One of the health writers at Vox, Julia Belluz, has written a bunch this past year about hearing loss due to loud ambient noises. (I stumbled across all this when I was fretting about the loud, blasting music at my gym during the workouts. It drives me crazy.)

I downloaded a decibel-reading app just now. We'll see how it goes.

Let's see if I'm clear: Trump got Cohen to pay 50K to a Liberty University pollster, Gauger, to rig polling in favor of Trump back in 2015. Cohen only paid the guy 13K and an MMA glove and pocketed the rest. And in addition,

During the presidential race, Mr. Cohen also asked Mr. Gauger to create a Twitter account called @WomenForCohen. The account, created in May 2016 and run by a female friend of Mr. Gauger, described Mr. Cohen as a "sex symbol," praised his looks and character, and promoted his appearances and statements boosting Mr. Trump's candidacy

Seems reasonable.

(Also thousands more children were separated from their parents at the border than were previously reported.)

Also:

Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to create the @WomenForCohen account, still active in 2019, to elevate his profile. The account's profile says it is run by "Women who love and support Michael Cohen. Strong, pit bull, sex symbol, no nonsense, business oriented and ready to make a difference!"

He has made a difference.

Mossy character writes: [emoticon]

Heebie's take:

Climate change is prompting Miami's rich to abandon the oceanfront and head for higher ground. That's bad news for the people of Little Haiti, a ridge-top immigrant community suddenly sitting on hot property.

(Everything being the worst.)

This fucking shutdown will never end. I know there was a rightwing anonymous op-ed celebrating that this will starve the government, but I don't actually think that's how our royal dumbfuck in chief is thinking about it. I think Trump is enjoying the tension/high ratings in the TV season sense. I also think that a TV season and an election season had external calendar endings, so he could sustain one posture and things would wrap up anyway, and I think that's the stance he's operating from: that his job is to sustain one note. This is unlike the Mueller investigation and current events, to Trump, because he's a victim of those things, where as he perceives himself to have agency in this. Like a TV show. Or election season.

This sounds like lunacy, but I'm worried that government never officially reopens. That piecemeal agencies get funded here and there and another norm of SOP is obliterated.

This is kind of neat: type in your address, and see where your home has been over the past 750 million years.

(It's part of a larger dinosaur site. I randomly clicked on the Carnotaurus and learned:

Carnotaurus has the smallest forelimbs of all theropods, smaller even than those of the notoriously small-armed Tyrannorsaurus Rex. It is thought that the arms may have been entirely vestigial, serving no practical function, unlike the T. Rex's arms, which are now suspected to have been functional.

along with maybe 20 different artist renderings, with some really silly flappy forearms in some of them.)

A browser plugin that detects when you're signing up for a service whose TOS includes mandatory arbitration, collects an electronic signature and programmatically send in a letter opting out.

Alternatively, a law requiring that anything you can opt out of in the TOS be presented to you as an option at the time of of agreeing to the TOS, which would bar provisions that can be agreed to electronically but only disagreed to telephonically or postally.

Minivet writes: While a lot of the content is interesting and useful - sun exposure has huge health benefits and vitamin D was promoted because it's an intermediate result, but not a cause, of that positive effect - the title and some of the content wrongly implies sunscreen is unnecessary and even harmful. For example, it spends a couple of paragraphs talking about problems with older formulations, labeling, and some problematic ingredients - the title having set the reader up for an indictment across the board.

But the official Australian guidelines it references recommend (a) no sunscreen in winter months or when UV<3, (b) make sure to get regular unprotected sun exposure including a few minutes a day in high summer, and finally (c) do protect yourself with clothes/sunscreen the rest of the time, just not all of the time. It relays (a) and (b) but not (c).

And when it leaves that distorted an impression, one does have to wonder about how well it's conveying the state of the research.

However, I have now downloaded a UV index app, as potential better guidance.

Heebie's take: "The New Margarine" isn't the right reference point - this feels much more like the opening gambit in the sugar vs fat wars of the past 20 years. As in, trying to up-end a much bigger doctrine than just whether butter or margarine is more natural.

The idea is basically that dermatologists have thrown the baby out with the bathwater:

When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it's natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, don't advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries.

It sounds like, psychologically, one of those misleading situations that Thinking Fast & Slow loves: a very clearcut causality that accounts for a few, clear deaths taking priority over a large, amorphous, diffuse causality that is one factor affecting a huge number of deaths. It's so much harder to articulate the latter that it's easy to prioritize the former, especially when it's your area of expertise.

may be found here.