Near as I can tell, it’s perfect, and her peers also thought so. The only suggestion I could possibly make is to maybe add a few spider photos…or a picture of my granddaughter? I don’t know that my suggestions would necessarily help.

It’s nice to have a vague idea of what she’s been up to!

One film was The Castle a 1997 low-budget Australian film that I have praised highly before. ‘Low budget’ hardly does it justice. The cast is largely unknown outside Australia and it took less than two weeks to film at a cost A$750,000. To save costs, the name of the family (Kerrigan) was chosen so that the film makers could use trucks that belonged to an actual towing company with that name.

The Kerrigan home, in the outer Melbourne blue-collar suburb of Coolaroo, is filled with love as well as pride in their modest lifestyle, but their happiness is threatened when developers attempt the compulsory acquisition of their house to expand the neighbouring airport.

The Kerrigan house is built in a largely undeveloped housing tract, on a toxic landfill, and directly adjacent to an airport runway. Despite all this, sweet-natured family patriarch Darryl (Michael Caton) believes that he lives in the lap of luxury. He busies himself by driving a tow truck, racing greyhounds, and constantly adding (and only half-finishing) renovations to the house. The rest of the Kerrigan clan shares and supports his enthusiasm in every way.

The David versus Goliath struggle between them and the the developers forms the basis of the plot. The Kerrigans are a close-knit, loving, naive, and earnest family with a doting father who is immensely proud of his family that finds enjoyment in what the rest of us might consider mundane or even undesirable. With such films, there is always the risk of condescension, of making fun of unsophisticated people, but that danger is avoided here. The innate decency of the family is what dominates the film and means that you are with them all the way. It is an absolutely wonderful film that I will undoubtedly watch again some time in the future.

Here’s the trailer.

The other film The Third Man (1949) is very different and repeatedly watchable for the same reasons: good writing, direction, and strong character portrayals. It was also shot on a relatively small budget, though not as extreme as The Castle. Set in the ruins of post-war Vienna, it follows Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American writer of pulp westerns, who arrives just in time to learn that it is the day of the funeral of his boyhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) who had invited him to come but had died in an accident. Martins is puzzled by inconsistencies in the story of Lime’s death and is disconcerted by a British army officer (Trevor Howard) who hints that Lime was an unsavory character. Martins investigates and falls in love with Lime’s girl friend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who does not reciprocate.

The film is moody, in black-and-white, with plenty of shadows and odd camera angles. No one who has seen the film will ever forget the music score, as described by Roger Ebert.

Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”? The score was performed on a zither by Anton Karas, who was playing in a Vienna beerhouse one night when Reed heard him. The sound is jaunty but without joy, like whistling in the dark. It sets the tone; the action begins like an undergraduate lark and then reveals vicious undertones.

There are some unforgettable set pieces. One is the the scene where Lime and Martins meet on a Ferris wheel and another is the ending with a very long, silent shot of Anna walking along a long straight road directly towards the camera, with Martins standing by the side of the road, waiting for her. We do not know if she will ignore him or whether they will join up and walk off together and the tension is palpable.

(A minor point. I have written before of a pet peeve of mine in films where a character who is shot from the front is thrown violently backwards, sometimes crashing through a window. This is utterly absurd. In older films, as in this one, the character who is shot just stops and then slowly falls to the ground. That is how it should be. But in modern films, the shot character gets flung back as if they had been hit with a cannonball.)

Here is the trailer.

So I started speaking to a dietician, and we did a bunch of tests to see what was going on. I kept a food diary. I eliminated a lot of different foods, and reintroduced them one by one. I determined that I have a sensitivity to a class of carbohydrates called FODMAPs.

I had heard of FODMAP sensitivity before my dietician told me about it. In a rare case where blogging has materially benefited me, I had blogged about the very same subject almost a decade ago. I had heard of (then recent) research that many people who believe they have gluten sensitivity are actually sensitive to FODMAPs. FODMAPs and gluten both occur in the same food, and so going gluten-free tends to help even if it wasn’t gluten that was the source of the problem.

FODMAP background

Gluten is a protein that occurs in wheat, and it’s what gives dough its elasticity. There’s a disease called Celiac’s, which causes an allergic reaction to gluten, even in small quantities. Other people appear to have non-Celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), which is far less severe. It’s contested how much of NCGS is actually explained by FODMAP sensitivity.

FODMAPs are short-chain carbohydrates that ferment in the colon. There are many types, although the FODMAP diet usually talks about just six: fructans, galactooligosaccharides, fructose, lactose, sorbitol, and mannitol. Different people may be sensitive to different types.

Fructans in particular, is the one that occurs in wheat, alongside gluten. However, fructans also appears in other foods, most notably garlic and onion.

“Sensitive” usually means that people have gastrointestinal symptoms, irritable bowel syndrome mostly. I was motivated to try gluten-free because I was having GI symptoms. However, I found from testing that my more severe symptoms were headaches. I’ve had chronic headaches all my life, and it wasn’t really on my radar that it could be caused by diet, but it clearly showed up in my food diary. Headaches are not a typical symptom, but the dietician has a “these things are known to happen” sort of response.

Unwarranted skepticism

If you follow the link to what I wrote about FODMAPs on my blog you’ll see that I was complaining about how skeptics had discussed the FODMAP diet when the research was new. I understand that these discussions occurred more than a decade ago, but please allow me my rant. Now that it’s a subject that is directly relevant to my experience, I know more and have even more to complain about!

Skeptics had a thing about NCGS. They didn’t think it existed. To them, it was a health fad. It was part of an industry of overrated food certifications, alongside the “organic” label. So when research came out arguing that most people claiming NCGS actually have something different (FODMAP sensitivity), skeptics took this as confirmation of their views.

From an epistemological standpoint, the problem with health foods is that somebody is trying to sell you something, whose value is mostly invisible and subjective. Pay more for our inferior snack product, and you’ll have a clearer mind or live longer or something–you know, healthy stuff. If the vague promises are not fulfilled, nobody is held accountable. So it’s fair to be critical of the health food industry.

But this criticism feels very misplaced when talking about gluten-free diets. Irritable bowel syndrome is not some subjective symptom that occurs far off in the undefinable future. It’s pretty immediate and not subtle. For me I was having symptoms within a day at most. There are still epistemological challenges, since the typical diet has so many different things in it that it’s hard to identify exact sources. But if someone experiences fewer symptoms after going gluten-free, there’s a certain amount of direct empirical observation that would be difficult to deny.

Skeptics presumed an adversarial relationship between people claiming NCGS, and FODMAP research. That’s absurd. When I found that a gluten-free diet helped, that did not always and forever commit me to the belief that gluten must be the problem. I am happy that there is research showing that fructans is the more likely culprit, because this new knowledge helps me improve my diet.

Skeptics were basically mocking people who claimed to have NCGS for not having figured out the FODMAP thing on their own. Excuse me, how are they supposed to figure it out? When the researchers figured it out, it took a lot of time, money, and expertise. So how should dieters automatically know about it?

I was involved in skepticism for most of the 2010s, but over time I had become increasingly disillusioned—not necessarily with the core values, but with the resultant community that those values had wrought. This is a common backstory for many FTB readers. Looking at this one issue of FODMAPs, it’s difficult not to be cynical about it. Skeptics got this one wrong. What does that say about their epistemological standards and practices? Nothing good.

What diet is like

What’s it like being on a low FODMAP diet? During testing, it was pretty tough. Without knowing which things I was sensitive to, I needed to cut out all FODMAP sources. I have an app with a database of foods, and it feels like practically everything has FODMAPs. Luckily, it’s dosage dependent. So if I got a little here and there, not an issue. In several cases I was eating something that was a source of FODMAPs, but I didn’t realize it until later, and it wasn’t causing issues, so it’s fine actually.

I tested foods as directed by my dietician. First try a low dose, then the next day a medium dose, then a high dose, where dosage is listed in my app. If it was fine, then I didn’t need to eliminate it anymore. So my diet slowly opened up as I narrowed down what I was sensitive to.

Eventually it seemed pretty clear that only fructans and lactose were the issues for me. So that lets me generalize to a lot of foods that I haven’t directly tested yet.

In home cooking, I’ve been sorry to see onion and garlic go. We practically treated them as staple foods before, putting them in everything. Now I put green onions and ginger in everything. Green onions don’t have much fructans, go figure.

Restaurants are a bigger problem, since, just like we used to do in our own cooking, they put garlic and onions in everything. Now imagine that I’m going on a business trip, having obligatory meals at restaurants that I did not choose. Sometimes none of the options are compliant with the diet.

The dosage dependence makes the diet more forgiving. I’ve found that a bit of garlic powder isn’t necessarily a problem. I haven’t had any issues with chickpeas although they’re supposed to have fructans too. A single slice of bread is fine. But that also makes it all the harder when I have to explain the diet. On one of these business trips I told a restaurant about it, and they treated it like I had a garlic allergy—which was excessive but honestly nice.

Later, my dietician suggested I try a supplement. I am not going to name the supplement, since I would feel like a shill. But it’s basically an enzyme for fructans, in the same way people with lactose intolerance will take lactase pills. The supplement is somewhat less convenient than lactase, since it comes in powder form rather than pills, and it’s expensive. I’m not putting it on everything, but it seems to open up options quite a lot.

I don’t like having to restrict my diet, but overall I’m happy with the outcome. I didn’t imagine when I started that I would more or less cure my chronic headaches. That’s a huge win.

No one will be surprised to learn that RFK jr is trying to bias the scientific literature. He’s upset that the journal Toxicology Reports had killed an article that supported his weird belief that childhood vaccines are causing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so he pressured them to restore it.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.

Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared to be trying to intimidate and influence the journal’s editorial process. The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.

This is patent meddling in the publication of scientific ideas. David Gorski commented on it.

Dr David Gorski, a surgical oncologist who has written extensively about the antivaccine movement, pointed out in a post that Kennedy has portrayed himself as pro-free speech, but that he was “apparently using the power of his position” to put pressure on an editorial decision by a private publisher.

“To antivaxxers, it’s free speech for me, but not for thee,” Gorski wrote on X.

I’m interested in that bit about how the paper was “seriously flawed”. The first clue is that the paper is yet another example of VAERS cherry-picking, a common tactic by vaccine deniers to scavenge through reports of vaccine effects to find isolated examples that they they then assemble into fanciful fairy tales of statistical significance, and that’s what this paper is.

The paper raised concern among scientists soon after it was published in 2021 by Neil Z Miller. It used reports made in the federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) to find what Miller said were “unusual patterns and safety signals highly suggestive of a causal relationship” between vaccination and Sids. VAERS is a vaccine safety monitoring program where anyone can submit a report about any suspected adverse health event that happens after a vaccination.

The second clue is that the author is Neil Z Miller. They can stop right there — Miller has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons. He’s not a scientist, not a doctor, and has no qualifications whatsoever, and all he does is comb through diverse data to assemble “evidence” supporting his a priori conclusion that vaccines are bad, mmmK?

Neil Z. Miller is a “medical research journalist”, “health pioneer”, “independent researcher” (yes, that means exactly what you think it means) and Director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute, an anti-vaccine organization listed here (and Miller has a long history in various altmed and antivaxx organizations). Gary S. Goldman is an “independent computer scientist” affiliated with WAVE – World Association for Vaccine Education, another anti-vaxx organization, and President and Founder of Medical Veritas, a rabidly anti-vaccine “journal” (listed here) that is into HIV/AIDS denialism as well, having published dubious “reanalyses” of autopsy results of victims of AIDS. Neither Miller nor Goldman have any qualifications that would lead one to think that they have any special expertise in epidemiology, vaccines, or science. But they have google and are not afraid to use it.

Together they have actually managed to publish a paper or two in obscure journals, where they completely misunderstand data in favor of their cherished hypotheses. In “Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?” they “found” that nations requiring the most vaccines tend to have the worst infant mortality rates, and their cherry-picking of data and speculation needed to reach that conclusion are rather painful – quite simply yet another poorly planned, poorly executed, poorly analyzed study that is poorly done exactly because it needs to be in order to show what the authors want it to show, namely that vaccines cause autism, a hypothesis so thoroughly falsified as any in the history of science. The study was of course praised in the venues you’d suspect, and where the assessment of the methodology used in the study is determined by whether it supports the conclusions the praiser wants it to show. Indeed, it was even praised at NaturalNews in a long post written by … Miller himself.

That paper should not have been accepted in the first place, and now we have RFK jr stepping in to push for its publication. And what qualifications does RFK jr have to assess scientific papers? Also none whatsoever.

It’s also an example of where bringing in yet-another-foreign species, in this case moths and scale insects, defeated the problematic invasive species. For now.

Without notification, the United States Space Force and the Space Division of the Israel Defense Forces staged a mock invasion of Bolingbrook.

According to anonymous officials at Clow UFO Base, they almost launched interceptors to attack the approaching paratroopers and dropships. They were called off at the last second after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called. Despite the late notice, Hegseth insisted he did nothing wrong and that Jesus had already forgiven him. 

Said one female official, “I told him next time to contact us before landing troops in Bolingbrook. He called me a DEI hire. I said he didn’t earn his position and that he ran the Defense Department. I couldn’t understand his reply, and I think he slipped off his chair before disconnecting.”

Karen, who didn’t provide her last name, claims she spied on the so-called beachhead. She claims to have overheard an argument between a Space Force commander and the IDF fleet commander. According to Karen, the IDF wanted to drop actual bombs, but the Space Force commander refused.

The IDF commander replied, “But we’re the only IDF branch that hasn’t inflicted civilian casualties. Please?”

“No!” Replied the Space Force commander. 

“But Israel had the right to exist.”

“And we have the right to invade any country that disobeys us!”

“I’m telling Bibi!”

Eyewitnesses reported seeing 12 men entering Fountaindale Library carrying orange foam cylinders. Half wore Space Force tactical uniforms and half wore IDF uniforms. 

The leader of the Space Force team approached the front desk and said, “Pretend we’re armed and show us where you would keep the fake ballots.”

When a patron accidentally dropped a book, the IDF squad leader yelled, “Ceasefire violation!” The witness said the IDF members aimed their foam cylinders and started making shooting sounds. 

The Space Force commander shook his head and yelled, “Ceasefire!  Now!”

The IDF soldiers pretended to keep firing.  

“I said ceasefire!”

“This is a ceasefire,” one IDF soldier allegedly said. “They can’t shoot at us, but we can shoot at them before they violate the ceasefire.”

When the war game ended, Hegseth had a videoconference with the troops. Witnesses claimed Hegseth delivered a rambling speech    At one point, he said, “Real men commit war crimes.” He later said, “I wish all the Jews would hurry up and move back to Israel. I want to see the Second Coming of Jesus, God damn it”

The speech ended when an IDF general said, “Can we just skip to the part where you give us everything we want?”

The President’s Chief of Staff refused to let President Trump comment on the deployment.

In the background, a man who sounded like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “You know the moment this war ends, they’ll convict me. You understand what I’m going through! Right?” After a short pause, he said, “Mr. President? Are you still alive?”

Trump replied, “Your temple has three missing walls. My ballroom has four walls, and a basement. A very deep basement.  You have a shallow wall.”

“Oy vey!”

Also in The Babbler:

Clow UFO Base cancels UFC match
Record number of residents applying to be alien abductees
Brookie chatbot argues with Copilot AI.
God to spare Bolingbrook 

Here is an example that I found in a recent post by PZ Myers where he quoted the CEO of some video company saying the following:

“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”

Notice that in the short space, she used the phrase ‘going forward’ three times. I do not want to be too harsh in my criticism because she was making a speech. When one is speaking extemporaneously, it is hard to avoid using cliches and I too have done so. As George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language:

When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

I too when speaking in public and making an argument on the fly, have sometimes found myself unable to find the right way to bring the thought to a satisfactory end and so insert some filler, kicking myself while doing so.

But if the above speaker was reading from a prepared speech, then that is less excusable. When writing, one has to be ruthless in editing out redundancies such as these and carefully choose words to fit the point one is trying to make.. But that requires some time and attention to detail on the author’s part and, as Orwell says, it appears that some are unwilling to make that extra effort.

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

Orwell says that he is not advocating some kind of language orthodoxy.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a “standard English” which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a “good prose style.” On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.[My italics-MS]

In writing these blog posts, I have some point that I wish to make but do not have the luxury to edit multiple times. It is when the writing comes most easily, when the words just flow out, that I have to be most vigilant, because that may mean that I am too receptive to ready-made phrases (like ‘going forward’) and have surrendered to them.

Several years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a range of scenarios, dubbed the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs, that set out a range of different visions for the future, depending on how much progress humanity made toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The worst of these, known as RCP8.5, painted an apocalyptic picture of a world so hot and chaotic that billions would be at risk from heat waves, coastal cities would flood, agriculture would be starved by drought, and mass migrations would spark war. Civilization would be at risk of utter collapse. That was the future we were headed toward until recently.

The good news is that this dire scenario now looks like it will never come to pass. Despite the best efforts of rich petrostates and science deniers, humanity has made solid progress toward decarbonizing the economy and replacing fossil fuels with green energy. While we waited too long to act and as a consequence have already missed the best-case scenario of a world that completely avoids climate change, there’s reason to believe that worst-case scenario is off the table as well.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The RCP8.5 scenario represents 4°C or more of warming. As a reference point, this is roughly the same magnitude as the temperature difference between today and the last glacial maximum, when northern Europe and North America were buried under mile-thick ice sheets. Try to picture a future that’s as much hotter than the present as the present is hotter than that.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), you don’t need to use your imagination. Climate scientists have sketched a picture.

In a world with 4°C of warming, 4.7 billion people would be exposed to potentially lethal levels of heat over the course of the year. Summer temperatures in equatorial regions like the Middle East and North Africa could reach 60°C (140°F) on the hottest days. Southern Spain would become a desert. Cities like Karachi and Kolkata would become uninhabitable. As journalist David Wallace-Wells put it in a famous article: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”

4°C is a nightmare scenario. That’s why it should be a vast relief to hear that this isn’t the path we’re on.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

If I’m not back by noon, call out the helicopters and the search parties. (I also have an ace in the hole: Morris has an informal bus service where you just call and they eventually deliver you right to your door. Don’t worry.)

I’m back, call off the emergency search teams. It took an hour and a half to walk there and back? I’m getting so slow.

We present a morphological description of a recently discovered species of spider in the family Trogloraptoridae from the Columbia River Gorge in northwestern Oregon. The family was previously monotypic (Trogloraptor marchingtoni) and only known from populations near the southwestern Oregon—northern California border. Trogloraptor tulishpun sp. nov. retains the key family synapomorphy, distinctive subsegmented raptorial tarsi, and an oblique membranous division of the basal segment of the anterior lateral spinnerets. Trogloraptor tulishpun is distinguished from T. marchingtoni by its color pattern, clypeal height, vulvar and palp structure. We have found T. tulishpun in four localities in the Columbia River Gorge, which show little mitochondrial sequence divergence from one another, but are highly genetically distinct from T. marchingtoni. Trogloraptor tulishpun is found in basalt features, including lava tubes and shallow talus caves, and has been observed to eat arachnids and moths, making them top predators in these environments.

First, that’s a truly awesome name, Trogloraptor, for a cave spider. Somebody hit a home run with that name.

Naming a new species isn’t a trivial thing, but the lab that found this one went above and beyond to come up with the name Trogloraptor tulishpun. They consulted the local people of the Yakama nation, and got the name “tulishpun” from them. And then they had a formal naming ceremony, as reported on NPR.

ANTHONY WASHINES: At this time, we’ll open this ground, the sacred ground that we’re standing on, and then we’ll begin.

PRICHEP: Naming ceremonies are usually, unsurprisingly, for people. It’s a formal introduction of the name, but it’s also a way to sort of welcome that individual and mark their place in the community.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

WASHINES: You’re being a witness to this brother being acknowledged.

PRICHEP: Anthony Washines is the Yakima elder who came up with the spider’s name.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

WASHINES: And so, from this day forward, we will call them by the name tulishpun. Repeat after me – tulishpun.

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Tulishpun.

PRICHEP: Gifts and food were shared, and a traditional naming song was sung. A few spiders were gathered to receive their name and then returned back to the nearby caves. Washines knows people will see tulishpun as a small thing. But he says every creature has its place, and this little spider has been in this place even when his people were not.

WASHINES: We were literally herded to a reservation up in the high-desert plateau, which was not our land. But he stayed here and remained. He still took care of this land.

PRICHEP: Usually, the discovery of a new species is celebrated with a pizza party in the lab, maybe a nod from the dean. It’s an academic milestone. But for tulishpun, it’s a community event, a gathering of scientists and citizens, of human and animal, to name all of those who make up this land and honor the connections between them.

How lovely. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever discover a novel species, which is extremely unlikely. In my background, we didn’t go looking for new species — new mutations and new molecules, sure, and we had ceremonies, usually involving popping a champagne bottle, when a paper was published, but we lack a connection to the community, the people, and the land. A species, though, is something people may have interacted with before, and that interacts with other levels of its biome, and it is appropriate to add a scientific context to a known part of our world.