I've been on a spurt of backyard photography, so I have a whole bunch of pictures of birds, bees, and butterflies in the queue right now.
I'll start with butterflies. Getting a picture of a butterfly resting on a plant is easy, so I've instead been trying to get them in flight, which is very, very hard. I finally decided—and this is not a joke—that my best bet was to literally wave the camera in the general direction of a butterfly in flight and rip off a few dozen shots in burst mode. This technique finally yielded one good picture, which is one more than I ever got by trying to track butterflies in the viewfinder.
On another occasion I got a picture of our pair of butterflies, who have produced a cocoon that will produce a baby butterfly someday, maybe. According to the Guardian, there are only 2,000 western monarch butterflies left in the world, which means the picture on the bottom shows 0.1% of all the monarchs in existence.
May 25, 2021 — Irvine, CaliforniaMay 28, 2021 — Irvine, California
The barely concealed point here is that workers are being treated like shit by hotel and restaurant owners who are too hidebound to change their ways, so they're quitting in record numbers now that other jobs are available. There's obviously something to this, given that job openings are up 30% since the beginning of the year. If something better is out there, why not take it?
But take a look at this:
In the most recent month, the number of people quitting their jobs was only 43% of the number of job openings. That's a record low aside from a single month at the height of the pandemic last year. What this suggests is that workers are actually being more cautious than usual about quitting their jobs. Given the huge number of job openings, the normal response in April would have been something like 4.6 million quits instead of the 3.9 million it actually saw.
In other words, take the "everyone is quitting lousy jobs" narrative with a grain of salt. It's not necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure it's necessarily right either. My bet is that when everything shakes out later in the year, we'll end up with roughly the same set of workers, the same set of jobs, and a little bit higher pay compared to pre-pandemic days. And low-income workers, unfortunately, will be treated about the same as they've always been.
We have quite the little war going on in Florida right now. Gov. Ron DeSantis, in some kind of deranged bid to be the Trumpiest pandemic guy around, has forbidden cruise lines from insisting that all passengers must be vaccinated. What an idiot! If there's anyplace on the planet that should insist on vaccinations, it's cruise ships. But to DeSantis, this is a mite too close to a "vaccine passport," which he's loudly opposed to.
But the CDC says cruise lines should require vaccinations, which is surely the sensible position. So what's going to happen?
So far, Royal Caribbean has opted to cave in to DeSantis and allow anyone onto their ships. Norwegian and Carnival are going ahead with vaccinated cruises and basically daring DeSantis to do something about it.
So what will happen? Will DeSantis try to levy huge fines on Norwegian and Carnival? Is Royal Caribbean opting for some kind of trickery, where they'll only ask about vaccination after you've boarded and you're in "international waters"? Will someone, for God's sake, talk some sense into DeSantis? There must be someone in Florida who has his ear and hasn't lost his mind.
The SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps, has been in operation for over 50 years. Within ten years of its start, SNAP benefits were reaching 20 million people, representing about 10% of the population of the US:
Benefits during the early years of the program hovered around $100 per month. That went up at the start of the 1990 recession, again in 2008, and yet again in 2020. Benefits today are about $150 per month:
Despite persistent Republican efforts to cut back on SNAP benefits, it has remained a popular program, generally serving more people during recessions and then declining as the economy recovers.
However, there has also been a long-term upward trend in SNAP benefits. The number of recipients has grown from around 8% of the population in its first couple of decades to 13% or so over the past decade. Likewise, monthly benefits have gone up from around $100 to an average of $140 over the past decade.
Dex day was on Saturday this week in order to keep me awake during my trip to Sheephole, which means that Monday became crash day. But I'm finally awake! Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts while I continue to brush the cobwebs out of my brain:
Whatever else you can say about Joe Manchin, he's sincere in his beliefs. If he weren't, he'd be happy to bargain over his opposition to ending the filibuster. Right? But as far as I know he hasn't done this. There have been no backroom offers of ending his opposition if, say, West Virginia gets a new federal highway or something. His views may be odd and contradictory, but they're real.
The press keeps reporting that progress is being made in the negotiations over an infrastructure bill, but that's not true. The real sticking point has never been the details of what's in the bill, but the question of how it's going to be paid for. On that score, Republicans haven't moved an inch.
Can everyone please slow down a bit with their hot takes on the economy? The pandemic recession was a weird recession, which means that recovery is likely to be a little weird too. And in any case, even if recovery is lightning fast by historical standards, that still means it will take at least several months to unfold. I realize that a lot of the yelping about inflation and deficits is just partisan hoohah, which I hardly expect to go away, but even the fairminded among us need to understand that monthly data dumps don't tell us much. Just take it easy for now. We won't know until fall how things are really going.
We still need a virologist to comment on the great "double CGG" proof that the CoV-2 virus was created in a lab. Come on, folks! It's not like you have anything else going on right now.
On Saturday night I trekked out to the Sheephole Wilderness Area, allegedly the darkest spot in Southern California. It was dark, but I'm not sure it was really any darker than other areas that I've been to around here.
This was, naturally, a mission to take pictures of the Milky Way. The biggest problem I have with my little camera is sensor noise, which can be improved by a process called stacking. Basically, you take a dozen identical pictures and then let Photoshop put them all together. Since noise is random, Photoshop aligns the photos and then looks for areas that differ, figuring that these areas represent noise. Everything left over is part of the genuine image, and is (more or less) left alone.
Anyway, this is what I did. I tried taking photos in RAW mode, JPG mode, and JPG mode without using the camera's built-in noise processing. RAW mode is supposed to be the best, but mine turned out terribly. I don't know why. The best results used the camera's noise processing plus stacking plus a noise reducing algorithm from a piece of third-party software I own.
Even at that they still weren't all that great. The top photo was shot with a cell tower in the foreground just so I could have something there. Unlike, say, Death Valley, which has lots of cool stone formations, Sheephole has nothing but scrub. The bottom photo was shot in front of that scrub.
All six of the final photos sported a different color palette, in some cases wildly different. In these two, the top one has the colors that I've come to think of as normal, while the bottom one is blue heavy. Others were washed out with red or green or something else entirely. Very strange. All of them were underexposed, and the next time I do this I'm just going to crank my ISO all the way to its max and accept the noise that comes with it. Then we'll really see how good all this anti-noise technology is.
June 6, 2021 — Sheephole National Wilderness Area, San Bernardino County, California
There was a period during the climate change debate—largely gone these days, I think—where skeptics were constantly coming up with new, scientific-sounding arguments against the idea of manmade warming. Typically, the claims were just technical enough that it was hard for lay readers like me to evaluate them, which meant they hung around in the air (and Fox News) until some climatologist took a break from real work to dive in and figure out what was going on. Almost without exception, these quasi-scientific arguments turned out to be wrong, usually egregiously so.
I wonder if we're entering a similar stage with proponents of the lab leak hypothesis? In the Wall Street Journal today, a pair of scientists argue that there's a specific location in the coronavirus genome that's often used in gain-of-function research. In this location, researchers splice in a code that generates two arginine amino acids in a row. There are six codes for arginine and therefore 35 possible combinations that will produce two in a row, and in the CoV-2 genome the combination turns out to be the rarest and least likely to occur in nature (a "double CGG"). It is, however, the most common in gain-of-function research because it's handy and easily available.
Is this true? How would I know? There are, of course, reasons to be cautious:
This seems like fairly obvious stuff to a virologist. Surely someone would have mentioned this before if it were genuinely suspicious.
The authors of the piece are a retired physicist and a physician/author who's been leading the lab leak hypothesis for a long time. No virologists signed onto this.
The piece was published on the op-ed page, not the news pages.
So . . . there's probably nothing to this. But it will now swirl around among conservatives until it's conclusively debunked, and probably even after that. In any case, someone needs to get cracking on this.
