terms. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and Lewis a devout Anglican. As recently as when I was a kid, we would have running street battles with the local Catholic kids – not play fighting, real serious biffo of the “hate your filthy guts” variety. Even at university we coexisted uneasily, and I became good friends with only one Catholic guy. (And the Jewish guy declined to become friends with anyone.)

      My mother nearly spewed when I said I was going to marry a Catholic. I had to explain that the Chinese Catholic I was going to marry hadn’t actually seen the inside of a church since she left school, although she wouldn’t walk past a Buddhist or Taoist temple without going in and doing whatever the hell it is she does when she goes into a temple. That veneration also extends to Thai spirit houses, which is mildly amusing. (I might add that my mother stopped going to church when I was 12, but that didn’t stop her hating Catholics – you can’t explain this stuff rationally.)

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  29. Just got a Facebook photo from a pen pal visiting the Hard Rock Cafe in Lissabon.
    Started thinking. Hard rock+ Portugese liberal drug laws. How do their hard rock artists stay alive?

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  32. Juice Media are four people: one bloke who writes the scripts and does the filming, his wife who does the voices, and the two girls who appear on camera and mime to the voice-overs. All of the filming is done in the couple’s living room.
    They’ve really nailed this one.

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  33. This is a brilliant article. The writer has it absolutely correctly.

    Sweden, with a population of 10.4 million, has a very viable defence industry which, inter alia, has produced the very highly regarded Gripen (which Australia should be buying instead of the hugely expensive disaster that is the F-35, but they have to toady up to the Americans, being a vassal state of the USA). Australia, with a population of 26 million, couldn’t manufacture its way out of a wet paper bag. Correction – there are some highly regarded armoured vehicles made in Australia….by a French company.

    https://createdigital.org.au/making-sovereign-capability-a-national-priority/?j=5688144&e=john.massey47@gmail.com&l=114584_HTML&u=136633195&mid=7001827&jb=11003&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EngineeringNews

    It’s bloody pathetic. And it’s not going to change.

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  34. Clark Gable threatened to quit filming “Gone with the wind” if the bathrooms were not de-segregated.

    He was “woke”. 80 years ago.

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  35. Enrolments in mathematics in Australia are at an all time low. This does not bode well for engineering, and the politicians can forget about talking about anything “tech” or trying to reinvigorate anything to do with manufacturing. Or infrastructure. Or just about anything, really.

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  36. The Texas governor’s border PR stunt cost Texas billions of $$.

    or try

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