58 thoughts on “Open Thread For February”

  1. Birger, several years ago you asked me if it was possible to be able to say from which part of Africa the people came who migrated out and populated the rest of the world.

    At the time the answer was no, because not enough ancient genomes had been mapped in Africa to be able to tell.

    The answer now is yes. The following clip (for mtDNA) and the clip I will link in the next comment (for Y DNA) will give it to you.

    mtDNA shows how humans migrated across the world.

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  4. February is the last month of *mid*winter. Then we get the month when the boreal owls have their mating calls, and that is before spring proper.

    Do not mimic the mating call you hear in the late winter forests at night- they will attack, claws aimed at the eyes.

    There is gruesome CCTV and mobile phone footage from the region hit by the earthquake. I am not adding a link, because depressing content.

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  5. Ha! Two young punks in Vällingby tried to mug an undercover cop.
    Two ordinary policemen were hiding in the background and the would-be robbers were caught along with their knives. Stolen items were then found in their homes, and now they are en route to a prison sentence.

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  6. I have a serious overdose of Turkey earthquake fatigue.

    They know (or should by now) that they are at the intersection of four tectonic plates and major recently (as in very recently) active faults. Of course the earth movements don’t happen in the same location every time. The affected region is very large. Oh gee – some major movements happened on tectonic plate boundaries and major recently active faults. What a sudden, shocking surprise. Who would ever have expected it? Several universities in the UK, for starters, and no doubt equivalent institutions in Germany and other European countries.

    They keep building untied masonry structures, which are notorious for collapsing under earthquake loading, and for killing people when they do because falling masonry is deadly.

    They keep building tower blocks which respond badly to earthquake frequencies.

    Their own emergency preparedness and response are woefully bad, and they never learn. Every time it happens, they put out this woe woe is poor us, please send huge rescue resources and lots of money, the bulk of which inevitably comes from Germany.

    They keep not learning lessons, and not amending and enforcing building codes.

    Turkey is not an impoverished country. They have no excuse for this.

    I have run out of sympathy. They have come to the well once too often, and worse things are happening in the world.

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      2. That word “they” is lumping together some pretty distinct groups! The relationship between Erdogan and developers is one rabbit hole to go down, another is the things the central government has done in the parts of Turkey with a large Kurdish population. IME the well-connected folks buying public land for a token price and putting up shoddy buildings on it are not the ones living or working in them when they collapse.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. They (Homo sapiens) are living in one of the most seismically active regions on earth. Aside from the cognitively challenged (and perhaps not even they), I doubt any of them are unaware of it.

        What do you mean by ‘shoddy’ buildings? A lot of the structures that collapse in big earthquakes in this region have been built in the same way for at least 2,000 years.

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      4. Traditional architecture in Hatti-land is low mud-brick buildings with wooden beams and maybe a stone foundation. Most builders in Iran these days can afford cinderblocks and concrete and I am pretty sure the same is true in Turkey!

        Its hard to have and enforce sound building codes if the people who write and enforce them were bought by the developers (and if protesting against this gets you thrown in prison or put under surveillance as a separatist radical).

        Liked by 2 people

      5. All bullshit. Those things are useless without steel as tensile reinforcement to resist the shear forces from the earthquake.

        If you live in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, you shouldn’t need anyone to tell you that you need to tie your cinder blocks together with steel rods, or else if you get hit by a big earthquake in the early hours of the morning, you will get a cinder block on your head, and that will do you no good at all.

        So if you are not buying the steel rods, it’s because you’re taking a gamble that your area won’t get a big earthquake so you can save the money on the steel.

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      6. Mud bricks, masonry blocks, cinder blocks, unreinforced concrete, it’s all the same – without steel as tensile reinforcement, big enough earthquake forces will knock it all down. And that’s what happens every time there is a big enough earthquake in those areas. Every-single-time.

        It’s not just them – it happened with untied brick houses in Australia, but they had the ‘excuse’ that they were in an intraplate zone and so didn’t realise they could get big enough earthquakes too, just less frequently. Now they use wire ties to tie the bricks together – doesn’t cost the earth and works like magic.

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      7. As one Turkish person pointed out, the ruins of collapsed houses look like heaps of sand. Not much concrete, and no irons. The building codes may be strict, and the plans good, but since there is no enforcement, the plans are not followed. Irons and cement get stolen, and other materials are replaced with inferior alternatives. The result is worse than traditional building. As the person mentioned, old buildings are expensive, because they are quake-proof.

        BTW, Turkey has a quake tax that is collected from everybody. The money is expected to go for quake preparedness. But when Naci Görür, the leading Turkish geologist, warned two years ago about a coming quake in SE Turkey, and had a preparedness plan made, the authorities rejected it.

        Liked by 2 people

      8. “old buildings are expensive, because they are quake-proof” – the 2,000 year old Roman castle didn’t look like it came through it too well.

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      9. “The building codes may be strict, and the plans good, but since there is no enforcement, the plans are not followed.”

        And the developers and the officials who conspire to build as cheaply as possible and split the profits will not be living in these. Crassus does not live in an insula. Ordinary working people anywhere mostly have to live in pre-built housing and their landlords object to drilling the walls to check for rebar or make sure that the concrete was not diluted. A “they” which includes conspirators, ordinary working people, and the geeks who care about long-term risks like fires and earthquakes is covering different groups with different interests!

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  9. Manchester City Football Club are now in deep shit, facing more than 100 charges of breaching the Financial FairPlay Rules between 2012 and 2018.

    Erling Haaland is probably feeling like he has made a bad career choice.

    Goes to show – that’s what happens when you sell English football clubs to Arabs. At least Abrahamovich was smart enough to comply with the financial rules when he bought Chelsea (which is now owned by an American who has just spect obscene amounts of money on new players – I don’t know if he realises that he will need to employ some of them into their 40s to comply with the rules).

    In the category of things I didn’t know, only two English clubs were associated with religious institutions when they were established: Manchester City with the Anglicans and Southampton with the Catholics (although unofficially for a long time Arsenal were the ‘Catholic’ club while bitter north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur were the ‘Protestant’ club, although I think that has gone now with all of the migrants living in the area).

    Not so in Glasgow – Celtic are the Catholic Club and Rangers are the Protestant Club who for a long time would not field a player who was a Catholic.

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  16. …so when I am going to transport and assemble the Sphinx-sized statues to my honor, I know what vehicle to use.
    Hmm, if a stone of the great pyramid has twice the density of water, that means 5,2 million tons…26000 loads of building material using the Zubr.

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  17. The tobacco plant can be grafted with plants from different families, something previously thought impossible.
    And now 95% of the very complex genome has been sequenced. As it is one of the most widely used experimental models of plant science this will speed up research in the future.
    .
    My suggestion: insert genes from the kava plant from polynesia.
    Instead of nicotine or alcohol, people can stimulate themselves with a chemical that does not seem to have any disadvantages.

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  19. She is almost unbearably cute, and very creative, capable, industrious and focused.

    Now that the border is open again, I feel like catching a taxi over to her place and having a long talk to her about channeling her talents into something more beneficial to humanity.

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Missouri votes against banning children from carrying real guns in public.
    Not making this up.
    This makes David Bowie’s song “I’m Afraid of Americans” more relevant…

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  23. Spell check sabotage again. Should be “drummer”.

    I looked for good pre-1960 film examples at Youtube but the links all had lower-case l or upper-case I which my mobile phone cannot distinguish from each other.

    The balloon that would not die: see American debate.

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  24. “Terry talks movies” at Youtube is a good source to look for hidden gems.
    Passport to Pimlico is an old comedy that I recall from Swedish TV in my childhood.
    Entertaining mr Sloane is a transgressive film from 1970 that no longer feels provocative.
    Carnifex: A well-made small-budget horror film set in Australia.

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  25. At 14.22 our heroine hits her fingers with a hammer, and obviously leaves it in the clip for the entertainment of viewers, knowing we’ve all been there and done that.

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    1. I know who she is now – in the Mainland she’s an Internet celebrity (featured and praised by the Global Times, no less), as well as having 400,000 subscribers internationally on YouTube, which you can’t get in the Mainland unless you use a VPN, which is illegal.

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  27. Arne Treholt – a norwegian who was sentenced for espionage, and escaped to the Soviet Union died in Moscow, 80 years old.

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  28. I have always thought that there is something wrong with my hearing (or hearing-brain connection) when trying to unscramble speech, particularly with a lot of background noise, and that this was deteriorating with age.

    It turns out neither is true. I’m normal.

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  29. Tucker Carlson thinks we have too much diversity. I can think of an immediate solution to that in his case.

    And to think I used to go to Perth’s most down-market dilapidated supermarket (a) because my wife needed ‘exotic’ ingredients that she couldn’t get in the big flash supermarkets which were all carbon copies of each other and, (b) so while she was nosing around among the ‘Asian condiments’ I could walk around the shopping centre with its ravine-like pot holes in the car park (I had need of a small SUV with a high underside clearance then Phillip) and its eclectic mix of little shops, like the old Afghan guy’s tea shop, which was really more like a curiosity shop that sold a wonderful array of tea, and restaurants (a word far too grand for what they were), watch the impossibly tall South Sudanese ladies wheel their shopping home in shopping trolleys that actually belonged to a different shopping centre down the street, drink in the diversity, chat to the Vietnamese newsagent, all the while staying alert and watching out for the rampant crime there – which didn’t exist because no one there had any money, and there was no liquor store.

    If it was crime you wanted, you needed to go to the much more up-market supermarket down the street where there was alcohol on sale, people with some cash money in their pockets, and no impossibly tall African ladies and bossy little Thai ladies to lay down the law and tell everyone to behave.

    Damn I miss going to that place.

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    1. Jrette is backpacking in Thailand with her friends. She was a little worried that they might not want to come along with her to the grungy sidewalk eateries she’s grown up eating at.

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      1. Street food is one of the absolute delights of the urban areas of Thailand – it’s everywhere.

        On our first joint visit to Bangkok, my wife said with a mixture of amazement and amusement: “These people do nothing but eat!” And she’s Chinese.

        Liked by 2 people

  30. HK had huge quantities of emergency supplies for the big Covid-19 isolation camps that we built that it turned out we didn’t need. So now all of those supplies are going to Syria and Turkey, along with our 60 man (sorry, but it is man, of necessity) rescue team, that has so far chalked up three rescues and plans to keep at it.

    That is separate from the team and supplies sent from the Mainland.

    I predict with 100% confidence that you will see absolutely nothing in the Western media about how China and Hong Kong are helping out, in a situation where it seems that a lot of countries are not.

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      3. Your questions are uninformed and ignorant. If you want to pretend you care about Taiwan (and I can’t think of a reason why you would), then you need to do a lot more serious homework than your lazy personage is inclined to do.

        Taiwan will not be invaded.

        Japan is using the excuse that it would help Taiwan to defend itself in order to provide a cover for its remilitarisation and military aggression – pretty soon Japan will have the world’s third largest military, all while no one was noticing because they have been fixated on China. But it is just an excuse.

        If Taiwan ever were to be invaded, it would in reality be absolutely destroyed, which is why it will not happen, or at least one reason why it will not. China will regard it as unthinkable to destroy a large part of itself and annihilate 23 million of its countrymen.

        Ignore all of the above if the USA does what I think it is trying to do by the salami slicing method and turning Taiwan into an American military base from which to attack the Chinese mainland and Chinese shipping in the East and South China Seas. In that case, it would not be a Taiwan invasion, it would be a war against China started by the USA (which it is seeking every available means of doing).

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      4. I think it is obvious from the tone and content of your comments who is biased and who is genuinely curious, who is parroting propaganda and who is genuinely concerned about peace in the world. China uses its power (mainly due to its large population) to deflect criticism of human-rights violations. Just the one-China policy itself is a slap in the face to the very idea of democracy and self-determination.

        How much to they pay you?

        I AM informed. How would you know I’m not. I DO care about Taiwan? Why do you claim that I don’t?

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  31. Ha! The international olympic committee has no candidates for the 2030 winter games.
    The extreme costs (and compulsory cost overruns) make countries balk. No big bribes to the big cheese this time.

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    1. The cost of staging them is rapidly escalating because the world is rapidly running out of suitable snow.

      Wife just reminded me: “Remember the second time you came back to HK to see me? That was on 8 February, and it was freezing cold.” Then she pointed outside at the brilliant sunshine and people enjoying the 25.7C, which almost counts as warm on my personal scale. “That is not just different – the difference is huge.”

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  32. The last part of Rally Sweden – set in the area around Umeå- finished Sunday in good weather.
    An Estonian won, a Japanese came third. Last year, the rally resulted in widespread covid infections but today the situation is better.
    As I am NOT plugged in, I learned of the rally afterwards.

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      1. I read The Guardian online. And Dagens Nyheter but not the sports stuff.
        The kurdish staff at the pizzeria I frequent do not appear to be sports enthusiasts either.
        It might be different if there was a café, but the high rent has killed all of them in the area, capitalism throttling everyday gossip.

        BTW spell check thinks gossip is fossil, so if I write weird stuff you know the reason.

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  33. The Chinese balloons might be those balloon robots from The Prisoner. Obvious infiltration attempt!
    I joke, but Tucker the f*cker Carlson might take it seriously.
    (no he does not, but he has a nasty sense of what made-up BS his viewers might accept as true. He killed a lot of old people with his BS during the pandemic. Maybe one of the next of kin might go Japanese on him, like on that ex-PM? One can always hope.)

    BTW I never understood where the batteries and the propulsive equipment of those balloon robots were. Even my ten-year-old self found it implausible.

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