Link Banana

The thought had never really occurred to me, but it turns most of those really cool pictures from space are Photoshopped (that word looks ugly any way you write it).

An object that would in real life comprise several indistinguishable shades of red might be represented to the public as the composite of three pictures in red, green, and blue. As a general rule, professional “visualizers” try to assign red to the image showing the longest wavelengths of light and blue to the one showing the shortest.

Aside from telling an interesting story of how the Chinese government has nurtured it’s own flourishing film industry and adding a few more Chinese movies to my Netflix queue, Grady Hendrix’s piece includes this sentence:

The film [If You Are the One] has a cameo by Hitler, a suicide, some savage scenes of heartbreak, an ending that is qualified at best, and lots of jokes about Obama, the weak American dollar, and the current economic crisis.

In an excerpt from his book, Mike Steinberger lays some of the blame for the decline of French cuisine at the door of what is usually considered its ultimate judge.

Aside from hiring Kal Penn, President Obama recently reached an agreement with the Russians about arm limitation. I found Slate’s explanation of the logic behind the agreed target sobering.

U.S. military planners dream up a variety of hypothetical conflicts with other nuclear powers and determine how many warheads would be required to destroy all the most important targets in each scenario.

I heartily agree with what I think Troy Patterson is trying to say, but I think he’s failed to say it. Still, on this Fourth of July, I rise to note my malaise with the idea of “going to see the fireworks.”

William Saletan, as always, makes an interesting point: why, if we’re relatively sure it’s free of the smoke and health risks of cigarettes, are the US, Australia, and and Hong Kong banning nicotine vaporizers? His answer:

We tolerated smoking until science proved it was harmful to nonsmokers. As momentum grew, the war on smoking became cultural, with disapproval and ostracism of anyone who lit up. Electronic cigarettes have removed the war’s scientific basis, but our cultural revulsion persists. Therefore, so does our prohibition and condemnation.

I earlier said that William Saletan is “the most serious liberal writing about [the] difficult issues” of pre-birth life. I stand by that and direct your attention to this poetically structured piece about what the murder of an abortion provider means. If you’re too lazy, here are the meatiest lines:

If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for “educational and legislative activities” to stop him. Somebody would use force.

It’s that time of year.

• One sentence commencement speeches. (Scroll up to see the speech Frank Warren gave at St. Mary’s.) (via Neatorama)
• Obama’s ASU commencement, the best I’ve encountered this year. (Parts 2 & 3; Text)
• Perhaps stealing a theme from the President, Timothy Noah thinks commencement speakers are generally too accomplished.

Farhed Manjoo accurately captures the latest “Google killer”:

As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot. It’s been trained to respond to some kinds of queries, but any variations leave it stammering. It’s a savant, smart about a few things but profoundly ignorant about large swaths of human knowledge.

If you manage to input a query that’s it’s well-suited to answer, the results can be deeply interesting — a seach for “weather” and my zip code gave data I’d never seen anywhere — but it’s a very limited tool.

In an article encouraging us not to use genetic tendencies for racist ends, William Saletan offers a possible genetic answer:

One example is the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force and correlates with excellence at speed and power sports. The opposite variant of the gene is called XX. Tests indicate that the ratio of people with RR to people with XX is 1 to 1 among Asians, 2 to 1 among European whites, and more than 4 to 1 among African-Americans.

Obviously discipline, coaching, economics, and millions of other factors also matter. But this fact was new to me.

Someone finally asked the Green Lantern the question I’d been meaning to since Slate started the column:

Green Lantern, you’re always telling us how bad meat is for the environment. I’m willing to throw some more zucchini kebabs on my barbecue this summer, but are all meats equally awful? Or are there some that I can grill with a little less guilt?

The answer’s pretty much in line with what had been my assumption: the bigger the animal, the less efficient the meat.

Also, this chart (pointed to by this post) provided a less thorough answer.

I know I know. Pigs! Flu! Pandemic! Mexico! Death! But this was news to me:

Birds are known to carry every single one of the 144 varieties of influenza virus, as defined by the shape of their surface proteins (ranging from the H1N1 strain to H16N9). For this reason, most scientists believe that all forms of the virus originated in birds and every flu is on some level a kind of bird flu.

UPDATE: This seems relevant, if not contradictory, to the above: Swine Flu Genes From Pigs Only. I suppose it’s partly a question of how generously you define “originated.”

While I think this

…so I attached no value to time.

is probably a mistake, I found Jennifer Reese’s exploration of the cost-effectiveness of making some basic foods at home quite interesting.

In discussing the results and ramifications of China’s “one-child” policy, William Saletan revealed a fact I’d not known:

The government is very aware of the problem and has openly expressed concerns about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for societal stability and security. As early as 2000 the government launched a range of policies to specifically counter the sex imbalance, the “care for girls” campaign. This includes changes in laws in areas such as inheritance by females, as well as an educational campaign to promote gender equality. These measures have had some success, with reports of lower sex ratios at birth in targeted localities.

The result appears to have been a drop in the imbalance from 124 boys per 100 girls to 119.

Ceaselessly patrolling the boarders of our corporeal liberties, William Saletan notes the looming attack on “sugared beverages.”

New York City’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, is leading the way. He’s the guy who purged trans fats from the city’s restaurants and made them post calorie counts for menu items. Lately he’s been pressuring food companies to remove salt from their products.

Now he’s going after soda.

That paragraph put into my head this line: “First they came for the transfats, I said nothing…” Apologies to Niemöller fans.

While explaining that “motherfucker” is a popular insult worldwide, Nina Shen Rastogi says that:

Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology.

No part of that really surprises me, but I’d just like to congratulate anyone who gets paid to discover stuff like this.

Perhaps it’s just because my opinions on embryos are so close to his, but William Saletan seems to me the most serious liberal writing about these difficult issues. His piece on the way to treat the President’s recent decision to overturn the embryonic stem cell ban is good. This part especially:

The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing. You invent euphemisms like pre-embryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to slide.

There is also a follow-up here.

Jacob Gershman does some investigating into the rash of nonnatural fibers cropping up in processed American foods. As you probably suspected, their health benefits are mostly unproven:

For example, Campbell’s V8 High Fiber, which Liebman calls “high fibber,” claims on its label to offer “20 percent of the recommended daily value” of fiber per 8-ounce glass. As Liebman pointed out in a recent report, the fiber that Campbell’s is talking about is maltodextrin, which she says has not been shown to have “any impact on regularity, or any aspect of digestive health.”

Though it’s not exceptionally deep (not to mention aged in my Instapaper account for a few months), Sara Dickerman’s story of the cows historical journey from farmer’s field to feedlot and hamburger patty is pretty good.

It reminds me of my argument — which I’ve thus far failed to live up to — that no one should be able to eat meat that hasn’t (at least) watched an animal killed for that purpose in front of them.

Paul Collins decides that Amazon.com’s conspicuously uncharitable ways are not without philosophical merit — and left-leaning defenders — but finds the company’s reluctance to defend them disappointing.

His actual beef with the company — one with which I sympathize — is that it’s still fighting against collecting state-mandated sales taxes.