Did you know the entire universe seems to be short on lithium? Astronomers actually refer to it as the Cosmological Lithium Problem. The current standard model of the Big Bang theory (not the tv show) matches up with observations about (a) microwave background radiation (b) cosmic expansion as measured by light from distant supernovae and (c) primordial abundances of hydrogen and helium. There is a bit of an issue with (c) however.

Ars Technica published an article on Christmas Day (yesterday) entitled Children’s Belief in Santa is more Nuanced than you Think. The story talks about studies showing that children have hierarchies of belief, with individual figures falling categories like: “Real Person”, “Virtually Real”, “Cultural Figures”, “Ambiguous Figures” and finally “Fictional Figures”. So, like so many things, there is no binary on/off, but rather a spectrum between “real” and “nonreal”. One of the studies argued that three factors influence children’s belief and placement of the figures in the spectrum: Testimony (being told about the figure), indirect evidence (which included rituals like leaving milk and cookies for Santa or hunting for Easter Bunny eggs, and direct evidence like visiting Santa in the mall.

Suppose, in some far off land, there lived a president and his inner circle who had gaslit themselves into believing that an election had been stolen rather than lost. That somehow or other the opposition who couldn’t organize themselves out of a paper bag had convinced the deep state and all the judges and republican owned voting machine manufacturers to change just the presidential votes. Now suppose my post about Your Brain on Grievances has some validity and they decide on one more attempt to retain power when the Congress goes to count the votes.

You would think after all the years we’ve been married that we would know each other’s little ways and preferences. That is by and large true, but the spreadable butter question had never come up before. Taking a step back, we normally use some type of easily spreadable margarine and real butter is for cooking and special occasions. Just prior to the COVID mandated cocooning, we had been watching the Great British Bake Off and Shirley started baking a couple times a week in the afternoon.

There is an interesting article on Politico about Grievance Addiction focusing on Donald Trump. The author is James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Med School and he notes that “your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”

It might seem like a silly question, but where is Canada? I mean, when you ask the intertubes for the latitude and longitude of the geographic center of Canada, you get really different answers. Maps of the World says that Canada’s latitude and longitude is 60° 00' N and 95° 00' W. If I drop that into Google maps, I get a point on the line between Manitoba and Nunavut about 5 miles west of Hudson Bay.

Back to less serious stuff. Malinda just put up a highly enjoyable parody mashup of Christmas songs sung from the standpoint of both her optimistic and pessimistic sides looking at 2020. She also has done this for 2019 and 2018. She has two channels on youtube. The first, Translator Fails she runs various things through Google translate into multiple languages and back until it makes absolutely no sense. The second, just entitled Malinda is both more personal and has more original stuff.

I was reading a discussion on social media about a request for a book recommendation and, after awhile, thought maybe I should be diagramming arguments. The request was for science fiction book recommendations from a conservative, non-libertarian view. The person submitting the request specifically asked for books where “the central tenets of conservatism - tradition, hierarchy and authority - are working for humanity; where tradition is used to help, guide and comfort people rather than cynically used as a tool to keep people down.

Senator Thom Tillis is angry that Twitter is not sending a witness to an Anti-Piracy hearing he is holding in December. Setting aside the question of why the Senator is actually holding a hearing in December, I’m puzzled why the Senator thinks Twitter is a giant avenue of piracy. Lies and deceit, yes, but piracy? The Senator’s letter to Twitter claims that “[Twitter] continues to host and permit rampant infringement of music files on its platform” and that it hasn’t taken any “meaningful steps to address the scale of the problem.

Ok, the title is just slightly over the top because Microsoft filed for the patents back in July but the filings just became public; it doesn’t have them yet. BBC News So apparently there would be sensors which “could” record, which invitees actually attend a meeting attendees body language and facial expressions amount of time each participant spent contributing to the meeting speech patterns “consistent with boredom and fatigue” This information would be combined with other factors such as how efficient the meeting was, emotional sentiment expressed by participants and how comfortable the environment was into an overall quality score.

An update on an earlier post about a training deck used by the Kentucky State Police urging cadets to be ruthless killers and quoting Hitler advocating violence. At the time that story broke on Oct 30, the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet claimed the material had been removed in 2013. Since that date, state police have not replied to subsequent records requests. Maybe that particular slide deck was removed in 2013, but the Lexington Herald Leader reported today, confirmed by the Governor and the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet that another training video had been approved for training use in September of this year that featured Nazi symbols.

I don’t want to watch assholes be assholes. This seems to eliminate all news, any social media where echo chambers interact, all sitcoms (really, is there any sitcom which doesn’t consist of making fun of people?), most dramas, most movies and most social media or forum where people are anonymous. Any suggestions would be appreciated. As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link. My world view is a hypothesis, not a belief.

Many of us grew up with a dislike for Brussels sprouts. One reason we knew - our parents, as taught by their parents, as taught by their parents …. back to some English ancestors boiled everything to death. Maybe it was for sanitary reasons, but as an old Asterix and Obelix cartoon claimed, the British boil everything so that it has that lovely “same” flavour. (Some people claim that Britain became a global empire just looking for good food.