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Some like it hot: Simulating single particle excitations

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogrssfeed/~3/FF9b_mbXhig/

http://scienceblog.com/?p=479828


Some like it hot: Simulating single particle excitations

Plasmons, which may be thought of as clouds of electrons that oscillate within a metal nanocluster, could serve as antennae to absorb sunlight more efficiently than semiconductors. Understanding and manipulating them is important for their potential use in photovoltaics, solar cell water splitting, and sunlight-induced fuel production from CO2. But in these applications, single particle […]


Fish oil helps transform fat cells from storage to burning

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogrssfeed/~3/fuIKcRF8i08/

http://scienceblog.com/?p=479831


Fish oil helps transform fat cells from storage to burning

Researchers have found that fish oil transforms fat-storage cells into fat-burning cells, which may reduce weight gain in middle age. The team explains in Scientific Reports that fish oil activates receptors in the digestive tract, fires the sympathetic nervous system, and induces storage cells to metabolize fat. Fat tissues don’t all store fat. So-called “white” […]


Binge drinking with chronic alcohol use more destructive than previously thought

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogrssfeed/~3/Jjy6Q_QDIvo/

http://scienceblog.com/?p=479824


Binge drinking with chronic alcohol use more destructive than previously thought

Excessive alcohol consumption is a global public health issue. In the United States, binge drinking is the most common form — so common, in fact, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports approximately one in six adults binge drinks about four times each month. Now, a study by University of Missouri School of […]


Terrorism may make liberals think more like conservatives

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogrssfeed/~3/T466RUiRr6U/

http://scienceblog.com/?p=479826


Terrorism may make liberals think more like conservatives

Liberals’ attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants became more like those of conservatives following the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, new research shows. Data from two nationally representative surveys of British citizens revealed that feelings of national loyalty increased and endorsement of equality decreased among political liberals following the terrorist attack. The findings are published […]


Low prices lead to high regret at all-you-can-eat buffets

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogrssfeed/~3/5KSTNzfxfR4/

http://scienceblog.com/?p=479827


Low prices lead to high regret at all-you-can-eat buffets

Ever wonder how much the price you pay for an All-You-Can-Eat (AYCE) buffet influences how you feel at the end of the meal? To explore this idea and address the lack of studies that do, this study examines whether pricing affects key indicators such as overeating, physical discomfort, and guilt. Researchers discovered that lower paying […]


Off With Their Comments

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/12/17/off-with-their-comments/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=27671

The Toronto Star newspaper has decided to nix comments on its Web site. The reason:

We have passionate, opinionated readers who are eager to get involved in conversations about politics, education, municipal issues, sports and more. You’re talking about the news on thestar.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn and more — and we want to be able to capture all of these conversations.

With that goal, we have turned off commenting on thestar.com effective Wednesday and instead we’ll be promoting and showcasing the comments our readers share across social media and in their letters and emails to our editors.

This is a polite and deflect-y way of saying “Our comments are a raging cesspool filled with the worst that humanity has to offer and you all make us look bad by smearing your feculent mindpoops on our property, so do it somewhere else and we’ll pick the ones we like to highlight.”

And you know what? Good for the Star. At this late stage in the evolution of the Internet, it’s become widely apparent that, barring committed moderation, comment threads trend quickly toward awful and vile, and that their ostensible reasons for existing (“free exchange of ideas,” “building community,” “keeping eyeballs on the site” etc) are not just negated but very often undermined by their content. Very few online sites, news, social or otherwise, benefit commercially or reputationally from their comment threads. There’s a very real and obvious reason why “NEVER READ THE COMMENTS” is a phrase that has gained such currency in the online world.

So why not just ax them? This is apparently the question that the Toronto Star folks asked themselves, and equally apparently could not find a sufficient reason to keep them. Again: Good for them. The site will become marginally more readable, and the newspaper won’t have to task some poor sad staffer to moderate the flood of bigots and/or numbskulls and/or spammers who traditionally populate the comment threads of major news sites (and minor ones, and indeed, any site where they are given a chance to thrive). There’s no downside.

But what about the bigots and/or numbskulls and/or spammers? What of them? Where will they go? Won’t their special snowflake voices be silenced? Well, yes, on the Toronto Star site. But there is the whole rest of the Internet, and creating one’s own outpost to fill with one’s own thoughts — and one’s own thoughts on the news media — is trivially easy. Look! I’m filling my own site with my own thoughts right now! Now, the drawback to the bigots/numbskulls/spammers is that their thoughts won’t get the benefit of being a free rider on the traffic the sites they’ve attached themselves to; they will have to attract readers on their own in the marketplace of ideas.

But that’s not fair! Oh, well. That’s life. Also, it is in fact entirely fair. As I noted to someone elsewhere on this topic, no one is owed an audience. The audience I have, as an example, comes from a quarter century of writing, including seventeen years(!) on this very site. You want my audience? The answer is clear: get cracking, folks.

I mentioned on Twitter last night that the world would largely be a better place if all commenting ability were to be vaporized on the Internet, and someone asked me if I would include my own site in that. I said yes, for the general good of humanity, I would be willing to sacrifice my own site’s commenting ability (and also, that for the first five years of the site, it did not allow comments, and yet it did just fine). It would be hard, but I’m pretty sure most of the people who I like would keep in touch. Email would still exist.

This does not mean, I should note, that I plan to get rid of comments here. I do actually moderate my comments, and because I do — and because there is in fact a community of people here who care for the quality of the site, often as much as I do — this site is in my mind one of the exceptions to the general rule that comment threads suck. It also helps that this is a very idiosyncratic sort of site; if it was all politics (or all tech or all anything) all the time I suspect it would attract more people committed to trolling and being douchecanoes on particular subjects, and also garner more fly-by commenters. But the site is about whatever is going on in my brain, and my brain skips around a bit. Variety of topics is useful.

But I’ll also note that especially over the last few years my patience with comments runs thinner and how I approach them is different. There was a period of time not long ago where I began to dread writing about contentious topics here because I knew it would require me to babysit comment threads, and it would take a whole lot of my time and brain cycles — both of which I could better spend on writing — to plink out obnoxious comments and otherwise act as referee. It genuinely began to affect my overall happiness. I had to change the way I thought about commenting here because of it.

Now I do things like turn off comment threads when I go to sleep, which means I don’t wake up dreading coming to my own site to see what some shitty human has posted on it. If I write on a contentious topic but don’t feel like referring comments, I just plain leave the comments off (which, incidentally, has no measurable effect on how widely a piece is read, as far as I can see). And I’m quicker to mallet comments and punt people out of threads if I decide they’re out of line.

Basically, I changed seeing comments as something “of course” and more as “at my pleasure.” If I’m not going to be happy they’re there, then they won’t be.

Which is a point of view I think more people — and more sites — are beginning to take on: What does allowing comments get me? Does it make me happy or not? Will my site be better for them, or not? In the Toronto Star’s case, the answer apparently was that the site wasn’t better for them, so out they went.

Once more: Good call. I hope more people and sites ask themselves the same questions, and ditch the comments if they don’t measure up.


U.S. opposes marijuana challenge by Colorado’s neighbors

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scotusblog/pFXs/~3/-U9qxwc9kmE/

http://www.scotusblog.com/?p=236116

U.S. opposes marijuana challenge by Colorado’s neighbors

Citing a host of constitutional, legal and practical problems, the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday not to allow two states to sue Colorado directly in the Supreme Court over their claim of cross-border crime traced to their neighbor’s regime of legal sales of marijuana.

Nebraska and Oklahoma do have the option, the administration argued, to try to challenge the Colorado program in lower courts — though it suggested that such an approach may have problems, too.

Under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has the authority to try, as an original trial court, controversies between states.  It has great discretion to do so or not, and U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., noted that permission is seldom granted.  Mainly, he argued, it is the right approach only when one state is the direct cause of harm to another.

Colorado, the Solicitor General contended, is not directly harming either Nebraska or Oklahoma, and any criminal activity inside those states is the result of actions by third parties, not instigated by Colorado’s marijuana policy.

One year ago, the two states filed their plea to sue Colorado directly in the Supreme Court, contending that there is no other court where they could do so.  They do not challenge Colorado’s legalization of personal and medical use of marijuana, but they do object to the regime’s manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana — in short, its commercial aspects.

Solicitor General Verrilli, asked by the Court for the federal government’s views, outlined the federal policy against marijuana marketing, which has been relaxed so that it allows states to do as Colorado and Washington State have done in legalizing the availability of the drug in small quantities.  That is the gap in federal enforcement that Colorado’s neighbors have argued has led to marijuana buyers bringing the drug back across their borders.

In its brief, the federal government argued: “Where a state has alleged that another state permitted — but did not direct or approve — the injurious actions of other parties, this Court has declined to exercise original jurisdiction . . . .  This Court has continued to enforce the direct-injury requirement, which substantially overlaps with the Article III standing requirement that the injury be fairly traceable to the defendant’s actions.”

The Nebraska-Oklahoma complaint does not meet that standard, the federal government contended. Their basic complaint is that the authorization of licensed marijuana production and distribution within Colorado “increases the likelihood that third parties will commit criminal offenses in Nebraska and Oklahoma.”  Colorado has not directed or authorized anyone to carry marijuana across the state border, Verrilli said.

While the states have claimed that the Colorado program makes it easier for such transport, the federal government said, “that is a far less direct connection between state action and the alleged injury” that the Court had previously found in allowing original lawsuits between states.

Allowing this original case to go forward, Verrilli said, would open the way to many attempts by states to sue in the Supreme Court to try to compel other states to conform their laws to federal policies that do not demand such adherence.  The government argued that a number of other technical legal problems would arise if states were free to try to police the conduct of other states.

The government implied that the neighboring states were exaggerating the problem of cross-border criminal activity, noting that the Colorado program only allows the purchase of one ounce or less of marijuana.  Large-scale trafficking in marijuana is not likely, the government contended.  Moreover, that type of distribution is the focus of direct federal law enforcement, Verrilli pointed out.

The Solicitor General also discounted the states’ claim that the Supreme Court is the only tribunal where they could get relief from the Colorado marijuana scheme.  He noted that non-state parties interested in enforcing laws against marijuana have already filed two suits in federal court in Washington, D.C.

While private parties are on both sides of those two lawsuits, Verrilli said Nebraska and Oklahoma could sue in their own names against an appropriate state official in Colorado.  He conceded, though, that such a claim might encounter some of the same legal complications as their attempt to sue in the Supreme Court.

As a final point, Verrilli rejected Colorado’s suggestion that, if the original case went forward, the federal government would have to be sued, too, because of federal drug policy and its relationship to Colorado’s program.   The neighbors’ lawsuit would require no rulings on the rights or powers of the federal government, he argued.

The two states will get an opportunity to respond to the federal government’s views before the Justices decide whether to allow the states’ lawsuit to go forward. Colorado has already filed its opposition to the case.

Towering “Khaleesi” Building Planned for New York City

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/17/mark-gage-khaleesi-building/

http://www.tor.com/?p=199816

Mark Gage Khaleesi building

Not satisfied with her seat at the top of Meereen, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, Khaleesi to Khal Drogo, has her sights set on conquering a new land: New York City.

In early December, architect Mark Foster Gage, director of Mark Foster Gage Architects and Assistant Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, unveiled a plan for a 102-story building on the southern edge of Central Park, nicknamed the “Khaleesi.” Why “Khaleesi”? Well…look at it.

How would such ornamentation even withstand a 100+ story height? The proposal for the building explains:

Each unit has its own unique figurally carved façade and balconies that frame particular features of the surrounding urban and natural landscapes. The building is draped in a façade of limestone-tinted Taktl© concrete panels with hydroformed sheet-bronze details and brass-tinted alloy structural extrusion enclosures. The 64th floor features a sky-lobby with exclusive retail stores, a 2-story high ballroom for events, and a 4-star restaurant all of which have access to four massive cantilevered balconies that offer an awe-inspiring event and dining experience unique to the city of New York.

The building, if approved, would go up at 41 West 57th St, also known as Billionaire’s Row, named after the only clientele that can afford to build, buy, or rent in this area of Manhattan. The last decade has seen a frenzy of skyscraper-building activity in this area and many of the new buildings are so tall that they prematurely cloak the southern portion of Central Park in shadow. The “Khaleesi” Building, as proposed, would tower over even these skyscrapers, dominating the midtown skyline.

41 W 57th St from Mark Foster Gage on Vimeo.

You can check out the full proposal on the Mark Gage site. Be sure to check out the other projects that the firm has proposed, as they all bring a touch of fantasy to modern architecture.

Redefining the Manhattan skyline is possibly not what George R. R. Martin had in mind when he began writing A Song of Ice and Fire. It is astounding how firmly his fantasy world is becoming entrenched within the real world.

Mark Gage Foster Khaleesi building night

[via Gizmodo via 6sqft]

Thursday round-up

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scotusblog/pFXs/~3/kbUvLD7Kz10/

http://www.scotusblog.com/?p=236120

Thursday round-up

Briefly:

  • At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger weighs in on this week’s summary reversal of the Sixth Circuit in the habeas case White v. Wheeler, arguing that “[t]he fact that it is necessary for the high court to so admonish the federal appellate courts is a sad commentary on the state of our judiciary.  Judges who cannot or will not decide capital cases fairly should not sit on them.”
  • In the wake of last week’s arguments in the challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, Steven Mazie has an “explainer” for The Economist on the Court and its affirmative action jurisprudence.
  • At ACSblog, Scott Nelson contends that, although Monday’s opinion in DIRECTV v. Imburgia “itself will have little or no impact beyond the parties to the case,” it “is a reminder that the Supreme Court’s FAA jurisprudence—a relatively recent body of case law that has turned what had been an obscure piece of legislation into a broad license for companies to opt out of the justice system—is not likely to change soon.”
  • Bloomberg Law and Oyez recently hosted a Twitter chat to discuss the oral arguments in the December sitting.
  • At PrawfsBlawg, Steve Vladeck discusses the original cases involving the retroactivity of the Court’s decision in Johnson v. United States and concludes that the government’s “actions (and the arguments in the briefs) give rise at least to the appearance that, even though the Solicitor General agrees that Johnson is retroactive on the merits and should therefore be enforceable by federal prisoners through both original and second-or-successive applications for post-conviction relief, the government is perfectly content to run out the clock–and to not support efforts to have the Supreme Court so hold before next June’s deadline.”
  • On remand from the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit yesterday affirmed a federal district court’s ruling that Louisiana death row inmate Kevan Brumfield, who was sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of an off-duty police officer, is indeed intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed.  I covered the decision for my own blog.

 

[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in DIRECTV. However, I am not affiliated with the law firm.]

The Omnibus spending bill on health care policy

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/feed/~3/1iVsGm1OG9Y/the-omnibus-spending-bill-on-health-care-policy.html

http://marginalrevolution.com/?p=67298

Yuval Levin has a very good piece on this, here is one bit:

They’re [the Democrats] no longer offering themselves up as a sacrifice to protect every last bit of the law[Obamacare], as they have done at enormous political cost for the last five years. Now, they’re spending their capital to protect key constituencies (and therefore themselves), even at the cost of allowing the structure of Obamacare to become even more incoherent and unsustainable.

There is a less polemic but still true version of that sentence, if you are so inclined.  Here is another bit:

…They’re thinking past Obamacare, like the Republicans are. Of course, Democrats have a different vision of what comes after Obamacare. Hillary Clinton has started articulating that vision here and there: It’s a move in the direction of the original Hillarycare from 1993, which would add on to elements of Obamacare stricter price controls and more federal micromanagement of the provision of care. (Scott Gottlieb considered what this might look like in National Affairs this summer.)

And this:

The omnibus bill contains a provision, identical to one in last year’s bill, which requires that risk-corridor payments in the Obamacare exchanges be budget neutral.

That will make Obamacare much more difficult to manage.

Furthermore, in the bill Congress restricts federal funding for CRISPR.

Here is a more general piece on the Omnibus.  Overall I would say a lot of gridlock is gone, the Republicans have returned to being bigger spenders, and no one in town — once again — worries about the deficit.  The sequester was a very temporary victory.

December 16, 2015

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/feed/~3/12VX5Hr-TA8/december-16-2015.html

http://marginalrevolution.com/?p=67291

All the major reviews for Star Wars seem to be positive, but no one is calling it an “intense personal vision.”  So it probably isn’t very good.

My father-in-law was watching the debate last night, and so I caught some of it after giving my final exam for the evening.  I ended up being persuaded by Justin Wolfers’s “signaling theory,” not even mainly for Trump but for most of the candidates.  They feel an extreme need to signal to voters that something is deeply, deeply wrong and that they won’t just leap on the establishment bandwagon if elected.  In this sense the Republican candidates have more in common with the Progressive Left than might be evident on first glance.  That they feel induced to go so far out on various limbs is, most of all, a sign that GOP primary voters still do not believe their sincerity.  Fiorina strikes me as the one who is running “straight up,” and giving some semblance of her actual views, and perhaps that is why she has failed to achieve traction after a boost at the very beginning.  She is signaling she will be a female, conservative member of the Republican political establishment, rather than that she will side with the frustration of the voters.  The former is not such a marketable political commodity these days.

The law of one price almost holds:

…most fancy bills trade only slightly above face value. And many of the most sought-after by collectors really have only sentimental or personal value, like their child’s birthday or an anniversary (04072004, say, for April 7, 2004); ZIP Codes (00090210, where the final five digits in this instance represent the postal designation for Beverly Hills, Calif.); tombstones (19182014, here representing the birth and death years of a long life as they might appear on a gravestone; and others known by such names as Fibonaccis after the mathematical sequence and flippers whose digits look the same right-side up or upside down.

One well-known fan in this universe of collectors, Jim Futrell, for a long time focused on bills featuring the number 27 in some fashion—for example, 27000027. “The number 27 is pretty special in my family,” he says. “Not only is it my birthday, but my mom’s, grandfather’s and at least 10 others that I know of.”

The solstice approaches, and I am waking up slightly later than usual.