Monday Mule Pack – Snot Otters, Motion Sickness, Net Neutrality, and the Gas Tax
May 8, 2017
A weekly look at some of the more interesting articles from around the web.
‘I wanted to serve’: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space
“All of those experiments we went through, none of us got sick,” said 80-year-old David Myers, another participant. “There would be two groups, my group and the hearing group, and the hearing group, many of them would always get sick. And we never got sick. So that, essentially, was the whole purpose of research, was to find out ways to prevent motion sickness.”
Why this zoo is putting gigantic, slimy ‘snot otters’ back in streams
One glance at the creatures was unlikely to assuage nervous onlookers. The Eastern hellbender, the largest salamander in the Western Hemisphere, looks as though someone yanked out a giant’s esophagus, gave it legs and taught it to swim. The two-foot-long amphibian has slime-covered skin, beady eyes and a paddle-like tail. Its ruffled torso resembles the edge of a lasagna noodle, inspiring one of the creature’s many colorful nicknames, “old lasagna sides.” Other monikers are equally undignified: “snot otter,” “mud devil,” “grampus.”
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Because hellbenders are so vulnerable to changes in their habitats, they are an important indicator species — the “canary in the coal mine” whose ill health presages broader and more devastating changes in the overall ecosystem. Weird and obscure they may be, Boyer said, but “these strange creatures are important parts of our living world.”
Donald Trump’s Very Good Idea: Raise the Gas Tax
A higher gas tax is one way to help pay for Mr. Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan without increasing the federal deficit. It would benefit Americans by shortening their commutes, creating jobs and reducing costs for car repairs. Businesses would be able to ship raw materials and goods faster. All of that would bolster economic growth, which is probably why, in addition to truckers, the United States Chamber of Commerce and AAA support an increase.
Populism, Politics and Measles
Vaccines are among the greatest achievements of medical science, an easily and safely administered defense against once common and often deadly diseases like measles, polio, smallpox, whooping cough and cervical cancer. Yet fear of vaccines has spread over the past two decades, fueled in part by an infamous study published in the medical journal Lancet in 1998 and later retracted and completely discredited.
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To these and other skeptics, the measles outbreak in Italy should sound a piercing alarm. As of April 26, the Italian Ministry of Health had reported 1,739 cases of the disease, compared with 840 in all of 2016 and only 250 in 2015. Of those stricken, 88 percent had not been vaccinated. The danger was not only to them: 159 of the cases were health care workers infected by patients. Yet studies show that 97 percent of people who receive the recommended two doses of MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine are fully protected. Most people today would not remember a time when measles — or mumps, or polio — were commonplace.
The Collapse of American Identity
Americans of both political parties sense the unraveling of a broadly shared consensus of American identity, although they cite different reasons for feeling that way. About seven in 10 Republicans and Democrats fear that the United States is losing its national identity, the A.P.-NORC survey found. The two political parties may not share much, but each is increasingly aware that the other has embraced a radically different vision of America’s identity and future.
Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. A Kentucky judge must have missed that.
A judge should recuse himself if he or an immediate family member has a personal interest in a case, by dint of financial, personal or family relationship. He should recuse himself if he is plainly biased against one or the other party in a case that comes before him in a proceeding. Bias against a whole slice of the population is a different, and disqualifying, matter, and renders Mr. Nance unfit to serve.
John Oliver Wants You to Flood the FCC Website to Save Net Neutrality, Again
Oliver encourages everyone from every Internet subculture, every Internet time waster, YouTube celebrities, every Yelp reviewer, people who tweet rude things to the Pope, congratulate Beyoncé on her pregnancy, or take the time to write very involved memes on Facebook. Oliver wants them to all come together, get involved, and save net neutrality.
Trump: Crazy Like a Fox, or Just Crazy?
As for the next 100 days, who will protect us? Myself, I am not counting on the Democratic Party. It’s too weak. On the issues I care about most, I’m actually counting on California. I believe California’s market size, aspirational goals and ability to legislate make it the most powerful opposition party to Trump in America today.
To confirm this for yourself, here’s a fun experiment you can do, first described by James Thomson (incidentally, the elder brother of Lord Kelvin, for whom the kelvin scale is named) in 1855: pick up a sealed, partially-full bottle of whiskey and shake it around. No beading will occur on the inside of the bottle, no matter how long or hard you swirl it, because the air inside the bottle is saturated with ethanol vapor and no evaporation is happening. Now, take the cork out, and swirl the bottle around a little more. As the air in the bottle mixes with the air outside, the alcohol will start to evaporate and you’ll see legs appear on the glass. Cool!
