tal

Multivitamins

Some of this article is just summarizing the current situation, which I don't think is all that interesting.

But it does have discussion on an important perspective that I hadn't considered or read much about.

Right now, there's a lot of focus on the response to Iran's October 1st ballistic missile attack. We've talked about what Israel is likely to do, what the US supports or does not, and so forth. Most of what I've read focuses on one of three potential targets:

• IRGC facilities

• Iran's oil infrastructure

• Iran's nuclear weapons facilities

I also recall reading one (early) article that cited an anonymous US official saying that they were hoping to convince Israel to hit Iranian-linked targets outside Iran, that that might be sufficient to satisfy Israel. I haven't seen more discussion on that. Looking closely at what each party has said, that'd permit Israel to damage a bunch of things that Iran values, but also permit Iran to say that Israel hasn't crossed the line that the IRGC drew in Bagheri's statement when he threatened a larger ballistic missile attack in response to any Israeli attack on Iranian territory.

But...assuming continued escalation, that's not the end of things. I've read a few articles talking about what the end game between Israel and Hezbollah is, but not longer-term Iran-Israel.

The author is a nuclear weapons specialist focusing on the Middle East. His perspective is more "where does this go if Israel hits Iran, and then Iran hits Israel back again harder".

He stated that he didn't presently believe that Israel would likely hit Iran's nuclear weapons facilities in this strike.

What’s on the table? Israel may target military installations, such as surface-to-surface missile bases or anti-aircraft systems, or Iran’s energy sector and political regime symbols. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is being debated in Israel, but is not likely at the moment.

Factors being considered include the operational capability to execute such a strike effectively, the time that would be required to rebuild the facilities, expected regional reactions and the impact on Iran’s future decision to develop nuclear weapons. Additionally, the Biden administration’s opposition to attacking the nuclear sites is a consideration, particularly in view of the upcoming presidential election.

However, he also looks down the line of an escalation spiral -- if Israel hits Iran, then Iran conducts a large-scale ballistic strike against Israel in response -- as Bagheri had threatened after the earlier attack -- then the author believes that Israel hitting Iran's nuclear weapons facilities becomes more-likely:

Recently, however, there has been a possible shift in the Israeli stance — evident, for instance, in a growing public discourse on the issue. The increased attention in Israel stems partly from the unprecedented advancement of the Iranian nuclear project, the overconfidence this gives Tehran and the intensifying internal Iranian calls to acquire nuclear weapons. An underlying cause for the shift is the absence of an international mechanism to control and monitor the program and the looming expiration of the “snapback” mechanism in October 2025, which would hinder a quick reinstatement of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

The significant weakening of Hezbollah and the reduced risk it poses to Israel in a future confrontation with Iran, coupled with the high costs Israel is already bearing in its fight against the “axis of resistance,” might be viewed by Israeli decision-makers as an opportunity to act. The trauma of Oct. 7 and the public’s increasing support for more aggressive responses against external attacks intensify belligerent Israeli sentiments towards Iran.

All eyes are now on Israel. Its response is likely to follow a military-regional logic aimed at preventing further direct attacks from Iran and isolating the various fronts of conflict. However, continued intense confrontations between the two countries, along with escalating attacks on Hezbollah, could further amplify the discourse in Tehran favoring a nuclear breakout and increase support in Jerusalem for striking the nuclear facilities. This would create a dangerous self-perpetuating cycle.

The history of the Middle East and beyond is being shaped right now. In the years to come, scholars will explore the crucial decisions facing leaders in Jerusalem, Tehran, Washington and elsewhere that today may seem like just another news update.

Like, in looking at the situation, it's worth considering actions both in the light of the action themselves, and where they'll wind up, after multiple iterations of the responses involved.

But what Ms Salagaras and the dozens of others who purchased the cookies didn't know was that their baked goods were five days old, purchased at a store in Hawaii by people unaffiliated with Crumbl Cookie (Crumbl), and flown back to Australia.

Hmm. Setting aside trademark law, that sounds like a legitimate concern from a consumer standpoint. This "Crumbl Cookie" company presumably wouldn't intentionally sell five-day-old baked goods under their brand, and as a consumer, I'd distinguish between fresh cookies and five-day-old cookies, even if five-day-old cookies are perfectly edible. Maybe there's an argument for making it normal to also rate the maximum age of a given baked good -- I don't know if that's mandated in the US, but bakeries I've seen normally distinguish between bagels and day-old bagels, for example.

But setting legalities aside...I wonder how practical it would be to do something like this and get better output than these guys flying the things did?

Most of the time, it probably makes sense to just bake whatever the thing is domestically. But it sounds like the issue here is that the demand is small in scale, not enough to support a domestic bakery:

"I think the fact that our market is small here, means that there's a lot of things that never get here," said Ellen Garbarino, a professor in marketing at the University of Sydney's Business School.

According to Professor Garbarino, many international brands are unlikely to open permanent locations in Australia due to the required costs and expected return.

"The cost of setting that up is pretty high, to get it into the shelves or to get a retail outlet and pay rent and get customers and get staff and all those kinds of things, and get over the laws of a different country."

So for Australia -- and, hell, anyone to some degree -- it might make sense to just try to do a better job of being able to ship stuff and keep it as fresh as possible.

https://www.quora.com/What-chemical-reaction-causes-food-to-go-stale

There isn’t a single well-defined meaning of “stale.” When we say bread is stale, we usually mean it’s hard. Interestingly, this is due to the bread absorbing water from the air (water usually softens things, doesn’t it?) If bread is slightly hardened, you may be able to restore some of its freshness by microwaving it. This will make it obviously moist, and you can then toast it. This is also a good procedure if you freeze bread, which we have to do in our household because otherwise we eat way too much :) It’s not like super-fresh bread, but I find it edible.

Another meaning of “stale” is partially rotten or rancid. Rotting is generally due to bacterial growth. Rancidification is chemical oxidation of fats to fatty acids, which is why rancid butter tastes sour (acids are sour).

I mean, there are ways that you can counter that. They will add cost to the item. But they're doable.

Like, you can make something not rot by irradiating it sufficiently and then sealing the food in a sterile environment.

Storing them in a low-oxygen environment, like under carbon dioxide, can cut into oxidation (though I'm not sure that that'd help much for cookies if they use yeast to rise, since the yeast would require oxygen, though maybe they're okay if you use baking soda to make them rise).

You could control humidity in the transport container.

https://discover.texasrealfood.com/food-shelf-life/oreos

The shelf life of Oreos can depend on various factors, including the storage method and whether the package has been opened. A packet of Oreos typically comes with a "best before" date, which is usually set for 9 to 12 months after the manufacturing date. This date serves as a guideline for optimal freshness rather than a hard expiration date. When stored properly in a cool, dry place, unopened Oreos can retain their quality slightly beyond this date, while opened Oreos should be consumed within a shorter timeframe to enjoy their characteristic crunch and flavor.

Oreos are designed to have a pretty impressive shelf life, as long as you don't open the package. They're very dry. The problem with these "Crumbl Cookie" things is trying to use a cookie that isn't designed to have a shelf life but to get more of one. So you can't alter the cookie, can't add preservatives or something.

But some of the processes I listed above don't require modifying the original cookie.

I'd think that you could build some sort of temperature/light/humidity controlled terrarium, model mushroom growth, and then grow mushrooms at the maximum that they're biologically able to grow.

Even if it doesn't happen prior to some form of peace agreement or something...that's an interesting thought. Like, any scenario where the conflict restarts would place Ukraine in a considerably more-favorable position militarily than is the case today. Today, simply by dint of weapons each has available, Russia has much more ability to attack Ukrainian territory than vice versa. But in the event of such a guarantee and Russia restarting conflict with Ukraine in some form, Russia wouldn't be able to touch a lot of Ukraine's territory without starting a conflict with NATO, but Ukraine would have a free hand to hit Russia's territory, with whatever weapons it could obtain.

I'm not saying that that wouldn't work, but that seems like an excessively-complicated bit of lawyering.

If the goal is to provide NATO guarantees for part of Ukraine's territory, but not to provide guarantees for another part of it, to counter Russia playing the "as long as I control part of your territory, you can't join NATO" bit, the only thing that produces the guarantee is what's on the paper of the NATO Treaty.

That treaty text is not written in stone. As long as all the members -- and this assumes that we can avoid excessive shennanigans of the sort that Hungary and Turkey did around Sweden and Finland joining -- are okay with it, the treaty text can be revised to say whatever. Yeah, you need unanimity for any such revision, but you need unanimity anyway to add a member, so the bar is no different from having Ukraine join in any other way.

NATO Treaty Article 6 defines the scope of Article 5 coverage.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm

Article 6

For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:

• on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;
• on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

In the original treaty, the bit about Turkey -- much of Turkey's territory is outside Europe -- was not present. When Turkey joined, we did a small revision to extend NATO coverage -- which originally did not cover territory outside of the Mediterranean, North Atlantic, Europe, and North America at all. Even today, the treaty does not guarantee against attacks on European territories like New Caledonia or American territories like Hawaii.

Honestly, I think that there may be a very legitimate argument that given that Romania and Bulgaria joined -- and this becomes even more-significant with a Ukrainian membership -- that the scope of Article 6 should be extended to the Black Sea, as we did with Turkey when Turkey joined. Otherwise, it's possible for Russia to perform a blockade on NATO Black Sea powers and sink their warships without them being able to avail themselves of NATO Article 5 protection.

Hmm.

You'd think that you could take three exposures, using a red, blue, and green laser, and then use optics to recombine the output to create a color hologram.

But I've never heard of such a thing. I wonder if there's some kind of physical limitation that I can't think of preventing it?

kagis

Nope. Apparently you can do exactly that, and devices do exist to do it:

https://www.litiholo.com/hologram-kits-color.html

First I'd seen of this, though.

EDIT: Ah, late in the video, they actually do show a few color holograms, the most-obvious of which is probably the R2D2 shot, which clearly has both blue and red.

investigates

Ah. It looks like the same UI is used for "bookmarks", and the "added" field is for when the entry was added as a bookmark. For non-bookmark items, there's no "added" date.

So you can look for a site by the last time you visited it ("Most Recent Visit"), but not by the first time, I reckon, not unless you bookmarked it then.

By the same logic I would think this idea would be legal as well.

That's a thought, though I'd also point out that this might involve international law, and there might be different doctrines involved in international law.

Also, international law on involvement in warfare is fluid. I remember reading an article pointing out that if you go back, to, say, the pre-World War era, the obligations on non-involved parties were generally held to be much stricter -- like, doing something like having preferential arms export policy to one party would be considered involvement in a conflict. When Switzerland, earlier, refused to export Gepard ammunition to Ukraine, that's not really in line with the present norm, where countries often do provide arms to countries and consider that to be separate from being directly involved, but it does conform to historical rules on neutrality.

kagis

Not the article I was thinking of, but this is some related discussion:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10735/3

International neutrality law governs the legal relationship between countries that are not taking part in an international armed conflict (neutral states) and those that are engaged in such a conflict (belligerents). The international community developed the principles of the international law of neutrality in an era before the Charter of the United Nations (U.N.) prohibited using force as a tool to resolve international conflict. Scholars have described the law of neutrality as an “old body of law” with a “slightly musty quality” that does not always translate to modern warfare.

Russia and Ukraine are engaged in an international armed conflict and, thus, are belligerents. Under traditional conceptions of neutrality, sending “war material of any kind” to Ukraine or any other belligerent would violate a duty of neutrality; however, some countries, including the United States, have adopted the doctrine of qualified neutrality. Under this doctrine, states can take non-neutral acts when supporting the victim of an unlawful war of aggression. For the reasons discussed in an earlier Sidebar, Ukraine has firm grounds to contend that it is such a victim and is acting in self-defense. Under these circumstances, arms assistance to Ukraine would generally be lawful under the qualified neutrality doctrine, provided that Ukraine complies with other legal frameworks governing the conduct of hostilities.

There was that cat in the news a few years back who drove off that dog that was attacking and dragging a little boy in that family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEa6jZv-Khc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)

On May 13, 2014, Jeremy Triantafilo, a four-year-old boy, was riding his bicycle in his family's driveway in Bakersfield, California when Scrappy, a neighbor's eight-month-old Labrador-Chow mix cross, came from behind and bit his leg.[9] As the dog began dragging Jeremy down his driveway, Tara, who the family states was very attached to Jeremy, tackled the dog and chased him away before returning to Jeremy's side to check on him.

Jeremy needed ten stitches in his left calf following the attack. He quickly recovered and was thankful for Tara's actions calling her "my hero".[10]

If mean, if I were a cat -- smaller than the dog in question, and physically less-able to take on larger animals than a dog anyway -- and the dog was already doing a number on a human, that's not a fight I'd casually jump into. And while there are a few social cat species, like lions, I don't think that the wildcat ancestor of the housecat is a social animal, so it's probably not really geared up to be helping out other members of a pride or anything.

kagis

Yeah, it's solitary:

https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2020/03/small-cats-domestic-cats-closest.html

Among these three species, the one thought to be closest of all to the domestic animal is the sand cat (Felis margarita). This split off from the line leading to the wildcats and the Chinese mountain cat around 2.5 million years ago, just before the Ice Ages got going, while the other species (or their immediate ancestors) seem to have been around since the Late Pliocene 3 to 3.5 million years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat

The sand cat is solitary, except during the mating season and when a female has kittens.

Another poignant note that some other news sources have pointed out: it looks like she was a rescue dog. That is, in getting her, her elderly owner probably saved her from being euthanized.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/rescue-dog-stevens-county-returns-favor-saving-elderly-owner-who-fell/E54BZZERANB4FI2BN2ES7OUS2M/

Rescue dog in Stevens County returns favor, saving elderly owner who fell

Honestly, given a canine's physical capabilities, I'm not sure that I could have done as well as she did in that situation.

And for a dog, what had to have gone into that...

• Assess that her owner was in trouble.

• Assess that another human could help. I'm not sure that that's an obvious conclusion for a dog to come to from an evolutionary standpoint. My guess is that most cases, in a pack of wild dogs, for most problems short of being attacked by something, there's not a whole lot that bringing another dog to help is going to do, if one gets hurt.

• She had to plan out in advance a way to get a human to do what she needed them to do.

• Assess that disrupting traffic would be a way to get attention. That is, she had to have a model of the mental state of other humans sufficient to predict how they'd act in a situation that I doubt that she'd seen before.

• Evade capture when someone tried to capture her.

• And keep them interested enough to follow her to the cabin.