Month: April 2023

The Chinese team that collected samples from the Huanan Seafood Market three years ago has finally published its report, and an advanced draft has been posted on the Nature website. Let the games begin:

A peer-reviewed paper that concludes there is no evidence for zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market in #Wuhan has just been published @Nature. How will the #media, especially science journalists, deal with it? This is a test. #journalism https://t.co/kQwa95Pcz2

— @mbalter — investigations and commentary (@mbalter) April 5, 2023

Test accepted! First, here's the relevant discussion in the paper:

Another report [the international study reported a few weeks ago] hypothesized that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals to humans at least twice in November or December 2019, and the raccoon dog was hypothesized to be the intermediate host animal. The evidence provided in this study is not sufficient to support such a hypothesis. Our study confirmed the existence of raccoon dogs, and other hypothesized/potential SARS-CoV-2 susceptible animals, at the market, prior to its closure. However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected.

And here's a table showing which animals the Chinese team tested:

There were no raccoon dogs tested because, as we already knew, there were no raccoon dogs left at the market by the time the testing started.

In other words, this report is literally neutral on the question raised in the international study that pinpointed raccoon dogs as the likely intermediary for a zoonotic spillover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Both reports agree that no samples were collected directly from raccoon dogs because the Huanan market didn't have any raccoon dogs still there when the swabs were taken. However, the international study reported that there were lots of samples which contained both SARS-CoV-2 DNA and raccoon dog DNA. The Chinese study didn't address this at all. So when you say the Chinese study concluded there was "no evidence" for the raccoon dog hypothesis, that's literally true. It's just as true to say it didn't confirm that the virus arrived from Mars.

The raccoon dog hypothesis may or may not be true. The international study laid out its argument and it's now up to experts to hash it out. Today's Chinese study adds nothing to that debate one way or the other.

National Review's Jeffrey Blehar is unhappy about the victory of liberal Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin's supreme court race:

The rollback of the significant Tea Party-era gains made by the GOP in the state now seems, if not foreordained, then on the horizon. Democrats have seized control of the state Supreme Court — once held by conservative justices 5–2 during the Scott Walker era — and look set to undo the state’s abortion law and legislative map, and may even threaten Act 10, Walker’s signature legislative achievement.

The Wisconsin supreme court is now under 4-3 liberal control. This small change means that Wisconsin's wildly extreme Republican gerrymandering will probably be moderated, which in turn means there's at least a fighting chance that Democrats can someday win control of the legislature. It also means that Wisconsin is unlikely to overturn the 2024 election results in favor of Donald Trump, something that was a real possibility if the court had remained in conservative hands. Also, the court will probably now overturn Wisconsin's 1849 abortion ban and remain a state where abortion is freely available.

That's a lot riding on a single supreme court justice in one state.

I think I may have a trip to Los Angeles in my near future:

A battle is being waged at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station near downtown Los Angeles. The weapon of choice? Loud classical music....L.A. Metro’s goal with the music and lights is to reduce crime and drive away unhoused people.

....The transit authority says the strategy has resulted in an “improvement in public safety,” citing a “75 percent reduction in calls for emergency service, an over 50 percent reduction in vandalism, graffiti and cleanups, and a nearly 20 percent drop in crime.”

....Yet the current alternative of elevated volume, coupled with repetition, is a way that music has been used as torture throughout history, says [musicologist Lily E. Hirsch]. Constant exposure to loud music can disrupt sleep and thought and eventually make people lose their connection to themselves.

The transit folks say the music is being played at a level of 72 db, which is quite reasonable. But Jessica Gelt, who wrote this story for the LA Times, visited with a decibel meter and says the music is playing at a level of 83 decibels—about the same as a leaf blower.

Which is it? I gotta hear this for myself.

Over at New York, John Herrman describes the TikTokification of everything—except worse:

You’re stuck in line at the grocery store, so you check your phone. Your brain shuts off, and your thumb takes over. Soon, a tall video plays. A man is tricking a baboon with some sleight of hand. He makes a lighter disappear and the baboon makes a weird expression. Laughter. The video starts again. The baboon is confused, and so are you. Who made this video? Nobody you’ve ever seen before. Why are you watching it? Because the app showed it to you....To the right, you see a vertical row of icons: hearts, a voice bubble, and a paper airplane that suggests you send the video to someone else (who? where?). Lots of big numbers. You swipe down. A thunking scroll produces another video, then another, then another.

We all know where this is going, don't we? Mike Judge showed us a couple of decades ago:

This is a guy walking his dog on the road up to Idyllwild. The man's politics may be suspect, but his dog was very sociable. I had my car door open and he almost jumped onto my lap.

Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add.

I am curious to see what the charges are, just in case there's something interesting and unexpected. We should know shortly.

¹Although it is, of course.

UPDATE: It's just 34 counts of falsifying business records. Nothing unexpected. Given that, my view remains the same: these are fairly trivial charges and probably shouldn't have been prosecuted.

Let's review the recent history of human communication:

1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication.

2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages.

Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin using text infrastructure to send voice messages.

2024-2025: New startup devises way to translate voice messages into specially notated text that passes along emotional cues.

2025: Even newer startup uses advanced AI to translate notated text into a better version of the voice message the sender would have sent if they'd been smarter.

2026: Old-school telephone calls make a comeback, but are mediated by AI so that everyone speaks and sounds better than they would in real life. Kids need only speak a few words for the AI to figure out what they were about to say and just say it for them.

Hold on. What's this about voice messages?

Maybe you’ve noticed: Lately, they’re popping up in more group chats and one-on-one conversations. 62 percent of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message, and around 30 percent communicate this way weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.

Some are even communicating more with voice messages than texts....“I use voice messages every single day,” Kennedy Dierks, a 21-year-old student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told me. “I find it to be a lot more personal than a text.”

Dierks said voice messages have exploded in popularity on her college campus in the past year. As an example, she said she recently used the feature to give a friend the rundown about a date she’d just gone on, because it was easier to “hash it out” than via text. More broadly, voice memos are popular because they allow people to share the richness that comes with voice communication, like tone, mood, and humor — without the pressure of inconveniencing someone with a phone call.

Everything old is new again. Everything new is also new again. Oh, and everything new is old again. The only constant is that, one way or another, h. sapiens is built to gossip and will do so no matter the obstacles.

In today's release of economic news for February, job openings continued their yearlong fall and orders for durable goods continued their decline of the past few months (with a brief timeout for Christmas). It was against this backdrop that the Fed continued to raise rates a couple of weeks ago. Good job, Fed.

Man, the minimum standards to qualify as a culture war sure have fallen lately.

This is a bateau chugging downstream on the Seine. A few minutes after taking this picture I myself would be on one of the bateaux chugging along the Seine.